American Indian Place Names of Greater New York and Vicinity
by Robert S. Grumet
Drivers exiting the New Jersey Turnpike for Perth Amboy, and map readers marveling at all the places in Pennsylvania named Lackawanna, need no longer wonder how these names originated. Manhattan to Minisink provides the histories of more than five hundred place names in the Greater New York area, including the five boroughs, western Long Island, the New York counties north of the city, and parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Robert S. Grumet, a leading ethnohistorian specializing in the region’s Indian peoples, draws on his meticulous research and deep knowledge to determine the origins of Native, and Native-sounding, place names.
Boundaries—lines imposed on the landscape—shape our lives, dictating everything from which candidates we vote for to what schools our children attend to the communities with which we identify. In Creating the American West, historian Derek Everett examines the function of these internal lines in American history generally and in the West in particular. Drawing lines to create states in the trans-Mississippi West, he points out, imposed a specific form of political organization that made the West truly American.
Mapping Indigenous Land explores how, as persuasive and rhetorical images, these maps did more than simply record the disputed territories for lawsuits; they also enabled indigenous communities—and sometimes Spanish petitioners—to translate their ideas about contested spaces into visual form.
Written by distinguished linguist William Bright, the handbook is organized alphabetically, and its entries for places—including towns, cities, counties, parks, and geographic landmarks—are concise and easy to read. Entries give the state and county, along with all available information on pronunciation, the name of the language from which the name derives, the name’s literal meaning, and relevant history. In their introduction to the handbook, editors Alice Anderton and Sean O’Neill provide easy-to-understand pronunciation keys for English and Native languages.
Their origin, evolution, and meanings, collected in Kansas from the Siouan, Algonquian, Shoshonean, Caddoan, Iroquoian, and other tongues
by John Rydjord
The study of place-names has many facets—linguistics, geography, legends, literature, and folklore. Avoiding the straitjacket of purely linguistic treatment, John Rydjord grouped the place-names into chapters based mainly on tribes or linguistic families. He treated the names in their historical context, delving into the circumstances that caused them to be given to each political and topographical feature and including a variety of interpretations, even contradictions.
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