"Explores how Ole Miss and other Southern universities presently contend with an inherited panoply of Southern words and symbols and "Old South" traditions, everything that publicly defines these communities--from anthems to buildings to flags to monuments to mascots"--
Who uses "skeeter hawk," "snake doctor," and "dragonfly" to refer to the same insect? Who says "gum band" instead of "rubber band"? The answers can be found in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), the largest single survey of regional and social differences in spoken American English. It covers the region from New York state to northern Florida and from the coastline to the borders of Ohio and Kentucky. Through interviews with nearly twelve hundred people conducted during the 1930s and 1940s, the LAMSAS mapped regional variations in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation at a time when population movements were more limited than they are today, thus providing a unique look at the correspondence of language and settlement patterns. This handbook is an essential guide to the LAMSAS project, laying out its history and describing its scope and methodology. In addition, the handbook reveals biographical information about the informants and social histories of the communities in which they lived, including primary settlement areas of the original colonies. Dialectologists will rely on it for understanding the LAMSAS, and historians will find it valuable for its original historical research. Since much of the LAMSAS questionnaire concerns rural terms, the data collected from the interviews can pinpoint such language differences as those between areas of plantation and small-farm agriculture. For example, LAMSAS reveals that two waves of settlement through the Appalachians created two distinct speech types. Settlers coming into Georgia and other parts of the Upper South through the Shenandoah Valley and on to the western side of the mountain range had a Pennsylvania-influenced dialect, and were typically small farmers. Those who settled the Deep South in the rich lowlands and plateaus tended to be plantation farmers from Virginia and the Carolinas who retained the vocabulary and speech patterns of coastal areas. With these revealing findings, the LAMSAS represents a benchmark study of the English language, and this handbook is an indispensable guide to its riches.
The authors have done an outstanding job of compiling decades of data collected by their own field reconnaissance and other geoscientists... This represents a significant contribution to the understanding of the development of the Florida carbonate platform, and it will assist other disciplines as they strive for better understanding of our groundwater resources, aquifer characterizations, paleoenvironmental interpretations, and historical/educational geology programs. Walt Schmidt, Florida State Geologist & Chief, Florida Geological Survey, USA (praise for the first edition) Painting a complete picture of the history of the Everglades, Ancient Seas of Southern Florida: The Geology and Paleontology of the Everglades Region, Second Edition provides an overview of the geology, paleontology, and paleoceanography of the region. It emphasizes the upper 300m of the geologic framework of the area and gives insight into the local stratigraphy, geomorphology, lithology, and historical geology. Designed to be a field guide as well as a reference, the book is illustrated in full color with brand new photographs of exposed geologic sections, stratotype localities, collection sites, and details of interesting fossil beds. In this book, the authors illustrate almost 800 of the most important and diagnostic stratigraphic index fossils found in these beds, including over 50 species of corals and almost 700 species of mollusks, along with echinoderms, crustaceans, echinoids, petrified wood, and aquatic vertebrates. A new edition of The Geology of the Everglades and Adjacent Areas, it contains larger images of fossil shells, corals, and echinoderms and includes new updated geological data and concepts, as well as an expanded iconography of stratigraphic index fossils. Based on the data gleaned from these fossils, it also offers a series of geomorphological visualizations, showing the possible appearances of the Florida Peninsula during the times when it was covered by tropical seas, from the Oligocene to the late Pleistocene. This second edition provides a new perspective on both the historical geology of southern Florida and the evolution of one of America’s most beautiful natural treasures, the Everglades.