John White's watercolours of the flora, fauna and North Carolina Algonquians he encountered on the expedition sent by Walter Raleigh in 1585 are some of the greatest treasures of the British Museum; engraved by Theodor de Bry in 1590 to illustrate Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia , they informed and shaped Europe's view of America and its people for the next two centuries. This volume publishes a very successful interdisciplinary conference held in connection with the exhibition centred on John White, 'A New World: England's first view of America', with speakers from Europe, the USA and Britain, all of them experts in their fields. The varied and wide-ranging papers provided contextual and detailed information not covered in the exhibition catalogue and provide us with new ways of seeing and understanding both the European and Native American perspectives.

This volume examines the challenges cinemas in small European countries have faced since 1989. It explores how notions of scale and »small cinemas« relate to questions of territory, transnational media flows, and globalization. Employing a variety of approaches from industry analysis to Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the »minor«, contributions address the relationship of small cinemas to Hollywood, the role of history and memory, and the politics of place in post-Socialist cinemas.

Exploring the visions of the end of the Cold War that have been put forth since its inception until its actual ending, this volume brings to the fore the reflections, programmes, and strategies that were intended to call into question the bipolar system and replace it with alternative approaches or concepts. These visions were associated not only with prominent individuals, organized groups and civil societies, but were also connected to specific historical processes or events. They ranged from actual, thoroughly conceived programmes, to more blurred, utopian aspirations -- or simply the belief that the Cold War had already, in effect, come to an end. Such visions reveal much about the contexts in which they were developed and shed light on crucial moments and phases of the Cold War.

Rifkin delves deeply into the history of Europe--and eventually America--to show how Europeans have succeeded in slowly and steadily developing a more adaptive, sensible way of working and living.

Goethe’s 1832 poem Faust offers a vision of humanity realising freedom and prosperity through transcending natural adversity. Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development returns to Faust as a way of exploring the rise and fall of European humanist aspirations to build free and prosperous national political communities protected from natural disasters. Faust stories emerged in early modern Europe linked to the shaking of the traditional religious and political order, and the pursuit of new areas of human knowledge and activity which led to a shift from viewing disasters as acts of God to acts of nature. Faust’s dam building and land reclamation project in Goethe’s poem was inspired by Dutch hydro-engineering and in turn inspired others. Faustian dreams of an engineered future were pursued by the American Yugoslav inventor Nikola Tesla and the country of his birth towards establishing its national independence and escaping the fate of being a borderland. Faust remains a compelling reference point to explore European visions of disaster and development. If Faust captured the European spirit of earlier centuries, what is today’s outlook? Ambitious Faustian development visions to eradicate natural disasters have been replaced by anti-Faustian risk cosmopolitanism sceptical towards human activity in ways counter to building collective protection from disaster. Tesla’s country of birth fears returning to being an insecure borderland of Europe. This powerful and timely book calls for a rekindling of European humanism and Faust’s vision of ‘free people standing on free land’.

Given the destruction and suffering caused by more than four years of industrialised warfare and economic hardship, scholars have tended to focus on the nationalism and hatred in the belligerent countries, holding that it led to a fundamental rupture of any sense of European commonality and unity. It is the central aim of this volume to correct this view and to highlight that many observers saw the conflict as a 'European civil war', and to discuss what this meant for discourses about Europe. Bringing together a remarkable range of compelling and highly original topics, this collection explores notions, images, and ideas of Europe in the midst of catastrophe.