Les gens d'ici

Sample

Paul A. Shackel and Barbara J. Little

The Chesapeake Bay area's economy, ecology, and history have made it an extraordinarily rich area for archaeological study for nearly a century. Ranging across many methods of historical archaeology, this volume represents current work on the Chesapeake's western shore dealing with early European settlements, plantations and landscapes, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life. Historical Archaeology of the Chesapeake presents a history of past excavations, as well as a sampling of recent historical archaeological discoveries. The essays include an examination of seventeenth-century decorated tobacco pipes as evidence of possible African-made material culture, a detailed analysis of the decline of Alexandria's sugar industry, and a comparison of household objects from a working-class neighborhood with those of the nearby Hooker's Division, once the red-light district of Washington, D.C. Using an array of theoretical orientations, the contributors analyze relationships among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans, as well as among economic and occupational groups. Their findings illuminate changing social and political situations, including stratification within cities, between urban and rural areas, and between the Old and New Worlds.

Sample

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.

Sample

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.

Sample

from Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla

"Records the turbulent life of a warrior who served and fought in every corner of Europe, from Russia to Sicily, and tells how the last of the great Vikings was rewarded, for his claim to the English throne, with 'seven feet of English soil'"--from page [4] of cover.