Memory on the Margins: Anne Grant’s Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-142
Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Army Officer ◽  
Intercultural Exchange ◽  
The Us

Chapter 2 takes up the retrospective writing of Anne Grant, in which she imagines the peripheral spaces of the British Atlantic as the unique enclave of a particular mode of human society and of intercultural exchange. In both the US and Britain, Grant acquired a reputation as a keen observer of so-called primitive peoples. She wrote widely on her life in the Scottish Highlands, and her published letters, poetry and essays were deemed important accounts of Highland culture. In addition, Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady relates her childhood experiences growing up in colonial New York, where her British army officer father was posted. Taken as a whole, Grant’s writing provides a unique account of the transperipheral circuits of movement and exchange in the Atlantic world. She reveals a complex inter-play of national, ethnic and regional identities that are ultimately at odds with her reputation for providing nostalgic renditions of a ‘lost world’ for discrete readerships on either side of the Atlantic.

The Bush Administration and Northern Ireland as a Local Political Issue

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
Andrew Sanders
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Army Officer ◽  
Single Term ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government

The British government welcomed Vice President George HW Bush’s election in 1988 and, predictably, his policy towards Northern Ireland remained consistent throughout his single term in office. In local politics, however, much was made of the situation in Northern Ireland, most notable in the office of the Mayor of New York City. There, Ed Koch and David Dinkins both took an interest in Northern Ireland with the latter heavily involved in the campaign to extradite Joe Doherty, an IRA member who had been convicted of killing a British Army officer, from New York to Northern Ireland. The Doherty case had led to the signing of a new extradition agreement between the US and UK but still Doherty resisted his removal. The chapter also examines the 1992 Presidential Election with particular focus on the Democratic Primary campaign which saw former Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s interest in Northern Ireland develop over a series of weeks and months before he pledged to involve the US Government, if elected, in ways never before seen.

scholarly journals Immigration Politics

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-503
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Immigration Politics

“You are a Greek Jew? I thought all Greeks were Orthodox?” As a Jewish-American growing up in New York City, whose paternal grandparents were Jews who had emigrated from Greece in the 1920s, I was frequently asked this question by well-meaning—if confused—friends and acquaintances. Indeed, while “Greek Jew” has always been a central aspect of my multiply-hyphenated American identity, in fact my grandfather Morris Isaac, né Izaki, was from Salonika and, it turns out, he himself grew up as a Turkish Jew under the Ottoman Empire, only to discover after World War I that he was in fact (now) not a Turkish but a Greek Jew (which was not, in the parlance of his time, synonymous with being an authentic “Greek”). Greek (Orthodox) or Jewish? Greek or Turkish? Pogroms, wars, “ethnic cleansings,” and sometimes even genocides have been undertaken to resolve such questions, and indeed my ancestors experienced all of these things in the opening decades of the twentieth century. For my family, such traumas are part of the story of how my grandparents came to leave Greece and migrate to the US and become Americans and US citizens (alas, many of their relatives were not able to leave, and most ultimately perished at the hands of the Nazis).

RECKONING WITH THE ATLANTIC ECONOMY Migration and the origins of the English Atlantic world. By Alison Games. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii+322. ISBN 0-674-57381-1. £31.50. The early modern Atlantic economy. Edited by John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+369. ISBN 0-521-78249-X. £40.00. Purchasing identity in the Atlantic world: Massachusetts merchants, 1670-1780. By Phyllis Whitman Hunter. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+224. ISBN 0-8014-3855-1. $42.50. The people with no name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish and the creation of a British Atlantic world, 1689-1764. By Patrick Griffin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. xv+244. ISBN 0-691-07462-3. $55.00. Letterbook of Greg & Cunningham, 1756-57: merchants of New York and Belfast. Edited by Thomas M. Truxes. Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xxxi+430. £50.00.

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 749-764
Author(s):  
S. D. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
English Atlantic World ◽  
Atlantic Economy

In July 1768, the Boston merchant John Amory paid cash for two bills of exchange sold to him by a certain Mr Mumford. These bills, valued at £279 4s 3d and £342 10s, had originally been drawn on the London commission house of Lascelles and Daling by two Barbados merchants trading in partnership as Stevenson and Went. The bills were drawn in favour of another merchant called Charles Wickham. Stevenson and Went were in the business of supplying slaves to sugar planters on credits of up to twelve months, but as soon as their slave shipments arrived, however, the partners' own obligations to the merchants and mariners who had fitted out their vessels and supplied them with cargo fell due. To overcome this remittance problem, Lascelles and Daling acted as the slave importers' guarantors by agreeing to accept their bills before receiving the funds needed to pay them. A bill drawn on a sound London house was considered good for payment in any Atlantic port, including Rhode Island where Wickham was based. The bills presented to Lascelles and Daling were due at twelve months' sight, but creditors such as Wickham did not have to wait a full year before receiving their money. Wickham endorsed the bills in favour of Mumford (probably a coastal mariner to whom he owed a debt), who in turn passed them on to Amory. With balances owing in London, Amory was happy to discount the two bills for cash, judging this a better option at the current rate of exchange than sending specie or merchandise across the Atlantic. And cash is what Mumford would have needed to pay his crew members.

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