In a rare bout of insanity (maybe I mean sanity), I ask the readers of my blog for a little advice. First, I wonder if anybody knows of a good, one volume history of England. Secondly, I would like to find the same thing except for Germany rather than England. I am quite deficient in the histories of these two countries and I would like to at least begin plugging those deficiencies.

One concept I have had trouble trying to understand is the idea of the case and what function casing in language provides. I have been reading about the history of the English language. Old English has four cases and, I guess because of the cases, sentence structure wasn't all that important whereas, because Modern English (and Middle English) lost its casing (for the most part), sentence structure is extremely important. I'm going to see if I can get this casing thing straight in my mind.