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Canada is often considered a multicultural mosaic, welcoming to immigrants and encouraging of cultural diversity. Yet this reputation masks a more complex history. In this groundbreaking study of the pre-history of Canadian multiculturalism, Daniel Meister shows how the philosophy of cultural pluralism normalized racism and the entrenchment of whiteness. The Racial Mosaic demonstrates how early ideas about cultural diversity in Canada were founded upon, and coexisted with, settler colonialism and racism, despite the apparent tolerance of a variety of immigrant peoples and their cultures. To trace the development of these ideas, Meister takes a biographical approach, examining the lives and w...
This volume is dedicated to Professor Hans Renders, founder of the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Throughout his academic career, Renders witnessed a reflexive turn in historical research: biographers became more open about the limitations of their sources, and the subjective nature of their selection. Over this same period, however, the availability of digital sources has increased exponentially, which has profound implications for biographical research and the transnational framework used to approach the genre. Through its thirteen thought-provoking essays, this work seeks to make an intervention in Biography Studies by bringing the well-developed reflexive tradition to bear on the pressing challenge of proliferating digitized sources.
Biography: An Historiography examines how Western historians have used biography from the nineteenth century to the present – considering the problems and challenges that historians have faced in their biographical practice systematically. This volume analyses the strategies and methods that historians have used in response to seven major issues identified over time to do with evidence, including but not limited to the problem of causation, the problem of fact and fiction, the problem of other minds, the problem of significance or representativeness, the problems of perspective, both macro and micro, and the problem of subjectivity and relative truth. This volume will be essential for both postgraduates and historians studying biography.
Internationally acclaimed biographies are almost always written by British or American biographers. But what is the state of the art of biography in other parts of the world? Introduced by Richard Holmes, the volume Different Lives offers a global perspective: seventeen scholars vividly describe the biographical tradition in their countries of interest. They show how biography functions as a public genre, featuring specific societal issues and opinion-making. Indeed, the volume aims to answer the question: how can biography contribute to a better understanding of differences between societies and cultures? Special attention is given to the US, China and the Netherlands. Other contributions a...
The first contemporary historiography of international law and an essential methodological guide for researching international legal history.
For centuries, people moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran. This book studies the biographies of individuals and groups as different as rulers and revolutionaries, frontier bandits and merchants, soldiers and slaves from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Following their journeys across borders, the case studies of this volume emphasize the profound effect that mobility had on the lives and thoughtworlds of everyone with a Transottoman trajectory. The chapters reveal breaks, adjustments, and continuities in people’s biographies and the in-betweenness that moving typically created.
This collection explores Kollwitz’s most creative years, examining her sequences of images, with a focus on the tension between making and meaning. German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. This volume explores her most creative years, roughly the late 1890s to the mid-1920s, highlighting the tension between making and meaning throughout her work. Correlating Kollwitz’s obsessive printmaking experiments with the evolution of her images, it assesses the unusually rich progressions of preparatory drawings, proo...
A compelling biography of Sheikh Abdullah, the charismatic, combative, and controversial Kashmiri politician Written by the leading historian of modern Kashmir, this is a comprehensive portrayal of one of the most enigmatic politicians in modern South Asia, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, known as the Lion of Kashmir. Abdullah (1905–1982) devoted much of his life to mobilizing Kashmiris to assert their rights, to trying to achieve a fair resolution for their politically contested state, to shaping its turbulent relationship with India, and to bridging the divide between India and Pakistan. Although he forged ties with the Indian National Congress, Abdullah’s support for Kashmir’s accession t...
From the expansionist fervour of the late nineteenth century through both world wars and the Cold War, a varied and ever-changing group of dreamers campaigned for Canada’s union with the British Caribbean colonies. They hoped to diversify Canada’s climate and agricultural capabilities, spur economic development, boost the nation’s autonomy and stature in the Empire-Commonwealth and the world, temper American power, and secure a tourist paradise. Dominion over Palm and Pine traces the transnational ebb and flow of these union campaigns, situating them in the global history of colonialism and white supremacy, Black activism, and decolonization. Paula Hastings centres the British Caribbea...
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 ...