Examining the complex and rapidly expanding world of print culture and reading in the nineteenth century, Linda E. Connors and Mary Lu MacDonald show how periodicals in the United Kingdom and British North America shaped and promoted ideals about national identity. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, periodicals instilled in readers an awareness of cultures, places and ways of living outside their own experience, while also proffering messages about what it meant to be British. The authors cast a wide net, showing the importance of periodicals for understanding political and economic life, faith and religion, the world of women and children, the idea of progress as a transcendent ideology, and the relationships between the parts (for example, Scotland or Nova Scotia) and the whole (Great Britain). Analyzing the British identity of expatriate nineteenth-century Britons in North America alongside their counterparts in Great Britain enables insights into whether residents were encouraged to identify themselves by country of residence, by country of birth, or by their newly acquired understanding of a broader whole. Enhanced by a succinct and informative catalogue of data, including editorship and price, about the periodicals analyzed, this study provides a striking history of the era and brings clarity to the perception of British transcendence and progress that emerged with such force and appeal after 1815.

Examining the complex and rapidly expanding world of print culture and reading in the nineteenth century, Linda E. Connors and Mary Lu MacDonald show how periodicals in the United Kingdom and British North America shaped and promoted ideals about national identity. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, periodicals instilled in readers an awareness of cultures, places and ways of living outside their own experience, while also proffering messages about what it meant to be British. The authors cast a wide net, showing the importance of periodicals for understanding political and economic life, faith and religion, the world of women and children, the idea of progress as a transcendent ideology, and the relationships between the parts (for example, Scotland or Nova Scotia) and the whole (Great Britain). Analyzing the British identity of expatriate nineteenth-century Britons in North America alongside their counterparts in Great Britain enables insights into whether residents were encouraged to identify themselves by country of residence, by country of birth, or by their newly acquired understanding of a broader whole. Enhanced by a succinct and informative catalogue of data, including editorship and price, about the periodicals analyzed, this study provides a striking history of the era and brings clarity to the perception of British transcendence and progress that emerged with such force and appeal after 1815.

This volume in Oxford's A Very Short Introduction series offers a concise, readable narrative of the vast span of American history, from the earliest human migrations to the early twenty-first century when the United States loomed as a global power and comprised a complex multi-cultural society of more than 300 million people. The narrative is organized around major interpretive themes, with facts and dates introduced as needed to illustrate these themes. The emphasis throughout is on clarity and accessibility to the interested non-specialist.

The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.

From Eusebio Kino to Daniel Berrigan, and from colonial New England to contemporary Seattle, Jesuits have built and disrupted institutions in ways that have fundamentally shaped the Catholic Church and American society. As Catherine O’Donnell demonstrates, Jesuits in French, Spanish, and British colonies were both evangelists and agents of empire. John Carroll envisioned an American church integrated with Protestant neighbors during the early years of the republic; nineteenth-century Jesuits, many of them immigrants, rejected Carroll’s ethos and created a distinct Catholic infrastructure of schools, colleges, and allegiances. The twentieth century involved Jesuits first in American war efforts and papal critiques of modernity, and then (in accord with the leadership of John Courtney Murray and Pedro Arrupe) in a rethinking of their relationship to modernity, to other faiths, and to earthly injustice. O’Donnell’s narrative concludes with a brief discussion of Jesuits’ declining numbers, as well as their response to their slaveholding past and involvement in clerical sexual abuse.

A study of the emergence of community among African Americans in Nova Scotia.