Ackia and Ogoula Tchetoka: Defining Two Battlefields of the 1736 French and Chickasaw War in Southeastern North America

Investigations into the location of two battles related to the Chickasaw and French Wars of the 1700s in Mississippi, USA, show the value of a multi-pronged strategy for identifying and delineating military sites. We used metal detecting, shovel test pits, surface collections, local informant interviews, historical maps, LiDAR-based topography, and air photographs to locate Ogoula Tchetoka and Ackia, two Chickasaw towns where French forces were defeated in 1736. Despite the ambiguity introduced by overlapping domestic occupations and other complicating factors, the weight of our complementary approaches demonstrates that Ogoula Tchetoka and surrounding battle features have been modestly impacted by modern developments, whereas Ackia has been largely obliterated by the construction of a residential neighborhood. Our ability to identify major landscape features related to the military history of these sites contributes to our understanding of the tactics and consequences of warfare between European powers and Native Americans in the Colonial era.     

The Unbearable Lightness of Bones: Memory,Emotion, and Pedagogy in Patricio Guzmán’s Chile,La Memoria Obstinada and Nostalgia De La Luz

Focusing on two documentary films by Patricio Guzmán, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) and, especially, Nostalgia of the Light (2010), this paper examines some of the relations between neoliberal violence (during and after the Pinochet dictatorship), memory, knowledge and emotionality, both historical and personal. It does so by reading and reviewing the actions, narratives and experiences of a group of astronomers, archaeologists and geologists who work in the Atacama desert of northern Chile and a group of women who search for the remains of their loved ones, victims of political violence, in the same desert within the shifting contexts of cinematic spectatorship. Attentive to the possibilities and pitfalls of empathic identifications and connections, it also considers the ethical and political implications of the interplay of cinema (Guzmán), photography (Paula Allen) and poetry, sky writing and "land art" (Raúl Zurita).     

A Whole New Ballgame: The Rise of Canada's Fifth Party System

This article asserts that Canadian politics underwent a major transition beginning in late 2003 and represents the rise of a new era in Canadian politics: the fifth-party system. This era is drastically different from the previous “fourth party system.” The fifth party system is characterized by the introduction of a number of new variables, most notably new patterns of partisan competition, amendments to Canada's system of campaign finance, the growing importance of policies appealing to the family, and growing importance of Web 2.0.     

The 1864 Sully Expedition and the Death of Captain John Feilner

This article addresses an area of nineteenth century American history that is often ignored in history textbooks. While a great deal of emphasis is often placed on the Civil War era (1861–65), it is also important to realize that other notable events occurred during the same time on the northern plains of the United States. As a result of the 1862 Minnesota Uprising by the Santee Sioux, the United States military began an aggressive campaign to break the will of the Sioux Indian nation. General Alfred Sully’s first retaliatory campaign in 1863, which resulted in the disgraceful events at Whitestone Hill, and his follow‐up campaign of 1864, in which Captain John Feilner was killed, reflect the attitudes and hostilities that existed during the 1860s. This article addresses the situation on the northern plains as whites continued to move westward.     

Too many Scotlands? Place,the SNP,and the future of nationalist mobilization

Scottish nationalism has always had a ‘geographical problem’ in the sense that support for its central goal, the independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom, has had much more backing in some regions and localities than it has had in others. In the 1970s and 1980s the geographical pattern to this support, at least as expressed in votes for the Scottish National Party (SNP), seemed very clear. Suddenly the picture changed between 2011 and 2016, to the extent that the whole of Scotland, notwithstanding the overall ‘No’ vote on Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum, seemed to be lining up to some degree or another in the ‘nationalist column.’ As quickly, this proved ephemeral. As of 2017, the future of the central goal of Scottish nationalism is once more in doubt because of a new geography of support and disaffection that seems to reflect a number of recent trends in attitudes towards voting for the SNP. The article maps the course of the older and newer geographies of Scottish nationalism in terms of the overall political economy of the country, given its proponents’ heavy emphasis on economic themes, and the ways this is refracted through place-to-place social and economic differences across the country.