Graeme Davis – författare

It was the Vikings, not Christopher Columbus, who made the first European discovery of America. It was the Vikings, not the Pilgrim Fathers, who were the first Europeans settlers in America, and it was probably the Vikings who first used the name America.Around a thousand years ago the Vikings crossed the North Atlantic and established their settlements on the American continent. Yet today both Europe and North America treat the Vikings in North America as if it were no more than a curious footnote to their histories – as if the Vikings made just a handful of voyages with little impact. This book challenges this outdated view. We now know that the Vikings travelled widely in North America, both on the east coast and in the high Arctic and Hudson Bay. Today we realise that Viking presence in America lasted nearly five centuries, and its legacy inspired much of the post-Columban exploration of North America.

Even before Theseus descended into the labyrinth to face the Minotaur, he was already a famous hero and a veteran of many battles. The son of a man, a woman, and the god Poseidon, he’d journey far across Ancient Greece, fighting numerous monsters including the Periphetes ‘the clubber’, the Crymmyon Sow, and the insane demigod, Procrustes ‘the stretcher’. He also survived several assassination attempts, including one by Medea, the famous witch-wife of Jason. Despite these adventures, it was on Crete that Theseus faced his greatest challenge. Taking the place of a sacrificial tribute to the king of Crete, Theseus used his wits and charm to convince the princess Ariadne and the famous inventor Daedalus to help him defeat the dreaded Minotaur, a hideous combination of man and bull that lived in a labrythine dungeon. In this book, Graeme Davis draws upon the classic sources to retell the great myths and legends of Theseus, the founder-king of Athens, and backs this narrative with a factual examination of the myth, its variations, and its development over time. Replete with both classical and modern illustrations, this book is a concise exploration of one of the most enduring myths of Ancient Greece.

In the dying days of World War II, Nazi Germany spent increasingly large amounts of its dwindling manufacturing capability on the construction of a small fleet of flying saucers capable of travel beyond the atmosphere. While these saucers were too few in number to affect the eventual outcome of the war, they did allow for a small, but fanatical Nazi group to escape Germany, first to Antarctica, and then on to the moon!For the first time, the history of the Nazi space program has been revealed - with a focus on the design, construction, and layout of the moonbase. Using detailed maps, the entire moonbase is reconstructed, noting the locations of various important features, such as weapon emplacements, the Vril generator, the air recyclers and water extractors. The book also covers the various attempt by the allies to overcome this last Nazi stronghold through both subterfuge and outright battle.

A darkly luminous new anthology collecting the most terrifying horror stories by renowned female authors, presenting anew these forgotten classics to the modern reader.

This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction.Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus—but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” anticipated Holmes’ deductive reasoning by more than forty years. In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe—and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If Rue Morgue was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Among the possibilities are two books by Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)—Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and The Notting Hill Mystery (1862-3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.” As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages—hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted “cozy” murders in Britain—and these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured in these pages.

The most spine-tingling suspense stories from the colonial era—including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft—are presented anew to the contemporary reader.This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the Colonial era’s stifling religion and its dark and threatening woods. Today the best-known tale of Colonial horror is Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” although Irving’s story is probably best-known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors—Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them—are overshadowed by their bestsellers and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today’s reading public. Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary reader, the book will help bring their names—and their work—back from the dead. Featuring stories by Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and many more.

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the Colonial era’s stifling religion and its dark and threatening woods. Today the best-known tale of Colonial horror is Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” although Irving’s story is probably best-known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors—Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them—are overshadowed by their bestsellers and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today’s reading public. Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary reader, the book will help bring their names—and their work—back from the dead. Featuring stories by Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and many more.

In the stories of the ancient Vikings, Thor is a warrior without equal, who wields his mighty hammer in battles against trolls, giants, and dragons. He is the god of storms and thunder, who rides to war in a chariot pulled by goats, and who is fated to fall in battle with the Midgard Serpent during Ragnarok, the end of all things. This book collects the greatest myths and legends of the thunder god, while also explaining their historical context and their place in the greater Norse mythology. It also covers the history of Thor as a legendary figure, how he was viewed by different cultures from the Romans to the Nazis, and how he endures today as a popular heroic figure.

Born in the dark days of the great crusades, the warrior monks of the Knights Templar vowed to defend pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. Yet strangely, there are few historical records of the Templars ever fulfilling this task. Instead, their history is one of bloodshed and conquest, wealth and power, dark secrets and conspiracies. Today, the story of the Knights Templar is intimately linked with the story of the Holy Grail. But what exactly is this ancient artifact, and how has it been used to manipulate history for the last one thousand years? This book, based on the notes of the recently deceased historian, Dr. Emile Fouchet, attempts to unlock the secrets of the Knights Templar. It begins with an examination of their historical origins, their growth in the early middle-ages, and their supposed destruction under the charges of heresy. From there, it uses the clues left by the Templars themselves to reconstruct their secret journeys as they moved the Holy Grail from Europe to the New World and back. It also charts the secret, three-way war that is still being fought between the Templars, the Freemasons, and the Catholic Church. Finally, the book reveals the greatest of all Templar conspiracies, the attempt to found a new world order under the auspices of the European Union.

This book links cattle to the construction of cursus monument sites. It suggests that these monuments commenced life as a form of cattle management prior to their possible ritual importance. As such it is an original and important contribution to the cursus monument ‹enigma› debate. Previous cursus monument studies have tended to focus on the construction or post-construction phases of the monument rather than the practical reasons communities decided to locate and align these monuments where they did.

«Dariush Borbor has created an impressive lexicographical reference work with zeal and passion for over three decades, having collected the largest possible assemblage of alternatives for every single reduplicate. Linguists from many scientific fields must be grateful to him for his pioneering work.»(Adriano V. Rossi, Professor Emeritus of Iranian Philology, DAAM, University of Naples L’Orientale and ISMEO, Rome)«The author has created a truly remarkable work on a very strange and little studied area of linguistics. The book contains a wealth of fascinating information and I can only congratulate him on the care and assiduity which he has devoted to it.»(Nicholas Sims-Williams, Professor Emeritus of Iranian and Central Asian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London)«I had an occasion to look again at your Dictionary of Reduplication. I realized once again how much useful work you have put into compiling it. Your bibliography is comprehensive and very useful. I should like to congratulate you on your assiduous effort to investigate so comprehensively a complex morphological aspect of the Middle Eastern Languages.»(† Ehsan Yarshater, Professor Emeritus, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University)The present dictionary is an analytical, comparative and etymological presentation of reduplication over a wide spectrum of languages. The range of featured languages – Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish – include three separate families connected only by geographical proximity, each with an extremely rich literary tradition. The dictionary covers multiple independent phenomena in several unrelated languages, the underlying idea being that their reduplications are all somehow connected, and that there exists a general «field» of reduplication. The book is not limited to a single field, but rather for several largely separate ones, such as linguistic relations, the theory of reduplication and etymology. Several other related or unrelated languages such as Icelandic, Japanese, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Hittite, etc. have been included for comparative purposes.The preliminary findings of this study indicate that reduplication in the languages under study, and in nearly all other languages, deal mostly with the fundamental, primary human requirements. Another strong proof of the «universality» of reduplicates are that they closely follow the same and similar formation, development and rule in most related and unrelated languages. In consequence of the universality of reduplication and its near identical development in all related or unrelated languages, it even legitimizes the creation of a grammar of reduplication in the future. A few of the essential features of this book include: a complete revision and updating of the semantics; a particular attention to the cognitive aspects; and, many etymologies that cannot be found elsewhere.

Polysemous lexical items have multiple senses associated with a single form, and these senses are interrelated. Polysemy is a universal and omnipresent phenomenon, providing a robust tool to convey creatively our ideas and thoughts. As a result, polysemy presents challenges for second language (L2) learners.Existing studies on the issue of polysemy in language acquisition often rely on researchers’ subjective understandings of the network of meanings around a lexical item or focus on English examples. Yet Chinese lexis exhibits greater polysemy than English and deserves its own examination. This book takes one Chinese polysemous item as an example to explore how native (L1) speakers and L2 learners perceive its multiple senses as well as how these senses are acquired by L2 learners. This book also investigates the predictive strengths of various factors that contribute to the acquisition pattern. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted to achieve these objectives, including methods from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

An all-important question for humans, death is unsurprisingly used as a source of intensification in language, perhaps even cross-linguistically. This book explores the use of death for intensification purposes in English and aims to shed light on how certain forms from this semantic field came to be used with an intensifying function over time, specifically dead(ly), mortal(ly) and to death. The author provides a full account of the evolution of these intensifiers from their origins up to present-day English from the perspective of grammaticalisation and other concomitant phenomena. To this end, this corpus-based research resorts to evidence from historical dictionaries, diachronic corpora and electronic collections. The study conducted, unprecedented in the number of examples analysed, combines both a qualitative and a quantitative approach to provide the most comprehensive picture of the long diachrony of these intensifiers.

This book shares a narrative inquiry study that explores the voices of Chinese students and unveils how they understand their study of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as part of their higher education (HE) journey in the UK. The book foregrounds the neo-liberalisation of the university and considers visiting Chinese students in this commodified education space. While challenging common misperceptions of Chinese students that result in the negative labelling and homogenisation of this international student cohort, it links the discussion to aspects of Orientalism applied to East Asian students, reportedly still evident in Western universities today.For contextualisation purposes and the encouragement of a meaningful understanding of contemporary Chinese students, the book includes an exploration of Chinese Education Reforms. The core argument sees a need for an increasing understanding of contemporary Chinese students in the UK HE academic community in relation to social, historical and cultural considerations, in order to enhance their Western education experience.

This is a step-by-step guide to using the wealth of online records to trace your family tree from your own computer, without the need to travel to national and regional record offices. Whether you are a novice or an experienced genealogist, and whether you plan to devote just a few hours of your time or embark on a life-time hobby, this book will guide you through the mass of records available - birth, marriage and death, the census, and much, much more - so that you can trace your line back hundreds of years. You will also learn how to upload your results to the internet, both to preserve your family's heritage and to connect with relatives, so that you can exchange photos and reminiscences.Contents: Welcome!; 1. What the internet offers the genealogist; 2. How to start; 3. Finding records of birth, marriage and death; 4. Using census records; 5. Other major sources; 6. Military; 7. Wills and where to find them online; 8. Migration; 9. Newspapers; 10. Occupations; 11. The poor and workhouse records; 12. Noble ancestors; 13. Directories; 14. School and university records; 15. Working with the wider context; 16. Family medical history; 17. DNA; 18. Working with names; 19. Recording your family tree; 20. Online recording options; 21. Problems of online trees; 22. Finding living relatives; 23. Genealogical miscellany; 24. Accent and dialect; 25. Final; Key websites; Index

'Brick walls' occur everywhere and all the time in genealogy research, but with this book you can take your British Isles family tree back further. Solving Genealogy Problems will: - Help you find new records, including unusual ones genealogists often don't know about; and make the best use of them when you do find them. - Suggest new ideas for looking at old problems. - Give additional ideas on using the census - then more ideas on using census substitutes when the census doesn't have the answers. - Suggest ways of finding elusive births, marriages and deaths - and then of making progress anyway, even when you absolutely cannot find them. This book covers all periods of British Isles genealogy. The new frontiers of genealogy are considered for the hope they give on even the most intractable research block, and the possibility they allow of building even the most difficult of family trees.Contents: 1. RECOGNISING BRICK WALLS; 2. UNDERSTANDING BIRTHS, MARRIAGES AND DEATHS; 3. FINDING BMD BIRTHS; 4. FINDING BMD MARRIAGES; 5. FINDING BMD DEATHS; 6. CENSUS SOLUTIONS; 7. UNDERSTANDING PARISH REGISTERS; 8. FINDING PARISH REGISTER CHRISTENINGS; 9. FINDING PARISH REGISTERS MARRIAGES; 10. FINDING PARISH REGISTER BURIALS AND MEMORIAL INSCRIPTIONS; 11. USING NEWSPAPERS AS AN ALTERNATIVE SOURCE; 12. GETTING MORE FROM WILLS AND ADMINISTRATIONS; 13. DIRECTORIES AS A CENSUS SUBSTITUTE; 14. ELECTORAL ROLL AS AN ALTERNATIVE SOURCE; 15. OTHER ALTERNATIVE SOURCES; 16. YET MORE SOURCES: THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTS AND THE GENEALOGIST; 17. PUBLISHING YOUR FAMILY TREE; 18. ORAL HISTORY; 19. LOCAL HISTORY; 20. DESCRIPTIONS OF AN ANCESTOR'S HOME; 21. CLUSTER GENEALOGY AND COMMUNITIES; 22. MILITARY RECORDS; 23. OCCUPATIONAL RECORDS; 24. IRELAND: PROBLEMS AND INSPIRATION; 25. INTERNATIONAL GENEALOGY; 26. PHOTOGRAPHS; 27. EARLY GENEALOGY; 28. GENETICS AND GENEALOGY; 29. HERITAGE; 30. COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS FOR RESEARCH; 31. THE GENEALOGY INDUSTRY; APPENDIX: THE TOP 10 BRICK WALL TIPS; INDEX.