How did Renaissance theatre create its powerful effects with so few resources? In The Shakespearean Stage Space, Mariko Ichikawa explores the original staging of plays by Shakespeare and his ...contemporaries to build a new picture of the artistry of the Renaissance stage. Dealing with problematic scenes and stage directions, Ichikawa closely examines the playing conditions in early modern playhouses to reveal the ways in which the structure of the stage was used to ensure the audibility of offstage sounds, to control the visibility of characters, to convey fictional locales, to create specific moods and atmospheres and to maintain a frequently shifting balance between fictional and theatrical realities. She argues that basic theatrical terms were used in a much broader and more flexible way than we usually assume and demonstrates that, rather than imposing limitations, the bare stage of the Shakespearean theatre offered dramatists and actors a variety of imaginative possibilities.
In Policing the City, Harris seeks to explain the transformation of criminal justice, particularly the transformation of policing, between the 1780s and 1830s in the City of London. As utilitarian ...legal reformers argued that criminal deterrence ought to be based on certain and rational punishment rather than random execution, they also had to control the discretionary authority of enforcement. This meant in theory and practice the centralization of policing in the 1830s, and the end of local policing, which was seen as corrupt, inefficient, and unsuitable for rational criminal justice. Revolutionary changes in policing began locally, however, in the 1780s. Such local changes preceded and inspired national reforms, and local policing up to the centralizing measures of the 1830s remained dynamic, responsive, and locally accountable right until its demise. Anxiety about policing had as much to do with the social origins of the police as it did about the origins of criminality, and control over the discretionary authority of watchmen and constables played a larger role in criminal justice reform than the nature of crime. The national, metropolitan, and City police reforms of the late 1830s were thus the culmination of a contentious argument over the meanings of justice, efficiency, and order, rather than its beginning. Harris's evidence reveals how what we've come to think of as “modern”policing evolved out of local practice and reflects shifts in wider debates about crime, justice, and discretionary authority.
This is the first full account of the evolution of the government of London from the tempestuous days of the Commune in the late twelfth century to the calmer waters of Tudor England. In this ...three-hundred-year period Londoners learnt how to construct, and to manage, 'self-government at the king's command'. They had to develop ways of negotiating with demanding and very different kings and to devise ways of raising money from citizens which were seen to be fair. London's elected rulers had also to resolve conflicting economic interests, to administer common resources and to protect and enhance the health and well-being of all those who lived in the city. London was by far the most populous and wealthy city in the kingdom, and its practices were widely copied throughout England. It was, as the Londoners claimed in 1339, the 'mirror and example to the whole land'. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780199257775/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Anne Lancashire
The Smoke of London uncovers the origins of urban air pollution, two centuries before the industrial revolution. By 1600, London was a fossil-fuelled city, its high-sulfur coal a basic necessity for ...the poor and a source of cheap energy for its growing manufacturing sector. The resulting smoke was found ugly and dangerous throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading to challenges in court, suppression by the crown, doctors' attempts to understand the nature of good air, increasing suburbanization, and changing representations of urban life in poetry and on the London stage. Neither a celebratory account of proto-environmentalism nor a declensionist narrative of degradation, The Smoke of London recovers the seriousness of pre-modern environmental concerns even as it explains their limits and failures. Ultimately, Londoners learned to live with their dirty air, an accommodation that reframes the modern process of urbanization and industrial pollution, both in Britain and beyond.
Fear and Self-Loathing in the City is a practical guide to both managing the pressures of the workplace and coping with the struggles we may have in our personal lives. It incorporates simple ...techniques and quick solutions to many stressful work-related issues that exist in most working cultures.
This book is crucial for today’s workplace. The current state of the economy, financial disasters and general instability is having a massive affect on employees. Workers have to deal with redundancies and the pressures of finding new jobs; the number of sick days is on the rise; drug use and alcoholism is increasing; and depression and anxiety are becoming more and more common.
Although more people are seeking help, there is still a stigma in the workplace about depression, anxiety, and other very real mental illnesses. As a result, many employees suffer in silence for fear their contemporaries will find out they are not coping, see it as a sign of weakness and think badly of them. In this book, Michael Sinclair has taken a lighter approach and used language common to the workplace with which the reader can identify. In short, this book aims to remove this stigma about mental health, and promote a sense of acceptability about seeking help and resolving problems in a healthy way.
The book deals with very current topics, including: depression, anxiety, alcoholism, sleep deprivation, and unhealthy lifestyles (e.g. eating habits) amongst many others.
This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified ...field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects - those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, the legacy of which remains to this day. This comparative analysis looks afresh at the writings of observers such as Henry Mayhew, Patrick Colquhoun, Charles Grant, Pierce Egan, James Forbes and Emma Roberts, thereby seeking to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination. Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history it also attempts to extend our understanding of the relationship between 'centre' and 'periphery'. The other empire will be of value to students and scholars of modern imperial and urban history, cultural studies, and religious studies.
Gone at 3:17 Brown, David M; Wereschagin, Michael
2012, 2012-02-01
eBook
At 3:17 p.m. on March 18, 1937, a natural gas leak beneath the London Junior-Senior High School in the oil boomtown of New London, Texas, created a lethal mixture of gas and oxygen in the ...school’s basement. The odorless, colorless gas went undetected until the flip of an electrical switch triggered a colossal blast. The two-story school, one of the nation’s most modern, disintegrated, burying everyone under a vast pile of rubble and debris. More than 300 students and teachers were killed, and hundreds more were injured. As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the catastrophe approaches, it remains the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history. Few, however, know of this historic tragedy, and no book, until now, has chronicled the explosion, its cause, its victims, and the aftermath. Gone at 3:17 is a true story of what can happen when school officials make bad decisions. To save money on heating the school building, the trustees had authorized workers to tap into a pipeline carrying “waste” natural gas produced by a gasoline refinery. The explosion led to laws that now require gas companies to add the familiar pungent odor. The knowledge that the tragedy could have been prevented added immeasurably to the heartbreak experienced by the survivors and the victims’ families. The town would never be the same. Using interviews, testimony from survivors, and archival newspaper files, Gone at 3:17 puts readers inside the shop class to witness the spark that ignited the gas. Many of those interviewed during twenty years of research are no longer living, but their acts of heroism and stories of survival live on in this meticulously documented and extensively illustrated book.
The School of Oriental and African Studies, a college of the University of London, was established in 1916 principally to train the colonial administrators who ran the British Empire in the languages ...of Asia and Africa. It was founded, that is, with an explicitly imperial purpose. Yet the School would come to transcend this function to become a world centre of scholarship and learning, in many important ways challenging that imperial origin. Drawing on the School's own extensive administrative records, on interviews with current and past staff, and on the records of government departments, Ian Brown explores the work of the School over its first century. He considers the expansion in the School's configuration of studies from the initial focus on languages, its changing relationships with government, and the major contributions that have been made by the School to scholarly and public understandings of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Multiculturalism still matters and is even more important after 7/7 than it was before. The political discourse and rhetoric of integration sits uncomfortably alongside both multicultural realities ...e.g. the civil disturbances in Birmingham, England (October 2005), Paris, France (November 2005) and Sydney, Australia (December, 2005) and social scientific notions of where multiculturalism positions itself domestically and internationally. This edited collection is intended to be a major contrib.
London Writing in the 1930s offers a new perspective on the decade that has long been associated with the Auden generation and the rise of documentary.
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