The West: Encounters & Transformationstakes a new approach to telling the story of Western Civilization. Rather than looking at Western Civilization only as the history of Europe from ancient times to the present, this groundbreaking book examines the changing nature of the West--how the definition of the West has evolved and transformed throughout history. It explores the ways Western civilization has changed as a result of cultural encounters with different beliefs, ideas, technologies, and peoples, both outside the West and within it. Presenting a balanced treatment of political, social, religious, and cultural history, this text emphasizes the ever-shifting boundaries of the geographic and cultural realm of the West.

Coastal Encounters opens a window onto the fascinating world of the eighteenth-century Gulf South. Stretching from Florida to Texas, the region witnessed the complex collision of European, African, and Native American peoples. The Gulf South offered an extraordinary stage for European rivalries to play out, allowed a Native-based frontier exchange system to develop alongside an emerging slave-based plantation economy, and enabled the construction of an urban network of unusual opportunity for free people of color. After being long-neglected in favor of the English colonies of the Atlantic coast, the colonial Gulf South has now become the focus of new and exciting scholarship. ø Coastal Encounters brings together leading experts and emerging scholars to provide a portrait of the Gulf South in the eighteenth century. The contributors depict the remarkable transformations that took place?demographic, cultural, social, political, and economic?and examine the changes from multiple perspectives, including those of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; colonizers and colonized; men and women. The outstanding essays in this book argue for the central place of this dynamic region in colonial history.

This book explores a particular genre of intervention into cultural difference, used across the globe. Organised cultural encounters is an umbrella concept referring to face-to-face encounters that are organised across a wide variety of social arenas in order to manage and/or transform problems perceived to stem from cultural difference. The authors base their focus on empirical contexts either located in Denmark or related to a Danish organisation, investigating interfaith work, training sessions in diversity management, volunteer tourism, a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, and a community dance project. Through different theoretical approaches, and careful analyses of the micro-level practices occurring within the time-space of specific encounters, Galal and Hvenegård-Lassen demonstrate how both the interactions and their outcomes are considerably more complex – and contradictory – than evaluative and instrumental accounts of success or failure may capture. This book will provide a valuable resource for practitioners and scholars of intercultural relations working in the fields of cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and migration studies.

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas brings together 15 archaeological case studies that offer new perspectives on colonial period interactions in the Caribbean and surrounding areas through a specific focus on material culture and indigenous agency.

Nordamerika - Kolonialzeit - Landschaft - Raumkonzepte - soziale Konstruktion.

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism. A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.

Fresh Encounters presents a new and different model for praying together that has seen results in churches across the United States. Put it into practice at your church, and watch the transforming power of Jesus Christ work through united, worship-based prayer.