Political cartoons as headline representation are in effect a combination of artistic licence and a critical version of the truth. Linley Sambourne and Jean Veber’s 1901 cartoons on the Boer War for ...Punch and L’Assiette au Beurre create tensions and dialectic not only on British and French feeling about foreign policy in South Africa and at home, but also indicate fine points on each publication’s editorial remit. This comparative study is a mirroring synthesis of these approaches that sets the Boer War forty five cartoons in context. Whereas Punch’s cartoons are set within a text layout and L’Assiette’s are the text themselves, both transmit set ideas on The Boer War as ‘sight bite’ news and opinion pieces. Veber’s cartoons offered swift knee-jerk reactions against the ruling elite and the horrors of British cruelty toward Boer prisoners as coverage of the war escalated in 1901. His extreme capturing of the zeitgeist followed the magazine’s editorial bent, but they also reflected his brave counter-hegemonic stance towards a French government seeking an alliance with its British counterpart. With this in mind, Antonio Gramsci’s theory on hegemony as applied to journalism allows the scholar to look at the media from a cultural perspective. This focus is used to show cartoons as representative of conflicts in the fight for power, but this time publicly conveyed to the readership. Thus, types of truth enhancements in each set of cartoons indicate the cartoonists’ respective entrenchment with, or detachment from, Imperial institutions, thereby signalling emerging attempts of the attitudinal persuasion of the reader toward Punch or L’Assiette’s political leanings. The inclusion of political cartoons in editorial pages was part of the cult of visual attention-grabbing news values that had become professionalised, industrialised and popularised by the early Twentieth Century. Cartoons can be decoded using Ernst Gombrich’s six-point filter in order to identify the cartoonist’s method of compressing messages about people and events. A publication’s politics are reflected in the telescoping of exaggerated opinions – an effective way to pass on an authoritatively saturated message to the readership. Gombrich recognised the power of conveying messages to the audience through seemingly incongruous placement of figures in odd situations within cartoons. His methodology acts as visual shorthand for images designed to elicit a desired response to a reported situation as the publication saw it. In the context of the history of journalism, his psychologically analytical approach is appropriate in the appreciation of cartoons’ extremes, often made more acute by the partisan politics of war.
Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf's diary is her longest work, her longest sustained, and last work to reach the public. In the only full-length work to explore deeply ...this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolf's development as a writer through her first twelve diaries-a fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolf's pioneering modernist style can be seen.
Starting with fourteen-year-old Woolf's first palm-sized leather diary, Becoming Virginia Woolf illuminates how her private and public writing was shaped by the diaries of other writers including Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, the French Goncourt brothers, Mary Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Woolf's "diary parents"-Sir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney. These key literary connections open a new and indispensable window onto the story of one of literature's most renowned modernists.
The ability to capture impressions of movement and to store them for replay as a more or less stable record of the world are without doubt film’s most celebrated features. Although this double ...function of film as a perceptual and a mnemonic medium has lent itself to a variety of uses, it has been studied mostly in its narrative application: the recording of perceptual experiences and their reproduction within a narrative frame. As film historians such as Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have pointed out, the predominant focus on narrative cinema in orthodox film histories has led to a bias that defines early cinema for what it lacks rather than study early films on their own terms and in their historical contexts. This article proposes an alternative approach. Instead of subsuming the perceptual and mnemonic functions of film exclusively within a narrative scope, I will examine them as mediated practices of autopsy and autography. These notions of seeing with one’s own eyes and recording with one’s own hand are defining constituents of testimonial genres such as travelogues, diaries and notebooks, which played a key role in the early development of film. As these notions and their generic contexts lend themselves to narrative as well as non-narrative uses, they are particularly apt to address the diversity of early cinema and its intersections with artistic, scientific, legal and medical discourses. Further, the deeper meanings of these concepts draw attention to the meta-implications of media use: Just as autopsy not only refers to an act of eyewitnessing but also signifies reflecting on the self and being in the absence of life, the autograph extends its literal meaning when it promises to trace something (about the writer or writing) that seems irreplaceable and individual. Discussing early film criticism and films from the first two decades of the twentieth century, I will examine instances of filmic autopsy and autography as strategies of exploring a novel medium and self through that medium.
Disputing the so-called ghetto studies that depicted the early part of the twentieth century as the nadir of African American society, this thoughtful volume by Christopher Robert Reed investigates ...black life in turn-of-the-century Chicago, revealing a vibrant community that grew and developed on Chicago’s South Side in the early 1900s. Reed also explores the impact of the fifty thousand black southerners who streamed into the city during the Great Migration of 1916–1918, effectively doubling Chicago’s African American population. Those already residing in Chicago’s black neighborhoods had a lot in common with those who migrated, Reed demonstrates, and the two groups became unified, building a broad community base able to face discrimination and prejudice while contributing to Chicago’s growth and development. Reed not only explains how Chicago’s African Americans openly competed with white people for jobs, housing and an independent political voice but also examines the structure of the society migrants entered and helped shame.  Other topics include South Side housing, black politics and protest, the role of institutionalized religion, the economic aspects of African American life,  the push for citizenship rights and political power for African Americans, and the impact of World War I and the race riot of 1919. The first comprehensive exploration of black life in turn-of-the-century Chicago beyond the mold of a ghetto perspective, this revealing work demonstrates how the melding of migrants and residents allowed for the building of a Black Metropolis in the 1920s.
The early skyscraper posed a persistent challenge to modernist mimetic description during the early twentieth century. Although canonical urban novels resisted the skyscraper, the structure appears ...as a speculative object of mystery within the genred space of weird fiction. As a cipher for the recently closed Western frontier, these fantastic depictions of the skyscraper channeled both American melancholy for this lost space of American imagining and ethical distaste for its legacy of barbarism and misanthropy. With the decline of the mythic frontier and the rise of the amorphous space of the metropolis, the weird skyscraper played out the nation's anxieties about the nation's cosmopolitan and colonial future as inherited from America's old spatial legacies of both creation and destruction.
The 1909-1918 era can be regarded as the formative years of MI5, as it developed from a small counter-espionage bureau into an established security intelligence agency. MI5 had two main roles during ...this period; counter-espionage, and advising the War Office on how to deal with the police and the civilian population, particularly aliens. Most of the existing literature tends to focus on the development of MI5 as a whole and pays little attention to the six individual branches that constituted MI5 by the armistice. Recently released MI5 documents in The National Archives (rnA) make it possible to examine MI5 at the micro level and set out the intimate workings of its six branches. The study examines the evolution of MI5 from its formation in October 1909 to the end of the First World War in November 1918, paying particular attention to three questions. First, what did a map of the structure of the MI5 organisation look like and "how" did it develop during these years? Secondly, "why" did it develop as it did? Thirdly, "how effective" was MI5 throughout this period? MI5 began as a one-man affair in 1909, tasked with the limited remit of ascertaining the extent of Gemlan espionage in Britain and an uncertain future. By the armistice MI5's role had expanded considerably and it had begun to develop into an established security intelligence agency, with 844 personnel spread over six branches covering the investigation of espionage, prevention, records, ports and travellers, overseas, and alien workers. This study suggests that the main driver of these developments, if one key factor can be singled out, was the changing perception of the nature of the threat posed by German espionage. However, because some within official circles equated all forms of opposition to Government policy with support for Germany, increasing attention also began to be paid to the possibility that industrial umest, pacifists and others who opposed the Government might actually be being directed by a German "hidden hand". From 1917 onwards MI5's development was driven by a conviction that it had defeated German espionage, such that Germany had switched its efforts to promoting Bolshevism and other forms of umest in order to undermine British society. However, MI5's activities were restricted to investigating if there was really any enemy influence behind such things, while Special Branch was to focus on labour unrest generally. This study makes an original and useful contribution to knowledge in three noteworthy respects. First, it sets out probably the most detailed description of MI5's organisational structure available. Secondly, it poses the stimulating question of "how to measure" the effectiveness of a counter-espionage agency? Thirdly, it suggests that, contrary to claims that Vemon Kell was an "empire builder" who wanted a greater role in labour intelligence, Kell felt it appropriate that MI5's activities should be restricted to the investigation of cases of peace propaganda and sedition that arose from enemy activities and did not actually want MI5 to assume a broader role in labour intelligence at that time.
A number of books in recent years have analysed the reasons behind R.B.Haldane's radical decision to create a home defence auxiliary designed to replace the Militia, Yeomanry and Rifle Volunteers. ...Rather than cover again material which has already been extensively examined, this study concentrates on the formation of the several auxiliary bodies which were intended to assist the new Territorial Force in its defence of mainland Britain. The thesis also looks at the dynamics which, in 1914, prompted the spontaneous emergence of another, unofficial auxiliary, the Volunteer Training Corps. Regarded with disdain and contempt by the War Office, the VTC, later the Volunteer Force, was used by the political authorities as a means by which the civilian population could, without excessive government expenditure, be encouraged to take an active part in the defence of its country. The Volunteer Force developed into a recognized body of part-time auxiliary soldiers which became, in time, intimately involved with the workings of the tribunal system and with the concepts of total war and universal sacrifice. In contrast to the military authorities' distrust of the Volunteers, the Government decided that political expediency demanded it partially support and eventually fund the movement. Although awarded a post-war certificate of appreciation, the Volunteers were denied any real official recognition of their patriotism and commitment. Research into Britain's auxiliary forces of the early twentieth century has largely ignored the contribution of the National Reserve, Corps of Guides, Royal Defence Corps and the Volunteer Force: their existence has occasionally been acknowledged but there has been no adequate study of the role of these bodies in the context of what some historians regard as a nation-in-arms. An examination of government documents, the papers of individuals closely involved in home defence and, in particular, the minute books of the County Territorial Associations, has revealed a sometimes bizarre and occasionally bewildering picture of Government and War Office contradictions. By unravelling the nature and complications of the political and military difficulties involved in raising and maintaining Britain's auxiliary forces, this thesis attempts to develop recent research on the character, controversies and contribution of Britain's part-time amateur soldiers.
