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In Automotive Empire, Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organized colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole. European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pre...
From its invention in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the automobile crisscrossed the world, completely took over the cities, and became a feature of daily life. Considered basic to the American lifestyle, the car reflected individualism, pragmatism, comfort, and above all modernity. In Latin America, it served as a symbol of distinction, similar to jewelry or fine clothing. In The Cultural Life of the Automobile, Guillermo Giucci focuses on the automobile as an instrument of social change through its “kinetic modernity” and as an embodiment of the tremendous social impact of technology on cultural life. Material culture—how certain objects generate a wide array of cultura...
This booklet is about what can be read on the labels attached to the insects in a historical collection. These labels are labeled with the name of the animal, location, date of discovery and collector's name. At least that's how it's been said to have been since around 1905. This insect collection on which this is based covers the period from 1868 to 1963 and therefore also contains contemporary wit-nesses to historical events (e.g. Versaille 1919, Kherson 1942) that are no longer familiar to young people. Also included are insects from collectors with interesting résumés that are not even known to insiders, as well as expeditions and real adventure trips (Hedin, Citroen). Socially relevan...
This book accompanies an exhibition at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, on the role of photography in Central Africa. This is the first book to link two related themes: the role of photographic images in constructing and circulating fantasies, ideas, and sentiments in Europe and the US relating to the peoples of Central Africa; and the role of photography in enabling Africans to project images of themselves by becoming familiar with photographic technology. Broad in thematic and temporal scope, the book focuses on several time periods, especially on the years before and between the two world wars. This is also the first publication devoted to the important holding...
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically ‘consumed’, to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French...
Essays on orientalism in American and European cinema
Each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains 250 entries on the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. This is not a who's who. Instead, each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. All entries conclude with a fully annotated bibliography.
This book explores how physical anthropologists struggled to understand variation in bodies and cultures in the twentieth century, how they represented race to professional and lay publics, and how their efforts contributed to an American formulation of race that has remained rooted in both bodies and cultures, as well as heredity and society.
Virtual Voyages illuminates the pivotal role of travelogues within the history of cinema. The travelogue dominated the early cinema period from 1895 to 1905, was central to the consolidation of documentary in the 1910s and 1920s, proliferated in the postwar era of 16mm distribution, and today continues to flourish in IMAX theaters and a host of non-theatrical venues. It is not only the first chapter in the history of documentary but also a key element of ethnographic film, home movies, and fiction films. In this collection, leading film scholars trace the intersection of technology and ideology in representations of travel across a wide variety of cinematic forms. In so doing, they demonstra...
Throughout their history, the Guardian and the Observer have avidly reported the worlds of exploration and adventure travel. In the 19th century, they covered the British and European explorers who were trying to fill in the 'blanks on the map' - crossing deserts, racing to the poles, searching for the source of the Nile and trying to be the first to master the peaks of the Alps, and, later, the Himalaya. By the turn of the 20th century, interest turned to Everest, the 'third pole', to the deserts that needed to be conquered, and also to the new ways of exploring that opened up a whole new world of adventure - airships over the North Pole and Citroen driving across the Sahara in the 1920s, t...