Empire at the Periphery

Empire at the Periphery

Author: Christian J. Koot

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011-07-18

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0814748848

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British Empire, and the endurance of a culture of cross-national cooperation in the Atlantic that had been forged in the first decades of European settlement and still resonated a century later. In Empire at the Periphery, Christian J. Koot examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York and the Caribbean and Dutch traders in the Netherlands and in the Dutch colonies in North America and the Caribbean, demonstrating that these interimperial relationships formed a core part of commercial activity in the early Atlantic World, operating alongside British trade. Koot provides unique consideration of how local circumstances shaped imperial development, reminding us that empires consisted not only of elites dictating imperial growth from world capitals, but also of ordinary settlers in far-flung colonial outposts, who often had more in common with—and a greater reliance on—people from foreign empires who shared their experiences of living at the edge of a fragile, transitional world.


Constructing The Self, Constructing America

Constructing The Self, Constructing America

Author: Philip Cushman

Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company

Published: 1995-03-20

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this groundbreaking "cultural history of psychotherapy", historian and psychologist Philip Cushman shows how the development of modern psychotherapy is inextricably intertwined with that of the United States and how it has fundamentally changed the way Americans view events and themselves. Using an interpretive historical approach, Cushman shows how and why psychotherapy was created, what its functions are, and how it has come to play such an enormous role in American life. Asserting that each era develops a different conception of "what it means to be human", Cushman traces the evolution of the self throughout history to contemporary times, naming its current configuration in our consumerist society the "empty self", one that needs constant filling. In Constructing the Self, Constructing America, he places psychotherapy in its social and historical context, and examines its origins in the nineteenth century to its preeminence in American life today, arguing that its establishment as a social institution may in fact reproduce some of the very ills that it is meant to heal. Finally, in an unusual move, Cushman suggests a way to use interpretive methods in the everyday practice of psychotherapy. By doing so, he hopes to dissuade both patient and therapist from colluding with the empty self or the rampant consumerism of our time.


Constructing American Lives

Constructing American Lives

Author: Scott E. Casper

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-07-25

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1469649047

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writing, says Scott Casper; it was the medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers. In this pioneering study, Casper examines how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies and how their conceptions of the genre changed over the course of a century. Campaign biographies, memoirs of pious women, patriotic narratives of eminent statesmen, "mug books" that collected the lives of ordinary midwestern farmers--all were labeled "biography," however disparate their contents and the contexts of their creation, publication, and dissemination. Analyzing debates over how these diverse biographies should be written and read, Casper reveals larger disputes over the meaning of character, the definition of American history, and the place of American literary practices in a transatlantic world of letters. As much a personal experience as a literary genre, biography helped Americans imagine their own lives as well as the ones about which they wrote and read.


Ruling the Savage Periphery

Ruling the Savage Periphery

Author: Benjamin D. Hopkins

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0674980700

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Benjamin Hopkins develops a new theory of colonial administration: frontier governmentality. This system placed indigenous peoples at the borders of imperial territory, where they could be both exploited and kept away. Today's "failed states" are a result. Condemned to the periphery of the global order, they function as colonial design intended.


Science and Society in Latin America

Science and Society in Latin America

Author: PABLO. KREIMER

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-30

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9781032093260

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the form of a sociological pilgrimage, this book approaches some topics essential to understanding the role of science in Latin America, juxtaposing several approaches and exploring three main lines: First, the production and use of knowledge in these countries, viewed from a historical and sociological point of view; second, the reciprocal construction of scientific and public problems, presented through significant cases such as Latin American Chagas Disease; and third, the past and present asymmetries affecting the relationships between centers and peripheries in scientific research. These topics show the paradox of being at the same time "modern" and "peripheral."


The Intellectual Construction of America

The Intellectual Construction of America

Author: Jack P. Greene

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0807861774

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jack Greene explores the changing definitions of America from the time of Europe's first contact with the New World through the establishment of the American republic. Challenging historians who have argued that colonial American societies differed little from those of early modern Europe, he shows that virtually all contemporary observers emphasized the distinctiveness of the new worlds being created in America. Rarely considering the high costs paid by Amerindians and Africans in the construction of those worlds, they cited the British North American colonies as evidence that America was for free people a place of exceptional opportunities for individual betterment and was therefore fundamentally different from the Old World. Greene suggests that this concept of American societies as exceptional was a central component in their emerging identity. The success of the American Revolution helped subordinate Americans' long-standing sense of cultural inferiority to a more positive sense of collective self that sharpened and intensified the concept of American exceptionalism.


Reinterpreting Exploration

Reinterpreting Exploration

Author: Dane Keith Kennedy

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0199755345

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.


Making America

Making America

Author: Luther S. Luedtke

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 588

ISBN-13: 9780807843703

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this richly interdisciplinary work twenty-eight of the nation's leading critics and scholars offer a comprehensive exploration of American society and culture. Each outstanding in his or her own field, the contributors address "America" from a diversit


Out in the Periphery

Out in the Periphery

Author: Omar G. Encarnación

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-01-04

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0199356734

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Known around the world as a bastion of Catholicism and machismo, Latin America has emerged in recent years as the undisputed gay rights leader of the Global South. Even more surprising is that several Latin American nations have surpassed many developed nations, including the United States, in legislating equality for the LGBT community. So how did this dramatic and unexpected expansion of gay rights come about? And why are Latin American nations diverging in their embrace of gay rights, a point highlighted by the paradoxical experiences of Argentina and Brazil? Argentina, a country with a dark history of repression of homosexuality, legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, a first for a Latin American nation; and since then it has enacted laws to ensure transgender equality, to abolish "ex-gay reparative therapy," and to provide reproductive assistance to same-sex couples. By contrast, Brazil, a country famous for celebrating sexual diversity, proved incapable of legalizing same-sex marriage via the legislature, leaving the job to the courts; and Brazilian anti-gay discrimination laws are among the weakest in Latin America. In Out in the Periphery, Omar G. Encarnación breaks away from the conventional narrative of Latin America's embrace of gay rights as a by-product of the global spread of gay rights from the developed West. Instead, Encarnación aims to "decenter" gay rights politics. His intention is not to demonstrate how the "local" has trumped the "global" in Latin America but rather to suggest how domestic and international politics interacted to make Latin America one of the world's most receptive environments for gay rights. Economic and political modernization, constitutional and judicial reforms, and the rise of socially liberal governments have all contributed to this receptivity. But the most decisive factor was the skill of local activists in crafting highly effective gay rights campaigns. Inspired by external events and trends, but firmly grounded in local politics and realities, these campaigns succeeded in bringing radical change to the law with respect to homosexuality and, in some cases, as in Argentina, in transforming society and the culture at large.