Boris Vian transatlantic

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Steven E. Aschheim

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

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Hervé Cheuzeville

<a href="javascript:pop_img(' class=encadrevitrine2>Lire les articles parus dans France Soir<a><br> Des massacres de masse se déroulent discrètement en Afrique Centrale depuis des années. Le prétexte : les "rébellions" et les "luttes tribales". Mais en vérité, ce sont les conséquences d'un combat féroce entre chefs pour s'approprier le pouvoir exclusif sur les ressources locales. Les groupes armés des milices ethniques impliquées sont composés en majorité de jeunes et d'enfants presque toujours recrutés de force : les Kadogo. Leurs récits de vie dramatiques rompent avec le silence qui couvre les guerres chroniques au Soudan, en Ouganda, en R.D du Congo, au Rwanda.

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Karen O'Brien

Is there a common European identity? If so, what kinds of history does it possess? Narratives of Enlightenment examines the literary and historical achievements of major figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the American historian David Ramsay in the light of eighteenth-century political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America. Undertaking a comparative reappraisal of these writers, Karen O'Brien investigates the degree and nature of their intellectual investments in the idea of a common European civilisation. This original and incisive study intervenes from the perspective of literary criticism in contemporary debates about Enlightenments past and present, the political uses for narrative, and the European contexts of national awareness.

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M.J. Morgan

Drawing on research from a variety of academic fields, such as archaeology, history, botany, ecology, and physical science, M. J. Morgan explores the intersection of people and the environment in early eighteenth-century Illinois Country?a stretch of fecund, alluvial river plain along the Mississippi river. Arguing against the traditional narrative that describes Illinois as an untouched wilderness until the influx of American settlers, Morgan illustrates how the story began much earlier. She focuses her study on early French and Indian communities, and later on the British, nestled within the tripartite environment of floodplain, riverine cliffs and bluffs, and open, upland till plain/prairie and examines the impact of these diverse groups of people on the ecological landscape. By placing human lives within the natural setting of the period?the abundant streams and creeks, the prairies, plants and wildlife?she traces the environmental change that unfolded across almost a century.^ She describes how it was a land in motion; how the occupying peoples used, extracted, and extirpated its resources while simultaneously introducing new species; and how the flux and flow of life mirrored the movement of the rivers. Morgan emphasizes the importance of population sequences, the relationship between the aboriginals and the Europeans, the shared use of resources, and the effects of each on the habitat. Land of Big Rivers is a unique, many-themed account of the big-picture ecological change that occurred during the early history of the Illinois Country. It is the first book to consider the environmental aspects of the Illinois Indian experience and to reconsider the role of the French and British in environmental change in the mid-Mississippi Valley.^ It engagingly recreates presettlement Illinois with a remarkable interdisciplinary approach and provides new details that will encourage understanding of the interaction between physical geography and the plants, animals, and people in the Illinois Country. Furthermore, it exhibits the importance of looking at the past in the context of environmental transformation, which is especially relevant in light of today?s global climate change.