A linguistic history of Native American place-names in Indiana In tracing the roots of Indiana place names, Michael McCafferty focuses on those created and used by local Native Americans. Drawing from exciting new sources that include three Illinois dictionaries from the eighteenth century, the author documents the language used to describe landmarks essential to fur traders in Les Pays d’en Haut and settlers of the Old Northwest territory. Impeccably researched, this study details who created each name, as well as when, where, how and why they were used. The result is a detailed linguistic history of lakes, streams, cities, counties, and other Indiana names. Each entry includes native language forms, translations, and pronunciation guides, offering fresh historical insight into the state of Indiana.

Well before the innovation of maps, gazetteers served as the main geographic referencing system for hundreds of years. Consisting of a specialized index of place names, gazetteers traditionally linked descriptive elements with topographic features and coordinates. Placing Names is inspired by that tradition of discursive place-making and by contemporary approaches to digital data management that have revived the gazetteer and guided its development in recent decades. Adopted by researchers in the Digital Humanities and Spatial Sciences, gazetteers provide a way to model the kind of complex cultural, vernacular, and perspectival ideas of place that can be located in texts and expanded into an interconnected framework of naming history. This volume brings together leading and emergent scholars to examine the history of the gazetteer, its important role in geographic information science, and its use to further the reach and impact of spatial reasoning into the digital age.

A linguistic history of Native American place-names in Indiana In tracing the roots of Indiana place names, Michael McCafferty focuses on those created and used by local Native Americans. Drawing from exciting new sources that include three Illinois dictionaries from the eighteenth century, the author documents the language used to describe landmarks essential to fur traders in Les Pays d’en Haut and settlers of the Old Northwest territory. Impeccably researched, this study details who created each name, as well as when, where, how and why they were used. The result is a detailed linguistic history of lakes, streams, cities, counties, and other Indiana names. Each entry includes native language forms, translations, and pronunciation guides, offering fresh historical insight into the state of Indiana.