In the early hours of April 22, 1914, American President Woodrow Wilson sent Marines to seize the port of Veracruz in an attempt to alter the course of the Mexican Revolution. As a result, the United States seemed on the brink of war with Mexico. An international uproar ensued. The governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile offered to mediate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Surprisingly, both the United States and Mexico accepted their offer and all parties agreed to meet at an international peace conference in Niagara Falls, Ontario. For Canadians, the conference provided an unexpected spectacle on their doorstep, combining high diplomacy and low intrigue around the gardens and cataracts of Canada's most famous natural attraction. For the diplomats involved, it proved to be an ephemeral high point in the nascent pan-American movement. After it ended, the conference dropped out of historical memory. This is the first full account of the Niagara Falls Peace Conference to be published in North America since 1914. The author carefully reconstructs what happened at Niagara Falls, examining its historical significance for Canada's relationship with the Americas. From this almost forgotten event he draws important lessons on the conduct of international mediation and the perils of middle-power diplomacy.

This work underscores the need to examine history philosophically, not only to better appreciate how it unfolds and relates to our own unfolding lives, but to better appreciate our free engagement in this changing world. Linking a conception of ourselves as free beings to the historical process was of central importance to the classical speculative philosophies of history of the nineteenth century, most notably Hegel’s. Michel Foucault’s work is often taken to be the antithesis of this kind of speculative approach.
This book argues that Foucault, on the contrary, like Hegel, sees freedom as tied to the self-movement of thought as it realizes and shapes the world. Unlike Hegel, however, he does not see in that self-movement the process of Spirit reconciling itself with the world and thereby realizing itself as freedom. Rather, he sees in the freedom at the core of the self-movement of thought a possible threat around which that movement consolidates itself and gives shape to the world.
Foucault’s work is therefore not a simple rejection of Hegel’s speculative philosophy of history, but rather an inversion of the manner in which history and freedom are related: for Hegel history realizes or actualizes the “idea” of freedom, whereas for Foucault freedom realizes or actualizes the “materiality” of history.

Francophonie, minorités et pédagogie regroupe des textes de sociologues et sociolinguistes activement impliqués dans la recherche sur l’éducation de minorités linguistiques au sein de la Francophonie. La richesse en diversité de ces textes permet de souligner l’apport de la sociolinguistique en matière d’analyse des politiques éducatives. De même, ce collectif met en lumière la contribution de la sociolinguistique en matière de production de connaissances mais aussi de développement d’une pédagogie visant une inclusion et le respect du groupe minoritaire au-delà de toutes frontières.

Freedom, Nature, and World is a collection of essays by Peter Loptson which examine issues posed by a broadly naturalistic view of the world, which Loptson defends while also exploring some of the challenges it confronts. Papers on freedom, Kant, Christianity, Homer, the history of analytic philosophy, the place of humanity in nature, and other topics, are brought together within a synoptically naturalistic purview. All the essays rest on, and in some cases extend, that synoptic perspective, which seeks to encompass both a scientific understanding of humankind in the natural world and the complexities of free rational agency within our cultural and historical settings.

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