Robert MacDougall's The Emigrant's Guide to North America, written in Gaelic and published in 1841, attempts to give an accurate picture of Canada. Set up to provide a practical background for Highland Scots coming to Canada, it includes all the information MacDougall feels will be necessary -- including preparation for the trip. The book also serves as a type of travelogue, describing particular sights and sounds found on the way to his ultimate destination, Goderich, in the Huron Tract. This translated work retains the unmistakable speech patterns, images and rhymes of the Gaelic language. Robert MacDougall's quirky, opinionated personality speaks clearly, seeking to dispel some myths about Canada of the time by telling the "truth." This book deserves to be read by a wide audience. "I don't know where else you could find such riches of information and observation, so compactly presented, about this exhilirating and trying time in our past. Or get so fresh a sense of a real man of that time, with his energy and sweeping opinions and flourishing rhetoric. The translator and the editor have done a splendid job." -- Alice Munro>

The 19th century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn't just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervor, and utopian imaginings. This volume shows how 19th-century lexicography continues to influence how we speak, write, and think in the 21st century.

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus linguistics, variation studies, dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, language ideology, and the enregisterment framework. In the ten chapters of the volume, a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, containing evidence of past language use in the U.S. and Canada are introduced and exploited for novel insights. Among the research questions addressed are the following: how to best model the emergence of new varieties of English in North America? Are morphological Americanisms historical retentions, post-colonial revivals, or progressive innovations? What is distinctly Canadian in the context of North American Englishes? How can synchronic dialects be used to examine trajectories of change in the history of Canadian English?

In 1966 Jim Allen undertook the first professional excavation of a European site in Australia. The 1840s military settlement of Victoria was established at Port Essington, the northernmost part of the Northern Territory and was the end point of Ludwig Leichhardt's epic journey in 1844-45. This settlement was the longest lived of three failed attempts by the British to establish a settlement on the northern coast of Australia before 1850. Its history reflects many of the dominant themes of wider colonial history - isolation, tropical disease, poorly equipped and inexperienced colonists, inept government bureaucracies and relations with the Indigenous population. By looking at both the material evidence produced by archaeological excavation and the written sources, Allen sought to integrate both sorts of evidence to produce an eclectic history that was neither social nor political nor economic in its primary emphasis, but combined all three. When his research was presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Australian National University in 1969 its main theoretical thrust concerned the problems of this data integration and this remains a central issue in the discipline of historical archaeology in Australasia. Some 40 years on, ASHA's decision to launch its new monograph series by publishing this work has several purposes. At one level this monograph is of historical importance in establishing where the discipline began in this country. It explains both the theoretical and methodological problems Allen faced and how he sought to overcome them. At another level it provides the data from an important excavation that has not been previously published. On a third level it provides a particular sort of historical account of a small but important chapter of Australia's European beginnings that could not have been written without the dual sources of written documents and archaeology. Together they reflect a poignant episode in our past. In the decade following this work Port Essington became the subject of a four part ABC-TV drama, a musical composition by Peter Sculthorpe and paintings by Russell Drysdale. Port Essington will appeal as a reference book to both students and practitioners of historical archaeology and to people interested in Australian colonial history. After Port Essington, Jim Allen established an academic career in prehistoric archaeology in Australia and the Pacific. He is currently Emeritus Professor in the School of Historical and European Studies in La Trobe University.