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This is a pioneering introduction to the emergent field of information history. It explores how the contemporary values and concerns of our own information society have helped lead to a reconsideration of our history, and of what constitutes our historical understanding of information in the twenty-first century. In Information History, Toni Weller examines the historiography of information and asks how the key schools of thought have explored the concept in terms of its social, technological, economic and cultural understandings. Based on personal experiences, the author also proposes some practical applications of information history in research and university teaching, offering some suggestions as to how the field may develop based on its growth during the last decade. - A ground-breaking introduction to the field of Information History - Takes an interdisciplinary approach – embracing both historical, and information science research and ideology - Explores the relevance of Information History to contemporary society
How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the fi...
This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of religion and belief, it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity. Stefan Fisher-Hyrem (PhD) is a historian and Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Agder, Norway.
The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens's Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens's work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, 'standard' time, which now ticks on our clocks. Jonatha...
There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's one-time business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The association is not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the most part, however, it was welcomed as a "divine art" by Western churchmen and statesmen. Sixteenth-century Lutherans hailed it for emancipating Germans from papal rule, and seventeenth-century English radicals viewed it as a weapon against bishops and kings. While an early colonial governor of Virginia thanked God for the absence of printing in his colony, a century later, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic ...
‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of the history of reading Jane Austen’s novels. It discusses Austen’s own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the aspects of her style that are related to the ways in which she has been read. The volume considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers’ responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to the ordinary readers who read Austen’s works between 1786 and 1945.
This book offers a comparative analysis of British Army Unit War Diaries in the two World Wars, to reveal the role played by previously unnoticed technologies in shaping the archival records of war. Despite thriving scholarship on the history of war, the history of Operational Record Keeping in the British Army remains unexplored. Since World War I, the British Army has maintained daily records of its operations. These records, Unit War Diaries, are the first official draft of events on the battlefield. They are vital for the army’s operational effectiveness and fundamental to the histories of British conflict, yet the material history of their own production and development has been widel...
Historical disaster research is still a young field. This book discusses the experiences of natural disasters in different cultures, from Europe across the Near East to Asia. It focuses on the pre-industrial era and on the question of similarities, differences and transcultural dynamics in the cultural handling of natural disasters. Which long-lasting cultural patterns of perception, interpretation and handling of disasters can be determined? Have specific types of disasters changed the affected societies? What have people learned from disasters and what not? What adaptation and coping strategies existed? Which natural, societal and economic parameters play a part? The book not only reveals the historical depth of present practices, but also reveals possible comparisons that show globalization processes, entanglements and exchanges of ideas and practices in pre-modern times.
It is increasingly acknowledged that an analysis of emotions is necessary to fully understand the social world, and recent research on transport, travel and mobilities has begun to consider the gendered nature of public and personal life in relation to this sphere. The focus of this multidisciplinary and auto/biographical volume is the emotional relationship that individuals and groups have with different means of travel. Attention is given to a variety of travel experiences, including travelling in trains, planes, cars, buses and ships, as well as biking, cycling, running and walking, from the perspective of travellers and those who earn their living in assisting these experiences of others. Imaginary travel and the relationships between art and travel are also considered. Adopting innovative approaches to experiential material ranging from personal memories to empirical research, Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions opens up and illuminates an interdisciplinary debate about the gendered, emotive and emotional nature of travelling.
This book tells the story of the history of popular culture in Europe since 1800, providing a framework which challenges traditional associations that have formulated popular culture firmly in relation to the post-1945 period and the economic power of the USA. Focusing on key themes associated with modernity – secularisation, industrialisation, social cohesion and control, globalisation and technological change – this synthesis of research across a very wide field fills a gap that has long been felt by students and educators working in the field of popular culture. While it is organised as a history of cultural forms, it can also be used across a wide range of social science and humaniti...