In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences. He also puts forth that there are recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience. Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson focus on the provenance and central character of writing by mainstream figures in our literary past. The essays on Brockden Brown, Nathan Asch, O. Henry, Frank O'Hara, Lewis Mumford, and Van Wyck Brooks highlight marginal, neglected, forgotten, or not yet fully acknowledged contributors to American writing.

In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences. He also puts forth that there are recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience. Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson focus on the provenance and central character of writing by mainstream figures in our literary past. The essays on Brockden Brown, Nathan Asch, O. Henry, Frank O'Hara, Lewis Mumford, and Van Wyck Brooks highlight marginal, neglected, forgotten, or not yet fully acknowledged contributors to American writing.

African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity asks why, from some moment onwards, 'Europe' and 'the rest of the world' entered into a particular relationship: one of domination, conceived as a kind of superiority and as an 'advance' in historic

North America is steering a new course, with the United States, Canada, and Mexico moving toward continental economic, integration. This book examines basic value changes that are' transforming economic, social, and political life in these three countries, demonstrating that they are gradually adopting an increasingly compatible cultural perspective. A narrow nationalism, dominant since the 19th century, has slowly been giving way to a more cosmopolitan sense of identity. As old economic boundaries become outmoded, a North American perspective makes greater sense. To what extent, then, do the three North American publics - I each with its own heterogeneities and tensions - share a common culture? That question can only be answered if we have some yardstick by which to measure their cultural similarity. These societies are far from identical. But data from the 1990- 1991 World Values survey, drawn from 43 societies around the world, show that on crucial topics, the core values of the American public are significantly closer to those of the Canadians and (to a somewhat lesser extent) to those of the Mexicans, than they are to those of most other peoples in the world. Furthermore, time series evidence indicates that the values of the three North American publics have been converging. This book draws on a unique body of directly comparable cross-national and cross-temporal survey evidence to show that what Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans want out of life is changing in analogous ways. These changes, coupled with sociostructural transformations, are reshaping peoples' feelings about national identity, about trusting each other, and about the balance between economic and non-economic goals. North American economic integration is being reinforced by the gradual emergence of increasingly similar cultural values.

In the last twenty years, transnational perspectives have gained momentum in the field of historical-educational research. Scholars have made substantial efforts to rethink nation-based historiographies by reconstructing and reinterpreting the cross-border encounters and intertwined processes that have turned the history of education into a transnational enterprise. A closer look at specific transnational spaces furthers a better understanding of these processes. Against this backdrop, the book offers case studies focusing on transatlantic encounters with special regard to the manifold entanglements between Germany and the United States of America that represent one of the most complex, dynamic, and vivid educational spaces between the eighteenth and twentieth century. Drawing on excellent source material, each contribution examines interaction processes as the genuine transformative moment within any cross-border transfer, and investigates exchanges of concepts, institutions, and materials. Under this premise, the book draws attention to shifting trajectories in the German-American history of education that can be identified by focusing on long-lasting transnational entanglements. By offering a wide range of research approaches, the publication furthermore contributes innovative methodological thoughts to transnational histories of education that go beyond the German-American context and will interest students, emerging researchers, and experts of history of education.

R.M. Berry -- Debra Di Blasi -- Percival Everett -- Thalia Field -- Renee Gladman -- Bhanu Kapil -- Michael Martone -- Carole Maso -- Joseph McElroy -- Christina Milletti -- Lance Olsen -- Alan Singer -- Steve Tomasula

The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge. Contributors. Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Rafael Cazarin, Hansjörg Dilger, Alessandro Gusman, Murtala Ibrahim, Peter Lambertz, Isabelle L. Lange, Isabel Mukonyora, Benedikt Pontzen, Hanspeter Reihling, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon