• “Miseries in the name of Liberty”

    A Review of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021). Todd Webb This bleak and brilliant book offers a history of the antebellum United States in the wider context of its North American neighbours. That story, for Alan Taylor, was dominated by three processes: the… Continue Reading

  • De-sanctifying Written Constitutions

    Review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021) 502 pp. $35.00. Elizabeth Mancke and Adam Nadeau[1] In the conventional metanarrative of modernity, written constitutions symbolize progressive trends, political events that were considered “benevolent and normally acted as… Continue Reading

  • Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire – A Review

    Ollivier Hubert and François Furstenberg, eds., Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Adam Nadeau In Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire, editors Ollivier Hubert and François Furstenberg present… Continue Reading

  • Was New France a society of the “long Middle Ages”?

    Arnaud Montreuil With the arrival of the first explorers, then as settlers began to claim land, medieval West burgeoned in the Americas.[1] This is the idea put forward by historian Jérôme Baschet in a series of works, including his book La civilisation féodale: de l’an mil à la colonisation de l’Amérique and his article “Un… Continue Reading

  • La Nouvelle-France, une société du « long Moyen Âge » ?

    Arnaud Montreuil Avec l’arrivée des premiers explorateurs, puis à mesure que se consolide la colonisation, c’est l’Occident médiéval qui prend place en Amérique[1]. Telle est l’idée défendue par l’historien Jérôme Baschet dans une série de travaux, dont son ouvrage La civilisation féodale : de l’an mil à la colonisation de l’Amérique et son article « Un Moyen… Continue Reading

  • Histoire et mémoire du régime seigneurial au Québec

    Olivier Guimond Benoît Grenier (dir.) (coll. Alain Laberge et Stéphanie Lanthier), Le régime seigneurial au Québec : fragments d’histoire et de mémoire (Sherbrooke, Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). L’abolition du régime seigneurial, en 1854, a paradoxalement « consacré le maintien de la propriété seigneuriale[1] » au Québec. En effet, la Loi seigneuriale a prévu, pour les… Continue Reading

  • History and memory of the seigneurial regime in Quebec

    Olivier Guimond Benoît Grenier, ed. Le régime seigneurial au Québec: fragments d’histoire et de mémoire. In collaboration with Alain Laberge and Stéphanie Lanthier. (Sherbrooke: Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). The abolition of the seigneurial regime in 1854 has, paradoxically, “ratified the maintenance of seigneurial property”[2] in Quebec. Indeed, in addition to a compensation… Continue Reading