Detroit S Hidden Channels

Colonial Canada changed enormously between the 1760s and the 1860s, the Conquest and Confederation, but the idea of civilization seen to guide those transformations changed still more. A cosmopolitan and optimistic theory of history was written into the founding Canadian constitution as a check on state violence, only to be reversed and undone over the next century. Civilization was hegemony, a contradictory theory of unrestrained power and restraints on that power. Occupying a middle ground between British and American hegemonies, all the different peoples living in Canada felt those contradictions very sharply. Both Britain and America came to despair of bending Canada violently to their will, and new forms of hegemony, a greater reckoning with soft power, emerged in the wake of those failures. E.A. Heaman shows that the view from colonial Canada matters for intellectual and political history. Canada posed serious challenges to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Pax Britannica, American manifest destiny, and the emerging model of the nation-state. David Hume’s theory of history shaped the Canadian imaginary in constitutional documents, much-thumbed histories, and a certain liberal-conservative political and financial orientation. But as settlers flooded across the continent, cosmopolitanism became chauvinism, and the idea of civilization was put to accomplishing plunder and predation on a transcontinental scale. Case studies show crucial moments of conceptual reversal, some broadly representative and some unique to Canada. Dissecting the Seven Years’ War, domestic relations, the fiscal military state, liberal reform, social statistics, democracy, constitutionalism, and scholarly history, Heaman shows how key British and Canadian public figures grappled with the growing gap between theory and practice. By historicizing the concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada before Confederation.

French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit’s history. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit’s development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior. Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit’s location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating a multitude of gender norms of their nations, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor. These families would maintain that power as the British imperial presence splintered on the eve of the American Revolution.

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.

The commonplace history of Quebec and the Maritime Peninsula tells us that Canada and the US were decisively shaped by the defeat of Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham in 1759. This brilliant new history takes us back almost a hundred years earlier, examining French and English warfare, trade, diplomacy, and settlement on Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, and Wolastoqiyik Lands. In doing so, Thomas Peace demonstrates how these Peoples maintained their Homelands, while, at the same time, after 1759, the broader historical context established in the early chapters of this book set the stage for a rapid influx of colonists on their Lands.

This text seeks to clarify various contradictory claims regarding capabilities and limitations of blind equalization. It highlights basic operating conditions and potential for malfunction. The authors also address concepts and principles of blind algorithms for single input multiple output (SIMO) systems and multi-user extensions of SIMO equalization and identification.

In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent's interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge. Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.

Great Women of Mackinac, 1800–1950 tells the dramatic history of thirteen women leaders on Mackinac Island in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their linked visions of family and community define this beautiful island in the western Great Lakes. In this collective biography, author and Mackinac Island resident Melissa Croghan reveals how central they were to the history and literature of Mackinac. Elizabeth Bertrand Mitchell, Madeline Marcot LaFramboise, Therese Marcot Schindler, Elizabeth Therese Baird, Agatha Biddle, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft were Anishinaabe fur traders, farmers, memoirists, and poets who established the nineteenth-century island community. Among the women of Mackinac, there were also those who sang the island’s praises and recorded the lively relationships of the English, French, and American inhabitants. These writers included Juliette Magill Kinzie, Anna Brownell Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. There were also community builders who founded key institutions and midwifed generations of island children: Rosa Truscott Webb, Daisy Peck Blodgett, and Stella King. Readers interested in American literature, women’s lives, and Mackinac Island’s storied history will find this book a fascinating read.