The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations - Hardcover

Rawson, Hugh; Miner, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195168232 ISBN 13: 9780195168235

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

With nearly 6,000 quotations arranged historically and annotated extensively, you'll know not just who said what, but get the full story behind the quote. Follow any of the more than five hundred topics (from Abolition to Zeal) and you will get a nutshell history of what great (and not-so-great) Americans had to say about each one. Quotations are arranged chronologically in each topic, allowing the reader to trace patterns of thought over time.

Fully indexed by author (including brief biographical sketches) and keyword, this is an essential reference for anyone interested in the great people and ideas of American history.

About this title

About the Author:

Margaret Miner and Hugh Rawson are also the editors of The New International Dictionary of Quotations, A Dictionary of Quotations from the Bible, and A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare. Hugh is also the author of Wicked Words, Devious Derivations, and Rawson's Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk. They live in Roxbury, Connecticut.

From Booklist:

In a revised edition of their American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations (1996), Rawson and Miner offer a carefully assembled collection of nearly 6,000 quotations about American culture and life. According to the compilers, hundreds of quotations have been added to this edition, and original entries have been reverified. In many cases, this means that misattributed quotations are now accurately cited.

There are three means of finding a quotation: through the subject headings by which the main text is arranged, through the keyword index, or through the author index. Although an author index is certainly a useful feature, experience shows that when looking for a quotation, subject and keyword indexes are indispensable.

The individuals quoted here include the famous and the infamous, Americans and foreigners, and those from the distant as well as recent past. Pronouncements from George Abbott to Fran Lebowitz to Frank Zappa and plenty of personalities, presidents, and pundits are organized under more than 500 cross-referenced topics. The selections beneath each topic are listed chronologically, allowing the reader to track the temper of the times. One of the strengths of this compilation is the annotations, which set many of the quotations in context and in some cases help to correct years of misinterpretation.

As Benjamin Franklin observed in Poor Richard's Almanack, "Nothing gives an author so much pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors." Nothing will give those in search of some Yankee wit or wisdom as much pleasure as this browser-friendly compilation. Recommended for most reference collections. Carolyn Mulac
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0195168232
• ISBN 13: 9780195168235
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 898