Why Americans Speak English

About the Book

This informative and engaging historical novel uniquely turns a complicated study into interesting reading of American history. All the characters are the creation of the author and entirely fictional. The exceptions, of course, are those public figures mentioned by name. This is the saga of a family of Renaissance Florence that had re-awakened the culture of education, ideas, art, and governance with responsibility. The world suddenly opened to exploration and adventure. The book brilliantly intertwines historical fact with gripping fiction—a novel of politics, love, intrigue, and passions that rule human lives while spanning four centuries of a most unusual family deeply and personally involved with the age of discovery of the Western Hemisphere, an unknown mass that encompassed almost half of earth’s land mass to the founding of the United States of America. Picture yourself with Marco Polo and the Emperor of China, or talking with Christopher Columbus in his cabin aboard the Santa Maria sailing an unknown ocean, or observing the remarkable Leonardo da Vinci when he required funds to visit the King of France, or perhaps listening to the discussions in the Court of St. James of plans of King Charles to rid England of undesirables and populate the Land Grants in the new American colonies. Western Civilization is replete with wars with little or no reason, with intrigues where monarchs make momentous decisions with little thought but having enormous unintended consequences, where a storm is able to change the course of history and the reader becomes involved in the drama. Almost as the wind changes, history bends and for America, it determines its language. ‘

About the Author

Richard Balmert is a native of Maryland and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University. After graduation and residing along the East Coast—in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York—he was drawn to the early history of the United States and the wide diversity of the old immigrant populations of Baltimore, Philadelphia, northern New Jersey, and New York City. Later, calling South Bend, Indiana; Fort Madison, Iowa; and Colorado Springs home provided the opportunity to observe the interests of a different, diverse population, piquing an interest in people in foreign lands that were immigrants here but who now call English their language and inculcating a desire to travel. Visiting almost every country in Europe produced a fervor for art, which always remains. As with his characters in his book, the urge to understand people expands, resulting in extended visits to Asia (China, India, Southeast Asia), Fiji Islands, Australia, and New Zealand. He finds the Middle East—from Turkey to Israel to Egypt to Morocco—especially fascinating because of its ancient history. Now having visited all fifty states and residing around our country, he discovered California, lecturing on art and history and becoming a docent at a museum of fine art in San Diego, where he now resides. Richard Balmert writes with an ease and intuitive understanding that appeals to a wide swath of readers. His book, Why Americans Speak English, is designed not as a boring history but as a fascinating study of human nature, tainted with wit, attraction of men to women, love, and the suffering and hardship experienced by those who travel far to find a better life in America. For Americans who never really learned their history, this new book ties together the threads to an understanding on how peoples could come together, throw off their allegiances to a former nationality, and produce a new nation with a common language—even if it took the fickle finger of fate.