The gentry played a central role in medieval England, yet this is the first sustained attempt to explore the origins of the gentry and to account for its contours and peculiarities as a social formation. The book offers definition and conceptual vigour, and argues that the gentry, a kind of lesser nobility, was formed between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century.
The Fencer, with its distinctive three-position variable-geometry wings, is the Soviet counterpart to the American F-111, though somewhat smaller and lighter, and to a lesser extent the Tornado. Its origins certainly owed a lot to Soviet observation of the American TFX competition and the resulting swing-wing variable-geometry solutions.
Who Said That First? The Curious Origins of Common Words and Phrases
Many bright minds have come up with expressions we now take for granted as part of the English language, and which we use freely in vernacular speech. But the originators of many of our most useful second-hand remarks go uncredited. The Bible and Shakespeare are rich sources of many common phrases, but this book concentrates on familiar expressions whose origins lie elsewhere. So who said it first?
This book addresses central questions in the evolution of language: where it came from; how and why it evolved; how it came to be culturally transmitted; and how languages diversified. It does so from the perspective of the latest work in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, and deploys the latest methods and theories to probe into the origins and subsequent development of the only species that has languages.
A History of Korea - From Antiquity to the Present
In this comprehensive yet compact book, Michael J. Seth surveys Korean history from Neolithic times to the present. He explores the origins and development of Korean society, politics, and its still little-known cultural heritage from their inception to the two Korean states of today. Telling the remarkable story of the origins and evolution of a society that borrowed and adopted from abroad, Seth describes how various tribal peoples in the peninsula came together to form one of the world's most distinctive communities.
