Historical Changes in Large River Fish Assemblages of the Americas

<em>Abstract.</em>—The longest river in North America, the Missouri, trends southeast from Montana across the mid continent of the United States, 3,768 km to its confluence with the Mississippi River near St. Louis, Missouri. Frequent flooding, a shifting, braided channel, and high turbidity characterized the precontrol “Big Muddy.” Major alterations occurred over the past century primarily for flood protection, navigation, irrigation, and power production. Today, the middle one-third of its length is impounded into the largest volume reservoir complex in the United States and the lower one-third is channelized, leveed, and its banks stabilized.

Author(s):  
Michael Lusztig ◽  
Athanasios Hristoulas ◽  
David Skidmore

The dynamics of foreign policy making in the United States, Mexico, and Canada—the three countries that make up North America—has been influenced by political geography, political culture, and state–society relations. The combination of these three factors helps to explain America’s slow emergence as a great power, its unique brand of civic nationalism, the moralistic terms in which the aims of U.S. foreign policy are often cast, the lack of consistency in American diplomacy, and the hesitation the United States has often shown about accepting or adhering to multilateral commitments. For Mexico and Canada, the proximity of the United States has fundamentally shaped their external relations whether as a force of repulsion or a source of attraction. For much of the past century, Mexican foreign policy treaded a path of resistance to U.S. domination, driven by the political traditions of nationalism, populism, and anti-imperialism. In the case of Canada, it has also at times sought greater independence from the United States through economic nationalism while also carving out a distinctive foreign policy identity as a liberal and idealistic middle power. In the second half of the twentieth century, Canada cycled through four somewhat distinctive eras of foreign policy: the liberal internationalism of the 1940s to 1968; the left nationalism of the Trudeau era; Brian Mulroney’s commitment to continentalism; and Jean Chrétien’s renewed commitment to left nationalism that has ruined cross-border relations and diminished Canada’s relevance in Washington.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Sabina Magliocco

This essay introduces a special issue of Nova Religio on magic and politics in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The articles in this issue address a gap in the literature examining intersections of religion, magic, and politics in contemporary North America. They approach political magic as an essentially religious phenomenon, in that it deals with the spirit world and attempts to motivate human behavior through the use of symbols. Covering a range of practices from the far right to the far left, the articles argue against prevailing scholarly treatments of the use of esoteric technologies as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, showing how they have also been operationalized by the left in recent history. They showcase the creativity of magic as a form of human cultural expression, and demonstrate how magic coexists with rationality in contemporary western settings.


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