We don’t want your must-see TV: Transatlantic television and the failed “Coupling” format

NBC's failed attempt to remake the BBC's Coupling generated a significant amount of press coverage in summer 2003. At the core of the debate was a struggle to reconcile an increasingly integrated transatlantic television market with traditional assumptions about culture and its authentic connection to space and place. The interest in the remake not only created a space where certain national differences were played out and performed but also facilitated an equally compelling transatlantic dialogue about creative ownership, appropriation, and a network's responsibility to its audiences. In doing so, the media attention highlighted how television formats are best understood not as innocuous commodities of international trade but as potential sites of articulation, contestation, and community in an increasingly transnational television environment.

PHYLOGEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS INDICATE TRANSATLANTIC MIGRATION FROM EUROPE TO NORTH AMERICA IN THE RED SEAWEED CHONDRUS CRISPUS (GIGARTINALES, RHODOPHYTA)1

Inferring how the Pleistocene climate oscillations have repopulated the extant population structure of Chondrus crispus Stackh. in the North Atlantic Ocean is important both for our understanding of the glacial episode promoting diversification and for the conservation and development of marine organisms. C. crispus is an ecologically and commercially important red seaweed with broad distributions in the North Atlantic. Here, we employed both partial mtDNA Cox1 and nrDNA internal transcribed spacer region 2 (ITS2) sequences to explore the genetic structure of 17 C. crispus populations from this area. Twenty-eight and 30 haplotypes were inferred from these two markers, respectively. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) and of the population statistic Theta(ST) not only revealed significant genetic structure within C. crispus populations but also detected significant levels of genetic subdivision among and within populations in the North Atlantic. On the basis of high haplotype diversity and the presence of endemic haplotypes, we postulate that C. crispus had survived in Pleistocene glacial refugia in the northeast Atlantic, such as the English Channel and the northwestern Iberian Peninsula. We also hypothesize that C. crispus from the English Channel refugium repopulated most of northeastern Europe and recolonized northeastern North America in the Late Pleistocene. The observed phylogeographic pattern of C. crispus populations is in agreement with a scenario in which severe Quaternary glaciations influenced the genetic structure of North Atlantic marine organisms with contiguous population expansion and locally restricted gene flow coupled with a transatlantic dispersal in the Late Pleistocene.

Transatlantic distribution of the Alaskan White River Ash

Volcanic ash layers preserved within the geologic record represent precise time markers that correlate disparate depositional environments and enable the investigation of synchronous and/or asynchronous behaviors in Earth system and archaeological sciences. However, it is generally assumed that only exceptionally powerful events, such as supereruptions (≥450 km3 of ejecta as dense-rock equivalent; recurrence interval of ∼105 yr), distribute ash broadly enough to have an impact on human society, or allow us to address geologic, climatic, and cultural questions on an intercontinental scale. Here we use geochemical, age, and morphological evidence to show that the Alaskan White River Ash (eastern lobe; A.D. 833–850) correlates to the “AD860B” ash (A.D. 846–848) found in Greenland and northern Europe. These occurrences represent the distribution of an ash over 7000 km, linking marine, terrestrial, and ice-core records. Our results indicate that tephra from more moderate-size eruptions, with recurrence intervals of ∼100 yr, can have substantially greater distributions than previously thought, with direct implications for volcanic dispersal studies, correlation of widely distributed proxy records, and volcanic hazard assessment.

Religion, anti-slavery, and identity: Irish Presbyterians, the United States, and transatlantic evangelicalism, c. 1820-1914

Scholars have devoted much attention to the causes and consequences of Presbyterian emigration from Ulster to the thirteen colonies before 1776. This article moves beyond the eighteenth century to examine the continued religious links between Presbyterians in Ireland and the United States in the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the influence of evangelicalism on both sides of the Atlantic and how this promoted unity in denominational identity, missionary activity to convert Catholics, and revivalist religion during the first half of the century. Though Irish Presbyterians had great affection for their American co-religionists, they were not uncritical, and significant tensions did develop over slavery. The article then examines the religious character of Scotch-Irish or Ulster-Scots identity in the late nineteenth century, which was articulated in response to the alleged demoralising influence of large-scale Irish immigration during and after the Famine of the 1840s, the so-called Romanisation of Catholicism, and the threat of Home Rule in Ireland. The importance of identity politics should not obscure religious developments, and the article ends with a consideration of the origins and character of fundamentalism, perhaps one of the most important cultural connections between Protestants in Northern Ireland and the United States in the twentieth century.