Figures Of Identity

Tim Cassedy’s fascinating study examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order. Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond. This engagingly written story is sure to appeal to historians of literature, culture, and communication; to linguists and book historians; and to general readers interested in how ideas about English developed in the early United States and throughout the English-speaking world.

Assumptions of politicians, teachers, and other professionals about integration often fall short of theoretical and empirical support. This work seeks to bridge this gap by proposing a new theoretical concept looking at personal security and testing it empirically with data from 21 European countries. As migration often affects migrants and members of the receiving society alike both have been included in the analysis. Whereas classic identity research strongly relies on qualitative techniques and experimental designs, Yvonne Hapke adopts a quantitative approach. She successfully demonstrates that ethnic closure and xenophobia are the result of damaged or threatened identities and pose a major obstacle to integration. However, welcoming individuals with all of their defining characteristics, needs, and identities helps people to develop trust in others as well as in political institutions and makes them more confident about their country's future.

The goals of this book are to examine the functional components that take basic identity systems and turn them into identity management operations and to highlight some of the implications of those operations for identity management schemes.

This book is a social psychological inquiry into identity in modern society. Starts from the social psychological premise that identity results from interaction in the social world. Reviews and integrates the most influential strands of contemporary social psychology research on identity. Brings together North American and European perspectives on social psychology. Incorporates insights from philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, cultural studies, anthropology and sociology. Places social identity research in a variety of real-life social contexts.

This study deals with the development, existence, and dilemmas concerning European identity among youth in Europe. It compiles the results of a research conducted within the Comenius project "Perception, Attitude, Movement - Identity Needs Action (PAM-INA)." The eight participating institutions in the PAM-INA project were from Germany, Slovenia, France, Greece, Poland, Northern Ireland (UK), Cyprus, and Sweden. The authors from the respective countries discuss the results and present their views on the issue of European identity and citizenship. (Series: Learning Europe. Perspectives for Teaching European Cultural Studies / Europa lernen. Perspektiven fur eine Didaktik europaischer Kulturstudien - Vol. 3)

This book is about individuals who have made dramatic changes in their lives. In the beginning, these people were living as patients or victims of circumstance. In the end, they were living as agents, free to shape the courses of their lives, to choose, set goals, plan--to make things happen, rather than to experience life as events happening to them. The authors describe what is involved in such remarkable transformations. They identify a common structure of transformation involving four distinguishable phases. They also clarify a progressive dialectic between living the plot of a patient and living the plot of an agent, and show how an old plot is destroyed or deconstructed and a new plot is constructed.

Through an analysis of glass beads from four key study regions in Britain, the book aims to explore the role that this object played within the networks and relationships that constructed Iron Age society.

Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, were significant figures before Shakespeare revitalized them on stage. When he did, Charnes argues, he used these legendary figures to explore the emergence of a new kind of fame, "notorious identity".