Our North America

The plant and animal life on this continent are described over a 4-billion-year time span.

The northern and southern borders and borderlands of the United States should have much in common; instead they offer mirror articulations of the complex relationships and engagements between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In North American Borders in Comparative Perspectiveleading experts provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of these three nations. This volume offers a comparative perspective on North American borders and reveals the distinctive nature first of the overportrayed Mexico-U.S. border and then of the largely overlooked Canada-U.S. border. The perspectives on either border are rarely compared. Essays in this volume bring North American borders into comparative focus; the contributors advance the understanding of borders in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts pertaining to North America with an intense sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives. Adding to the regional analysis of North American borders and borderlands, this book cuts across disciplinary and topical areas to provide a balanced, comparative view of borders. Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners convey perspectives on current research and understanding of the United States’ borders with its immediate neighbors. Developing current border theories, the authors address timely and practical border issues that are significant to our understanding and management of North American borderlands. The future of borders demands a deep understanding of borderlands and borders. This volume is a major step in that direction. Contributors Bruce Agnew Donald K. Alper Alan D. Bersin Christopher Brown Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly Irasema Coronado Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera Michelle Keck Victor Konrad Francisco Lara-Valencia Tony Payan Kathleen Staudt Rick Van Schoik Christopher Wilson

One of the 19th century's most adventurous travel writers offers vivid accounts of her journeys through Canada and the United States, from scenic vistas to dark encounters with cholera and slavery.

As a North American of European ancestry, Victoria Freeman sought to answer the following question: how did I come to inherit a society that has dispossessed and oppressed the indigenous people of this continent? After seven years of research into her own family’s involvement in the colonization of North America, she uncovered a story that begins in England, in 1588, and concludes in Ontario, in the 1920s. Among many others, we meet Puritan fur-trader and interpreter Thomas Stanton, who in 1637 participated in a genocidal war against the Pequots of New England, and nine-year-old Elisha Searl, who was captured in Massachusetts in 1704 by Native allies of the French, eventually becoming a “white Indian,” but was eventually “deprogrammed” by the Puritans. Through both the ordinary and remarkable episodes in her ancestors’ lives, and her own travels to the places where her ancestors lived, she illuminates the process of North American colonization. Freeman neither demonizes nor whitewashes her ancestors, but instead attempts to understand their actions and choices both in the context of their time and with the benefit of hindsight.

Vols. 277-230, no. 2 include Stuff and nonsense, v. 5-6, no. 8, Jan. 1929-Aug. 1930.