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preface Scholars and the Forty-ninth Parallel The authors whose work is assembled in this collection of essays were given a single challenge: to consider the historical significance and impact of the Canadian-American border on the lands and peoples west of the Rocky Mountains. This task is more di‹cult than it might seem, for most scholarship remains locked within the parameters of the nation-state. In an age of free trade, globalization, internationalism, transboundary migration, and the pervasive impact of popular culture, this assertion may seem odd. And given the academic proclivity for picking up ideas, theoretical perspectives, and new methodologies from people of other nations, the statement appears to border on the absurd. But from a practical perspective, from the world of university courses, funding agencies, research agendas, and the publishing priorities of academic journals and university presses, the point has greater legitimacy. To a larger degree than is typically recognized, university academics work within relatively insular, national worlds. We attend conferences within our respective countries, and relatively rarely venture beyond our borders. (Canadians travel to U.S. conferences far more often than the reverse, however .) We teach courses that are typically framed by national boundaries, a fact that often limits students’ understanding of the extranational history of places.Ourjournalsandpressesalsotendtooperatewitharegionalornational mandate. Occasionally, Canadian book titles find their way onto the lists of American university presses and, less often, the reverse is true. We apply for vii grants mostly from national agencies, which in turn set funding priorities in largely national—and often nationalistic—terms. The boundary line, which may have in some respects become less significant in recent years, still exerts considerable academic influence. The situation is not entirely hopeless, however. There are scholars, some of whose work is assembled in this collection, who are very concerned about transborder developments. Many scholars attempt to keep abreast of the intellectual developments on both sides of the border and regularly attend conferences that draw academics from both Canada and the United States. Some scholars deliberately seek to address the concerns of the region as a whole, and not just one side of the boundary. In recent years university presses have worked cooperatively to develop transboundary markets for their books. Yet these examples of openness to cross-border scholarship and audiences remain the exception rather than the rule. National boundaries play a vital role in professional and intellectual lives, often in ways that serve to limit and constrain scholarly research. There are important intellectual, conceptual, and practical reasons why this is so. On the most basic level, opting for cross-border study typically involves a substantial expansion in the research enterprise. A historian conducting research on a borderlands topic must visit archives in two countries and, given the dispersal of o‹cial and private records in both Canada and the United States, the cost of these expeditions can be considerable. Similarly, a geographer seeking to compare urban development in Seattle with that in Vancouver faces significant additional work and expense, often complicated by fluctuating and unbalanced currencies. To these financial and logistical burdens is added the extra challenge of staying abreast of the literature in at least two national communities (in addition to the literature in academic disciplines at large). These are formidable challenges and help explain why scholars often opt to study only Vancouver instead of Vancouver and Portland, or indigenous rights in British Columbia rather than throughout the Canadian and American Wests, or the development of feminist approaches in Washington state but not north of the forty-ninth parallel. But there is also a more fundamental explanation for this broad pattern of nationally exclusive scholarship. We remain, as scholars and as citizens, largely fixated on the primacy of the nation-state, both as a stage for analysis and as a primary explanatory device for the patterns and developments we seek to describe. Scholars typically write about Canadian attitudes toward immigrants, U.S. Indian policy, western American assumptions about the environment, and patterns in the evolution of British Columbia’s cities. viii Preface Running through these studies is the implicit assertion—typically unproven yet rarely challenged—that each nation is di¤erent and that national background is of fundamental significance in helping explain who we are, what happened, and why it happened. Nation-states are important—of that there is little doubt. But often we do not really know how many of the phenomena we describe as being “national” in character are truly that—and we have largely overlooked...

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