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Stewart's telling of the story behind so many names adds a new and pleasureable dimension to American history. And he reveals the naming processes, from adopting Indian appellations to names of explorers, to descriptions of events that took place there, to artificially contrived names, to names that evolved, to names brought from abroad -- in other words, the whole gamut of naming places. This is a book you read slowly, savoring the names on the land as they tell their story. Behind every name there's a story and Stewart's tome is a staggering monument of scholarship. One can only imagine the time and resources he put into this book which tells the origin of many of the place names that today are so familiar.
Sorry there aren't many reasons given to backup my review. I love American history also but this book didn't cut the mustard for me. I think it may have gotten better if I had stayed with it but I had had enough. Quite a disappointment, actually two of them since the book I ordered at the same time, How the States Got Their Shapes, was disappointing also. It was such a forgettable book, to me, I simply forgot them. I disliked this book so much I stopped reading it. Truly a record to get two losers at the same time. Very boring which is a shame since I am normally interested in this subject.
My husband and I both have really enjoyed looking through this book and plan to take it on trips. If you ever want to know how American cities and towns got their names, this is the place to go.
A great find. What a wonderful book. And such a pleasure to learn where the names of places come from.
The author starts with the blank canvas of the American landscape, before recorded history, and describes how a place becomes a name.The book is arranged chronologically, so the reader moves from pre-history to native Americans to colonists; and from the edges of the country (like Florida, California and New Mexico) to the middle regions; and from colonial governmental debates on names to the Congressional debates on state names in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The prose is spare and compelling. I learned so much from this book. The information about the place names comes at the reader not as a dry history lesson, but almost as an epic novel in which the main character is the landscape, and the minor characters are the natives, the immigrants, the politicians, the storytellers. The depth of research is mind-boggling.This is a book to be read, re-read and referred to for the rest of your life, especially if you are a traveller or a proud American. When I purchased it, I thought it might be like an annotated dictionary of sorts -- perhaps in alphabetical order, so that I could look up Topeka or New York. But it's not like that at all.
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