Features of the historical memory of students of Russian megacities

In the course of sociological analysis, linguistic models of students’ historical memory, events and historical figures were identified, that represent, in the opinion of young people, the “political evil” and the “political good” in Russian history. The students identified serfdom, “Stalinist repressions”, the famine of the 1920s and 1940s and the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya as “political evil”. The “political good” – the victories in the Patriotic War of 1812, the Great Patriotic War, the flight to space, the 1980 and 2014 Olympics. The author’s sociological studies of the largest Russian megalopolises have revealed the complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of student youth. The study established the adherence of student youth to liberal ideology, a shallow awareness of the life of their family, their kin in earlier periods of Russian history, from pre-revolutionary times to the lives of their relatives in the 20-40s of the XX century, the association of “political good” with the achievements of our country and the association of “political evil” with defeats and reforms.

The Attack on the US Capitol: An American Kristallnacht

The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was the first such attack on the US Congress since the British-American War of 1812. It was also the event leading to the highest number of injured first responders from any single event in the US since 9/11. What led to it? To respond this question, this article places this event within the broader crisis of Western democracies and the rise of populism that has been its hallmark. It explains the attack on the Capitol as a result of the “Big Lie”, that is, the assertion that the November 3, 2020, presidential elction was stolen from Donald Trump. The remarkable resonance this unfounded claim has found among the US population, in turn, can be traced back to the huge division by race, class and geography currently affecting the United States, a division that makes for a highly polarized polity.

Finale

In “The Future City and The Female Marine,” I set Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography against The Female Marine, a pamphlet narrative written in three overlapping installments and published in nineteen different editions between 1815 and 1818 by Boston publisher Nathaniel Coverly. I contrast the Autobiography’s version of US urban space as a replicable franchise city to the transgressive city constructed in The Female Marine. The Female Marine’s protagonist, Lucy Brewer, seduced, abandoned, and working as a prostitute in Boston, disguises herself as a young male sailor to serve on the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. Easily read as political allegory for Boston’s shifting wartime loyalties, The Female Marine also marks a critical transition in US urban literature. Coverly rewrites the seduction tale to allow for female urban success, foreshadowing the racy female libertines of the 1840s sporting press. Virtually untouched by literary critics, The Female Marine is a remarkably rich text. Coverly quotes from and revises Charlotte, offers us a newly graphic version of the city’s geography that evokes the phantasmic cities of Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard, previews the rise of urban serials in the penny press, and delivers a more triumphant outcome than the equivocal endings of Kelroy or Ormond. As it picks up on earlier urban forms, The Female Marine operates as a fantastic, subversive, and funny precursor to the urban genre fiction that would become immensely popular in the second half of the century.

The Legacy of 1812: How a Little War Shaped the Transatlantic World

The War of 1812 may have been a small and inconclusive war, but it had a profound and lasting impact of all the belligerents. The war may be largely forgotten, but it left a huge legacy that is still evident today. Wars can best be measured by their consequences, and the legacy of this war was both multifaceted and lasting. The conflict shaped both the United States and Canada as well as their relationship with Great Britain for nearly a century thereafter. It helps to explain how the Anglo-American alliance originated and why the British welcomed the Pax Americana in the twentieth century, as well as why Canada never joined the American Union and why American expansion after 1815 aimed south and west rather than north. It was during the War of 1812 that the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh earned his reputation, Laura Secord became famous, and Andrew Jackson began his rise to the presidency. Its impact on American culture was also far reaching and produced ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, Uncle Sam and ‘Old Ironsides’, amongst other symbols of United States nationhood.

‘In the Midst of Three Fires, a French one, an American one, and an Indian one’: Imperial-Indigenous Negotiations during the War of 1812 in Eastern British America

This essay argues that the War of 1812 in Eastern British America, despite the near-absence of land-based conflict in this region, marked a turning point in an imperial-Indigenous relationship that differed notably from comparable relationships elsewhere in North America because of the relatively late advent of substantial settler colonization. Diplomacy, which led in 1812 to the conclusion of a series of neutrality agreements in the borderland jurisdiction of New Brunswick, contributed to the forestalling of outright military conflict in the region. But diplomacy of this nature at the same time reached the end of its effective life, as the balance tipped towards a settled environment that eroded the effectiveness of the formerly powerful diplomatic tools of Indigenous-imperial negotiation. 1

Loyalty to the Regime: Prominent Men, Militia and French-Canadian Identity through the 1812 War

In the North American British colonies, the 1812 war led to a great mobilization of militia corps to protect the Empire’s possessions. For colonial authorities, such context represented an opportunity to measure local militia officers’ loyalty to the Crown, particularly those who resided in the French traditional countryside. What can we understand of the French-Canadian involvement in the War of 1812 as officers? What is the impact of their relation to the Crown on their capacity to hold on to positions in their respective communities? By bringing to life a few case studies, this paper wishes to examine the formation of the French-Canadian identity through the involvement of local elites in the militia. This study is based on an analysis of the correspondence of the principal officers of the battalions with the central authorities and prosopographical research of those same officers in the rural regions of Lower Canada. The analysis of the strategies, values and interests of the militia officers, will serve to enlighten the parameters of the collaboration between the local elite and the colonial elite.

‘True, Publick and Notorious’: The Privateering War of 1812

During the War of 1812, hundreds of private armed vessels, or privateers, carrying letters of marque and reprisal from their respective governments, served as counterweights to the navies of Great Britain and the United States. By 1812, privateering was acknowledged as an ideal way to annoy the enemy at little or no cost to the government. Local citizens provided the ships, crews and prizes while the court and customs systems took in the appropriate fees. The entire process was legal, licensed and often extremely lucrative. Unlike the navy, privateers were essentially volunteer commerce raiders, determined to weaken the enemy economically rather than militarily. So successful were they, that from July 1812 to February 1815, privateers from the United States, Britain, and the British provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (as well as those sailing under French and Spanish flags) turned the shipping lanes from Newfoundland to the West Indies, Norway to West Africa, and even the South Pacific into their hunting grounds. In the early months of the war, privateers were often the only seaborne force patrolling their own coasts. With the Royal Navy pre-occupied with defending Britain and its Caribbean colonies from French incursions, there were relatively few warships available to protect British North American shipping from their new American foes. Meanwhile, the United States Navy had only a handful of frigates and smaller warships to protect their trade, supported by 174 generally despised gunboats. The solution was the traditional response of a lesser maritime power lacking a strong navy—private armed warfare, or privateering.