Contemporary media history is a rapidly growing field that extends far beyond traditional studies of technology or institutions such as radio, film, and television. This volume expands the scope further still to analyse ephemeral, mundane phenomena long overlooked by media historiography. In eight original essays, the volume demonstrates the strengths of a broad concept of the media. The first part centres on media systems and media events, with studies of spiritist séances, Gallup polls, the mediated persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the burial of a Swedish elder statesman in 1915. The second part focuses on media materialities and infrastructure such as art replicas, ring binders, tourist guidebooks, and media technology in the IKEA home. Aimed at students and academics alike, Expanding Media Histories offers new empirical research, which engages critically with key concepts in media history today.

Historical actors are as central to the history of knowledge as to all historical scholarship. Every country, every era has its biographies of eminent scientists, intellectuals, and educational reformers. Yet the theoretical currents that have left their mark on the historical and sociological studies of knowledge since the 1960s have emphasized structures over actors, collectives over individuals. By contrast, Knowledge Actors stresses the importance of historical actors and re-engages with their actions from fresh perspectives. The objective of this volume is thus to foster a larger discussion among historians of knowledge about the role of knowledge actors. Do we want individuals and networks to take centre stage in our research narratives? And if so, which ones do we want to highlight and how are we to conduct our research? What are the potential pitfalls of pursuing that actor-centric trajectory? This the third volume in a trilogy about the history of knowledge from the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK).

Is it possible for two combatants who possess equally strong air forces to conduct limited warfare by restraining air operations? In Restraining Air Power, Robert C. Owen asks this question and allows contributing authors to provide theoretical and empirical assessments of restrained air warfare through five historical case studies since 1945. Through an objective analysis of the past, this collection evaluates the principles of escalation and escalation management in conventional warfare scenarios to better understand when, why, and how peer opponents in past conflicts have expanded or restrained air operations. The surge in cyber warfare, the development of artificially intelligent weaponry, and the founding of the US Space Force in 2019 means that analysts and military planners must be prepared to think about escalation management and peer conflict in increasingly complicated and challenging ways. This comprehensive study provides readers with refined theoretical visions of the possibilities and challenges of managing escalation as a powerful mode of warfare between opponents who believe they must choose between sacrificing their own national interests or risking escalated destruction of their economies, military forces, and governing authority. The analysis within the pages of this volume is an attempt to update our understanding of air warfare within a world of unprecedented military complexity and, as such, will hold immense value for specialists in advanced military studies as well as those studying international relations and history.

On January 16, 1944, the submarine rescue vessel USS Macaw (ASR-11) ran aground at Midway Atoll while attempting to get a towing line to the stranded submarine USS Flier (SS-250). The Flier was pulled free six days later, but another three weeks of salvage efforts, plagued by rough seas and equipment problems, failed to dislodge the Macaw. Then on Saturday, February 12, amid an episode of freakishly enormous waves, the sea accomplished that task, nudging the ship from her perch backward into deeper water. As night fell and the ship slowly sank, the 22 men on board – Lt. Cmdr. Paul W. Burton, USN, the captain, his executive officer and twenty enlisted men—sought refuge in the pilot house. By about 0230 Sunday, that compartment having flooded almost entirely, Burton gave the order to open the portside door and make for the foremast. Three men got to it and climbed it. Most of the rest were swept overboard. Five of the men, including Burton himself, died, as did three sailors from the base at Midway in a pair of unauthorized and effectively suicidal rescue attempts that morning. Drawing on contemporaneous written statements by survivors of that night and interviews conducted over a span of thirty years, this book traces the lives of the Macaw and her enigmatic captain, from birth on San Francisco Bay to death at Midway. It tells a war story short on combat but not on drama, a wartime tragedy in which the conflict is more interpersonal, and perhaps intrapersonal, than international. Ultimately, for Paul Burton and the Macaw the real enemy was the sea, and in a deadly denouement told here in riveting detail, the sea won. Highlighting the underreported role auxiliary vessels played in the war, A Strange Whim of the Sea: The Wreck of the USS Macaw should engage the military historian and lay reader alike with the previously untold story it tells of struggle, sacrifice, death and survival in the Pacific in World War II.

Additional burial areas for the parish of St James Westminster in the 17th to 18th century were excavated in 2008–9. As the northern part of the parish around Soho grew and its population increased from the mid 17th century, pressure mounted on burial space in the churchyard on Piccadilly and on existing support structures for the least fortunate members of society. In response, the lower ground (the early extramural burial ground, 1695–1733) and the upper ground (the later extramural burial ground, 1733–90) were opened in succession, along with the new workhouse complex (1725–1913) and the workhouse burial ground (1733–93). In the later 19th to 20th century public baths were constructed over part of the site and the workhouse was repurposed and then redeveloped.The three burial areas were used intensively and a total of 2553 burials were recorded. Intra-site comparisons exploring demographic and health profiles show a higher proportion of adult females in the workhouse population and a disproportionately low number of childhood deaths across all three grounds. Full osteological analysis of 1786 skeletons revealed the wide range of conditions afflicting the buried population. Higher overall rates of pathological bone conditions, including infectious disease and trauma, were identified, however, in the workhouse burials when compared to the extramural grounds. Together with historical and archaeological evidence, these results and those from comparative contemporary sites help place the lives of the urban poor and destitute within the wider context of the 17th and 18th centuries.

"The work of this institution has only begun I want to see this faculty continue to develop in not only teaching ability, but heart power—the ability to lead and inspire I want to see the fullest opportunities furnished to students I want to see young men and women who will become effective leaders I want to see all of these things and more" – Dr. John W. Carr, First President of Murray State University, April 1, 1926 When Murray State University was founded shortly after World War I, it was a modest, one-building teachers' college with a mandate to prepare better-trained educators for schools in the Jackson Purchase area of Western Kentucky. Now Murray State has grown to become a major university with nearly (or approximately) 10,000 students from all over the world. Over the past century, this institution has indelibly shaped the lives of generations of talented young people who went on to enjoy remarkable careers at NASA, the Kentucky Supreme Court, in Hollywood, the NBA, and elsewhere. In The Finest Place We Know, authors Robert L Jackson, Sarah Marie Owens, and Sean J. McLaughlin celebrate the 100-year story of Murray State University by looking back on the people, places, and events which have shaped the institution's history. This comprehensive, pictorial history features hundreds of images from the Progue Special Collections Library and is accompanied by stories that explore everything from the school's first student-produced weekly newspaper The College News that began publication on June 24, 1927, the hiring of Ernest T. Brooks, its first Black professor, in 1970, and the appointment of Dr. Kala Stroup, the first woman president of any Kentucky university. This work – equal parts history and celebration – presents an in depth account of one of Kentucky's prosperous public universities.

This study contends that the creation and consumption of fiction has not been looked at in a holistic way in terms of an overall process that takes us from author to consumer with all of the potential intermediate steps. It proposes and describes just such a process model, which begins with the author, who interacts with elements of his or her contemporary world and incorporates them into the imagined world of the novel. It describes how at each stage in the process other actors engage with the novel in various forms, and create artefacts such as critical reviews, filmed adaptations and tourist interpretations that comprise further imagined worlds that can be compared to the author’s original imagined world, and by extension, the original past world. Using a number of case studies of English novels of the period from 1800 to 1930, the study looks at what evidence of the process in action tells us about the ability of a novel to act as an adjunct to contemporary records in providing insights into that original real world. These studies incorporate analyses of the novels themselves, and of subsequent artefacts such as film and television adaptations, curated literary places and guidebooks, and reviews. The study concludes that fiction in its various forms, and especially in its adapted and interpreted forms, whilst not a pure historical document as such, can provide us with a vivid image of a past world. It contends that the process model could be used as an aid in the teaching of History or English Literature, or as an aid to the general reader, to help remove the layers of imagined worlds that potentially lie between us and a past historical world, thereby reducing the ability of that layering to create a misleading view of history.

Camels, one of creation's most remarkable animals, are celebrated through this fascinating historical study of their place in the modern imperial era. Goudie's wide-ranging research into the exploration and use of camels reveals dramatic stories and personalities, with an impressive geographical coverage. Descriptions of their biology, value and benefits, travellers' stories then link them to their historical context. Accompanied by splendid paintings, drawings, photos, and maps, and with an extensive bibliography, this volume entertains at the same time as providing a very comprehensive historical account of these amazing beasts.

Why are so many nautical words in Danish the same as in Dutch? Who taught the shipwrights in the Royal Danish Shipyard in Copenhagen to build carvel planked ships? How did the first Danish ships find their way to the riches of the East Indies? These questions and many more are meet in this Ph.D. dissertation, which circles around the maritime relationships between especially the seaward provinces of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. In the early renaissance Dutch maritime technology was imported by the Danish king, who recruited craftsmen and bough ships in the Netherlands and later on the Royal Danish Navy was profoundly influenced by Dutch master shipbuilders and naval officers. But it was not only maritime experts and mariners who travelled to the North, but also ordinary Scandinavian sailors, who migrated the other way and took a part in Dutch shipping to all parts of the world. This labour migration has been known amongst Dutch scholars for some time, but is almost unknown in Scandinavian historical circles.For the first time data from the Amsterdam City archive has made it possible to get closer to the individual sailors, who hailed from the coastal districts of Norway, the Southwest coast of Denmark and for a lesser part the West coast of Sweden and their participation in the Dutch shipping industry has been analysed showing, that they learned important maritime skills onboard. Coming back to Scandinavia these sailors were the backbone of the navies and merchant fleets of the Scandinavian countries especially in the eighteenth century.This study of maritime labour migration will be of interest for scholars of maritime-, migration and technology history but also for anyone, who likes to read about the life’s and work of ordinary sailors in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Why are so many nautical words in Danish the same as in Dutch? Who taught the shipwrights in the Royal Danish Shipyard in Copenhagen to build carvel planked ships? How did the first Danish ships find their way to the riches of the East Indies? These questions and many more are meet in this Ph.D. dissertation, which circles around the maritime relationships between especially the seaward provinces of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. In the early renaissance Dutch maritime technology was imported by the Danish king, who recruited craftsmen and bough ships in the Netherlands and later on the Royal Danish Navy was profoundly influenced by Dutch master shipbuilders and naval officers. But it was not only maritime experts and mariners who travelled to the North, but also ordinary Scandinavian sailors, who migrated the other way and took a part in Dutch shipping to all parts of the world. This labour migration has been known amongst Dutch scholars for some time, but is almost unknown in Scandinavian historical circles.For the first time data from the Amsterdam City archive has made it possible to get closer to the individual sailors, who hailed from the coastal districts of Norway, the Southwest coast of Denmark and for a lesser part the West coast of Sweden and their participation in the Dutch shipping industry has been analysed showing, that they learned important maritime skills onboard. Coming back to Scandinavia these sailors were the backbone of the navies and merchant fleets of the Scandinavian countries especially in the eighteenth century.This study of maritime labour migration will be of interest for scholars of maritime-, migration and technology history but also for anyone, who likes to read about the life’s and work of ordinary sailors in the 17th and 18th centuries.

A new volume in the Society for Studies series Short North African Histories, this book brings togeher the best stories of intrepid desert drivers in the early 20th century, crossing the vast and sometimes dangerous expances of the Sahara. The exploration of the Sahara - a huge swathe of terrain, the size of India - by motor car is one of the untold chapters in the story of 20th century exploration. This revised version of the successful title Wheels Across the Desert, looks at the intrepid drivers who crossed the desert in the early 20th century - bothmilitary and civilian.

Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what was at the time the largest out-migration in US history. When Tolbert Major, a former Kentucky slave and single father, was offered his own chance for freedom, he accepted. He, several family members, and seventy other people boarded the Luna on July 5, 1836. After they arrived in Liberia, Tolbert penned a letter to his former owner, Ben Major: "Dear Sir, We have all landed on the shores of Africa and got into our houses.... None of us have been taken with the fever yet."Drawing on extensive research and fifteen years' worth of surviving letters, author Susan E. Lindsey illuminates the trials and triumphs of building a new life in Liberia, where settlers were free, but struggled to acclimate themselves to an unfamiliar land, coexist with indigenous groups, and overcome disease and other dangers. Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia explores the motives and attitudes of colonization supporters and those who lived in the colony, offering perspectives beyond the standard narrative that colonization was driven solely by racism or forced exile.

In March 1856, a dead body washed onto the shore of the Mississippi River. Nothing out of the ordinary. In those days, people fished corpses from the river with alarming frequency. But this body, with its arms and legs tied to a chair, struck an especially eerie chord. The body belonged to a man who had been a passenger on the luxurious steamboat known as the Ohio Belle, and he was the son of a southern planter. Who had bound and pitched this wealthy man into the river? Why? As reports of the killing spread, one newspaper shuddered, "The details are truly awful and well calculated to cause a thrill of horror."Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Murder on the Ohio Belle uncovers the mysterious circumstances behind the bloodshed. A northern vessel captured by secessionists, sailing the border between slave and free states at the edge of the frontier, the Ohio Belle navigated the confluence of nineteenth-century America's greatest tensions. Stuart W. Sanders dives into the history of this remarkable steamer -- a story of double murders, secret identities, and hasty getaways -- and reveals the bloody roots of antebellum honor culture, classism, and vigilante justice.

This book is a critical study of the interaction between Russian Church and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At a time of rising nationalist movement throughout Europe, Orthodox patriots advocated for the place of the Church as a unifying force, central to the identity and purpose of the burgeoning, yet increasingly religiously diverse Russian Empire. Their views were articulated in a variety of ways. Bishops such as Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky - a founding hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia - and other members of the clergy expressed their vision of Russia through official publications (including ecclesiastical journals), sermons, the organization of pilgrimages and the canonization of saints. On the other hand, religious intellectuals (such as the famous philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and the controversial former-Marxist Sergey Bulgakov) promoted what was often a variant vision of the nation through the publication of books and articles. Even the once persecuted Old Believers, emboldened by a religious toleration edict of 1905, sought to claim a role in national leadership. And many - in particularly famous painter Mikhail Vasnetsov - looked to art and architecture as a way of defining the religious ideals of modern Russia. Whilst other studies exist that draw attention to the voices in the Church typified as “liberal” in the years leading up to the Revolution, this work introduces the reader to a wide range of “conservative” opinion that equally strove for spiritual renewal and the spread of the Gospel. Ultimately neither the “conservative” voices presented here nor those of their better-known “liberal” protagonists were able to prevent the calamity that befell Russia with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Grounded in original research conducted in the newly accessible libraries and archives of post-Soviet Russia, this study is intended to reveal the wider relevance of its topic to an ongoing discussion of the relationship between national or ethnic identities on the one hand and the self-understanding of Orthodox Christianity as a universal and transformative Faith on the other.

The destruction on the morning of All Saints Day 1755 of the heart of the city of Lisbon by an earthquake, tidal wave and the urban fires that followed was a tragedy that divides the 18th century in Portugal. One casualty on that fatal morning was the Royal Library, one of the most magnificent libraries in Europe at the time. The Lost Library of the King of Portugal tells the story of the lost library – its creation, collection and significance. This 18th-century library was founded by the Bragança monarch Dom João V shortly after he came to the throne in 1706, and was housed at the heart of the royal palace, the Paço da Ribeira in Lisbon. The king’s abiding ambition was to create one of Europe’s great court libraries and, at the time of his death in 1750, it was reputed to be one of the most magnificent libraries in Europe. The Royal Library was also composed of a Cabinet of Prints and Drawings, medals and scientific instruments as well as a Cabinet of Natural History with specimens from across Portugal’s global empire. This documented study describes the creation of the library, its cultural significance in 18th-century Portugal, the acquisition of single volumes as well as entire libraries from across Europe and the role in this of Portugal’s most talented diplomats. It include the collection of manuscripts from the celebrated library of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland and the unpublished correspondence that was exchanged during the negotiations between London and Lisbon. Throughout his reign, the devout Dom João V set out to conjure up his own vision of Rome and the papal court he never saw. Two chapters are devoted to Italy – one to the talented archaeologist Francesco Bianchini at the papal court, including the unpublished correspondence between him and his royal patron Dom João V, as well as the guides to Rome and art and architecture at the ducal courts of northern Italy, both commissioned by the king. When the library was destroyed in 1 November 1755 by the earthquake, tidal wave and the fires that followed, only a few books, manuscripts and albums of prints were saved, and the author traces their final journey with the royal family and court to Brazil on the eve of the invasion by Napoleon’s army in November 1806.

This publication is an exercise in the deconstruction of colonial myths and the creation of a decolonized native Atlantic Leeward historiography.