Face à l'internationalisation de l'économie, la globalisation des marchés et la fin de la guerre froide, toutes les sociétés occidentales doivent revoir leur modèle de développement. Cet ouvrage collectif regroupe des articles qui traitent des principaux enjeux de développement au Québec dont l'évolution de la place du Québec dans l'économie mondiale, l'impact du processus de continentalisation et les stratégies des acteurs.

L'économie québécoise en perspective - Le contexte international - La concurrence s'amplifie et se diversifie - La compétitivité de l'économie québécoise - Les changements technologiques - À la recherche de l'excellence - Vers une économie d'investissements - Quelques tendances plus spécifiques au Québec - Le rôle du gouvernement dans l'économie - Développer de grandes entreprises québécoises - Prendre parti pour le long terme - La formation : miser sur la qualité et l'audace - Le relèvement économique de Montréal - La langue : le compromis est-il possible ?

Aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, dans le contexte urbain de Québec, alors marqué par des rapports coloniaux avec la France, les groupes sociaux adoptent des comportements démographiques différents. Cet ouvrage reconstitue l'histoire de plus de 7000 familles ayant vécu à Québec au cours de près d'un siècle et demi d'histoire, ce qui permet d'analyser le régime démographique de la population et les conditions de son renouvellement en rapport avec les structures sociales existantes. Il intéressera toutes les personnes concernées de près ou de loin par les domaines de l'histoire ou de la démographie.

Quebec has undertaken a major policy change in recent years to meet the challenges posed by the emerging structure of a continental economy. Quebecers are ready to meet these challenges and regard the future with optimism. This book explores some of these issues looking from the historical, political, social, and economic dimensions posed by transnationalism and greater interdependence.

What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime?

Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the memories of her violent past.

On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature’s images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes.

In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century.

"Submissiveness is not my role, but certain platitudes on certain occasions are among the innocent deceits of the sex." A strong character with a fervent belief in woman's changing place, Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832-1899) was not content to live the life of a typical nineteenth-century Southern belle. Wife of Francis Wilkinson Pickens, the secessionist governor of South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War, Lucy was determined to make her mark in the world. She married "the right man," feeling that "a woman with wealth or prestige garnered from her husband's position could attain great power." She urged Pickens to accept a diplomatic mission to the court of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, and in St. Petersburg Lucy captivated the Tsar and his retinue with her beauty and charm. Upon returning to the states, she became First Lady of South Carolina just in time to encourage a Confederate unit named in her honor (The Holcombe Legion) off to war. She was the only woman to have her image engraved on Confederacy paper currency, the uncrowned "Queen of the Confederacy."

Beauty pageants are wildly popular in the U.S. Virgin Islands, outnumbering any other single performance event and capturing the attention of the local people from toddlers to seniors. Local beauty contests provide women opportunities to demonstrate talent, style, the values of black womanhood, and the territory's social mores.Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean is a comprehensive look at the centuries-old tradition of these expressions in the Virgin Islands. M. Cynthia Oliver maps the trajectory of pageantry from its colonial precursors at tea meetings, dance dramas, and street festival parades to its current incarnation as the beauty pageant or "queen show." For the author, pageantry becomes a lens through which to view the region's understanding of gender, race, sexuality, class, and colonial power.Focusing on the queen show, Oliver reveals its twin roots in slave celebrations that parodied white colonial behavior and created creole royal rituals and celebrations heavily influenced by Africanist aesthetics. Using the U.S. Virgin Islands as an intriguing case study, Oliver shows how the pageant continues to reflect, reinforce, and challenge Caribbean cultural values concerning femininity. Queen of the Virgins examines the journey of the black woman from degraded body to vaunted queen and how this progression is marked by social unrest, growing middle-class sensibilities, and contemporary sexual and gender politics.