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This is a book about visual literacy. It both advocates and equips the scholarly use of visual images as visual evidence. The visual is not mere illustration, it is the text. Enabling a rediscovery of the visual skills of the past facilitates the investigation of history and the understanding of the present. Chapters by international authorities have been specially commissioned on the use of visual evidence from painting to political prints, photographs, documentary, feature films, television, news and advertising.
Taking his title from the catch-phrase of the eponymous hero of the 1825 play 'Paul Pry', a huge success in London, New York, and around the English-speaking world, David Vincent explores the worlds of privacy and celebrity in 19th-century Britain, examining debates about mass communication and state surveillance that link to today's concerns.
In February 1942, intelligence officer Victor Jones erected 150 tents behind British lines in North Africa. "Hiding tanks in Bedouin tents was an old British trick," writes Nicholas Rankin. German general Erwin Rommel not only knew of the ploy, but had copied it himself. Jones knew that Rommel knew. In fact, he counted on it--for these tents were empty. With the deception that he was carrying out a deception, Jones made a weak point look like a trap. In A Genius for Deception, Nicholas Rankin offers a lively and comprehensive history of how Britain bluffed, tricked, and spied its way to victory in two world wars. As Rankin shows, a coherent program of strategic deception emerged in World War...
Arguably the most offensive, despised, and ridiculed dandy of the Regency period, Sir James Webster-Wedderburn would likely be forgotten were it not for an affair between his wife and his close friend, the poet Lord Byron. This unique work lays out the details and provides commentary on rare private letters between Webster's wife, Lady Frances Caroline Annesley, and the famous poet. Also included are analyses and transcriptions of Lady Frances' letters to other suitors, including the Duke of Wellington and another Regency dandy, Scrope Davies.
The advent of poison gas in World War I shocked Britons at all levels of society, yet by the end of the conflict their nation was a leader in chemical warfare. Although never used on the home front, poison gas affected almost every segment of British society physically, mentally, or emotionally, proving to be an armament of total war. Through cartoons, military records, novels, treaties, and other sources, Marion Girard examines the varied ways different sectors of British society viewed chemical warfare, from the industrialists who promoted their toxic weapons while maintaining private control of production,øto the politicians who used gas while balancing the need for victory with the risk of developing a reputation for barbarity. Although most Britons considered gas a vile weapon and a symptom of the enemy?s inhumanity, many eventually condoned its use. ø The public debates about the future of gas extended to the interwar years, and evidence reveals that the taboo against poison gas was far from inevitable. A Strange and Formidable Weapon uncovers the complicated history of this weapon of total war and illustrates the widening involvement of society in warfare.
**A brilliant new history of Georgian Britain through the eyes of the artists who immortalised it, by one of the UK's most exciting young historians** 'Alice Loxton is the star of her generation ... the next big thing in history' Dan Snow London, 1772: a young artist called Thomas Rowlandson is making his way through the grimy backstreets of the capital, on his way to begin his studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Within a few years, James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank would join him in Piccadilly, turning satire into an artform, taking on the British establishment, and forever changing the way we view power. Set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern ce...
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"Picture Freedom provides a unique and nuanced interpretation of nineteenth-century African American life and culture. Focusing on visuality, print culture, and an examination of the parlor, Cobb has fashioned a book like none other, convincingly demonstrating how whites and blacks reimagined racial identity and belonging in the early republic."--Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City
An exploration of the aesthetic challenges of representing Western European and American coal-mining experiences in art, literature and film. It features 19 essays offering critical analyses of topics such as gender, class and ethnicity as portrayed in 19th- and 20th-century works.