New Britain presents Tony Blair on all the major debates of British public life: from nationalized health care to crime prevention, from the welfare state to monetary policy, from religion to family values, from individualism to isolationism, from taxation to trade unions, from NATO to Northern Ireland, from community rebirth to economic growth. After seventeen years of Conservative Party rule under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, a change in Great Britain's leadership appears imminent. In Blair's Stakeholder Nation, government works in partnership with private and voluntary sectors to harness the pawer of the market to serve the public interest. In New Britain, we read in Blair's own articulate words how to improve the standard of living of all Britain's families; how to base a new social order on merit, commitment, and inclusion; how to decentralize British institutions of political power; and how to expand Britain's leadership in foreign affairs.
The first Assyrians arrived in Connecticut during the beginning of the 20th century. Initially brought here through a mission organized by the South Church of New Britain, larger numbers of Assyrian families later migrated to the United States in an attempt to find security during World War I. Since their arrival, New Britain has seen its Assyrian community thrive and grow. Upon settling in New Britain, many Assyrians put endless effort into helping recent immigrants find shelter and jobs. They also created an Assyrian magazine and established learning centers to ensure that the traditions, language, and history of Assyrian culture were not lost. These efforts were secured by the establishment of St. Thomas Church of the East in 1957. The history of New Britain's Assyrian community has been documented and collected for the past 100 years by local residents utilizing the New Britain Public Library, South Church, St. Marks Church, and St. Thomas Church.
New Britain was once known as the "Hardware Capital of the World," and it is this that has made the city famous. But as well as its rich industrial history, New Britain has a diverse and dynamic cultural heritage. As its name suggests, the town was originally settled by people of British descent, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it became a haven for immigrants fleeing oppression or economic hardship in Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Russia, Lithuania, Armenia, the Ukraine, Poland, and Greece. The photographs that make up this fascinating visual history bring life to the changes that took place in New Britain between 1920 and 1970. They show how much the city has developed and evolved as well as providing an intimate glimpse of the daily life of New Britain's many ethnic communities. Of particular interest are the images of women which together paint a vivid picture of their unique contribution to the city and its heritage.
A history of the relationship between Great Britain and the United States ranges from the establishment of the first English colony in the New World to the present day, examining both nations in terms of what connected them and what drove them apart.
In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.
New Britain Township, founded in 1723, was a rural farming community originally settled by Welsh Baptists and German Mennonites. This changed dramatically in 1856 when the North Pennsylvania Railroad was built. Two train stations were built in the township and were named Chalfont and New Britain. The villages next to these stations attracted numerous new residents and businesses. The local picnic grove was even converted into an amusement park, which became known as Forest Park. The villages surrounding these railroad stations grew until residents decided to create their own separate boroughs, establishing Chalfont Borough in 1901 and New Britain Borough in 1928. The postcards and pictures in Chalfont and New Britain include images of the villages of Chalfont, New Britain, Line Lexington, and New Galena, as well as scenes of historic homes, hotels, stores, churches, schools, and the businesses and people who lived and worked in the community.
How public land has been stolen from us. Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.
This account of fugitive slaves traveling through Connecticut “includes many stories from descendants of the underground agents . . . a definitive work.” —Hartford Courant Here are the engrossing facts about one of the least-known aspects of Connecticut’s history—the rise, organization, and operations of the Underground Railroad, over which fugitive slaves from the South found their way to freedom. Drawing his data from published sources and, perhaps more importantly, from the still-existing oral tradition of descendants of Underground agents, Horatio Strother tells the detailed story in this book, originally published in 1962. He traces the routes from entry points such as New Haven harbor and the New York state line, through important crossroads like Brooklyn and Farmington. Revealing the dangers fugitives faced, the author also identifies the high-minded lawbreakers who operated the system—farmers and merchants, local officials and judges, at least one United States Senator, and many dedicated ministers of the Gospel. These narratives are set against the larger background of the development of slavery and abolitionism in America—conversations still relevant today.
This book studies everyday forms of creativity. Comparing ethnography from three rural areas in Papua New Guinea, it analyses popular visions of utopia and dystopia. Distrustful of government promises of development and church expositions of heaven and hell, villagers cultivate their own clandestine versions of hope, of an alternative future, as a way of subverting existing governmental structures and pastoral powers. Through dreams, visions, rumors, sorcery accusations, cults, myths, and local fairy tales, villagers explore other versions of modernity. They imagine other ways to be Melanesian and other ways to be White. They combine Western and local culture in novel and often startling ways, which are never random or haphazard. Instead, villagers' inventiveness is structured and political. It strives to refigure the possibilities of social change, including contesting how subjects and subjectivities should be formed. Through sorcery fears and accusations, villagers voice their ambivalence towards modern commerce, urbanization, commodities, Western forms of personhood, and the new social inequalities of race, class, and ethnicity. Just as sorcery has been modernized, so has divination, with villagers incorporating Western technology into their practices for disclosing evil. In their new knowledge-making practices, villagers combine the traditional disclosing powers of dreams and the dead with the modern disclosing powers of Western forms of communication, perception, and travel. This creates almost a Melanesian form of science fiction. Villagers' novel experiments draw on local mythological understandings of hidden creative powers derived from solitude, singularity, transgression, and madness. These customary modalities of creativity and alterity have often been "Whitened." Thus, whereas previously bush spirits and the dead caused madness, today, Western culture (and especially Christianity) provides the extraordinary meanings, which entrap and alienate whilst offering hope and power. The dangerous ambiguous nature of Whiteness and modernity is also a prominent feature of local fairytales, which warn against the beguiling charms of beautiful Western objects and strange White people who have many customary Melanesian characteristics. It is the uneven, unfinished processes of Westernization that are being reflected upon and caricatured through new portraits of monstrosity and hope. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.
