About the Author
From The Atlantic: "Almost every British travel book about America from the 19th century ridiculed Yankee ways of talking, and the elites of U.S. society scrupulously imitated English upper-class speech patterns. Students at Harvard were taught to embrace the purity of the King's English, and if a president's version existed in the former colonies, no one in Cambridge would admit to speaking it. … Yet by 1930, Yankee English was well on its way to conquering the world. In a peculiar role reversal, writers and artists in other countries would now feel compelled to learn from American role models."