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Outdated reading material

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ForteBass:
So, I have been doing a fair bit of reading as of late. A lot of my books are on the English language, including history and dialects. As far as dialects go, I have a few on American dialects, but I am finding them to be pretty foolish. The main problem is they are ridiculously out of date. Pronunciations of words are attributed to one region of the US, but is actually found nationwide (at least today they are).

Anybody else ever come across material they consider far too antiquated*? Furthermore, does anyone have decent recommendations for books on English dialects?


*by the way: the first "durrhurrhurr the bible" response earns a furious soul punch. That's not what this thread is for. Constructive conversation or get the fuck out.

Scandanavian War Machine:
I have a racist dictionary from the late 60's or early 70's that has some fairly offensive definitions for some racial slurrs.

not like "this word is a racial slur for ____" but like "____ is a word used to describe the sub-human, slanty-eyed Asians" or some shit like that. It's ridiculous.

KaosPilot:
For part of my thesis I've been reading a lot of key feminist texts. Since feminist studies pretty much became gender studies at the end of the 20th century it's difficult to pin-point 'key' texts since they're so recent no-one has had time to figure out just how 'key' they are. So Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is pretty much the latest and that was 1990. If anyone knows any recent (last ten years?) texts I'd be happy to hear them. I know Butler wrote another one called 'Undoing Gender' which is fairly recent.

As for English dialect, I know some of Bill Bryson's 'Made in America' deals with how the English dialects at the time had an effect on how the American language came to be shaped, but for anything on recent dialects I'm at a loss, sorry!

Jimor:
My grandfather had his grandmother's junior high school Geography textbook from 1876 where there was a section in the back about the characteristics of the seven races of the world. Wasn't deliberately insulting, but you can imagine the unintended condescension dripping from it.

The only thing I can think on dialects was a PBS series, The Story of English, but it probably doesn't go into as much depth as a book would.

McTaggart:
For my project at uni I was reading a whole lot of stuff about supernovae, usually in the form of collections of conference proceedings. One of these books was from 1977 and was a summary of the current sum of knowledge and the state of research in the field at the time. Early in 1978 a supernova occurred in the large magellanic cloud, which is really nearby. This one supernova is probably the most studied event of it's type and a huge amount was learned from observing it. As a result this 1977 book is completely obsolete and actually quite wrong in some places. I thought the timing on that was pretty neat.

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