Reveals how the European travels of John and Abigail Adams helped define what it meant to be an American From 1778 to 1788, the Founding Father and later President John Adams lived in Europe as a diplomat. Joined by his wife, Abigail, in 1784, the two shared rich encounters with famous heads of the European royal courts, including the ill-fated King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the staid British Monarchs King George III and Queen Charlotte. In this engaging narrative, A View from Abroad takes us on the first full exploration of the Adams’s lives abroad. Jeanne E. Abrams reveals how the journeys of John and Abigail Adams not only changed the course of their intellectual, political, and cultural development—transforming the couple from provincials to sophisticated world travelers—but most importantly served to strengthen their loyalty to America. Abrams shines a new light on how the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity. They and their fellow Americans grappled with how to reorder their society as the new nation took its place in the international transatlantic world. After just a short time abroad, Abigail maintained that, “My Heart and Soul is more American than ever. We are a family by ourselves.” The Adamses’ quest to define what it means to be an American, and the answers they discovered in their time abroad, still resonate with us to this day.

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including “the global/national,” “culture,” “native speaker,” “immersion,” and “host society.” Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of “differences” in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.

This book examines external perceptions of the Franco-German relationship, both from a historical perspective and as a driving force for regional integration. By providing various country and regional studies, it analyses the various types of perception and self-perception in several regions around the globe. Here, Franco-German cooperation serves as a mirror in which third-party countries view their own situation, today and in the future. The contributions address the questions of if and how the Franco-German reconciliation and cooperation is perceived as a role model for other regions, especially for the reconciliation of other inter-state and international conflicts. A concluding chapter highlights the divergences and convergences between the respective conflicts, and proposes recommendations for actors involved in diplomacy and international relations. The book is intended to provide scientific support for the implementation of the Franco-German Aachen Treaty of January 2019. It will appeal to scholars in political science and cultural studies, and to anyone interested in learning more about the Franco-German relationship and on external perspectives on it.

Arabia was certainly the most mysterious country in the world during the historical era, an impenetrable and unknowable realm capable of stimulating the imagination and indeed the wildest fancies of the European intellectual elite. While the Hejaz region, where the two holy cities of Islamic Mecca and Medina are located, is still simply off-limits to non-Moslems, the rest of this vast land was at least as inaccessible and dangerous with its terrible deserts populated by Bedouins, whose reputation was enough to discourage the most fearless traveller. A small handful did, however, risk their lives to journey through Arabia and return with the rare texts and images that form the subject of this publication. These works, or rather the most captivating and successful of them in historical, anthropological and aesthetic terms, are gathered together in Visions from Abroad. Historical and Contemporary Representations of Saudi Arabia and presented in a dozen thematic chapters. All the media and all the genres, including painting, sculpture, engraving and photography as well as installation and even comics, are represented in this extraordinary gallery of images, where the works of great orientalist artists like Léon Belly, Georg Emanuel Opiz and Émile Prisse d'Avesnes are fruitfully juxtaposed with those of famous contemporary photographers like Raymond Depardon, Abbas and Humberto Da Silveira. Running parallel to these images, the text enables us to see through Arabia, a land so difficult and complex to penetrate and decipher, through the eyes of the travellers who undertook to describe it in the works they have left to posterity. It also addresses the often uncommon personalities of these figures, like the Italian Ludovico di Varthema from Bologna, who did not hesitate to become a Mamluk in 1503 in order to set foot on Arabian soil, and the British naval officer and writer Richard Burton, who managed to pass himself off as an Afghan physician and magician to the same end in 1853.

"In March 2015, a group of experts from four continents and a wide range of disciplines met with the leading African American writer Ishmael Reed in Mulhouse, France, and Basel, Switzerland. Guided by Swiss cultural and literary theorist Sami Ludwig, and deliberately migrating back and forth across a political border in the heart of Europe, they not only listened to Reed and discussed his work, but also looked more widely at the different meanings assigned to "multiculturalism" in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. This volume brings together their reflections.

For all Study Abroad programs. Via personalized exercises, this self-directed workbook guides students through five distinct strands of development, all of which are necessary to fully capitalize on their study abroad experience. Strands include: personal development, learning about one's own culture, learning about another culture, professional development, and learning a language, and each is addressed at the three crucial phases of the experience: before, during and after the sojourn. One major goal of the text is to offer a purposeful agenda to help students move from being the conventional tourist to an explorer who truly acquires an authentic view of another culture.