This book uses literature to explain why pre-Confederation Canadians did not want to become Americans. The author argues that the perceived cultural distinctions between 19th-century American and colonial Canadian societies echoed public attitudes towards the political systems of the US and the British Empire, and the ideologies that shaped them.

Representing five major areas of Augustan scholarship—historiography, poetry, art, religion, and politics—the nineteen contributors to this volume bring us closer to a balanced, up-to-date account of Augustus and his principate.

In 1837, a small group of rebels proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Canada. Between then and the Act of Confederation of 1867, colonial Canadians tried to imagine the future of their communities in North America. The choice between monarchy and republicanism shaped both colonial self-images and images of the United States; it also drove the political deliberations that eventually united the colonies of British North America into a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown. Between Empire and Republic is a thematic exploration of the political discourse embedded in the literary output of the period. Colonial authors Susanna Moodie, Th. Ch. Haliburton, and John Richardson enjoyed transatlantic popularity and explained colonial realities to their British, Canadian, and American readership. Collectively, their writings serve as the lens into colonial Canadian perceptions of American and British political ideas and institutions. Between Empire and Republic discusses North America as a literary contact zone where British principles of constitutional monarchy competed with American ideas of republicanism and democratic self-government. The author argues that political ideas in pre-Confederation Canada filtered into the literary works of the time, creating two settler-colonial communities whose recognizable cultural characteristics echoed public attitudes towards the political projects underpinning them.

Political image-making—especially from the Age of Augustus, when the Roman Republic evolved into a system capable of governing a vast, culturally diverse empire—is the focus of this masterful study of Roman culture. Distinguished art historian and classical archaeologist John Pollini explores how various artistic and ideological symbols of religion and power, based on Roman Republican values and traditions, were taken over or refashioned to convey new ideological content in the constantly changing political world of imperial Rome. Religion, civic life, and politics went hand in hand and formed the very fabric of ancient Roman society. Visual rhetoric was a most effective way to communicate and commemorate the ideals, virtues, and political programs of the leaders of the Roman State in an empire where few people could read and many different languages were spoken. Public memorialization could keep Roman leaders and their achievements before the eyes of the populace, in Rome and in cities under Roman sway. A leader’s success demonstrated that he had the favor of the gods—a form of legitimation crucial for sustaining the Roman Principate, or government by a “First Citizen.” Pollini examines works and traditions ranging from coins to statues and reliefs. He considers the realistic tradition of sculptural portraiture and the ways Roman leaders from the late Republic through the Imperial period were represented in relation to the divine. In comparing visual and verbal expression, he likens sculptural imagery to the structure, syntax, and diction of the Latin language and to ancient rhetorical figures of speech. Throughout the book, Pollini’s vast knowledge of ancient history, religion, literature, and politics extends his analysis far beyond visual culture to every aspect of ancient Roman civilization, including the empire’s ultimate conversion to Christianity. Readers will gain a thorough understanding of the relationship between artistic developments and political change in ancient Rome.

Taner Akçam is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and discuss openly the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman-Turkish government in 1915. This book discusses western political policies towards the region generally, and represents the first serious scholarly attempt to understand the Genocide from a perpetrator rather than victim perspective, and to contextualize those events within Turkey's political history. By refusing to acknowledge the fact of genocide, successive Turkish governments not only perpetuate massive historical injustice, but also pose a fundamental obstacle to Turkey's democratization today.

Traces the roots of the Turkish Republic to the Ottoman Empire

Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.” Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.