In poems at once profound and accessible, Nadia Colburn finds splendor and astonishment in a natural world - and a human world - that is deeply troubled yet still majestically beautiful. Both elegy and celebration, I Say the Sky addresses some of the most challenging aspects of human existence, from childhood trauma to environmental devastation, and discovers, in unexpected and clear-sighted ways, wisdom, wonder, and peace. Colburn's brilliant second book charts a journey to meet the self. From girlhood to parenthood, loss to discovery, in poems that sing, the book explores how meaning is made. Claiming the female voice from silence, the poems find their grounding in the body and achieve rootedness and hope. I Say the Sky is a meditative and ultimately inspiring book that will be savored by seasoned readers as well as those new to poetry.

Find the beauty. In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty—in the natural world, in their family and friends, and in everyday simplicities—during a time of political tensions, environmental disasters, a global pandemic, and personal disappointment. From the vibrant color of a blade of grass, to their dog sleeping quietly in the corner, to delicate petals fallen from a rose, a mindfulness of the beauty in their surroundings helped offset the feelings of fear, outrage, and helplessness. The result of this exercise is a profoundly moving poetry collection that explores Mehta's South Asian and Appalachian culture, their Queerness, their relationships with self and others, race, privilege, and a deep admiration of nature and the spiritual realm.With the ear of a poet and a novelist's understanding of narrative motion, Mehta draws in the reader through humor, tenderness, and complexity. This debut poetry collection from the Lambda Literary Award–winning writer is a magnificent celebration of our own ordinary yet miraculous daily lives—an acknowledgment of the "messy beauty... ugly beauty" in the world.

Two-up, a famous Australian soldiers’ gambling game, has given Australian English many unique words and phrases. The game is significant in Australia’s cultural history. This book is the essential guide to the language and history of the ‘national game’. Bruce Moore explains Two-up’s role in the development of the ANZAC legend and provides new evidence that aspects of the game and its terminology have their origins in Ireland. He shows us how the Australian concept of the ‘fair go’ had its origins in Two-up, and how working-class tenacity saved the game from the efforts of authorities and wowsers to wipe it out. The well-known phrase ‘come in spinne’r is just one of the more than 140 Australian words and phrases that have their origin in the game of Two-up. This is the reader’s chance to learn about ‘alley loafers’, ‘baldie’s, ‘bastards on bikes’, ‘boxer’s, ‘butterflies’, ‘cockatoos’, ‘floaters’, ‘grouter bettors’, ‘headies’, ‘kips’, ‘nit-keepers’, ‘nobs’, ‘ringmasters’, and ‘two-uppians’.

Contemporary media history is a rapidly growing field that extends far beyond traditional studies of technology or institutions such as radio, film, and television. This volume expands the scope further still to analyse ephemeral, mundane phenomena long overlooked by media historiography. In eight original essays, the volume demonstrates the strengths of a broad concept of the media. The first part centres on media systems and media events, with studies of spiritist séances, Gallup polls, the mediated persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the burial of a Swedish elder statesman in 1915. The second part focuses on media materialities and infrastructure such as art replicas, ring binders, tourist guidebooks, and media technology in the IKEA home. Aimed at students and academics alike, Expanding Media Histories offers new empirical research, which engages critically with key concepts in media history today.

Two events tie together the nine stories in Monic Ductan's gorgeous debut: the 1920s lynching of Ida Pearl Crawley and the 1980s drowning of a high school basketball player, Lucy Boudreaux. Both forever shape the people and the place of Muscadine, Georgia, in the foothills of Appalachia. The daughters of Muscadine are Black Southern women who are, at times, outcasts due to their race and also estranged from those they love. A remorseful woman tries to connect with the child she gave up for adoption; another, immersed in loneliness, attempts to connect with a violent felon. Two sisters love each other deeply even when they cannot understand one another. A little girl witnessing her father's slow death realizes her own power and lack thereof. A single woman weathers the excitement - and rigors - of online dating.Covering the last one hundred years, these are stories of people whose voices have been suppressed and erased for too long: Black women, rural women, Appalachian women, and working-class women. Ductan presents the extraordinary nature of everyday lives in the tradition of Alice Walker, Deesha Philyaw, James McBride, and Dorothy Allison in an engaging, engrossing, and exciting new voice.

PRINCESS RAINE IS A BRIGHT KID—a very bright kid. And that’s her problem. No one likes smart kids, especially when they’re unaware of the effect they have on other people. Even her Dad (that’s the king) finds her too much. To make things worse, she has two funny, silly, younger brothers—twins—both as dumb as a bar of soap—whom everyone loves. It’s not fair.So when the kingdom of Rainland is threatened by a massive and abnormal heatwave, the reason has to be a natural phenomenon, like global warming—right? It couldn’t be the arrival of some magical, mythical, firebreathing monster. Could it?The king wants Raine to go and investigate but she refuses; let him send his younger son, if he’s so sure there’s a monster: it’s always the youngest who slays the dragon in fairytales. And then something totally unexpected happens to her and everything changes. But how? Read on.

Writing does not begin and end with the encoding of an idea into a group of symbols. It is practised by people who have learnt its principles and acquired the tools and skills for doing it, in a particular context that affects what they do and how they do it. Nor are these practices static, as those involved exploit opportunities to adapt old features and develop new ones. The act of writing then has tangible and visible consequences not only for the writers but also for those encountering what has been produced, whether they can read its content or not – with potential for a wider social visibility that can in turn affect the success and longevity of the writing system itself.With a focus on the syllabic systems of the Bronze Age Aegean, this book attempts to bring together different perspectives to create an innovative interdisciplinary outlook on what is involved in writing: from structuralist views of writing as systems of signs with their linguistic values, to archaeological and anthropological approaches to writing as a socially grounded practice. The main chapters focus on the concepts of script adoption and adaptation; different methods of logographic writing; and the vitality of writing traditions, with repercussions for the modern world.Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

In Afterlives, the literary scholar Camilla Storskog investigates how classics with Scandinavian orgin have been reinterpreted as comics. She sets out how literary works, plays, and films have crossed and recrossed the boundaries of language and media, speaking to new times and new contexts. Comic art adaptations have long been neglected by academics, so in this book the author considers them as unique visual media with their own aesthetic, technical, and narrative qualities.

Historical actors are as central to the history of knowledge as to all historical scholarship. Every country, every era has its biographies of eminent scientists, intellectuals, and educational reformers. Yet the theoretical currents that have left their mark on the historical and sociological studies of knowledge since the 1960s have emphasized structures over actors, collectives over individuals. By contrast, Knowledge Actors stresses the importance of historical actors and re-engages with their actions from fresh perspectives. The objective of this volume is thus to foster a larger discussion among historians of knowledge about the role of knowledge actors. Do we want individuals and networks to take centre stage in our research narratives? And if so, which ones do we want to highlight and how are we to conduct our research? What are the potential pitfalls of pursuing that actor-centric trajectory? This the third volume in a trilogy about the history of knowledge from the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK).

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskri is not a deteriorated Sanskrit (as many believed at the discovery of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit), but, following the theoretical foundations underlying the pioneering work of Franklin Edgerton, a language with its grammar and vocabulary sui generis implemented rather consequently, which for a long period of time was used to spread the teaching of Buddha. The Reader is meant as a textbook for advanced students with an interest in non-standard Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan. A substantial novelty of the Reader is that it includes extracts from representative texts either recently critically re-edited on the basis of new manuscripts or from the texts unknown at the time of Edgerton’s publications. All extracts are accompanied by commentaries explaining their grammatical peculiarities as well as by selections of specific lexical items.

At the end of his last adventure (Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé), Belle Nash was banished for four years to the island of Grenada. It is now 1835, and Belle has returned to Bath, glad to be back but pained by the absence of his most recent Caribbean love. His heartache leads to confusions when he meets Pablo Fanque, the Black equestrian acrobat from Norfolk who longs to set up his own circus. As a well-loved figure in Bath, Belle uses his influence to try and help, but has to run the gauntlet of Lord Servitude, the most hated man in England and a die-hard supporter of slavery. As ever, William Keeling's whimsical tale brings Belle, his gay hero, into a situation where comedy does not obscure stark moral issues to do with prejudice and bigotry that are as alive today as they were in Regency times.

Public education plays a crucial role in crafting a nation's future. In the United States, education reform policy, particularly the reliance on large-scale, standardized testing, is a growing topic of national conversation and concern. An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education demonstrates how centuries of propaganda have led us to accept the idea that test scores indicate something so valuable about human beings that they should be used to organize society. Drawing on decades of experience as an educator, author Wendy Zagray Warren unpacks the origins of this practice, inviting us to probe the ideologies underlying testing procedures and score interpretation and to evaluate the rationale for using test scores as the sole markers for academic achievement. From the beginning, large-scale tests have produced scores divided by race and class. Initially, these results aligned with the eugenic ideology of its creators. Warren shows that while the rhetoric used to justify test-based policy has changed, the model used to produce test scores remains much the same. Therefore, so do the outcomes of test-based policies, which continue to reproduce and reinforce the existing social hierarchy of the United States. The hope of equity lies in educators charting new paths and scholars around the world who are dreaming new educational paradigms into being. Ultimately, Warren invites policymakers, educators, and parents to explore the richness of possibility when education is designed around the belief that every child is worthy of the opportunity to thrive.

What can the classification of languages tell us about human origins and human prehistory? This book presents a popular account of the origin of language. It is intended for an audience with no prior knowledge of comparative linguistics, genetics or archaeology. The present volume is a reprint of the 2009 second edition of the book, and includes the text of the first edition (1994) with minor modifications, as well as the scientific evidence for monogenesis, and a Postscript recounting developments in the field since the original publication of the book.

An English translation of a Latin work on the Syriac grammatical tradition ('Historia artis grammaticae apud Syros') by the 19th-century German theologian and linguist, Adalbert Merx.

This work argues that there are traces of Sufism to be found in British Romanticism. Most scholars of Romanticism have overlooked the impact of Sufism on Romanticism in favour of Christian and neo-Platonic Mysticism, but this work fills in this gap by showing the magnitude of the influence of Sufism on the Romantics without negating the influence of other -isms. What elements of Sufism attracted the attention of the Romantics? And why were the Romantics attracted more to Sufism and Sufi poets than to Christian Mysticism and Mystic poets?

No one will protect you. Months after being named the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. announced his decision to leave the public school system. His career as a high school English teacher had spanned more than a decade but ended abruptly - another casualty of the cruel and dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination that is creeping back into the halls of government and the homes of Americans. At the beginning of Carver's career, an administrator warned him about discussing his otherwise openly gay identity at work: "No one will protect you, including me." A new administration allowed for more freedom, but the initial warning eventually rang true. School officials failed repeatedly to address harassment of students and of Carver himself, until he could no longer endure such a purposeful deterioration of human rights. While Carver's testimony before the House of Representatives brought much-needed attention to the need for protections for LGBTQ+ people in schools, the damage was done. In Gay Poems for Red States, Carver counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a life full of beauty and pride is possible for everyone. More than a collection of poetry, Carver's earnest and heartfelt verses are for those wishing to discover and understand the vastness of Appalachia, and for the LGBTQ+ Appalachians who long for a future - for a home - in an often unwelcoming place.