Transatlantic Connections Research Articles

The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South by Noeleen McIlvenna

Reviewed by: The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South by Noeleen McIlvenna Julie Richter The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South. By Noeleen McIlvenna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 143. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2403-7.) In The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South, Noeleen McIlvenna focuses on the first twenty years of Georgia’s history in order to challenge the view that early settlers failed in their attempt to establish a colony in which the worthy poor could succeed and where slavery was not essential to the economy. McIlvenna tells a complex, multilayered story of Georgia’s beginning in six chronological chapters that include details from a wide range of primary sources. The Short Life of Free Georgia begins in England in the early 1720s, a time when British philanthropists believed that the worthy poor could improve themselves through hard work. Discussions among James Oglethorpe, [End Page 903] John Viscount Perceval (the soon to be Earl of Egmont), and others led to the establishment of Georgia in 1732. McIlvenna makes it clear that Georgia differed from Britain’s other mainland colonies: its Trustees approved regulations designed to support the goal of improving the lives of the worthy poor, including a prohibition on slavery and limiting tracts of land to five hundred acres. Once in Georgia, Oglethorpe and others who settled in the colony—English servants, German Pietists, Lowland and Highland Scots, and Irish convicts— struggled to implement the colony’s regulations. McIlvenna points to the “rough equality stemming from frontier conditions” as a particular problem for settlers (p. 36). Elite colonists complained about laziness and the lack of deference shown to them. In 1735, soon after Georgia’s establishment, many Lowlanders, also known as the Malcontents, informed the Trustees that poorer settlers refused to work and that the colony would be stronger if Georgia had enslaved laborers. In the eyes of the Malcontents, two dissenting ministers—John Wesley and George Whitefield—further weakened Georgia’s social order in the late 1730s as they revitalized religious life in the colony. As the Malcontents continued to push the Trustees to allow slavery, external matters took on a greater importance in the wake of the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the beginning of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Situated between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, Georgia acted as a buffer, a role that moved to the forefront, and between 1739 and 1742 the “central purpose of the colony became murky for the Trustees” (p. 58). Oglethorpe shifted his work from Georgia’s philanthropic mission to the fight against Spain. Although Oglethorpe failed in his attempt to seize St. Augustine, the 1742 battle of Bloody Marsh, in which Highland Scots, Chickasaws, and Creeks defended St. Simon’s Island against the Spanish, ended fighting in this region. Once Britain and Spain accepted the St. Johns River as the boundary between Georgia and Spanish Florida, the colony’s Trustees paid less attention to Georgia. In addition, Oglethorpe’s departure left Georgia without a strong advocate for free labor. James Habersham, Whitefield’s assistant, became Savannah’s leading figure and pushed the colony toward trade and away from agriculture. When Habersham asked South Carolinians for assistance, these planters used their transatlantic connections to persuade British officials that Georgia was a failure. In August 1748 Georgia’s Trustees decided to allow slavery “with some limitations by the following year” (p. 92). McIlvenna reminds her readers that there are different ways to assess success when one thinks about Georgia’s first twenty years. She demonstrates that early Georgians succeeded in many areas: they created farms, raised crops, tended livestock, and protected their colony against the Spanish. The true threat to the Trustees’ plans came from the South Carolina planters who worked to shape Georgia’s economy into one in which enslaved men and women labored for the benefit of their elite owners. McIlvenna finds the failure rests with the Trustees who did not realize that Georgia was on the cusp of thriving with an economy similar to that of Pennsylvania. [End Page 904] Julie...

Memorializing Contested Landscapes

This thematic collection of articles presents research that extends archaeological processes of investigation from the tangible to the intangible. These articles examine the ways in which contested landscapes, both physical and virtual, animate trans-Atlantic connections. Such terrains and places engage fraught memories of slavery. Each article attempts to navigate the residual pain of these histories in public spaces, while reflecting on how agencies and voices are negotiated.

National types: The transatlantic publication and reception of Crania Americana (1839)

Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana (1839) is most often read as a foundational work for the ‘American school’ of nineteenth-century ethnography. In this article, I challenge such a reading by demonstrating how transatlantic connections shaped both the publication and the reception of Morton’s atlas. In this lavish folio volume, complete with over seventy lithographic plates, Morton divides mankind into five races on the basis of skull configuration. However, to date, there have been no histories which consider the relevance of Morton’s extensive correspondence with physicians, naturalists, and phrenologists in Europe. Furthermore, there have been no studies which consider how Morton managed the reception of Crania Americana across the Atlantic Ocean. This article resituates American ethnology within this transatlantic world, drawing on archival collections in both Britain and the United States. More broadly, it demonstrates how the history of the book can be developed as we move beyond national contexts.

The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism

A key debate on the merits and consequences of globalisation asks to what extent we have moved to a multipolar global political economy. Here we investigate this issue through the properties and topologies of corporate elite networks and ask: what is the community structure of the global corporate elite? In order to answer this question, we analyse how the largest one million firms in the world are interconnected at the level of corporate governance through interlocking directorates. Community detection through modularity maximisation reveals that regional clusters play a fundamental role in the network architecture of the global political economy. Transatlantic connections remain particularly strong: Europe and North America remain interconnected in a dense network of shared directors. A distinct Asian cluster stands apart as separate and oriented more towards itself. While it develops and gains economic and political power, Asia remains by and large outside the scope of the networks of the incumbent global (that is, North Atlantic) corporate elite. We see this as a sign of the rise of competing corporate elites. But the corporate elites from the traditional core countries still form a powerful opponent for any competing faction in the global corporate elite.

Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands, edited by Peter E. Pope and Shannon Lewis-Simpson

Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands, edited by Peter E. Pope and Shannon Lewis-Simpson. Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2013. xxii, 353 pp. $50.00 US (cloth). In the preface to Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands, Peter Pope observes that post-medieval archaeologists are no longer wedded to interpreting artifacts of European origin found in North American sites as indicative of embryonic colonies. This reconceptualization of Europeans' objectives overseas engenders new ways of understanding archeological artifacts in time and place. Sarah Newstead, for example, shows that Portuguese redware constituted 13-24% of all pottery sherds found at sites of English occupation in Newfoundland, with higher percentages at sites of seasonal occupation and lower at sites of colonial settlement. The length of residence in Newfoundland influenced transatlantic connections and consumption patterns. This rich collection of thirty-one essays originated with the 2010 meeting of the Society of Post-Medieval Archaeology held at Memorial University to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Cupid's Cove, Newfoundland, the first permanent English settlement in what became Canada. Although topics range from late tenth-century Russia settlement north of Novgorod to the environmental impact of forest clearance in nineteenth-century British Columbia, two-thirds of all the articles are about areas of eastern Canada, and all are conceptually relevant to understanding the movement of people and goods in the early modem Atlantic world and how Europeans projected power. This collection is particularly important for the way it highlights the diversity of economic enterprises and ethnic groups across the entire North Atlantic world and offers new perspectives on relations among trade, resource extraction, and colonization. The earliest era covered is the late Middle Ages, when Europeans pushed northward within Europe. The essays by Mark Brisbane, David Gaimster, and Natascha Mehler and Mark Gardiner challenge us to consider the social and political impulses driving commercial and settlement expansion to remote places, the agents behind expansion, and its relevance for how Europeans projected control into the Americas. In a provocative essay, Peter Pope asks why in the early seventeenth century there was an efflorescence of settlement activity in the northern parts of North America. He suggests that a consumer revolution among the English and Dutch made utilitarian household items affordable for people of middling means, a suite of innovations that included metal and ceramic utensils and containers, and knitted woolen clothing. These commodities, Pope argues, made overwintering in North America more viable. In an evocative essay on the commodities exported from Portugal to Newfoundland in the seventeenth century, Tania Manuel Casimiro provides evidence of foods, such as olives, chestnuts and almonds, raisins and prunes, oranges and lemons that would have provided critical nutritional supplements to the diets of both seasonal labourers and overwinterers. Indeed, those food items probably helped to check the scurvy that Steven Pendery and Hannah Koon describe as such a scourge on early attempts at colonization. The combination of essays results in a repeated contextualization of early settlements in Newfoundland with activities elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Four essays address the Calverts and their legacies in Newfoundland, Maryland, and Ireland. …

Cape Verdeans in the Atlantic: the formation of Kriolu music and dance styles on ship and in port

Working from the premise that Cape Verde is a member of the Black Atlantic musical family whose styles flowed freely from port to port, this study has delved deeper into the styles and time frames that figured into the mix, verifying that periods of intense transatlantic port activity correspond to the emergence of new genres. Cape Verde’s musical history might be viewed as a sandbar on the beach that is continually reshaped and born a new by waves of musical influences circling between the continents. The ideas of individual Cape Verdeans ultimately created the music, of course, and a comparative approach is not meant to lessen those musicians’ importance, or detract from the beauty and perfection of Cape Verde’s greatest treasure. The footprints of transatlantic connections in Cape Verdean musical styles can be found in its rhythms, instruments, vocabularies, scores, and ship route patterns. People create styles, and musical communication happens on the personal level - through sailors sharing a tune at sea, through encounters in harbor dancehalls, and through ideas brought back home. Generations of seafarers found safe harbor in Cape Verde, carrying music round and round the Atlantic, and this process is still shaping the local forms, although the travel is now by jet, and the exchanges are often over the worldwide web. While some details about musical communities on the high seas may be lost to us, there is still information to be gained about Cape Verdean musical forms through a study of the multi-directional movements of musicians, artifacts, repertoires, and ideas around the Atlantic rim.

The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform by W. Caleb McDaniel (review)

Reviewed by: The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform by W. Caleb McDaniel Kyle G. Volk (bio) The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform. By W. Caleb McDaniel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 334. Cloth, $48.00.) Historian W. Caleb McDaniel provides an important reappraisal of leading Garrisonian abolitionists by exploring their political thought and behavior while also detailing the transatlantic nature of their movement. Where others have painted Garrisonians as apolitical moral perfectionists, McDaniel contends that they were unmistakable political activists. Garrisonians, he argues, thought deeply about democracy and sought to reform its imperfect American form by ceaselessly agitating apart from the ballot box. At stake for them, McDaniel contends, was not only the destruction of slavery at home but also the global flourishing of what they saw as the world’s most promising political form. Indeed, McDaniel shows that William Lloyd Garrison and his followers’ enduring belief in the planetary significance of American democracy undergirded their project of and approach to destroying slavery. Grounded in a thorough investigation of abolitionists’ public and private writings, this insightful monograph should find a wide audience among historians of abolition and reform, nineteenth-century political and intellectual historians, scholars of social movements, and historically minded democratic theorists. McDaniel’s book is organized in three parts. Comprising three chapters, part 1 proceeds chronologically and charts the rise of William Lloyd Garrison and his movement through the early 1850s. Some of this story is familiar. McDaniel recounts Garrison’s early influences, his conversion to immediatism, the antiabolitionist violence of the 1830s, and the abolitionist schisms of the 1840s, among other essential topics. But McDaniel’s dual emphasis on Garrisonians’ transatlantic connections and their political sensibilities provides a fresh perspective. Whether describing Garrison’s early interest in political conflict abroad and his enthusiasm for Lafayette’s return to the United States in 1824 or the later Atlantic crossings of American and British abolitionists and the transatlantic communications network they forged, McDaniel persuasively unearths the vitality of internationalism in Garrisonians’ intellectual framework and their tactics. Simultaneously, McDaniel establishes the early roots of Garrison’s faith in [End Page 590] democracy and of his turn to the tools of public opinion to defeat slavery democratically. These commitments would persist through the Civil War, constituting an important continuity, McDaniel argues, in the Garrisonian approach. Shifting gears somewhat, part 2 closely examines intellectual problems generated by abolitionist activism. To McDaniel, Garrisonians were “thinkers” as much as they were “agitators,” and their experiences led some to wrestle with fundamental issues of public opinion, nations and nationalism, aristocracy, and political influence (89). Each topic receives its own chapter and has a transatlantic perspective, and all are worthy of scholars’ attention. In probing public opinion, for example, McDaniel explores Garrisonians’ confidence in its power to eradicate injustice while coming to terms with its propensity to be wrong and despotic. Here Wendell Phillips emerges as the star. Well versed in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Phillips shared fears of democracy’s tendency toward majority tyranny, intellectual stagnation, and conformity. Yet he nonetheless continued to champion democracy. Phillips, McDaniel reveals, developed a theory of “eternal vigilance” in which agitators (i.e., the Garrisonians) limited democracy’s dangers by advancing dissenting positions that unsettled public opinion (104). As in this section’s other chapters, McDaniel maintains that this type of intellectual work helped Garrisonians make sense of their own movement while more broadly influencing subsequent democratic political life. Somewhat surprising is the absence of extended discussions or even an entire chapter exploring the problem of racial prejudice that concerned Garrisonians, influenced their thinking about democracy, and took on transatlantic dimensions. Garrisonians saw prejudice as another problem of public opinion and democracy, and leading black abolitionists who traveled to Britain shamed America by describing how they felt more equal as foreigners in an aristocratic nation than they did in their own democratic nation, which purportedly prized equality. The book’s final section returns to the chronological narrative at mid-century and continues to braid Garrisonians’ transatlantic enterprises with their domestic political agitation through the Civil War. International developments, including...

Transatlantic Connections: American Anti-Catholicism and the First Vatican Council (1869–70)

This article investigates the hostile U.S. reaction to the First Vatican Council (1869–70) and the doctrine of papal infallibility. For opponents of the Church, the Council Fathers could either make peace with the modern age or, by dogmatizing infallibility, reject progressive principles. Throughout the controversy, Americans closely monitored European developments; read translations of European polemics; and rapturously welcomed a former French friar, Charles Jean Marie Loyson (known as Father Hyacinthe), whose act of rebellion against the Vatican seemed to signal a second Reformation. These events evoke a history of anti-Catholicism in the United States that is less parochial and more sensitive to transnational connections.

Book Review: Policing Youth Violence: Transatlantic Connections

Book Review: Policing Youth Violence: Transatlantic Connections

EU-US Open Skies Agreement: What Is Changed in the North Transatlantic Skies?

Abstract This article presents analysis of air service levels and competition dynamics in the transatlantic market before and after the EU-US Open Skies Agreement (OSA) signed in 2008. By comparing direct and connecting flights in a typical off-peak week, we investigate whether the EU-US OSA has led to more choices for transatlantic travelers. We examine the impact of the EU-US OSA on competition between carriers, alliances, and hub airports. The results show that the number of direct transatlantic connections and served airport pairs decreased and only indirect competition increased.

Transatlantic and Transpacific Connections in Early American History

This article explores America’s earliest engagement with the transpacific world and in particular with China. From the mid-eighteenth century, Americans seeking new economic opportunities considered Asia and the Pacific region important to their development. Taking advantage of their geographical proximity to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Americans developed ways to connect the two regions. These transoceanic networks of trade proved crucial to the economic and political development of the young United States and set the stage for its future influence in the region.

New life for American Downtowns? The 1958 international seminar on urban renewal and the travel of planning ideas in the North Atlantic World

This article scrutinizes the travel of planning ideas between Western Europe and America in the post-war decades by employing the 1958 International Seminar on Urban Renewal as a case study. As a joint venture between the International Federation for Housing and Planning and James M. Miller, a planning professor from Columbia University, this meeting was the first transatlantic conference after 1945 principally intended to (re-)introduce American planners to European reconstruction efforts. Therefore, the seminar testifies to an emerging interest of the wider US professional public in West European planning during the 1950s. When American planners struggled with deteriorating downtowns and suburbanization, they turned to Europe, where cities experimented with pedestrianization, mixed-use zoning and comprehensive planning in order to build their razed city centres anew. Although Americans were relatively unsuccessful in implementing these ideas in their cities, the events surrounding the 1958 seminar show that, even during a period of US hegemony, transatlantic connections were more than a mere ‘Americanization’ of European practice. Thus, this article argues for viewing transnational connections in the post-war North Atlantic World as a circular flow of ideas, in which Europeans and Americans alternately acted as borrowers and lenders, according to their variable perceptions of each other.

Fetishizing the Holocaust: Comedy and Transatlantic Connections in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights

The British Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson has, from the start of his career, found himself saddled with the unenviable label of 'the English Philip Roth'. For many years, Jacobson bristled at the Roth comparisons, offering the alternative label 'the Jewish Jane Austen' and insisting that he had not read Roth at all, though more recently he has put on record his admiration for Roth's comic masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater.If Jacobson's early work was certainly imbued with a Rothian Jewish humour, its cultural reference points were almost invariably English. In contrast, Kalooki Nights is saturated with allusions to American culture, in particular Jewish American culture. This article traces some of the ways in which Kalooki Nights explores and exploits these transatlantic connections in a comic novel that both participates in and satirizes what will be called here the fetishization of the Holocaust. It is concluded that Kalooki Nights is Jacobson's audacious attempt to produce a piece of Holocaust literature that exploits the tension between the desire of some Jews of his generation to know all the 'gory details', and the necessity of recognizing that their own historical situation prevents them from ever doing so. The result is to make people laugh not at the events of the Holocaust itself but at the attempt to fetishize them.

Signposts: new directions in southern legal history

In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history. Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South. Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden.

Bristow’s Symphony No. 2

George Frederick Bristow. Symphony No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 24 (Jullien). Edited by Katherine K. Preston. (Recent Researches in Music, 72.) (Music of the United States of America, 23.) Middleton, WI: Published for the Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc., 2010. [Foreword, p. ix; acknowledgments, p. xi-xiii; American Orchestral Music at the Middle of the Nineteenth Century: Louis Antoine Jullien and George Bristow's Jullien Symphony, p. xv-cvi; 6 plates; score, p. 3-220; apparatus, p. 221-42; bibliog., p. 243-51; discog., p. 253. ISBN 0-89579-684-8, ISBN-13/EAN 978-0-89579-684-4. $220.] Perhaps no nineteenth-century United States composer of classical works is more underrated than George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898). Several of his contemporaries--too many to name here--are the subjects of book-length biographies. He is not. His extensive compositional oeuvre includes five symphonies, an opera, an oratorio, two large cantatas, at least four concert overtures, and dozens of shorter works scored for various small ensembles or soloists. Yet only two of these, the Third Symphony and a piano miniature, are readily accessible on commercial recordings; a handful of others were released on LP albums that are no longer widely available. A critical edition of his oratorio Daniel appears in the Recent Researches in Music series (vol. 34, ed. David Griggs-Janower [Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1999]), and a reprint of a published piano-vocal score to his opera Rip Van Winkle appears in the Earlier Music series (vol. 25, ed. Steven Ledbetter [New York: Da Capo, 1991]). His symphonies, arguably his best works, remain essentially terra incognita for the greater musicological community, while his papers and music manuscripts reside at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The volume under consideration here, a critical edition of Bristow's Second Symphony introduced by an outstanding monograph-length essay by Katherine Preston, vigorously challenges us to reassess our collective opinion of Bristow by offering a new interpretive perspective on his life, his music, and the roles played by each within the broader development of orchestral music in the United States. Preston's introductory essay alone is worthy of extended commentary, for it not only describes the work's genesis and musical characteristics, but also weaves an engaging and meticulously researched narrative about the forces animating United States orchestral music at midcentury. In sum, this volume is a much-needed and long overdue addition to our knowledge of orchestral music culture during the period. Like many musicians of his generation born in the United States, Bristow followed multiple career paths: in addition to composing, he was an orchestral violinist, a piano soloist, an organist in area churches, a conductor, and an educator in New York's public school system. His relatively long life, which more than fully encompassed that of Brahms, began in the Jacksonian Era, reached a midpoint during the Civil War, and concluded during the early Progressive Era. This roughly seventy-five-year period witnessed a seismic shift in the public's appreciation and support of classical music, and Bristow was at the epicenter--at least within the New York metropolitan area--for most of his life. After opening with a concise account of Bristow's professional career, Preston's essay then moves to the broader cultural milieu of orchestral music in the United States at midcentury, along with its transatlantic connections to Europe. The period was defined by movement, she argues. Itinerant opera companies and touring orchestras (mostly imported from Europe) introduced the public to a wide array of operatic and instrumental music repertories, while immigrant musicians intending to become permanent residents arrived in steady streams, especially after the European revolutions in 1848-49. …

Unfitting shoes: footwear fashions and social mobility in colonial Peru

Feminine footwear fashions changed from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century in colonial Peru. Through a variety of textual and visual sources, this essay focuses on footwear fashions and the practices they demanded. It confronts the stereotypical and misogynist vision of colonial women expressed by poets, travelers and Spanish officials with the experiences (if not the voices) of colonial women that emerge from archival records. The study of footwear as a cultural artifact enables us to explore the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific connections that directly or indirectly pushed women to move between worlds, cultural imaginaries and social expectations.

Transatlantic Connections in the Making of a Socialist–Feminist Framework for Social Welfare in Turkey

Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel (1895–1968) was one of Turkey’s most prominent advocates for the rights of children, women, the working class, and the poor. This article focuses on her training in community organizing at the New York School of Social Work in the early 1920s and her subsequent shift to social realist journalism and political advocacy in Turkey. Sertel’s biography offers evidence of transatlantic connections during the early years of professionalization and an early critique of liberal paradigms for addressing social welfare in the United States and Turkey.

Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity Andrea White Mallios, Peter . Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010. 468 pp. Conrad's influence on American writers is well known, as is the popular reception of Chance in the US followed by his much heralded trip there. But it might come as some surprise that the country so denigrated in Conrad's fiction and even referred to in one infamous instance as a last resort—"I vill an Amerigan citizen begome," protests the despicable Patna captain—supported a veritable Conrad industry in the early twentieth century. Former studies of transatlantic connections have been concerned with influence and consumption. The present study distinguishes itself by focusing on production—the ways "Conrad" was constructed in the US especially during the years of the Great War and its aftermath, his fictions serving as grist to disparate domestic social-political mills. While both Robert Weisbuch in The Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) and Mallios complain of the paucity of work in Anglo-American comparative study, Mallios's claim goes much further. In a more focused manner and for a more distinct purpose than "influence" and its anxieties, Mallios employs "a critical approach predicated on the minute investigation of the constitution and contestation of 'domestic' spaces by 'foreign' signs" (ix). This study of "the modern American invention of Joseph Conrad as a 'master' literary figure between 1914 and 1939" constitutes an effort, Mallios argues, to "transnationize the terms of global literary and cultural studies" (ix), and to better understand the arbitrariness of literary national borders. That Conrad's fictions could be so variously construed (and misconstrued) in these various American "productions" was a function particularly, Mallios claims, of a certain heterotopic quality intrinsic to Conrad's writings. Here he recuperates [End Page 254] Foucault's ideas about "other spaces," to focus on the heterotopic textual spaces in Conrad's fiction in order to help explain the multiplicity of their often contradictory receptions," those spaces "always unsettling and refusing confinement within any authorized, legalized, moralized, or ideological plane of discourse" (62). That Conrad's fictions were so commodious, so comprehensive, so capable of disparate readings, from diverse, even, contradictory points of view, was "a general property of Conrad's fiction," Mallios argues (31), that also served his various American "producers" well. His study examines the ways in which Conrad's American reviewers and critics constructed "Conrad" so that readers were made to see the many points of congruence between his fictions and America's distinctive sense of itself in the early twentieth century. Those "many points of resonance" included "a slippery discourse of Englishness, capable of both suturing and subverting U.S. 'Anglo-Saxon' articulations of world relation and domestic boundary and hierarchy," "the idea of revolutionary/Bolshevik Russia," "global practices of imperialism and the race ideologies subtending them," and "the idea of the nation itself" (34). The focus on these constructions is undertaken in this study within specific historical contexts and particular institutional constraints: the journals, newspapers, magazines of the day and the domestic narratives—often changing—each sought to advance. The book is divided into three parts. The first, which comprises almost half of the book and is entitled"The Nation in the World, the World in the Nation," examines the work of three "contra Anglo-Saxon" constructions of Conrad, all, in their rather different ways, engaging his "foreignness," enlisting him heterotopically for their particular purposes. Here Mallios provides a detailed study of H.L. Mencken's creation of "Conrad" in his many reviews, books, and articles as a counter-argument to the then raging pressures against immigration and for isolationism and nativist Anglo-Saxonism. The German-American, whose writings were marked by his own sense of alienation and homelessness, was especially keen on celebrating Conrad as "an unmelted British immigrant" (54) and a cosmopolitan figure of a profoundly comprehensive point of view. If we might wonder, as Conrad did and vehemently protested, why Mencken insisted on Conrad as "Slav," Mallios provides an answer. As a Slav, Conrad figured for Mencken as foreign, not Anglo-Saxon and as "a template for the un-national, "anti-national," and "true cosmopolitan,"(79) and in...

Sensitivity of advective transfer times across the North Atlantic Ocean to the temporal and spatial resolution of model velocity data: Implication for European eel larval transport

European eel (Anguilla anguilla) larvae achieve one of the longest larval migrations of the marine realm, i.e., more than 6000km from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea to European continental shelves. The duration of this migration remains debated, between 7 months and 3 years. This information is, however, crucial since it determines the period over which larvae are affected by environmental conditions and hence the subsequent recruitment success.We investigate the pathways and duration of trans-Atlantic connections using 3 years of high-resolution (daily, 1/12°) velocity fields available from a Mercator-Océan model configuration without data assimilation. We study specifically the effect of spatial and temporal resolutions on our estimates by applying various filters in time (from daily to 12-day averages) and space (from 1/12° to 1° gridcell aggregation) to the nominal model outputs. Numerical particles are released in the presumed European eel spawning area and considered as passive tracers at three specific depths (around 0, 50, and 200m).We diagnose particularly the intensity of the water transfer between suitable control sections that encompass the eel larva distribution. Transit ages are also investigated, with a particular focus on the pathways that minimize the connection times between the western and eastern North Atlantic. We show that small-scale structures (eddies and filaments) contribute to faster connections though they also correspond to additional complexity in trajectories. The shortest pathways mostly follow the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, whereas interior connections require longer transfers that prove less compatible with biological observations.

Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and The New Unhappy Lords

The internationalization of political antisemitism in the postwar period has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Studies of organized political antisemtism and far right extremism in postwar Britain has similarly suffered from a lack of focus on the increasingly transatlantic nature of the phenomenon. American scholars meanwhile have determined that the impetus for the ideological transmission of repackaged antisemitic tropes shifted from the Old World to the New after 1945. This article seeks to redress the balance by presenting a detailed case study of the Anglo–American activities of Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, the doyen of conspiratorial antisemitism in postwar Britain. Chesterton was the author of The New Unhappy Lords, which provided the far right on both sides of the Atlantic with a cogent and coherent antisemitic critique of the forces perceived to be driving globalization and which he believed threatened white racial and cultural identity. This article explores the importance of The New Unhappy Lords on a national and international level, assessing its impact on the far right in the United States before moving to locate its importance in terms of the contemporary debate within the transatlantic far right as to who or what constitutes the greatest threat to white racial survival, Islam or Judaism.