Bad judgment

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Robert Hendrickson

All of the lingo, slang, and patois of the greatest country on earth. The Queen?s English has no place across the pond, where a long history of defiance, creativity, and originality has made its way into the everyday vocabulary of Americans coast-to-coast. God Bless America is an informative and entertaining guide to the meaning and history beneath our uniquely American words and phrases. Robert Hendrickson makes it clear that whether you?re ordering?fried chicken? or heading out to see a?movie,? you are celebrating contributions to the English language made by Americans, both famous and forgotten. With extensive research and a passion for language, Hendrickson furthers our understanding of the familiar and introduces us to the more obscure artifacts of American speech. God Bless America provides the definitions and background for many uniquely American phrases and terms, such as:? Bald eagle? Boston baked beans? Five-and-ten? Give?em hell? Lazy Susan? Sho? nuff? Yankee Doodle? And more! A dictionary packed full of historical accounts, etymological peculiarities, and imaginative spirit, God Bless America represents not only the American language but also the American people. This book provides an undeniable resource for travelers, patriots, and Anglophiles from all walks of life.

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Ronald G. Walters

In Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America Ronald G. Walters brings together a distinguished group of contributors to reflect - often critically - on scientific and medical claims to moral, social, and political authority. Writing from a variety of perspectives - intellectual history, social history, feminist theory, philosophy, medical history, political theory, and visual analysis - the authors demonstrate that science no longer belongs exclusively to its practitioners or to any particular discipline. Situating science within other communities of discourse, they show how scientific language and metaphor spread outward into new realms, including popular culture, where they came into conflict with other languages of authority. They also show how medical authority shapes social behavior, how corporate agricultural science has displaced farmers' knowledge, and how popular science enters the collective imagination. Like such theorists as Gramsci and Foucault, the authors search out the subtle workings of power - often deeply hidden in language, culture, and the minutiae of social practice - to arrive at a demystification of claims to universal truth without going to the relativistic extreme of some modern critics of science.

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Ben Kane

"Tarquinius is an Etruscan, a warrior and soothsayer, born enemy of Rome, but doomed to fight for the Republic in the Forgotten Legion." "Brennus is a Gaul; the Romans killed his entire family. He rises to become one of the most famous and feared gladiators of his day - and mentor to the boy slave, Romulus, who dreams night and day of escape and revenge." "Romulus and Fabiola are twins, born into slavery after their mother is raped by a drunken nobleman. At thirteen years old they are sold: Romulus to gladiator school, Fabiola into prostitution, where she will catch the eye of one of the most powerful men in Rome." "The lives of these four characters are bound and interwoven in this marvellous story, which begins in a Rome riven by corruption, violence and political enmities, but ends far away, at the very border of the known world, where Romulus, Brennus and Tarquinius find themselves fighting against the Parthians and impossible odds."--Jacket.

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John G. Demaray

The design, staging allusions and symbolism of The Tempest are here freshly reconsidered in light of the drama's historical and theatrical milieu. Demaray maintains that Shakespeare, in composing this play, was not reverting to the "academic" dramatic structures, themes and character types of his early career, but was instead forging from different theatrical traditions a new kind of experimental drama. The Tempest, then, draws upon the European and English spectacle, pastoral, "romance" and dramatic traditions; it emphasizes reformist open symbolism rather than the classical iconography of Ben Jonson; and it points the way to the stylized "heroic" dramas of the Restoration with their exotic themes and staged scenic illusions. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness pays close attention to genre, structure and issues of printing and textual scholarship. Demaray examines the First Folio printings of The Tempest and of printings of drama, masques, balets de cour, spectacle productions and stage documents. On the basis of these primary documents, Demaray is able to show the influence of the conventions of court presentations on Shakespeare's theatrical references, and to reveal new accounts of the imaginative significance of stage illusions designed by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s.