Author: Gillian Roberts File Type: pdf Is Superman Canadian? Who decides, and what is at stake in such a question? How is the Underground Railroad commemorated differently in Canada and the United States, and can those differences be bridged? How can we acknowledge properly the Canadian labour behind Hollywood filmmaking, and what would that do to our sense of national cinema? Reading between the Borderlines grapples with these questions and others surrounding the production and consumption of literary, cinematic, musical, visual, and print culture across the Canada-US border. Discussing a range of popular as well as highbrow cultural forms, this collection investigates patterns of cross-border cultural exchange that become visible within a variety of genres, regardless of their place in any arbitrarily devised cultural hierarchy. The essays also consider the many interests served, compromised, or negated by the operations of the transnational economy, the movement of cultures raw material across nation-state borders in literal and conceptual terms, and the configuration of a material citizenship attributed to or negotiated around border-crossing cultural objects. Challenging the oversimplification of cultural products labelled either Canadian or American, Reading between the Borderlines contends with the particularities and complications of North American cultural exchange, both historically and in the present. **Review An excellent collection that takes a new and compelling approach to culture and the border, Reading between the Borderlines makes very strong addition to the literature on borderlands in general, and the Canada-US border in particular. Kyle Conway, University of Ottawa and co-editor of Beyond the Border Tensions across the Forty-ninth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies Reading between the Borderlines a remarkably even, fresh, and insightful collection of essays pushes the reader to question national ownership of texts and lays bare how and when the border matters in cultural production and consumption, and when it doesnt. Andrew C. Holman, Bridgewater State University, and co-editor of The Same but Different Hockey in Quebec About the Author Gillian Roberts is associate professor of North American cultural studies at the University of Nottingham and author of Discrepant Parallels Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border.

Author: Stephen Conway File Type: pdf The American war against British imperial rule (1775-1783) was the worlds first great popular revolution. Ideologically defined by the colonists formal Declaration of Independence in 1776, the struggle has taken on something a mythic character, especially in the United States. From the Boston Tea Party to Paul Reveres ride to raise the countryside of New England against the march of the Redcoats from the heroic resistance of the militia Minutemen at the battles of Lexington and Concord to the famous crossing of the Delaware by General George Washington and from the American travails of Bunker Hill (1775) to the final humiliation of the British at Yorktown (1781), the entire contest is now emblematic of American national identity. Stephen Conway shows that, beyond mythology, this was more than just a local conflict rather a titanic struggle between France and Britain. The thirteen colonies were merely one frontline of an extended theatre of operations, with each superpower aiming to deliver the knockout blow. This bold new history recognizes the war as the Revolution but situates it on the wider, global canvas of European warfare. **Review Stephen Conways A Short History of the American Revolutionary War offers proof that big things come in small packages. In lucid prose, without a whiff of cant, Conway cuts through a century-long scholarly logjam about whether the American Revolution is best seen as a war about home rule, or about who should rule at home (as Carl Becker famously posed the question). Instead, Conway gives us a global American Revolution with multiple causes and ambiguous and far-reaching consequences. Conways A Short History of the American Revolutionary War locates the conflicts deep roots early in the colonial period, and traces its broad branches from Boston to Bengal, Philadelphia to the Philippines. His tight narrative tracks the wars many fronts in North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, South Asia, and beyond. Conway explores multiple wars as well as multiple continents here unfolds a brutal civil war as well as a heroic struggle of colonial liberation, a European and ultimately a global conflict as well as the war that made the United States. A political and cultural conflict, Conways Revolution is first and foremost a shooting war, with all the attendant drama and contingency of the finest military history. A diverse cast of charactersranging from ministers in London to generals in far-flung fields to African-Americans fighting for freedom, Native Americans demanding alliance, and women seeking safety and stabilitygives a human face to bloody insurrection and grand strategy. This is the work of a master historian at the height of his powers. I know of nothing like it. - Jane Kamensky, Harry S. Truman Professor of History, Brandeis University, USA A major scholar of the Revolutionary War, Stephen Conway has written an outstanding introduction for both students and laymen. He excels in placing the war in a global context including Europe, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and India. He has demonstrated better than anyone the diffusion of British troops and ships throughout the world, and the extent to which military demands in the Caribbean deflected much-needed resources from winning the war in the American colonies. Transcending the narrow national focus of so many accounts, he reveals this to have been a war in which Britain was more isolated than at any other time in its modern history and in which it was threatened with serious attempts of invasion for the first time since the Spanish Armada. Conway offers a compelling explanation of why Britain lost America. At the same time, his broader perspective shows that it was a war that the British did not entirely lose, since they won major victories against the Bourbons in 1782 and succeeded in bankrupting France. - Andrew OShaughnessy, Professor of History, University of Virginia and Saunders Director, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello Stephen Conways Short History takes a remarkably enlarged view of the American Revolutionary War from a rebellion in the British colonies of North America to the intervention of European powers, to fighting that spread round the globe, to a post-war settlement in which Britain fared unexpectedly well. Conway has told this sprawling story with authority and clarity. He has shown that while the British were unable to keep thirteen of their American colonies, they did have the fiscal and naval resources to survive the war and fare better than their enemies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This Short History is just the place to begin to understand the American Revolutionary War. - Ira D. Gruber, Harris Masterson, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History, Rice University About the Author Stephen Conway is Professor of History at University College London. He is the author of The War of American Independence, 1775-1783 (1995), The British Isles and the War of American Independence (2000) and War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2006).

Author: Brett Krutzsch File Type: pdf On October 14, 1998, five thousand people gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to mourn the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who had been murdered in Wyoming eight days earlier. Politicians and celebrities addressed the crowd and the televised national audience to share their grief with the country. Never before had a gay citizens murder elicited such widespread outrage or concern from straight Americans. In Dying to Be Normal, Brett Krutzsch argues that gay activists memorialized people like Shepard as part of a political strategy to present gays as similar to the countrys dominant class of white, straight Christians. Through an examination of publicly mourned gay deaths, Krutzsch counters the common perception that LGBT politics and religion have been oppositional and reveals how gay activists used religion to bolster the argument that gays are essentially the same as straights, and therefore deserving of equal rights. Krutzschs analysis turns to the memorialization of Shepard, Harvey Milk, Tyler Clementi, Brandon Teena, and F. C. Martinez, to campaigns like the It Gets Better Project, and national tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting to illustrate how activists used prominent deaths to win acceptance, influence political debates over LGBT rights, and encourage assimilation. Throughout, Krutzsch shows how, in the fight for greater social inclusion, activists relied on Christian values and rhetoric to portray gays as upstanding Americans. As Krutzsch demonstrates, gay activists regularly reinforced a white Protestant vision of acceptable American citizenship that often excluded people of color, gender-variant individuals, non-Christians, and those who did not adhere to Protestant Christianitys sexual standards. The first book to detail how martyrdom has influenced national debates over LGBT rights, Dying to Be Normal establishes how religion has shaped gay assimilation in the United States and the mainstreaming of particular gays as normal Americans. **Review A must-read for scholars and activists alike, Krutzschs agile and far-reaching analysis demonstrates the tactics and the consequences of assimilationist gay politics veneration of white, cisgender gay men through sanitized, semi-fictionalized, and Christianized versions of their lives that erase their own realities and those of their communities. Krutzsch reminds us that there have always been other options, and challenges us to reject assimilationist tactics that are ultimately rooted in exclusion. --Melissa M. Wilcox, author of Queer Nuns Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody Dying to Be Normal offers a fascinating and heartbreaking history of the memorialization and martyrdom of gay figures in the United States. Krutzsch reveals how religious and secular narratives work in this history - often in unexpected ways - to make some gays appear normal, a process that all too often transubstantiates complicated queer lives into suitable Christian narratives, while leaving others, especially queer people of color, outside the circuit of memory. This moving, unflinching analysis raises the bar for how we talk about religion and sexuality in American politics. -- Anthony Petro, author of After the Wrath of God AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion Brett Krutzschs Dying to Be Normal is a brilliant study of martyrdom and memorialization as central to gay activism in the United States. Although religiosity and sexuality are often thought to be opposing forces, the book shows that religion and sex are powerfully entwined. Christian nationalism and Protestant secularism may form the current parameters of political possibility, but Krutzsch provides an expansive, alternative analysis that opens toward a diverse sexual democracy. -- Janet R. Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University About the Author Brett Krutzsch is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Haverford College. His scholarship examines intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, race, and politics in the United States.

Author: Barbara Hendrischke File Type: pdf In China, in the first centuries of the Common Era, prognostication was a widely used tool of political decision making, of cultural and ideological expression and, increasingly, also of popular resistance. The Scripture on Great Peace originated in this environment. It contains warnings of a universal cataclysm and suggests a radical social and religious reorientation as means of salvation. Thereby, it connects insights and ideas of the empires academic establishment to experiences and concerns of the population at large. It belongs to the earliest textual sources for Daoism, that is, for Chinas indigenous religion that took shape when the imperial government and with it the empire fell apart in the second century CE. The present volume documents the Scriptures doctrinal and stylistic diversity. The selected materials stem from different parts of the long text. Some focus on eschatological scenarios, others, in contrast, on utopian hopes for the reform of humankind and its future under the auspices of Great Peace. Still others design schemes for personal immortality. In this study, these materials are translated into a Western language for the first time. The translations are accompanied by extensive explanatory annotations. **