Arc Of The Medicine Line

Today the borderland between Canada and the United States is a wide, empty sweep of wheat fields and pasture, measured by a grid of gravel roads that sees little traffic and few people who do not make their lives there. It has been much this way for more than a century now, but there was a moment when the great silence shrouding this place was broken, and that moment changed it forever. Arc of the Medicine Line is a compelling narrative of that moment?the completion of the official border between the United States and Canada in 1874. ø In late July of 1874, the Sweetgrass Hills sheltered the greatest accumulation of scientists, teamsters, scouts, cooks, and soldiers to be seen in this part of the world before the coming of the railways. The men of the boundary commissions?American, British, and Canadian?established an astronomical station and the last of their supply depots as they prepared to draw the Medicine Line across the final hundred of the nearly nine hundred miles between Manitoba?s Lake of the Woods and the Continental Divide. In the brief weeks the surveyors and soldiers spent in Milk River country, they witnessed, and played a singular part in, the beginning of the end for the open West. That hot, dry summer of 1874 marked the outside world?s final assault on this last frontier.

The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States. Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-US border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement. The vision that seemed so clear in the minds of diplomats and politicians never behaved as such on the ground. Both countries built their border across Indigenous lands using hunger, violence, and coercion to displace existing communities and to disrupt their ideas of territory and belonging. The border's length undermined each nation's attempts at control. Unable to prevent movement at the border's physical location for over a century, Canada and the United States instead found ways to project fear across international lines They aimed to stop journeys before they even began.

Covering two hundred years, this groundbreaking book brings together essays on borderlands by leading experts in the modern history of the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia to offer the first historical study of borderlands with a global reach.

American territorial borders have undergone significant and unparalleled changes in the last decade. They serve as a powerful and emotionally charged locus for American national identity that correlates with the historical idea of the frontier. But the concept of the frontier, so central to American identity throughout modern history, has all but disappeared in contemporary representation while the border has served to uncomfortably fill the void left in the spatial imagination of American culture. This book focuses on the shifting relationship between borders and frontiers in North America, specifically the ways in which they have been imaged and imagined since their formation in the 19th century and how tropes of visuality are central to their production and meaning. Rodney links ongoing discussions in political geography and visual culture in new ways to demonstrate how contemporary American borders exhibit security as a display strategy that is resisted and undermined through a variety of cultural practices.

A brutally frank memoir about doctors and patients in a health care system that puts the poor at risk. No Apparent Distress begins with a mistake made by a white medical student that may have hastened the death of a working-class black man who sought care in a student-run clinic. Haunted by this error, the author—herself from a working-class background—delves into the stories and politics of a medical training system in which students learn on the bodies of the poor. Part confession, part family history, No Apparent Distress is at once an indictment of American health care and a deeply moving tale of one doctor’s coming-of-age.

Though some believe that the Indian treaties of the 1870s achieved a unity of purpose between the Canadian government and First Nations, in From Treaties to Reserves D.J. Hall asserts that - as a result of profound cultural differences - each side interpreted the negotiations differently, leading to conflict and an acute sense of betrayal when neither group accomplished what the other had asked. Hall explores the original intentions behind the government's policies, illustrates their attempts at cooperation, and clarifies their actions. While the government believed that the Aboriginal peoples of what is now southern and central Alberta desired rapid change, the First Nations, in contrast, believed that the government was committed to supporting the preservation of their culture while they adapted to change. Government policies intended to motivate backfired, leading instead to poverty, starvation, and cultural restriction. Many policies were also culturally insensitive, revealing misconceptions of Aboriginal people as lazy and over-dependent on government rations. Yet the first two decades of reserve life still witnessed most First Nations people participating in reserve economies, many of the first generation of reserve-born children graduated from schools with some improved ability to cope with reserve life, and there was also more positive cooperation between government and First Nations people than is commonly acknowledged. The Indian treaties of the 1870s meant very different things to government officials and First Nations. Rethinking the interaction between the two groups, From Treaties to Reserves elucidates the complexities of this relationship.