'The Mother of Combines': 
Representations of the United States in Early Canadian Discourse on the Combines Problem and the Formation of Canadian National Identity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The United States

Interpretative theories as roadmaps to constitutional identity: The case of the United States

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
OR BASSOK
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Patient Protection ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
Constitutional Identity

AbstractAs long as the American Constitution serves as the focal point of American identity, many constitutional interpretative theories also serve as roadmaps to various visions of American constitutional identity. Using the debate over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I expose the identity dimension of various interpretative theories and analyse the differences between the roadmaps offered by them. I argue that according to each of these roadmaps, courts’ authority to review legislation is required in order to protect a certain vision of American constitutional identity even at the price of thwarting Americans’ freedom to pursue their current desires. The conventional framing of interpretative theories as merely techniques to decipher the constitutional text or justifications for the Supreme Court’s countermajoritarian authority to review legislation and the disregard of their identity function is perplexing in view of the centrality of the Constitution to American national identity. I argue that this conventional framing is a result of the current understanding of American constitutional identity in terms of neutrality toward the question of the good. This reading of the Constitution as lacking any form of ideology at its core makes majority preferences the best take of current American identity, leaving constitutional theorists with the mission to justify the Court’s authority to diverge from majority preferences.

The transformation of tequila: From hangover to highbrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Sarita Gaytán
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Class ◽  
Song Lyrics

This article examines the evolution of tequila’s reputation – from lowbrow to high class – in Mexico and the United States. Analyzing the content of novels, magazines, newspapers, ads, and song lyrics, it argues that the current cachet associated with tequila was influenced by a range of historical, political, and economic circumstances within and between Mexico and the United States. Specifically, transformations took place in three key phases including tequila’s: (1) increasing ties to national identity in Mexico; (2) changing perception – moving from feared to fun – in the United States; and (3) gaining of state-backed support and legislative protection. In explaining the shifting patterns of prestige, the roles of transnational circuits of consumption and production merit closer analysis in understanding the relations that shape cultural fields.

The Lucrative Business of the Cyrus Cylinder

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-301
Author(s):  
Kamyar Abdi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
International Business ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The United States

This chapter focuses on the Cylinder of Cyrus the Great (c. 600–530 BCE) of Persia. More commonly known as the “Cyrus Cylinder,” this archaeological find housed in the British Museum is about 22 centimeters long, made of baked clay, and covered in cuneiform writing that has been noted by biblical scholars to corroborate the story of Cyrus’s liberation of the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity. Since the mid-twentieth century, it has been (mis/ab)used as a political tool to promote Iranian national identity. With its exhibition in Iran in 2010 and in the United States in 2013, it has also become a commodified icon in a lucrative international business.

Chasing the Pictures: Press and Magazine Photography

2014 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fay Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
News Photography ◽  
History Of

For over a century, press and magazine photography has influenced how Australians have viewed society, and played a critical role in Australia's evolving national identity. Despite its importance and longevity, the historiography of Australian news photography is surprising limited. This article examines the history of press and magazine photography and considers its genesis, the transformative technological innovations, debates about images of violence, the industrial attitudes towards photographers and their treatment, the use of photographs and the seismic recent changes. The article argues that while the United States and United Kingdom influenced the trajectory of press and news photography in Australia, there are significant and illuminating differences.

Muslims in America from the European Colonial Period to the Present

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
World War I ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Muslim Majority

The history of Muslims in America dates back to the transatlantic mercantile interactions between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Upon its arrival, Islam became entrenched in American discourses on race and civilization because literate and noble African Muslims, brought to America as slaves, had problematized popular stereotypes of Muslims and black Africans. Furthermore, these enslaved Muslims had to re-evaluate and reconfigure their beliefs and practices to form new communal relations and to make sense of their lives in America. At the turn of the 20th century, as Muslim immigrants began arriving in the United States from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia, they had to establish themselves in an America in which the white race, Protestantism, and progress were conflated to define a triumphalist American national identity, one that allowed varying levels of inclusion for Muslims based on their ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds. The enormous bloodshed and destruction experienced during World War I ushered in a crisis of confidence in the ideals of the European Enlightenment, as well as in white, Protestant nationalism. It opened up avenues for alternative expressions of progress, which allowed Muslims, along with other nonwhite, non-Christian communities, to engage in political and social organization. Among these organizations were a number of black religious movements that used Islamic beliefs, rites, and symbols to define a black Muslim national identity. World War II further shifted America, away from the religious competition that had earlier defined the nation’s identity and toward a “civil religion” of American democratic values and political institutions. Although this inclusive rhetoric was received differently along racial and ethnic lines, there was an overall appeal for greater visibility for Muslims in America. After World War II, increased commercial and diplomatic relations between the United States and Muslim-majority countries put American Muslims in a position, not only to relate Islam and America in their own lives but also to mediate between the varying interests of Muslim-majority countries and the United States. Following the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, Muslim activists, many of whom had been politicized by anticolonial movements abroad, established new Islamic institutions. Eventually, a window was opened between the US government and American Muslim activists, who found a common enemy in communism following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since the late 1960s, the number of Muslims in the United States has grown significantly. Today, Muslims are estimated to constitute a little more than 1 percent of the US population. However, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States as the sole superpower in the world, the United States has come into military conflict with Muslim-majority countries and has been the target of attacks by militant Muslim organizations. This has led to the cultivation of the binaries of “Islam and the West” and of “good” Islam and “bad” Islam, which have contributed to the racialization of American Muslims. It has also interpolated them into a reality external to their history and lived experiences as Muslims and Americans.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

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