Is English in Utah truly unique? If so, what makes it different? Which stereotypes about how Utahns speak are completely off base and which are accurate? To answer these questions, linguist David Eddington surveyed more than 1,700 Utahns in an effort to better understand and systematize the peculiarities of English spoken in the Beehive State. This resulting book is a sophisticated data analysis that presents results in an accessible and often humorous fashion.
Utah is linguistically interesting for a variety of reasons. The massive numbers of immigrants who flocked there in the first years of European settlement, its relative isolation until completion of the transcontinental railroad, and its large Latter-day Saint population signaled greater linguistic commonality than is often the case in other western states. The book argues that religious affiliation, or lack thereof, might particularly play a role in the features that make up Utah English.
An accessible study of dialect in Utah, this book explores how social and geographic factors influence the pronunciations and regional expressions that characterize Utah English. Reflecting years of dealing with misconceptions about dialect both in and out of the classroom, Eddington covers vocabulary, individual words, syntax, vowels, and consonants, blending a serious and sometimes humorous approach to his research.
The story of one of the longest-lived and most successful nomadic enclaves in North America provides a rare glimpse into the material expressions of Apache self-determination and survival. For nearly 200 years the Jicarilla Apache of New Mexico thrived in the interstices of Pueblo and Spanish settlements following their expulsion from the Plains. Critical to their success was their ability to extend key aspects of Plains-Pueblo exchange to Indian and mixed-blood communities on the fringes of colonial rule. More than other nomadic tribes, the Jicarilla played an enormous role in holding together the social fabric of New Mexican villages after the fall of the Spanish Empire.
This comprehensive study by Sunday Eiselt begins with the great Athapaskan migration out of Canada during prehis-toric times and ends with the forced settlement of the Jicarilla on the Dulce reservation in the 1880s. Eiselt combines archaeological and ethnohistorical data in an examination of Jicarilla strategies for self-preservation. She reveals the ideological and political imperatives of “belonging” that shaped their interactions with local communities and the state and that enabled them to avoid reservation life well into the 1880s. Throughout their long history, Jicarilla identity remained intact, distinctive, and discernable even as life on the reservation disrupted the intimate connections that once existed with their Hispanic and Pueblo neighbors.
When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he planned to cover his Yosemite years. Editors Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling have here provided a remedy.
Their account begins in 1863, the year Muir left the University of Wisconsin for what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Following an accident in 1867 that nearly left him blind, he vowed to turn from machines and continue to study nature. That led, in 1868, to his first visit to Yosemite Valley, where he began his glacier studies. Muir spent much time exploring the Yosemite region, Tuolumne, and both the southern and northern Sierras, publishing articles, and keeping extensive journals through 1875, when he began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and expanded his travels to areas throughout the west.
Mining a rich vein of sources—Muir’s letters, journals, articles, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as selections drawn from biographical pieces written about Muir by people who met him in Yosemite in the early 1870s—Engberg and Wesling have assembled what they term a "composite autobiography," providing brief interpretive and transitional passages throughout the book. This work is especially valuable because it documents Muir’s formative years, when he is maturing away from "conventional cultural paradigms of work and materialism toward new ways of thinking about nature and its impact on human development."
"I use violence as it is. It's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody...awful." Vilified for his violent vision of the American West as presented in films such as The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the artistry of Sam Peckinpah’s work was largely overlooked in his lifetime. Dismissed by critics, he was essentially ignored in the decade following his untimely death in 1984 at the age of fifty-nine. However, with the publication of a biography in 1994 and Warner Bros.’ theatrical re-release of The Wild Bunch in 1995, Peckinpah reemerged as a distinctive voice in American film.
In Sam Peckinpah’s West eleven scholars approach the director’s oeuvre with an eye toward his minor films, touching on themes and characters previously overlooked and linking his vision to America’s literary and historical traditions. These insightful essays assure us that Peckinpah’s work will not be forgotten again, nor the vibrancy of his characters who go out "not with a whimper, nor even a bang, but a cinematic explosion that rocked Hollywood and riveted us in a way we’ll never forget."
In 1870, Truman Everts visited what would two years later become Yellowstone National Park, traveling with an exploration party intent on mapping and investigating that mysterious region. Scattered reports of a mostly unexplored wilderness filled with natural wonders had caught the public’s attention and the fifty-four-year-old Everts, near-sighted and an inexperienced woodsman, had determined to join the expedition. He was soon separated from the rest of the party and from his horse, setting him on a grueling quest for survival. For over a month he wandered Yellowstone alone and injured, with little food, clothing, or other equipment. In “Thirty-seven Days of Peril” he recounted his experiences for the readers of Scribner’s Monthly.
In June 1996, Everts’s granddaughter arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park to meet with park archivist Lee Whittlesey. She brought two documents that her father had kept hidden and both were handwritten by Everts. One was a brief autobiography that gave new insight into his early life. The other was a never-published alternative account of his confused 1870 journey through Yellowstone. Both have been added to this volume, further enhancing Everts’s unlikely tale of survival.
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