Roundtable

The Rest Is History

The invention of American English, searching for the Fountain of Youth, and the dangers of ice cream.

By Angela Serratore

Friday, July 24, 2015

Postcard from the Fountain of Youth, 1912. Library of Congress

• The state of South Carolina has nearly 200 Confederate monuments. In Charleston, a graduate student and a historian are working to create new monuments dedicated to African slaves bought and sold in the city during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (CityLab)

• The messy invention of American English: “Residents of the United States hung on to words that dropped out of British English: guess, gotten, cabin, junk, molasses. We also began using words lifted from native languages—maize, canoe. But, mostly, Americans would just make words up. Thomas Jefferson, who described himself as ‘a friend to neology,’ created the word belittle. British writers despaired over it; he simply made up more.” (Atlas Obscura)

• A bookseller discovered a collection of All The Year Round, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens and annotated by the author himself. The annotations prove the previously disputed authorship of pieces by Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll, and two of Dickens’ teenage sons. (The Independent)

• Touring the Russian countryside with Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. (The Telegraph)

• Ice cream parlors struck fear into the hearts of upstanding nineteenth century Scotswomen worried about smoking, dancing, and boy-girl fraternizing. “It was concluded that ice cream shops embodied ‘perfect iniquities of hell itself and ten times worse than any of the evils of the public house. They were sapping the morals of the youth of Scotland.’” (The New Inquiry)

• If tight clothes cause constricted organs, are skinny jeans the new corsets? (JSTOR)

• “Juan Ponce de León never visited and never could have visited St. Augustine, Florida: St. Augustine was not founded until 41 years after his death, in 1565.” Despite a hiccup in the timeline, thousands of visitors descend upon the Florida city each year in search of the Fountain of Youth. (The Paris Review Daily)

• Future historic site? The first Burlington, Vermont, apartment of senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is now on the market for $1,300 a month. (Curbed)