scholarly journals "I have such sad news": Loss in Finnish North American Letters

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 53-71
Author(s):  
Samira Saramo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Death And Loss

Life writing has been an important tool for people to work through loss in their lives. In the context of twentieth-century migration, word of death and shared mourning occurred primarily through letters in the international post. Focusing on letters written by Finnish immigrants in the United States and Canada from the 1940s–1960s, this article analyzes some of the ways that letter writing has been used to address death and loss. Positioning personal letters within the broader field of life writing, this work examines how both loss and life writing often trigger a re/defining of the self, addressed in multiple and ambiguous ways by individual mourner/writers.  In its unsettling of life, feelings, and connections, loss is a rupture of the self. By narrating their life, writers create personal chronologies, position themselves in places and communities, and declare their values. The life writing of Finnish North Americans provides windows into the difficult work of trying to assign meaning to meaning-defying loss.

scholarly journals Kenneth Burke: Pioneer of Ecocriticism

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE COUPE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Know How ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
De Man

Nearly every handbook of critical theory acknowledges Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) to be the twentieth-century North American critic who was most ahead of his time. Yet he seems to have been so ambitious that we still do not know how to place him. Indeed, it would require the space of a whole book to trace the extensive but scarcely documented impact which he has had. Concepts for which many other critics became famous may be traced back to him: ‘‘the order of words’’ (Frye); ‘‘the rhetoric of fiction’’ (Booth); ‘‘blindness and insight’’ (De Man); ‘‘narrative as a socially symbolic act’’ (Jameson); ‘‘the anxiety of influence’’ (Bloom). Indeed, it may well be that very anxiety which has led so many contemporary critics to repress his memory. But there is a change in the critical climate, corresponding to the global. This article is written in the hope that Burke will shortly be recognized as the first critic systematically to analyse culture and literature from an ecological perspective. As the dating of our epigraph indicates, he initiated this project over half a century before the rise of ecocriticism in the United States. Moreover, this was no passing phase for him; his whole career may be understood as a profound experiment in green thinking.

scholarly journals Comparing Brazilian and North American songs about money

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Ruben George Oliven
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Intense Process

This article compares Brazilian and North American popular music. If focuses on the lyrics of songs composed mainly in the first half of the twentieth century when an intense process of national building was taking place in Brazil and the United States. Several of those compositions became classics. Those songs were and still are very popular because they echoed and continue to echo the social imaginary of both countries. It is for this reason that popular music is so crucial for the understanding of both societies.

AGAINST WHITENESS: RACE AND PSYCHOLOGY IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
RICHARD H. KING
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Way

It is tempting to think that we have heard just about all we want or need to know about race. As the above quotes indicate, modern notions of race have always revolved around the faculty of vision, with supplementary contributions from other senses such as hearing, as Arendt notes in a tacit allusion to one mark of Jewish difference—the way they sounded when concentrated in urban settings. Yet two very recent works—Mark M. Smith's How Race Is Made and Anne C. Rose's Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South—have much to teach us about how race has “worked”, particularly in the twentieth-century South but also, by implication, in the United States in general. Both works assume that, historically, race is no mere add-on to the self, a kind of externality that, once detected, can be relatively easily excised. Rather, it stands right at the heart of personal and group identity in a nation where race and ethnicity continue to assume surprising new shapes and forms.

Remaking North American Sovereignty

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The North ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of

This book explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from a continental perspective. Today’s political map took its basic shape in the continental crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This crisis transformed the continent from a patchwork of foreign empires, republics, indigenous polities, and contested no-mans-lands into the nation states of Mexico and the United States and the Dominion of Canada, an expanding, largely self-governing polity within the British Empire. Key to this process was the question of sovereignty, or the power to rule. Battles over sovereignty ran through the struggles waged not only by the nation states that came to dominate the North America, but also those that failed, like the Confederate States of America, and others—like the European empires and indigenous peoples—that came into conflict with the three main states. In light of the global turn in 19th-century historiography, this book examines these political crises as an inter-related struggle to redefine the relationship of North Americans to new governments. This volume brings together distinguished experts on the history of Canada, indigenous Americans, Mexico, and the United States to re-evaluate an era of political transformation that has had profound consequences for the future of the continent.

The United States and the Portuguese Atlantic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyson Reeder
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
The United States ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Republican Revolution ◽  
Foreign Commerce

Due to treaties between the British and Portuguese empires, Portugal and its Atlantic islands had served as some of the most important trade destinations of British Americans prior to the American Revolution. After US independence, however, Portugal restricted North American access to Portuguese markets. As a result, North Americans anticipated a day when they could trade with independent, republican Brazilians. For their part, however, Brazilians followed a different trajectory toward independence. The Portuguese monarchy liberalized trade in the 1790s to avoid uncomfortable associations of free trade and republican revolution. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Portuguese court relocated from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro to save the empire, opening Brazil to foreign commerce in the process. As a result of such reforms, Brazilians rarely equated republicanism with free trade. After the court returned to Lisbon in 1821 and Brazilians declared independence in 1822, Brazil adopted a monarchy rather than a republic. Brazil disrupted North Americans’ tidy narrative of the Americas as a hemisphere of republics contrasted with European monarchies.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the nomenclature of two North American fishes

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE M PORTER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Shad ◽  
New Name ◽  
The Common ◽  
Fish Louse

A curious error affects the names of three North American clupeids—the Alewife, American Shad, and Menhaden. The Alewife was first described by the British-born American architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1799, just two years after what is generally acknowledged as the earliest description of any ichthyological species published in the United States. Latrobe also described the ‘fish louse’, the common isopod parasite of the Alewife, with the new name, Oniscus praegustator. Expressing an enthusiasm for American independence typical of his generation, Latrobe humorously proposed the name Clupea tyrannus for the Alewife because the fish, like all tyrants, had parasites or hangers-on.

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