In typical academic circles, texts must be critiqued, mined for the obfuscated meanings they hide, and shown to reveal larger, broader meanings than what are initially evident. To engage in this type of writing is to perform an authentic version of scholarship. But what if a scholar chooses instead to write without critique? What if they write about travelling, their children, food, grocery shopping, frozen garlic bread, sandwiches, condiments, falafel, yoga, and moments that normally wouldn't be considered scholarly? Can the writing still be scholarly? Can scholarly writing be authentic if...

Translingual Inheritance tells a new story of the early days of democracy in the United States, when English had not yet become the only dominant language. Drawing on translingual theory, which exposes how language use contrasts with the political constructions of named languages, Elizabeth Kimball argues that Philadelphians developed complex metalinguistic conceptions of what language is and how it mattered in their relations. In-depth chapters introduce the democratically active communities of Philadelphia between 1750 and 1830 and introduce the three most populous: Germans, Quakers (the...