Download or read book Naming the New World written by Calvin Baker and published by St Martins Press. This book was released on 1997-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multigenerational tale forms a portrait of a people's passage to a new world, following the voices, as one flows into the next, of six African Americans, beginning with Ampofo, who is brought as slave cargo to America. A first novel.
Download or read book The Naming of America written by Martin Waldseemüller and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book features a facsimile of the 1507 World Map by Martin Waldseemuller - the first map ever to display the name America - and tells the fascinating story behind its creation in 16th-century France and rediscovery 300 years later in the library of Wolfegg Castle, Germany, in 1901. It also includes a completely new translation and commentary to Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann's seminal cartographic text, the Cosmographiae Introductio, which originally accompanied the World Map. John Hessler considers answers to some of the key questions raised by the map's representation of the New World, including "How was it possible for a small group of cartographers to have produced a view of the world so radical for its time and so close to the one we recognize today?"; and "What evidence did they possess to show the existence of the Pacific Ocean when neither Vasco Nunez de Balboa nor Ferdinand Magellan had yet reached it'." There are no easy answers, and yet, as this fascinating book reveals, this group of unknowns created some of the most important maps in the history of cartography, and afford us a glimpse into an age when accepted scientific and geographic principles fell away, spawning the birth of modernity.
Download or read book Naming the World written by Bret Anthony Johnston and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You already have the tools to become a gifted writer; what you need is the spark. Harvard creative writing professor and acclaimed author Bret Anthony Johnston brings you an irresistible interactive guide to the craft of narrative writing. From developing characters to building conflict, from mastering dialogue to setting the scene, Naming the World jump-starts your creativity with inspiring exercises that will have you scrambling for pen and paper. Every chapter is a master class with the country’s most eminent authors, renowned editors, and dedicated teachers. • Infuse emotion into your fiction with three key strategies from Margot Livesey. • Christopher Castellani dumps the “write what you know” maxim and challenges you to really delve into the imagination. • A point-of-view drill from Susan Straight can be just the breakthrough you need to flesh out your story. • Jewell Parker Rhodes shares how good dialogue is not just about what is being said but about what is being left unsaid. Brimming with imaginative springboards and hands-on exercises, Naming the World has everything you need to become a stronger, more inventive writer. “A delicious book. Imagine yourself at a cocktail party crammed with literary lions. You have the chance to spend a few moments with each of them. Wit and wisdom abound.” –Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way “A highly useful and perceptive book. With charm and intelligence it touches on nearly every teachable aspect of the devilishly difficult art of writing.” –Ethan Canin, professor of creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and author of Carry Me Across the Water “These entertaining and useful exercises, intelligently organized, are a boon for both beginning and experienced writers.” –Andrea Barrett, National Book Award—winning author of The Air We Breathe “Forget about getting an MFA! For any writer struggling with his craft, here is the equivalent of a master class in writing by some of the best writer/teachers around.” –Betsy Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers
Download or read book Names on the Land written by George R. Stewart and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Naming of Names written by Anna Pavord and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, some of the most brilliant minds in Europe searched for the rules of nature's game. In a world full of plagues and poisons, many medicines were made from plant extracts and there was a practical need to differentiate between one plant and another. Alongside this was an overwhelming desire to make sense of the natural world. Scholars, aided by the artists who painted the first pictures of plants, set out looking, writing and classifying, but 2,000 years were to pass before any rules became clear. Anna Pavord takes us on an exhilarating and fascinating journey through botanical history, travelling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople and Venice, Padua and Pisa to the present day.
Download or read book The Fourth Part of the World written by Toby Lester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling Waldseemüller world map of 1507.” So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth—until 1507, that is, when Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseemüller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus’s contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world. To celebrate his achievement, Waldseemüller and Ringmann printed a huge map, for the first time showing the New World surrounded by water and distinct from Asia, and in Vespucci’s honor they gave this New World a name: America. The Fourth Part of the World is the story behind that map, a thrilling saga of geographical and intellectual exploration, full of outsize thinkers and voyages. Taking a kaleidoscopic approach, Toby Lester traces the origins of our modern worldview. His narrative sweeps across continents and centuries, zeroing in on different portions of the map to reveal strands of ancient legend, Biblical prophecy, classical learning, medieval exploration, imperial ambitions, and more. In Lester’s telling the map comes alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across Central Asia and China; Europe’s early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally, vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseemüller map that the earth could not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered humanity’s worldview. One thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains. Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. Lavishly illustrated with rare maps and diagrams, The Fourth Part of the World is the story of that map: the dazzling story of the geographical and intellectual journeys that have helped us decipher our world.
Download or read book Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic novel of a perfectly engineered society is “one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the twentieth century” (The Wall Street Journal). Half a millennium from now, in the World State, the watchword is that every one belongs to every one else. No matter what class of human you are bred to be—from the intellectual Alphas to the Epsilons who provide the manual labor—you are a part of the efficient, well-oiled whole. You are nourished, secure, and blissfully serene thanks to the freely distributed drug called soma. And while sex is strongly encouraged, the old way of procreation is forbidden, eliminating even the pains of childbirth. But when a man and woman journey beyond these confines to where the “savages” reside, and bring back two outsiders, the cracks begin to show. Named as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, Brave New World is one of the first truly dystopian novels. Influenced by the historic events of Huxley’s era yet as relevant today as ever, it is a remarkable depiction of the conflict between progress and the human spirit. “Chilling. . . . That he gave us the dark side of genetic engineering in 1932 is amazing.” —Providence Journal-Bulletin “It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Name of the World written by Denis Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war." Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.
Download or read book Tempest written by Liz Skilton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liz Skilton’s innovative study tracks the naming of hurricanes over six decades, exploring the interplay between naming practice and wider American culture. In 1953, the U.S. Weather Bureau adopted female names to identify hurricanes and other tropical storms. Within two years, that convention came into question, and by 1978 a new system was introduced, including alternating male and female names in a pattern that continues today. In Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture, Skilton blends gender studies with environmental history to analyze this often controversial tradition. Focusing on the Gulf South—the nation’s “hurricane coast”—Skilton closely examines select storms, including Betsy, Camille, Andrew, Katrina, and Harvey, while referencing dozens of others. Through print and online media sources, government reports, scientific data, and ephemera, she reveals how language and images portray hurricanes as gendered objects: masculine-named storms are generally characterized as stronger and more serious, while feminine-named storms are described as “unladylike” and in need of taming. Further, Skilton shows how the hypersexualized rhetoric surrounding Katrina and Sandy and the effeminate depictions of Georges represent evolving methods to define and explain extreme weather events. As she chronicles the evolution of gendered storm naming in the United States, Skilton delves into many other aspects of hurricane history. She describes attempts at scientific control of storms through hurricane seeding during the Cold War arms race of the 1950s and relates how Roxcy Bolton, a member of the National Organization for Women, led the crusade against feminizing hurricanes from her home in Miami near the National Hurricane Center in the 1970s. Skilton also discusses the skyrocketing interest in extreme weather events that accompanied the introduction of 24-hour news coverage of storms, as well as the impact of social media networks on Americans’ tracking and understanding of hurricanes and other disasters. The debate over hurricane naming continues, as Skilton demonstrates, and many Americans question the merit and purpose of the gendered naming system. What is clear is that hurricane names matter, and that they fundamentally shape our impressions of storms, for good and bad.
Download or read book A Village with My Name written by Scott Tong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Download or read book The Power of Names written by Mavis Himes and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our proper name is as much a part of us as our own skin. It travels with us like a passport, testifying to our unique presence on this earth. The articulation of our name rolls off our tongue with ease and familiarity, yet we rarely turn and examine the part our name plays in what makes us who we are. Our first name reflects the hopes and dreams of our parents and family, our culture, and our own sense of self, while our surname carries our ancestral history, a branding of both affiliation and transmission. In The Power of Names, Mavis Himes explores both the profound ambivalence that many of us feel toward our names and the conscious and unconscious impact our names have on our lives, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. She explores such questions as: What do our names mean? How do they influence our destiny? What does it mean to lose or change our name - and what does this reveal or conceal about who we are? Himes engages readers through a skillful interweaving of reflections on her own Jewish surname, shortened by immigrant ancestors to accommodate a new life in a new world; the historical and cultural impact of a group on naming practices; the various ways different cultures celebrate the naming of infants; the power of names in myth and legend; and the impact of names on friends and patients from her practice. Readers are invited to consider their own names, the names they give others, and the names of those around them as a starting point for understanding the stories of our lives.
Download or read book Inspired Baby Names from Around the World written by Neala Shane and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of Names and the Blessings They Can Impart This unique guide includes 6,000-plus names from all corners of the globe, and each entry illuminates the name’s distinctive spiritual, historical, and cultural background — its poetry. Names, from the traditional to the newly coined, are fully explained. Pronunciation guide, origin, alternate spellings, and meaning are enhanced by the affirmation carefully chosen for each name. Lists of names by meaning, names by ethnicity, and most popular names by decade provide easy reference. Whether your aim is to honor ancestors, capture a child’s essence, or convey parental hopes, Inspired Baby Names from Around the World will help you greet and bless your new baby with heartfelt meaning.
Download or read book Letter of Christopher Columbus to Rafael Sanchez written by Christopher Columbus and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The First Delineation Of The New World And The First Use Of The Name America On A Printed Map An Analytical Comparison Of Three Maps For Each Of Which Priority Of Representation Has Been Claimed Two With Name America And One Without With An Argument Te written by Henry Newton Stevens and published by Alpha Edition. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Delineation Of The New World And The First Use Of The Name America On A Printed Map; An Analytical Comparison Of Three Maps For Each Of Which Priority Of Representation Has Been Claimed (Two With Name America And One Without) With An Argument Tending To Demonstrate That The Earliest In Each Case Is The One Discovered In 1893 And Now Preserved In The John Carter Brown Library At Providence has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.
Download or read book The First Delineation of the New World and the First Use of the Name America on a Printed Map written by and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Can You Guess My Name written by and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
