We are currently confronted with disconcerting signs of polarization in the societies of many democratic countries of North America and Europe. The storm on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, is only the tip of the iceberg of such developments. Conflicts are manifest between the generations and the genders, between ethnic groups in individual countries and between religious denominations, between migrants and the residents of countries, between the so-called elite and the average citizens, between the urban and rural populations. This interdisciplinary volume offers contributions by sociologists and historians, scholars in American and Canadian literary and cultural studies, linguists and philosophers, who, from a distinctly European perspective, analyze these highly topical areas of conflict. Historical views reveal that polarization in North America is not an exclusively recent phenomenon but has developed at least since the seventeenth-century colonial settlements in the New World.
