The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It dis

This chapter looks at English in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan – at first sight countries at the periphery of World Englishes research and theory, given the size of their populations, their economic weight, and the impact their varieties and uses of English have had on others. It traces the histories and the present-day sociolinguistic situation of English in the five countries, of which only South Sudan and Uganda share a colonial past of British control. The current chapter also provides an outline of the similarities across and differences between their Englishes and discusses how continuing regional migration and influence from exogenous varieties of English have contributed to their shape and whether Uganda and Ugandan English play an epicentral role in the region.

One group [of commentators] has intellectually accepted the philosophy, moral concepts and social principles on which Western civilization and culture are based. They consider life and its problems from the same viewpoint as was adopted by the architects of modern Europe, and now they want to mould the social pattern of their respective homelands also after the same Western pattern. They sincerely believe that the real aim of education for a woman is to enable her to earn her living and to acquire the arts of appearing attractive to the male. Her real position in the family according to them is that, like the man, she should also be an earning member, so as to subscribe fully her share to the common family budget. They think that a woman is meant to add charm and sweetness to communal life by her beauty, elegance and attractive manners. She should warm people up by her sweet, musical words, she should send them to ecstasy by her rhythmic movements and she should dance them to the highest pitch of pleasure and excitement. They think that the woman’s role in national life consists in doing social work, attending municipal councils, participating in conferences and congresses, and devoting her time and abilities to tackle political, cultural and social problems. She should take part in physical exercise and sports, compete in swimming, jumping and racing contests, and set new records in long-distance flights. In short, she should do anything and everything outside the house and concern herself less with what is inside the house. This is their ideal for womanhood. It leads to worldly prosperity, and all the moral concepts that run counter to it are devoid of sense and meaningless. To suit the purposes of the new life, therefore, these people have exchanged the old moral concepts for the new ones, just as Europe did. For them, material gain and sensual pleasures are of real worth, whereas a sense of honour, chastity, moral purity, matrimonial loyalty, undefiled lineage and the like virtues are not only worthless but antiquated whims which must be destroyed for the sake of making progress. These people are indeed the true followers [Urdu momin] of the Western creed. They are now trying their utmost to spread and propagate it in Eastern countries also by the same techniques and devices as have already been adopted in the West.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s early musical career was shaped by her formal training at the Royal College of Music and her subsequent studies in Prague. During her continental travels between 1929 and 1935, Maconchy participated in Prague’s vibrant musical scene, studying with Karel Jirák and performing for Czech audiences. Her successful performances with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and broadcasts on Czech Radio outside of the regular London concert halls helped transform her reception from a student to an innovative composer. With these triumphant continental performances to European audiences, Maconchy’s stature grew from student to seasoned professional.

In the summer of 1776, at least 14,000 overseers of the poor in England and Wales had to put pen to paper: a deadline was approaching, and information had to be gathered and returned. Only around April of that year had these men taken up their office, following a procedure set in the Elizabethan poor law. They would serve for one year, until the next Easter nomination, and during the previous few months they had no doubt been busy. Parish rates were to be collected; orphans, widows, and the infirm required pensions; pauper children had to be clothed and bound as apprentices; and actual and potential paupers had to be examined and sometimes removed. Every penny spent needed to be recorded, the magistrate and parish vestry had to be satisfied, county and state taxation required attention, and new cases had to be assessed. With an increasing population and mounting grain prices, even hard-working householders turned to the overseer of the poor. Women were reported for carrying illegitimate children – it was the overseer of the poor who had to chase the reputed fathers to extract the lying-in and maintenance costs.

Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765), records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

Maconchy’s musical outlook was fundamentally shaped by her time at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London. She first entered the RCM in 1923 as a painfully shy teenager from Ireland but the six years that she spent there as a student transformed her into a confident and brilliant, young professional – ready to take on the world with her music. Rhiannon Mathias considers the transformative encounters at the RCM that opened up entirely new paths for Maconchy, including the discovery of music that most inspired her, inspirational lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams, her composition and performance experiences and the important friendships with fellow collegians, including Grace Williams, that would stimulate and sustain her throughout her life.

The book’s thesis is that although the doctrine devised by airmen at the Air Corps Tactical School was significant in determining Air Corps force structure, it was far less important than other factors. Army doctrine, which trumped air theory, emphasized the use of aircraft to support the ground battle. This meant the Air Corps was compelled to buy observation aircraft, pursuit, attack aircraft, and medium bombers; large, strategic bombers were specifically rejected. As a consequence, when war broke out in Europe, there were only two dozen heavy bombers in the entire Air Corps inventory. This warped force structure would have a significant and detrimental impact on national strategy at the outset of World War II. Fortunately, inspired leadership, both in the Army as a whole and within the air arm, mitigated two decades of short-sightedness and allowed the Army Air Forces to play a decisive role in victory.

This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.