Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? As the US presidential election is looming, La Vie des idées/Books & Ideas and Public Books team up to examine the influence of money in today’s electoral democracies.
Until recently, the history of French colonial New Orleans was treated as an exception. Writing a total social history of 18th Century New Orleans, Cécile Vidal offers to reframe it as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town.
“Wood runners” is the name given to travelling fur traders in the age of pioneers. Focusing on two centuries of their risky adventures and on their relationship with Amerindian populations allows Gilles Havard to write a monumental multicultural history of the early North American West.
In his latest book, Emmanuel Désveaux proposes to combine the cultural (American) and structural (Levi-straussian) approaches to make sense of cultural differences between European and North American societies. Susan Carol Rogers responds by looking at the discipline’s future and arguing that these two approaches are fundamentally incompatible.
