Northern Lights - Böcker

A Circumpolar Landscape demonstrates that Canadian and Scandinavian landscape painting reaches far beyond national identity and a preoccupation with Eurocentrism. This study brings together the work of Emily Carr, the Canadian Group of Seven, Anna Boberg, and Gustaf Fjaestad among others, with each chapter highlighting the high level of interactivity between artists and the environment. Simultaneously, this book highlights the lack of awareness of the respective ecosystems in which many of these works were produced. Working around northern hemispheric latitudinal lines, this book considers how a similar ecology and topography - orientated around the themes of forests, wilderness, lakes, mountains, aurorae, and ice – was depicted and is shared across these northern landscapes.This powerful and timely book takes these respective art histories in the direction of the environmental humanities and an ecocritical art history, recognising the broader transnational and ecological framework of the Circumpolar North.

In the pages of this book, you will read of the efforts of many to fearlessly audit the state of education in Nunavik. To diligently seek improvement of an already good system. To fix what is not necessarily broken so that those who come after us will have it even better than we did. The various tensions and differences of opinion are, to me, not contentious at all. The status quo, however good or excellent, is no place to stay. I think all recognize this. Zebedee Nungak, from the Foreword.As a history of the development of self-government in education, this book provides Native perspectives on formal education in Nunavik while offering readers a unique view into contemporary Inuit society. This book documents the development of education from the arrival of the first traders and missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century through the creation of the Kativik School Board and the evaluation of its operations by the Nunavik Education Task Force in the 1990s.Nunavik takes a detailed look at the complex debate of the Inuit of Northern Quebec about the purposes, achievements, and failures of the public schools in their communities, the first Inuit-controlled school district in Canada. Participants in these debates included elders who were educated traditionally, their children with a few years of education in mission and government schools, their grandchildren who attended southern high schools or residential schools, and current students and recent graduates of the Kativik schools. Qallunaat (non-Inuit) were also participants, as residents of Nunavik communities, parents of Inuit children, teachers, administrators, and expert consultants.Illustrated with rich historical photographs (many in colour) and maps from the collections of the Avataq Cultural Institute and the Makivik Corporation, Nunavik provides a uniquely Native perspective on school change in indigenous communities.

Writing Geographical Exploration summarizes the various factors that influence the writing and interpretation of exploration narratives, demonstrating the limitations of the assumption that there is a direct relationship between what the explorer saw and what the text describes.Davies offers a revisionist evaluation of Captain Thomas James, who spent eighteen months in search of the Northwest Passage in the 1630s, to illustrate how modern textual analysis can enrich the appreciation of a traveller's account. Though James's work has been dismissed in the modern period, his work was highly regarded in previous centuries by scientist Robert Boyle and poet Samuel Coleridge.James was not a first-rank explorer, but he was an able navigator and leader, a perceptive scientific observer, and a master author who produced a thrilling tale of adventure that should occupy a more prominent place in exploration writing and history, literary theory, and post-modern geography.

As Long As This Land Shall Last is a thorough document of Treaty 8, 1899-1900, and Treaty 11, 1921-1941; between the Canadian Government and the Indigenous Peoples of Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. These treaties promised that the Indigenous Peoples who inhabited these places could live and hunt in freedom on their ancestral lands, "as long as the sun rises from east to west, as long as the river flows downstream, as long as this land shall last.""Historian Réné Fumoleau has delved into church and government sources dating from 1870 to 1939 and compiled interviews with over seventy Dene witnesses to provide a clear picture of treaty negotiations and their aftermath.Originally published in 1975, this new edition contains an afterword by Joanne Barnaby, Former Executive Director of the Dene Cultural Institute, outlining the significant cultural and political developments in the time since the book's first publication and paying special attention to their lasting implications for the future.As Long As This Land Shall Last is an invaluable resource not only for Treaty scholars, but also a fascinating source document for those who wish to chart the evolution of Indigenous Studies in Canada.

Many Faces of Gender is an interdisciplinary volume that addresses the dearth in descriptions and analyses of gender roles and relationships in Native societies in North America's boreal reaches. This collection complements existing conceptual frameworks and develops new methodological and theoretical approaches that more fully articulate the complex nature of social, economic, political, and material relationships between indigenous men and women in this region.The contributors challenge the widespread notion that Native women's and men's roles are frozen in time, a concept precluding the possibility of differently constructed gender categories and changing power relations and roles through time. By examining the prehistorical, historical, and modern records, they demonstrate that these roles are not fixed and have indeed gradually transformed.Many Faces of Gender is ideal for anthropologists and archaeologists interested in cross-disciplinary studies of gender, households, women, and lithics.

Lands that Hold One Spellbound is an informal history of East Greenland. Spencer Apollonio has written the only known overview of the history of this region, summarizing indigenous settlements over four millennia, and describing European explorations from the Norse period to recent years. East Greenland, running from Kap Farvel in the south to Kap Morris Jesup in the north, is an immense land of great mountains and fjords, of glaciers and meadowlands, and contrasts of weather perhaps unique in the world.It has been colonized seven different times over 4,000 years by migrants from the west. Intrepid explorers returned year after year, attracted by this land which captivated and enthralled them. But its history has never before been told. Here, each of the European and American expeditions are recounted, relying extensively on the explorers' original accounts, as well as on the author's often highly evocative narration. Apollonio details the struggles of vessels to reach the coast through the ice pack, the longest Arctic sledge journeys, the peculiar story of World War II in East Greenland, and the impact of centuries of exploration and change on Greenland's indigenous populations.

One of the most prominent Soviet Arctic scientists of the 1920s and 1930s, Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev was a geologist, physicist, and oceanographer. After working in the Arctic for some thirteen years, he was arrested by the NKVD, convicted on a trumped-up charge of "sabotage," and sent to the Gulag for ten years. After barely surviving a year of correctional hard labour in a lumber camp, Ermolaev was appointed to a sharashka, or professional team, which was charged with extending the railroad to the coal mines of Vorkuta in the farthest reaches of northeast Russia. Still later, he and his family were exiled to Syktyvkar and Arkhangel'sk. Remarkably, Ermolaev was eventually able to resume his academic career, ultimately establishing a new Department of the Geography of the Oceans at Kaliningrad State University.Translated from the original Russian and edited by William Barr, this biography is a fascinating personal account typical of the experiences of so many Soviet citizens who were unjustly banished to the infamous Gulag. Because Ermolaev was part of a specialist team, the conditions he and his family endured were better than most, with reasonably comfortable quarters and relatively adequate food. However, his story still clearly illustrates the brutality and inhumanity of the system.Ermolaev's son, Aleksei, was one of the authors of the original Russian-language biography published in 2005. His own recollections of his father's arrest and of the family's experiences while his father was in the Gulag, along with an excellent selection of family photographs, infuse Arctic Scientist, Gulag Survivor with a sense of immediacy and personal connection. Thanks to the expertise of William Barr, Ermolaev's story is now available in English for the first time.

The Reindeer Botanist is the first biography of one of Canada's most remarkable botanists. Alf Erling Porsild (1901-1977) grew up on the Arctic Station in West Greenland and later served as curator of botany at the National Museum of Canada. He collected thousands of specimens, greatly enlarging the National Herbarium and making it a superb research centre.For nearly twenty years, Porsild studied reindeer activities in Alaska and the Northwest Territories as part of the Reindeer Project designed to encourage grazing animal husbandry among aboriginal peoples. He published extensively, and his meticulous research and observations have particular relevance today with the growing concern over global warming in the Arctic.

In this timely new book, international scholars and military professionals come together to explore the strategic consequences of the thawing of the Arctic. Their analyses of efforts by governments and defence, security, and coast guard organizations to address these challenges make timely and urgent reading.Rather than a single national perspective, The Fast-Changing Arctic brings together circumpolar viewpoints from North America, Europe and Asia for an integrated discussion of strategic military, diplomatic, and security challenges in the high North. Thoughtful analyses are included of different regions, climate issues, institutions, and foreign and security policies. This is an important book for students of international studies, political science, and northern studies.

Benjamin Leigh Smith discovered and named dozens of islands in the Arctic but published no account of his pioneering explorations. He refused public accolades and sent stand-ins to deliver the results of his work to scientific societies. Yet, the Royal Geographic Society's Sir Clements R. Markham referred to him as a polar explorer of the first rank.Travelling to the Arctic islands that Leigh Smith explored and crisscrossing England to uncover unpublished journals, diaries, and photographs, archaeologist and writer P.J. Capelotti details Leigh Smith's five major Arctic expeditions and places them within the context of the great polar explorations in the nineteenth century.

Gordon W. Smith, PhD, dedicated much of his life to researching Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic. His 1952 dissertation from Columbia University on ""The Historical and Legal Background of Canada's Arctic Claims"" remains a foundational work on the topic, as does his 1966 chapter ""Sovereignty in the North: The Canadian Aspect of an International Problem"" in R. St. J. Macdonald's The Arctic Frontier.A Historical and Legal Study of Sovereignty in the Canadian North is the first in a project to edit and publish Smith's unpublished work, a manuscript on sovereignty and related Law of the Sea issues. Researched and written over three decades, this comprehensive and thoroughly documented study offers important insights into evolving understandings of Canada's sovereignty from the original transfers of the northern territories to the young dominion through the start of the Second World War. With Arctic issues once again at the forefront of public debate, this invaluable resource, available to researchers outside of government for the first time, explains how Canada laid the historical and legal foundations to support its longstanding, well-established sovereignty over Arctic lands.

A geographer with extensive research experience in the Canadian North, Jack D. Ives has written a lively and informative account of several expeditions to Baffin Island during the "golden age" of federal research. In the 1960s, scientists from the Geographical Branch of Canada's Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources travelled to Baffin to study glacial geomorphology and glaciology. Their fieldwork resulted in vastly increased knowledge of the Far North-from its ice caps and glaciers to its lichens and microfossils. Drawing from the recollections of his Baffin colleagues as well as from his own memories, Ives takes readers on a remarkable adventure, describing the day-to-day experiences of the field teams in the context of both contemporary Arctic research and bureaucratic decision making. Along the way, his narrative illustrates the role played by the Cold War-era Distant Early Warning Line and other northern infrastructure, the crucial importance of his pioneering aerial photography, the unpredictable nature of planes, helicopters, and radios in Arctic regions, and of course, the vast and breathtaking scenery of the North.Baffin Island encompasses both field research and High Arctic adventure. The research trips to Baffin between 1961 and 1967 also served as a vital training ground in polar studies for university students; further, they represented a breakthrough in gender equality in government-sponsored science, thanks to the author's persistence in having women permitted on the teams. The book contains a special section detailing the subsequent professional achievements of the many researchers involved (in addition to the later career moves of Ives himself) and a chapter that delves deeper into the science behind their fieldwork in the North. Readers need not be versed in glaciology, however. Ives has produced a highly readable book that seamlessly combines research and adventure.

Emil Bessels was chief scientist and medical officer on George Francis Hall's ill-fated American North Pole Expedition of 1871-73, on board the ship Polaris. Bessels' book, translated from the German in its entirety for the first time, is one of only two first-hand accounts of the voyage, and it is the only first-hand account of the experiences of the group which stayed with the ship after it ran afoul of arctic ice, leaving some of its crew stranded on an ice floe.Bessels and the others spent a second winter on shore in Northwest Greenland, where the drifting, disabled ship ran aground. Hall died suspiciously during the first winter, and Bessels is widely suspected of having poisoned him. Bill Barr has uncovered new evidence of a possible motive.Polaris includes considerable detail which does not appear elsewhere. It is the only account of the expedition which includes rich scientific information about anthropology, geology, flora and fauna and provides much more information than other accounts on the Greenland settlements Polaris visited on her way north.Bessels' is the only published first-hand account of the second wintering of part of the ship's complement on shore at Polaris House, near Littleton Island, and of that party's attempt at travelling south by boat until picked up by the Scottish whaler Ravenscraig. The same applies to the cruise aboard the whaler, Arctic, after Bessels and his companions transferred to that ship.Essential reading for researchers and students of arctic exploration history, this book is also a compelling read for the interested general reader.

Always recognised as a master print from the moment of its appearance around 1649, the Hundred Guilder Print is one of Rembrandt's most compositionally complex and visually beautiful works.This book gives a full overview of the fascinating story surrounding this print, from its genesis and market value toattitudes towards it in the present day. Focusing on the tradition of printmaking as well as the reception of theprint in Rembrandt's time, Golahny explores the ways the artist made visual references to the work of such mastersas Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, while uniquely combining aspects of Christ's ministry.Placing the work within its wider cultural and historical context, Rembrandt's Hundred Guilder Printoffers an original and engaging approach to current Rembrandt scholarship and is essential reading for anyoneinterested in the work of one of the most famous artists of the Dutch Global Age.

Vermeer and the Art of Love is about the emotions evoked in those elegant interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter’s attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary.In this engaging and beautifully illustrated book, Georgievska-Shine uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries to give the reader a fascinating insight into his unique understanding and interpretation of the subject.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) enjoyed European-wide fame during his lifetime. Dürer was not only a brilliant painter, but also a pioneering printmaker, experimental draughtsman, book publisher, first German art theoretician and amateur poet. His art was avidly collected, repeatedly copied in diverse media, and often forged. Then, with his death, the posthumous Dürers were born. This book addresses his afterlife or, more correctly, afterlives. Beginning with the heartfelt eulogies of his friends and the creation of contemporary portraits of the Nuremberg master, Dürer’s person, his likenesses, and his art have been celebrated for over five hundred years. Our contemporary Dürer is the subject of intense scholarly discussions on the one hand and of social and commercial popularization on the other hand.

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Dürer’s intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other Northern European artists who captured 'the truth of vegetation' in their work. These incidents of remarkable scenery in the visual arts have received little attention in the history of art, until now.  Prosperetti brings together a set of essays which are devoted to the poetics of the woodlands in the work of the great masters, including Claude Lorrain, Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, amongst others.Through an examination of aesthetics and eco-poetics, this book draws attention to the idea of lyrical naturalism as a conceptual bridge that unites the power of poetry with the allurement of the natural world. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated throughout, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art strives to stimulate the return of the woodlands to the places where they belong — in people’s minds and close to home.

This is the first book to address the long art history of dynastic marriage exchange between Denmark and Britain between 1600 and 1900. It explores an intersection of three themes trending in early modern studies: portraiture, gender and the court as a centre of cultural exchange. The book re-evaluates the construction and staging of gender in Northern consort portraiture over a span of three hundred years, examining the development of the scientific and social paradigms inflecting consort portraiture and representation, with a view to excavating portrait images' agency at the early modern moment of their conception and making. The consort's liminal position between royal houses, territories, languages and sometimes religion has often been equated with political weakness, but this new book argues that this position endowed the consort with a unique space for innovation in the representation of elite identity. As such, consort imagery drew upon gender as a generative resource of motifs and ideas. Each chapter is informed by new archival research and introduces the reader to little known, yet astonishing works of art. Collectively, they seek to trace a shift in practices of identity formation over time; the transition from an emphasis on rank to an increasingly binary emphasis on gender.

This richly diverse study examines the evolving image and contested status of the artist in late nineteenth-century France through the lens of the artist’s studio, which became a central theme in art and literature, stretching from Balzac to Proust and from Corot to Picasso. The studio was a hybrid space that blurred the distinctions between public and private, professional and domestic, artistic production and display. Besides a material space for art making, the studio was a social and commercial nexus and an extension of the artist’s persona. Drawing on paintings, prints, photographs, and primary sources ranging from memoirs to popular journals, this book sheds new light on the modern studio’s heightened significance as a laboratory of creative struggle and a platform for self-expression and the staging of artistic identity. It elucidates how the concept of the studio as a creative space emblematic of artistic identity, first theorized in the Renaissance, was reinvented and popularized after mid-century as debates about the role of art and the status of the artist intensified. Breaking new ground in focusing on the intersecting issues of artistic identity and the evolving role of the studio as creative arena, social and commercial locus, and informal exhibition space, McPherson allows us to participate in the popular ritual of visiting the artist’s studio.

Hendrick ter Brugghen’s work forms a key chapter in the history of 17th-century Dutch art. A significant follower of Caravaggio, Ter Brugghen was also important in the development of both Rembrandt and Vermeer. Yet until now there has been no accessible survey of his work. This important book provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s life and work while also offering new interpretations and insights, incorporating current art-historical research.Seaman explores Hendrick ter Brugghen's few known works from before 1620, his embrace – and transformation – of Caravaggio’s intense naturalism before 1625, and his subsequent move towards a more visually pleasing style. The book also outlines the artist’s impact on the work of Rembrandt and Vermeer and the reception of his work in later centuries.

Catherine the Great’s audacious power grab in 1762 marked a watershed in imperial Russian history. During a momentous 34-year reign, her rapacious vision and intellectual curiosity led to vast territorial expansion, cultural advancement, and civic, educational and social reform. In this pioneering book, Rosalind Blakesley reveals the remarkable role women artists played in her pursuit of these ambitions. With challenging commissions for an elite cast of Russian patrons, their work underscores the extent to which cultural enrichment co-existed with the empress’s imperial designs. Catherine’s acquisitions propelled renowned artists to new heights. The history paintings that she purchased from Angelica Kauffman brought the Swiss artist to the attention of keen new patrons, while Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun found in Russia safe refuge from the horrors of revolutionary France. Just as important were Catherine’s relationships with lesser-known artists. The young sculptor Marie-Anne Collot made the arduous journey from Paris to St Petersburg to assist on the equestrian monument to Peter the Great and enthralled Russian society with her portrait busts, while Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, wife of Catherine’s troubled son Paul, sculpted cameos which the empress sent to distinguished correspondents abroad. With stories of extraordinary artistic endeavour intertwined with the intrigue of Catherine’s personal life, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great uncovers the impact of these and other artists at one of Europe’s most elaborate courts.

Godefridus Schalcken: A Late 17th-century Dutch Painter in Pursuit ofFame and Fortune is the first book in English dedicated to the entireartistic output of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Godefridus Schalcken(1643–1706). It examines the artist’s paintings and career trajectory againstthe background of his ceaseless pursuit of fame and fortune. Combining acomprehensive analysis of Schalcken's artistic development and style with ourincreasing biographical knowledge, it provides an authoritative overview ofSchalcken’s ample production as an artist. It also integrates his art intothe circumstances of his life in relation to his ambitious careeraspirations, exploring how economic conditions, a concomitantly oversaturatedart market, talent and ambition, demographics, and even sheer luck all playeda role in Schalcken’s great professional success. Since Schalcken’s art,like that of all Dutch painters, provides a plethora of information aboutseventeenth-century culture—its predilections, its prejudices, indeed, itsvery mind-set—the book inevitably links his work to the broadersocio-cultural contexts in which it was created.

Europe Views the World examines the wide diversity of images that Europeans produced to represent the wide variety of peoples and places around the globe during and after the so-called 'Age of Exploration'. Beginning with the medieval imagery of Europe’s imagined alien races, and with an emphasis on the artists of Northern Europe, Larry Silver takes the reader on a tour across continents, from the Americas to Africa and Asia. Encompassing works such as prints, paintings, maps, tapestries and sculptural objects, this book addresses the overall question of an emerging European self-definition through the evidence of visual culture, however biased, about the wider world in its component parts. Unique to this book, each chapter concludes with an 'in response', analysing representations of Europeans by indigenous peoples of each continent to give a deeper and more multi-faceted account of the impact of Europe's view of the world.

Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) painted pictures that critics praised for their ability to exude the fragrance of field flowers and glow with the plumage of birds. Raised in Salem and long residing in Connecticut, she maintained a studio in New York City, where she exhibited her art for over forty years at the National Academy, American Watercolor Society and other prestigious venues. Transforming flower painting from a domestic outlet for female amateurs to a marketable commodity for professionals, she never wavered in her conviction that women had the right to shape independent careers on their own terms. She delineated both cultivated flowers and clumps of weeds with an intensity of focus unmatched by any other artist of her era. Often, she combined plants with local birds to convey a sophisticated understanding of their environmental interaction that encouraged others to appreciate and conserve nature. She made an extended European tour in the 1860s and regular trips to Great Britain in later years but preferred home nature.Assembling a cross-section of her stunning oil paintings, watercolours, chromolithographs and illustrated volumes for the first time, and analysing them against letters, diaries and periodical reviews, Fidelia Bridges combines a recovery of the artist’s biography with close readings of her artworks. Living an outwardly conventional life, she embraced the bicycle and later the automobile as vehicles of female liberation, cultivated her garden with the skill of a horticulturalist, and left a lasting pictorial legacy to be found in US public museums and private collections nationwide.

Henry Holiday (1839–1927) was a polymath who counted figures such as Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Emmeline Pankhurst as his friends. Most significantly, he was unquestionably one of the greatest stained-glass artists of the Victorian-Edwardian period, yet his considerable achievements have not received the recognition that they deserve.Taking Holiday’s commissions for New York State churches as its focus, George Bryant’s ground-breaking study places the artist’s transatlantic accomplishments in the context of the social, artistic, religious and economic shifts that shaped his success in the US during America’s Gilded Age – a period where existing social hierarchies were challenged by new money and European immigration that ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Also providing a clear understanding of the technical and aesthetic differences that set Holiday's stained glass apart from that of his contemporaries such as Edward Burne-Jones, La Farge, and Tiffany, Bryant's truly original publication, based on substantial archival research, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century stained-glass design and Henry Holiday's important achievements.

The metaphorical meanings that have accrued to mist and fog, encouraged by their indeterminate and transitory nature, and the emotions to which they give rise, are variously evident in the work of major artists and their contemporaries.This book is the first to address the themes of mist and fog in British and European painting, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. It features paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and JMW Turner, amongst others, and the discussion of artworks is enriched with parallel literary examples that employ mist and fog as metaphor and in allegory, from antiquity to Joseph Conrad.Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their wispy veils and vaporous moods, and they are the stuff of dreams and visions. 'The mists of time' and 'in a fog' are common expressions that substantiate the long association of mist and fog with the passage of time, the vagaries of memory and feelings of uncertainty. Mist and fog obscure, conceal and when they dissipate, reveal. Vaporous atmosphere in art and life masks evil and can elicit presentiments of death. It also has been used in art to convey the splendours of the spiritual world and the terrors of the supernatural.