Historical archaeology of the Chesapeake

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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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Gilles Perrault

L'histoire d'un village de huit cents âmes accroché à la hanche droite du Cotentin : Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. Gilles Perrault, qui s'y est installé en 1961, retrace, grâce aux archives paroissiales, ce microcosme de l'histoire de France marqué par deux débarquements : celui de son fondateur, le viking Vieul Aux Epaules, en 900 et celui des Alliés en 1944 sur la plage qu'ils baptisèrent Utah-Beach.

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Alan Gordon

"Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and the building of national identities. Alan Gordon focuses on one national hero - Jacques Cartier - to explore how notions about the past have been created, passed on through the generations, and used to present particular ideas about the world in English- and French-speaking Canada. He reveals that the cult of celebrity surrounding Cartier by the mid-nineteenth century reflected a particular understanding of history, one which accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This new sensibility shaped the political and cultural currents of nation building in Canada. Cartier was a point of contact between English and French Canadian nationalism, but the nature of that contact had profound limitations."--BOOK JACKET.

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Christopher R. DeCorse

"An Archaeology of Elmina examines a complex African settlement on the coast of present-day Ghana from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, using the archaeological record, European narratives, and indigenous oral histories. Placing the site in broader context as the first European trade post in sub-Saharan Africa, Christopher R. DeCorse explores developments there in light of Portuguese, Dutch, and British expansion and illustrates remarkable cultural continuity in the midst of technological change."--BOOK JACKET.