Undiplomatic History

Undiplomatic History

Author: Asa McKercher

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0773558209

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When the field of Canadian history underwent major shifts in the 1990s, international history became marginalized and the focus turned away from foreign affairs. Over the past decade, however, the study of Canada and the world has been revitalized. Undiplomatic History charts these changes, bringing together leading and emerging historians of Canadian international and transnational relations to take stock of recent developments and to outline the course of future research. Following global trends in the wider historiography, contributors explore new lenses of historical analysis – such as race, gender, political economy, identity, religion, and the environment – and emphasize the relevance of non-state actors, including scientists, athletes, students, and activists. The essays in this volume challenge old ways of thinking and showcase how an exciting new generation of historians are asking novel questions about Canadians' interactions with people and places beyond the country's borders. From human rights to the environment, and from medical internationalism to transnational feminism, Undiplomatic History maps out a path toward a vibrant and inclusive understanding of what constitutes Canadian foreign policy in an age of global connectivity.


Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds

Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds

Author: Jill Campbell-Miller

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0774866438

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Where are the women in Canada’s international history? Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds answers this question in a comprehensive volume that explores the role of women in Canadian international affairs. Foreign policy historians have traditionally focused on powerful men. Though hidden, forgotten, or ignored, this book shows that women have also shaped Canada’s relations with the world over the past century – whether as activists, missionaries, aid workers, diplomats or diplomatic spouses. Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds examines the lives and careers of professional women working abroad as doctors, nurses, or economic development advisors; women fighting for change as anti-war, anti-nuclear, or Indigenous rights activists; and women engaged in traditional diplomacy. This wide-ranging collection reveals the vital contribution of women to the search for global order that has been a hallmark of Canada’s international history.


Constant Struggle

Constant Struggle

Author: Julien Mauduit

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-10-06

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0228009952

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Most Canadians assume they live under some form of democracy. Yet confusion about the meaning of the word and the limits of the people’s power obscures a deeper understanding. Constant Struggle looks for the democratic impulse in Canada’s past to deconstruct how the country became a democracy, if in fact it ever did. This volume asks what limits and contradictions have framed the nation’s democratization process, examining how democracy has been understood by those who have advocated for or resisted it and exploring key historical realities that have shaped it. Scholars from a range of disciplines tackle this elusive concept, suggesting that instead of looking for a simple narrative, we must be alert to the slower, untidier, and incomplete processes of democratization in Canada. Constant Struggle offers a renewed, sometimes unsettling depiction, stretching from studies of early Indigenous societies, through colonial North America and Confederation, into the twentieth century. Contributors reassess democracy in light of settler colonialism and white supremacy, investigate connections between capitalism and democracy, consider alternative conceptions of democracy from Canada’s past, and highlight the various ways in which the democratic ideal has been mobilized to advance particular visions of Canadian society. Demonstrating that Canada’s democratization process has not always been one that empowered the people, Constant Struggle questions traditional views of the relationship between democracy and liberalism in Canada and around the world.


Sanctuary in Pieces

Sanctuary in Pieces

Author: Laura Madokoro

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0228023297

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Over the past two decades, the Sanctuary City movement has resulted in hundreds of jurisdictions declaring themselves safe spaces for undocumented migrants and people without status. Although they often draw on historical precedent, public sanctuary efforts amongst settler societies are markedly different from how refuge was conceptualized in the past. To explore these broad shifts, Sanctuary in Pieces looks at the history of protection and hospitality in Montreal/Mooniyaang/Tiohtià:ke over two hundred years. Laura Madokoro traces the movements and experiences of fugitives from slavery, wanted criminals, internationally renowned anarchists, and war resisters before turning to instances of public sanctuary practices since the 1970s. As people sought and forged refuge, they navigated a web of social connections, political agendas, and economic realities, testing the notion of the city and whom it was for. Even as those in search of sanctuary imagined, and often enacted, possible futures in the city, sanctuary was far from easy: it lay in an underground marked by refusal and denial, selective compassion and solidarity, and sometimes outright animosity. This contested and tumultuous history offers a profound challenge to the symbolism and substance of contemporary sanctuary city efforts. Conceptually innovative, Sanctuary in Pieces speaks to activist and policy considerations in the present, the making and unmaking of community, and how historical practice can accommodate silence in studies of intimate experiences of mobility and, on occasion, refuge.


The Nuclear North

The Nuclear North

Author: Susan Colbourn

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0774864001

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Since the first atomic weapon was detonated in 1945, Canadians have debated not only the role of nuclear power in their uranium-rich land but also their country’s role in a nuclear world. The Nuclear North investigates critical questions in these ongoing debates. Should Canada belong to international alliances that depend on the threat of using nuclear weapons for their own security? Should Canadian-produced nuclear technologies be exported to potential proliferators? Does the country’s championing of arms control and disarmament on the global stage matter? What about the domestic costs of nuclear technologies and atomic research, including their impact on local communities and the environment? The contributors to this important collection consider how the atomic age has shaped Canadian policies at home and abroad. Their incisive assessment of the country’s nuclear history engages with much larger debates about national identity, Canadian foreign policy contradictions during the Cold War, and Canada’s place in the international order.


The Clocks Are Telling Lies

The Clocks Are Telling Lies

Author: Scott Alan Johnston

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2022-01-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0228009634

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Until the nineteenth century all time was local time. On foot or on horseback, it was impossible to travel fast enough to care that noon was a few minutes earlier or later from one town to the next. The invention of railways and telegraphs, however, created a newly interconnected world where suddenly the time differences between cities mattered. The Clocks Are Telling Lies is an exploration of why we tell time the way we do, demonstrating that organizing a new global time system was no simple task. Standard time, envisioned by railway engineers such as Sandford Fleming, clashed with universal time, promoted by astronomers. When both sides met in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, to debate the best way to organize time, disagreement abounded. If scientific and engineering experts could not agree, how would the public? Following some of the key players in the debate, Scott Johnston reveals how people dealt with the contradictions in global timekeeping in surprising ways – from zealots like Charles Piazzi Smyth, who campaigned for the Great Pyramid to serve as the prime meridian, to Maria Belville, who sold the time door to door in Victorian London, to Moraviantown and other Indigenous communities that used timekeeping to fight for autonomy. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, The Clocks Are Telling Lies offers a thought-provoking narrative that centres people and politics, rather than technology, in the vibrant story of global time telling.


Revolutions across Borders

Revolutions across Borders

Author: Maxime Dagenais

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 077355775X

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Starting in 1837, rebels in Upper and Lower Canada revolted against British rule in an attempt to reform a colonial government that they believed was unjust. While this uprising is often perceived as a small-scale, localized event, Revolutions across Borders demonstrates that the Canadian Rebellion of 1837–38 was a major continental crisis with dramatic transnational consequences. In this groundbreaking study, contributors analyze the extent of the Canadian Rebellion beyond British North America and the turbulent Jacksonian period's influence on rebel leaders and the course of the rebellion. Exploring the rebellion's social and economic dimensions, its impact on American politics, policy-making, and the philosophy of manifest destiny, and the significant changes south of the border that influenced this Canadian uprising, the essays in this volume show just how malleable borderland relations were. Chapters investigate how Americans frustrated with the young republic considered an “alternative republic” in Canada, the new monetary system that the rebels planned to establish, how the rebellion played a major role in Martin Van Buren's defeat in the 1840 presidential election, and how America's changing economic alliances doomed the Canadian Rebellion before it even started. Reevaluating the implications of this transnational conflict, Revolutions across Borders brings new life and understanding to this turning point in the history of North America.


The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations

The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations

Author: Tyson Reeder

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-29

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1000516636

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The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations provides a comprehensive view of U.S. diplomacy and foreign affairs from the founding to the present. With contributions from recognized experts from around the world, this volume unveils America’s long and complicated history on the world stage. It presents the United States’ evolution from a weak player, even a European pawn, to a global hegemonic leader over the course of two and a half centuries. The contributors offer an expansive vision of U.S. foreign relations—from U.S.-Native American diplomacy in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the post-9/11 war on terror. They shed new light on well-known events and suggest future paths of research, and they capture lesser-known episodes that invite reconsideration of common assumptions about America’s place in the world. Bringing these discussions to a single forum, the book provides a strong reference source for scholars and students who seek to understand the broad themes and changing approaches to the field. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. history, political science, international relations, conflict resolution, and public policy, amongst other areas.


Distant Stage

Distant Stage

Author: Eric Fillion

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2022-11-04

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0228015138

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It is a little-known fact that the first cultural agreement Canada signed was with Brazil in 1944. The two countries’ rapprochement launched a flurry of activity connecting Montreal to Rio de Janeiro amid the turbulence of war and its aftermath. Why Brazil? And what could songs and paintings achieve that traditional diplomacy could not? Distant Stage examines the neglected histories of Canada-Brazil relations and the role played by culture in Canada’s pursuit of an international identity. The efforts of French-Canadian artists, intellectuals, and diplomats are at the heart of both. Eric Fillion demonstrates how music and the visual arts gave state and non-state actors new connections to the idea of nation, which in turn informed their sense of place in the world. Tracing the origins of Canadian cultural diplomacy to South America, the book underscores the significance of race and religion in the country’s international history, showing how Brazil served as a distant stage where Canadian identity politics and aspirations could play out. Both a timely invitation to think about cultural diplomacy as a critical practice and a reflection on the interplay between internationalism and nationalism, Distant Stage draws attention to the ambiguous yet essential roles played by artists in international and intercultural relations.


The Forgotten Front

The Forgotten Front

Author: Walter Carl Ladwig

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-06-22

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 110717077X

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This book explains why the United States' local allies are often as much of an obstacle to success in counterinsurgency as the insurgents themselves.