From The Social Structure of Revolutionary America
The prejudice against novels shown by North Carolina farms was not shared by men of education. Many such books were advertised in the newspapers, and when a Yale class disputed “Whether reading of Novels be advantageous,” the President himself decided “that it is advantageous in some measure, if not much attended to.”
At the Huffington Post, Rebecca Serle interviews Newberry Prize winning author Kathi Appelt, specifically on the subject of American Fantasy. Not fantasy fiction written by Americans, but fantasy fiction that draws on American locales and imagery.
Regular readers know that I have been all over this like a bear on a beehive with my Story Behind the Story series, explaining how I wanted to step away from the elves and swords and write fantasy that drew on American imagery and textual artifacts the way Tolkien drew on northern European imagery and textual artifacts.
Appelt could not echo my sentiments more clearly than when she says: Continue reading
For all of those nerds intellectual types out there who love to see news about the pre-Columbian history of the Americas, or who simply love learning more about humans before the advent of civilization, new research at the University of Copenhagen will prove irresistible to the imagination.
Scientists have sequenced DNA from the hair of a 4,000-year-old man locked in the Greenland permafrost long before the ancestors of modern Inuit moved into the region, and from the genetic coding have reconstructed the face of this archaic American.
POMPKIN. A man or woman of Boston in America: from, the number of pompkins raised and eaten by the people of that country. Pompkinshire; Boston and its dependencies.
– 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue : A Dictionary of British Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (unabridged) compiled originally by Captain Grose
