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Victor Stafford Reid
Victor Stafford Reid, Order of Jamaica, OJ, (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote to influence younger generations to embrace local history. He was awarded the silver (1950) and gold (1976) Musgrave Medals, the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981.''Journal of West Indian Literature'', vol. 2, no. 1, December 1987. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children; one play production; and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are ''V.S. Reid's New Day, New Day'', "the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form", and ''The Leopard (V.S. Reid novel), The Leopard''. As a writer, Reid aimed to instill an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. His writings reflected many of the social and cultural hardships that pervade the time periods illustrated in his literary works. As literary critic E ...
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The Honourable
''The Honourable'' (Commonwealth English) or ''The Honorable'' (American English; American and British English spelling differences#-our, -or, see spelling differences) (abbreviation: ''Hon.'', ''Hon'ble'', or variations) is an honorific Style (manner of address), style that is used as a prefix before the names or titles of certain people, usually with official governmental or diplomatic positions. Use by governments International diplomacy In international diplomatic relations, representatives of foreign states are often styled as ''The Honourable''. Deputy chiefs of mission, , consuls-general, consuls and honorary consuls are always given the style. All heads of consular posts, whether they are honorary or career postholders, are accorded the style according to the State Department of the United States. However, the style ''Excellency'' instead of ''The Honourable'' is used for ambassadors and high commissioners only. Africa Democratic Republic of the Congo In the Democrati ...
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Patois
''Patois'' (, same or ) is speech or language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. As such, ''patois'' can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects or vernaculars, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant. In colloquial usage of the term, especially in France, class distinctions are implied by the very meaning of the term, since in French, ''patois'' refers to any sociolect associated with uneducated rural classes, in contrast with the dominant prestige language ( Standard French) spoken by the middle and high classes of cities or as used in literature and formal settings (the " acrolect"). Sociolinguistics is the discipline that studies the relationship between these language varieties, how they relate to the dominant culture and, in the case of France, to national language policy. Etymology The term ''patois'' comes from Old French (originally meaning ), possibly from the verb , from ...
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1987 Deaths
Events January * January 1 – Bolivia reintroduces the Boliviano currency. * January 2 – Chadian–Libyan conflict – Battle of Fada: The Military of Chad, Chadian army destroys a Libyan armoured brigade. * January 3 – Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah says that Afghanistan's 1978 Communist revolution is "not reversible," and that any opposition parties will have to align with Communist goals. * January 4 – ** 1987 Maryland train collision: An Amtrak train en route from Washington, D.C. to Boston collides with Conrail engines at Chase, Maryland, United States, killing 16 people. ** Televangelist Oral Roberts announces to his viewers that unless they donate $8 million to his ministry by March 31, God will "call [him] home." * January 15 – Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, is forced into retirement by political conservatives. * January 16 – León Febres Cordero, president of Ecuador, is kidnapped for 11 hours by followers of imprisoned ...
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1913 Births
Events January * January – Joseph Stalin travels to Vienna to research his ''Marxism and the National Question''. This means that, during this month, Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky and Tito are all living in the city. * January 3 – First Balkan War: Greece completes its Battle of Chios (1912), capture of the eastern Aegean island of Chios, as the last Ottoman forces on the island surrender. * January 13 – Edward Carson founds the (first) Ulster Volunteers, Ulster Volunteer Force, by unifying several existing Ulster loyalism, loyalist militias to resist home rule for Ireland. * January 18 – First Balkan War: Battle of Lemnos (1913), Battle of Lemnos – Greek admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis forces the Turkish fleet to retreat to its base within the Dardanelles, from which it will not venture for the rest of the war. * January 23 – 1913 Ottoman coup d'état: Enver Pasha comes to power. February * February 1 – New York City's Grand Central Te ...
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Mervyn Morris
Mervyn Eustace Morris OM (born 21 February 1937) is a poet, writer, editor and professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His poetry is well respected throughout the Caribbean, which has consistently ranked him among the top West Indian poets. He was also one of the first academics to espouse the importance of nation language in helping to define in verse important aspects of Jamaican culture." Morris was Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2014 to 2017. Biography Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at the University College of the West Indies (UWI) and as a Rhodes Scholar at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In 1970, he began lecturing at UWI, where he went on to be appointed a Reader in West Indian Literature. In 1992, he was a UK Arts Council Visiting Writer-in-Residence at the South Bank Centre. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & West Indian Literature. In 2009, Morris was awarded the ...
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Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone codification to the point of being socially perceived as the standard language, associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing th ...
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Norman Manley
Norman Washington Manley (4 July 1893 – 2 September 1969) was a Jamaican statesman who served as the first and only Premier of Jamaica. A Rhodes Scholar, Manley became one of Jamaica's leading lawyers in the 1920s. Manley was an advocate of universal suffrage, which was granted by the British colonial government to the colony in 1944. Encouraged by Osmond Theodore Fairclough, who had joined forces with the brothers Frank and Ken Hill, Hedley P. Jacobs and others in 1938, he helped to launch the People's National Party which later was affiliated to the Trade Union Congress and even later the National Workers Union. He led the PNP in every election from 1944 to 1967. Their efforts resulted in the New Constitution of 1944, granting full adult suffrage. Manley served as the colony's Chief Minister from 1955 to 1959, and as Premier from 1959 to 1962. He was a proponent of self-government but was persuaded to join nine other British colonies in the Caribbean territories in ...
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Jamaican Maroons
Jamaican Maroons descend from Africans who freed themselves from slavery in the Colony of Jamaica and established communities of Free black people in Jamaica, free black people in the island's mountainous interior, primarily in the eastern Parishes of Jamaica, parishes. Africans who were enslaved during Colony of Santiago, Spanish rule over Jamaica (1493–1655) may have been the first to develop such refugee communities. The English, who Invasion of Jamaica, invaded the island in 1655, continued the Atlantic slave trade, importation of enslaved Africans to work on the island's Sugar plantations in the Caribbean, sugar-cane plantations. Africans in Jamaica continually resisted enslavement, with many who freed themselves becoming maroons. The revolts disrupted the sugar economy in Jamaica and made it less profitable. The uprisings decreased after the British colonial authorities signed treaties with the Leeward Maroons in 1739 and the Windward Maroons in 1740, which required them ...
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Juan De Bolas
Juan de Bolas originally Juan Lubolo (1604?–1664) was one of the first chiefs of the Jamaican Maroons. Background When the English captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1655 Invasion of Jamaica, the latter freed their slaves, who fled into the mountainous forests of the interior, where they established independent communities of Free black people in Jamaica, and fought a guerrilla war against the English. It is likely that these early Spanish Maroons were descended from both escaped African slaves and Taino men and women. Juan de Bolas and his Maroon community was based primarily around the town of Lluidas Vale. The Spanish attempted to retake the Colony of Jamaica, and to this end Don Christobal de Ysasi relied on his alliance with the Spanish Maroons to secure this victory. Juan switches sides However, Governor Edward D'Oyley succeeded in persuading one of the leaders of the Spanish Maroons, Juan de Bolas, to switch sides and join the English along with his Maroon war ...
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Samuel Sharpe
Samuel Sharpe, or Sharp (1801 – 23 May 1832), also known as Sam Sharpe, was an enslaved Jamaican who was the leader of the widespread 1831–32 Baptist War slave rebellion (also known as the Christmas Rebellion) in Jamaica. He was proclaimed a National Hero of Jamaica on 31 March 1982 and his image is on the $50 Jamaican banknote. Biography Samuel Sharpe was born into slavery in the parish of St James, Jamaica, on a plantation owned by Samuel and Batty Sharpe. The Slave Return of 1832 announcing his death gave his name as Archer aka Samuel Sharpe, the son of Eve, and he was only 28 years old when he died. The Slave Return of Samuel and Jane Sharpe in 1817 showed a young 12-year-old Archer on the plantation with his mother Juda Bligom and siblings Joe (two years old) and Eliza (20 years old). He was allowed to become educated, for which he was well respected by his enslaved peers. Sharpe became a well-known preacher, leader and missionary in the Baptist Church, which ...
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Maroon (people)
Maroons are descendants of African diaspora in the Americas, Africans in the Americas and islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from slavery, through flight or manumission, and formed their own settlements. They often mixed with Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous peoples, eventually ethnogenesis, evolving into separate creole cultures such as the Garifuna and the Mascogos. Etymology ''Maroon'' entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective , meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive', itself possibly from the American Spanish word , meaning 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'. In the early 1570s, Sir Francis Drake's Francis Drake's expedition of 1572–1573, raids on the Spanish in Panama were aided by "''Symerons''", a likely misspelling of '. The linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal ''Language (journal), Language'', says, "If there is a connection between Eng. ''maroon'', Fr. ', and Sp. ', Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to E ...
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