bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Paradoxical Glamour of the Phoney War: Examining the Design of Picturegoer
Authors: King Carolyn Owen
Published: January 2024

By March 1940, British film magazine Picturegoer was the UK’s longest running and most popular film magazine with an estimated readership of around 500,000 people for each issue (Glancy, 2011, 453-478). This chapter examines an issue edition of the magazine from 1940, considering the ways in which assumptions are made about gendering in the reading experience, and focusing on how advertisements work in conjunction with features and articles. Furthermore, the chapter investigates the ways in which gender and nationality are represented in articles, reviews, letters and advertisements, whilst also examining how anxiety about war and the wider political situation seeps into the discourse about film and stardom. In this issue of the magazine, which is focused almost exclusively on Hollywood films and stars, there is a particular emphasis on the British stars working in the US industry and their responsibilities in a time of war. The periodical’s use of images and its dominant voice express attitudes about gender, nationality and class that are often revealing and sometimes contradictory. The expression of concern about Hollywood and its output reveals the importance of American film to British audiences, particularly in this wartime context.
Mid-Century Masculinities: Presentation as Subtext in Photoplay January 1955
Authors: Hood Lisa
Published: January 2024

Victor Mature’s film career spanned 1939-1984, covering roles in a wide range of genres. Despite this versatility, by 1961 he had ceased consistent output. Even during the mid-1950s when his work still seemed to be flourishing, a Photoplay article cast doubt on Mature’s potential for career longevity. This chapter will consider the layout and placement of the article, interrogating whether its position within the magazine, selection of pictures, and production in colour or black and white, related to Mature’s status in Hollywood. Comparisons are made with other stars in the issue, including Rock Hudson and Marlon Brando, and also with issues of Photoplay from 1942, the point when Mature’s magazine mentions were most numerous. As the chapter will show, Mature’s peak seemed to come only three years into his career and was boosted by the star power of his female leads, in particular Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. Even at the pinnacle of his career, then, Mature’s fame was perhaps only partial or by association with his leading ladies, which maps on to the traditional downplaying of male stars within Hollywood movie magazines.
Dorothy Dandridge the Invisible Star: Racial Segregation in Hollywood Fan Magazines in the 1950s
Authors: Lomax Cathy
Published: January 2024

In 1954, Dorothy Dandridge’s career and stardom were approaching their peak: after many years playing small roles on screen and performing on the nightclub circuit she was cast as the lead in Otto Preminger’s all-black musical Carmen Jones, a role that won her an Academy Award nomination. Despite this, Dandridge was ignored by the American fan magazines. Though major mainstream publications like Life, Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Look ran features on her, the top movie magazines such as Photoplay, Modern Screen and Motion Picture downplayed her significance, denying her stardom. This chapter examines one issue of Photoplay from February 1955, which amongst the usual content has a one-page sponsored feature in black and white about Carmen Jones. Using a detailed analysis of the content of this issue, the chapter outlines the way that the American fan magazines of the mid-1950s, in an effort to maintain the status quo, screened their mostly female audience from any political issues, which by the very nature of her race Dandridge epitomised. The result of this invisibility for Dandridge was that the progress of her career was impeded and short-lived.
Tyrone Power: International ‘Cover Boy’
Authors: Kelly Gillian
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores Hollywood leading man Tyrone Power’s presence in fan magazines across his career, and the abundance of magazine covers he graced, at a time when most covers depicted women stars or romantic on-screen couples. Celebrated for his exquisite male beauty, Power adorned the cover of numerous publications globally for over twenty years, starting as early as his first leading role in Lloyds of London in 1936 and extending until his death in 1958, while his career was still active and his good looks remained evident. Moreover, Power also appeared frequently within these magazines, with early articles focusing almost exclusively on his love life. After he married French actress Annabella, fan magazines began exploring the Powers’ domesticity, before reporting on Power’s active war duty during World War II. Power divorced Annabella shortly after returning from war, and when he started dating again, fan magazines reverted to stories about his new bachelorhood, with detailed coverage of his highest-profile romances. Power thus occupies the usual space of the female star both on the fan magazine cover and in the gossip and romantic narrative sections inside.
A Star is Drawn: Media Hybridity and Ordinary Cinephilia in La Passion De Dora
Authors: Topp Dominic
Published: January 2024

In April 1948, readers of popular French movie magazine Ciné-Miroir were introduced to a new discovery, Dora Grey, a 19-year-old fashion-house model just cast in a film to be shot in Paris and Cannes. Unlike other actresses in Ciné-Miroir, however, Dora Grey never actually existed: she was the fictional protagonist of a comic strip ‘The Passion of Dora, Audacious Starlet’, which ran for fifteen issues. This chapter analyses the words and images of ‘The Passion of Dora’ from several angles: as a genre-bending narrative combining elements of backstage drama, workplace romance, adventure story and gangster film, while incorporating some of the visual conventions of the cinema; as a pedagogical tool taking readers behind the scenes to teach them about filmmaking; and as a self-reflexive explication of the apparatus of promotion and publicity by which film stars are manufactured and marketed – in which Ciné-Miroir itself is seen to play an active role. In line with recent scholarship on post-war French movie magazines, ‘The Passion of Dora’ is posited as an example of mass-market publications’ cultivation of a “popular cinephilia” among film fans, before the advent of the “erudite cinephilia” associated with Cahiers du cinéma.
Context, Content and Form in 1940S British Film Star Fan Club Publications
Authors: Wright Ellen , Smith Phyll
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers valuable historic examples of visible and ‘invisible’ star and fan labour, in a socio-industrial context operating before contemporary celebrity culture and the neo-liberal focus on self-improvement and building oneself as a brand. It examines the concerted development of a coterie of popular British film stars and their fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned but fan or star-produced magazines and bulletins for the official fan clubs of British actors and actresses such as Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, and Richard Attenborough.Recently digitised, these rare, engaging, supremely collectible and yet academically overlooked resources form a coherent body of fan media ideally suited for detailed scrutiny. These materials raise a number of surprisingly prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtures and maintains a star’s unique brand, offering parasocial precedents and valuable insights into visible and invisible star and fan labour and film fandom more generally. But beyond this they provide fascinating insights into the post war British stars and the star system, and the lives and complex, differentiated culture of British post war film fan consumption, whilst also demonstrating how socio-cultural, industrial and economic factors shape form and convention.
The Missing Piece: Imaginary Audiences in the Ecran Fan Magazine of the 1940S
Authors: Peirano María Paz , Bossay Claudia
Published: January 2024

This chapter investigates the image of local audiences constructed by Chilean fan magazines, particularly Ecran, one of the few specialised written and visual sources of the 1940s. It argues that Ecran’s strategies to engage with readers allow scholars to observe audiences through the eyes of the press, by analysing direct references, such as editors’ descriptions and impressions expressed in screening reports, and forms of reader participation, including letters and local contests. These audiences’ actual appearances contrast to the ideal social images that Ecran communicated through advertising, photographs, and Hollywood reports, which created expectations and desires for modernity not always corresponding to the audiences encoded in the pages of the magazine. Exploring such rifts provides valuable information not only on the actual behaviour of local cinemagoers but particularly on media strategies and negotiations to respond to imaginary spectators. Although magazines have hardly been explored in local film history, these results suggest that they might shed some light on a missing piece – that of local readers and cinemagoers – especially considering the absence of data about historical audiences in Chile.
The Silver Screen and the Golden Land: Hollywood and ‘Hereness’ in the Pages of Film-Nayes (1936–1938)
Authors: Lanckman Lies
Published: January 2024

While much fan magazine research focuses on mainstream American magazines such as Photoplay, increased digitisation of archival resources has also made lesser-known publications accessible. This chapter looks at the Yiddish-language fan magazine Film-Nayes, published from 1936 to 1938 in pre-Holocaust Poland.The chapter has a twofold focus: firstly it examines the way the magazine occupied a site of “in-betweenness” in its investigation of Hollywood cinema, positioning itself and its readers between the United States and Europe, but also acknowledging the position of its editor and readers as between Yiddish and Polish cultural universes.Secondly, it demonstrates how this “in-betweenness” is also apparent within the magazine’s design choices: numerous items exploited the fact that its audience were not just bilingual, but also bidirectional, readers, switching as easily between Polish and Yiddish, between reading left-to-right and right-to-left, as they did between the different cultural universes in which they lived.
Who Was the Tramp?
Authors: Yazell Bryan
Published: January 2024

The book’s introduction locates the emergence of the modern tramp among the literature and policies formed in response to the dramatic rise in unemployed populations following the ‘Great Depression’ of 1873. The welfare codes during that time represented at once the pinnacle of progressive politics and the culmination of state regulation over the lives of citizens in both North America and Europe. Cross-disciplinary treatment of vagrancy was pivotal in this process. For government officials, vagrants confounded the notion of the productive citizen—the cornerstone of the social safety net—by continually refusing settled employment. Where legal and medical documents see this itinerancy as a problem, tramps themselves write texts celebrating their non-productive form of labour on aesthetic grounds. On the basis of this art, the tramp represents both a threat to the definition of the citizen as a productive member of society and an appeal to widen the terms of inclusion within the nation-state.
Vagrant Nationalism: Jack London and W. H. Davies on the Super-Tramp
Authors: Yazell Bryan
Published: January 2024

This chapter follows the discursive project around tramping overseas to Britain, where authors further connect tramping to the national fabric. The work of Welsh author W.H. Davies, the most famous British tramp writer of his day, marks a point of transition away from the archetypal tramping previously associated with the US. In The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), Davies celebrates the individualism of the American tramp and American governing institutions. This chapter poses Davies’s work against Jack London’s US-British comparison in The People of the Abyss (1903), which stresses the exceptionalism of American tramps against their British equivalents. But unlike London, Davies suggests that these forms of vagrancy are adaptable. His description of the British tramp thriving in the US takes up the notion of American vagabond mobility and makes it distinctly British. Davies thus implicitly considers the extent to which the features of vagrancy spring from an inherent national character and the environment in which they are generated. In doing so, he assists states in managing their respective vagrant populations by disentangling the regionalism associated with tramp types in literature—such as London’s exceptional Americans—from the language of statecraft and policy, which is fungible and international in scale.
Tramps in the Machine: Interwar British Vagrancy
Authors: Yazell Bryan
Published: January 2024

The discursive project established in the previous chapter, which hinges on identifying and containing vagrant subjects, explodes to the forefront of government policy during the 1930s. As this chapter argues, the incorporation of vagrant white men into workhouses reflects a turning point in the popular discourse around migrancy: the tramp as Davies knew it disappears almost entirely during the interwar period. The social ramifications of this disappearance are apparent in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times (1935), which both describe how government oversight brought an end to unregulated mobility in Britain. In these accounts, vagrants are citizens in need of rehabilitation rather than social outcasts to be punished. Their incorporation into governmental institutions like the casual ward fulfils Davies’s earlier call for greater management of vagrancy, but tramps suffer from the invasive medical scrutiny and meagre provisions the wards provide. Ultimately, this chapter connects Orwell to more modern critiques of the population control associated with biopower as elaborated by theorists such as Lauren Berlant.
Steinbeck’s Migrants: Families on the Move and the Politics of Resource Management
Authors: Yazell Bryan
Published: January 2024

This chapter offers new insight into John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), one of the most familiar depictions of migration in American literature. Steinbeck decries the institutions that prevent certain members of the population from fruitful labour in both his famous novel and The Harvest Gypsies (1936), its non-fiction predecessor. Like the tramp writers of the past, he tries to rehabilitate vagrants by stressing their close relation to mainstream values; unlike his predecessors, their whiteness is critical in this appeal. For Steinbeck, the model of the itinerant family, as opposed to the singular tramp, promises to transform the country so long as the federal government can provide the resources that facilitate their movement to where their labours (and cultural values) are most in need. As a result, this chapter claims, Steinbeck’s explicit push for greater governance of cultural, economic and demographic modes of production amplifies the more latent interest in social policy embedded in earlier vagrancy sources.
Tramping’s Afterlife
Authors: Yazell Bryan
Published: January 2024

This epilogue considers what it terms the afterlife of the tramp type in the United States after 1945, a time largely devoid of the dangerous connotations once attached to vagrancy. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), little remains of the tramping problem that concerned the likes of Mark Twain and Jack London. Rather, it is the normalization of tramping that vexes the author, who connects tramps to a romanticized version of whiteness that, he argues, no longer exists. Kerouac in turn locates the danger once embodied by tramps in the non-white people he observes in his travels. Kerouac’s text thus affirms in plain terms the extent to which the tramp had become synonymous with whiteness, a characterization that goes a long way in explaining the figure’s disappearance (and romanticization) in the postwar period. To elaborate on this racial subtext, this section concludes by reading Kerouac alongside Steinbeck, who offers a strikingly similar assessment of whiteness in Travels with Charley (1962), his late-career travel narrative.
On Animal Apocalypses in the First Century and Beyond
Authors: Dugan Elena L.
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides a new summation and contextualization of the Apocalypse of the Birds among first-century ce literature, with particular attention to the implications for the study of Paul, first-century apocalyptic (Revelation, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, the Synoptic tradition), and the methodology of dating the New Testament. The Animal Apocalypse is characterized as a literary tradition with energy and life, one that effloresced into the Vision of the Beasts and the Apocalypse of the Birds. And the model of an energetic Animal Apocalypse is confirmed by identifying a small work named herein the “Little Animal Apocalypse,” hidden in the Armenian Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
Wyler’s Early Films: Evolution of the “Styleless Style”
Authors: Price John M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks at Wyler’s late silent and early sound films and points out how the development of an embryonic style can be detected even at this early stage of his career. It also opines that many of the visual cinematic characteristics that are often attributed to other filmmakers were really first explored by Wyler.
Author: John M. Price
Persistent Presence: Space and Time in the Films of William Wyler
Authors: Mickus Francis
Published: January 2024

The past looms large in the films of William Wyler. Many of his films are structured around an inescapable past, which is as much historical as it is personal and social. Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver, The Heiress, Ben Hur all use aspects of personal, social and at times meta-filmic history to convey a sense of inescapability. While most films use ‘backstory’ as an important element in their narrative structure, it is the present problems that motivate Wyler’s characters, while the past remains a source of dramatic tension. This chapter asserts that Wyler’s films are resolved on whether or not characters can come to terms with their seemingly overwhelming legacy. Author: Francis Mickus
Turning the Other Cheek: Wyler’s Pacifism Trilogy— Friendly Persuasion (1956), The Big Country (1958), and Ben-Hur (1959)
Authors: Price John M.
Published: January 2024

This chapter contends that Wyler’s “pacifism trilogy” presents audiences with an insight into Wyler’s complex sentiments on non-violence, and that over the course of these three films, there is an evolutionary trajectory in the director’s depiction of pacifism and its efficacy. Author: John M. Price
William Wyler’s Voyage to Italy: Roman Holiday (1953), Progressive Hollywood, and the Cold War
Authors: Smith Anthony
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the complex history of Hollywood, politics, and transnationalism in Wyler’s Roman Holiday, and argues for Wyler’s significance at the intersection of the central developments of post-war cinema, the rise of Hollywood on the Tiber, the eclipse of neorealism, and the Red Scare in America. During production of the film, Wyler became the target of anti-communists eager to take down the liberal filmmaker who had opposed the HUAC investigations into the American film industry. All the while, Wyler pursued his own diplomatic mission to Italy, utilizing Italian film workers in Rome, working with Italians on the script, and employing an Italian second unit director. Wyler’s interests in making Hollywood more international are evidenced in the production of this film. Author: Anthony Smith
An Uncertain India: Early Nationalism in Charulata and Ghare Baire
Authors: Sanyal Devapriya
Published: January 2024

I look at these figures who have interacted with the colonial power and absorbed its ways, but have also felt the stirrings of a nascent nationalism within themselves. These characters could also be reflecting on the first reformers of nineteenth-century Bengal as it tried to break free of tradition. The men are engaged in anticipating what it means to be citizens of a nation – instead of subjects of the colonial power – and how to understand nationhood. These films also speculate on the zeitgeist of nineteenth-century India. The women become more important here and the chapter reflects upon that, with regard to the meaning of weak masculinity.
The Hollow Men: The Complacent ‘Achiever’ in Nayak, Aranyer Din Ratri and Seemabaddha
Authors: Sanyal Devapriya
Published: January 2024

Even as the 1960s and 1970s created large scale dissatisfaction, this period favoured the few, who had frequently to shed their earlier ideals. This chapter looks at this class of men that emerged in the turbulent 70s, who share certain common characteristics in that they favour personal advancement and are willing to play the game as long as it benefits them. A feminine presence is introduced into the narrative as a way of interrogating masculinity.
The Loneliest Revolution
Authors: Mirsepassi Ali
Published: January 2024

The Loneliest Revolution tells the story of the 1979 revolution through the long-forgotten memories of a sociologist of Iran who came of age in the 60s and 70s in Iran’s provinces. It holds together provincial politics, the rise of religious nativism, and the left’s response to a changing Iranian society, despite the restrictions state suppression placed on them, in a narrative blend of academic and autobiographical writing. It moves chronologically through the author’s encounters with Iranian nationalism, nativism, and radicalism, and ends with his sudden exit from Iran on the heels of political violence. Writing the political and the personal together, this book offers a singular contribution not only to the accounts of the Iranian revolution but to studies of historical memory and of twentieth-century social movements more broadly.
Golpayegan, 1966–1970
Authors: Mirsepassi Ali
Published: January 2024

When his father takes up a new position in the neighbouring town of Golpayegan, Mirsepassi is once again uprooted from his high school community. In this chapter, we learn how in Golpayegan, Mirsepassi absorbed all the information he could via radio and print about the liberation struggles of the 1960s. He also finds in his new environment a group of teachers who take him in and nurture his political growth. One of these teachers, a pious man, introduces him to the fulminating, anti-Pahlavi sermons of the cleric Mohammad Taqi Falsafi, while two other teachers, a pair of Marxists from Tehran, sneak him a copy of Lenin’s State and Revolution. Disaffected by his religious teacher’s rigid conservatism, Mirsepassi accepts an invitation to join a Hojjaitiyeh meeting, only to learn that the underground group was fiercely anti-Bahai and was meeting to plan a bombing attack on a local Bahai family’s house.
Tehran University, 1970–1974
Authors: Mirsepassi Ali
Published: January 2024

This chapter takes readers to Tehran, where Mirsepassi relocates to study political science at the University of Tehran. He imagines the city to be a modern metropolis, yet what he counters there is a certain intellectual provincialism. The narrow-minded nativism of prominent faculty members, like Ehsan Naraghi and Hamid Enayat, demonstrates the political confusion of the time and the tendency of foreign-educated Iranians to romanticize the countryside as the seat of Iranian virtue and tradition. Mirsepassi then discusses his interaction with student protesters and activist organizations like the Palestine Group, which convinces him to take the side of the latter in the Islamist vs. leftist divide that had been the source of personal political confusion for years.
Zahra’s Paradise, 1977–1978
Authors: Mirsepassi Ali
Published: January 2024

After completing his compulsory military service and beginning to explore postgraduate studies in the UK, Mirsepassi postpones his plans for graduate school. In this chapter, the author returns to Iran after hearing that the country is on the precipice of revolution. Fissures between Islamists and leftists, however, start to surface, and Mirsepassi and other leftists fret about their inability to challenge the popularity of Islamists, given the systematic erosion of leftist organizational capacities by the state through exile, imprisonment, and torture. The chapter ends with an account of two spectacular public events: one, a massive gathering of people in a working-class district of Tehran to hear Taqi Falsafi speaks, and another a protest at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, where the University of Tehran professor Homa Nategh summarily dismissed questions from foreign journalists about Islam’s view of women. Mirsepassi reflects on the haste with which Leftist activists dismissed these questions and their meaning for the trajectory of the revolution.
Conclusion
Authors: Mirsepassi Ali
Published: January 2024

Given the haste with which Mirsepassi left Iran, this chapter explores the life of his mentors and interlocutors in the aftermath of the revolution. The lives of some ended in premature death, disaster, and exile, while others learned how to reconcile themselves to the demands of the new regime so that they could continue living in Iran. It concludes with a reflection on the value of memories for piecing together a fuller history of the revolution, one which does not bury or renounce the missteps of the parties involved, but bares them all for examination.
Glasgow Dailies
Authors: Fraser W. Hamish
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the editors and owners behind huge expansion in competing daily newspapers aimed at the rapidly growing city of Glasgow and the surrounding area, from the North British Mail of 1847 through papers that had an often brilliant but relatively brief existence in the 1850s and 1860s such as the Glasgow Morning Journal. By the 1870s the North British Daily Mail and the Glasgow Herald had seen off rivals for a daily morning paper, including unsuccessful efforts by the Conservative Party to challenge a Liberal press. The emergence of evening papers, from the Evening Citizen in 1864, proved more fruitful ground for Conservatives and by the 1890s the Evening News was proving more successful than its rival Evening Citizen and Evening Times.
Aberdeen
Authors: Fraser W. Hamish
Published: January 2024

This chapter deals with the rivalry of a variety of newspapers in this city. The Aberdeen Journal remained unflinchingly Conservative in its attitudes even when out of line with the dominant political views of the city. It struggled at times against the Liberal press, first the Aberdeen Herald and then the Aberdeen Free Press the latter of which backed Gladstonian Liberalism. Although vulnerable at times and slow to innovate, helped by a successful Evening Express and with financial aid from leading Conservatives in the north-east of Scotland the Aberdeen Journal survived and gradually became the dominant paper in the city and its readership spread to the surrounding areas. There was an often-brief existence of numerous other papers, but the Journal and the Free Press survived, eventually merging as the Aberdeen Press & Journal.
The North-East Counties
Authors: Fraser W. Hamish
Published: January 2024

The usually owner/editors behind the many weekly newspapers that appeared in the small towns of lowland north-east Scotland is the theme of this chapter. It was an area of extensive literacy and produced many self-educated journalists who found success outside the North-East. Each town had its own distinctive local identity and local newspapers played a key part in developing that identity. Most papers saw themselves as playing a crucial role in assisting in the progressive development of their towns. Many newspapers had ambitions beyond their immediate locality and sought to compete across county boundaries while others saw their market a wider farming community or fishing community. As befitted an area where Gladstonian Liberalism remained strong there was often a remarkable radicalism in some of the views presented but by the early twentieth century most had adopted a mild Conservatism.
Lanarkshire and Clydeside
Authors: Fraser W. Hamish
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks at the press in the towns of west central Scotland, such as Airdrie and Coatbridge in Lanarkshire, Paisley and Port Glasgow in Renfrewshire and the industrialising Dunbartonshire on the north side of the Clyde, all of which were at the heart of much of Scotland’s heavy industry. They struggled to escape the shadow of Glasgow, but most had their own identity and a range of local issues with which a variety of new local papers sought to deal. The appearance of a local newspaper was frequently an indication of a desire to create an identity as villages were transformed into spreading towns. Areas on both sides of the Clyde, although going through huge industrial change, retained through their newspapers a sense of a separate history. At the same time, it is in this area that one sees the emergence of substantial chains of newspapers from firms such as John Cossar & Son aimed at the Glasgow suburbs and focussing entirely on local news.
Coping with the New
Authors: Fraser W. Hamish
Published: January 2024

The first half of the twentieth century saw an increasingly Conservative press operating in a Scotland that remained predominantly Liberal and Labour in its politics. This chapter considers how old themes such as Irish immigration, educational change and Scottish identity and governance remained central issues. Increasingly these were secondary to recurring concerns first about what was seen as the radicalism of pre-1914 Liberal governments and then about the rise of the Labour Party. Fears of the spread of socialism became widespread. This often brought in some papers an empathetic response to Mussolini’s activities in Italy and even to the rise of Naziism in Germany and support for appeasement was widespread. There often seemed to be a resistance to the new and the innovative and few of the daily newspapers showed enthusiasm for any of the reforms of the 1945 Labour Government.
Conclusion
Authors: Fraser W. Hamish
Published: January 2024

This final chapter looks at what the Royal Commission on the Press of 1949 had to say about Scottish newspapers. It then considers how far there had been a change in the approaches and attitudes over a century and concludes that even with Scottish-owned newspapers there was less of a sense of looking at the world from a specifically Scottish perspective. No Scottish-owned paper succeeded in achieving national dominance and the dailies in the four Scottish cities remained remarkably regionally focussed. What was significant news was increasingly identified from London and filtered through London owned papers. The selling of the Scotsman to the Canadian businessman, Roy Thomson was a symbolic end to an era. Most weeklies no longer saw themselves as having much to say about national or international issues and were becoming reports of local events, committees and organisations. Financial pressures were bringing reduced coverage in all papers and were already pointing towards a decline in print journalism.
Human-Animal Relations and the Hunt in Korea and Northeast Asia
Authors: Kallander George
Published: January 2024

This book focuses on the transitional period in late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn dynasty Korea from the 1270s until 1506, situating the Korean peninsula in relations to the neighboring Mongol Empire and Ming Dynasty China. During this period, Korean statesmen expanded their influence over people and the environment. Human-animal relations became increasingly significant to politics, national security, and elite identities. Animals, both wild and domestic, were used in ritual sacrifices, submitted as tax tribute, exchanged in regional trade, and most significantly, hunted. Royal proponents of the hunt as a facet of political and military legitimacy, were contested by a small but vocal group of officials. These vocal elites attempted to circumscribe royal authority by coopting hunting through Confucian laws and rites, either by regulating the practice to a state ritual at best, or, at worst, considering it a barbaric exercise not befitting of the royal family. While kings defied the narrow Confucian views on governance that elevated book learning over martial skills, these tensions reveal how the meaning of political power and authority were shaped. Attention to animals and hunting depicts how a multiplicity of cultural references—Sinic, Korean, Northeast Asian, and steppeland—existed in tension with each other and served as a battleground for defining politics, society, and ritual. This book argues that rather than mere resources, animals were a site over which power struggles were waged.
Introduction: Why Animals and the Hunt?
Authors: Kallander George
Published: January 2024

The introduction begins by describing a royal hunting excursion in the late fifteenth century when the young king and his entourage, including the most senior women at the court, attended a hunt outside the palace. This particular moment, one of many recorded in the early sources, demonstrates some of the political, social and gendered meanings of the hunt in premodern Korea and Northeast Asia. Next, the introduction examines the book in terms of animal and environmental studies. Considered throughout are ecological questions about land use and overhunting, the impact of human settlements on forests and animals, and the environmental consequences of state expansion. The introduction outlines the book’s structure and discusses the genesis of the project before offering a brief survey of the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia on the eve of the fourteenth century and Mongol expansion.
Wild Beasts on a Premodern Peninsula
Authors: Kallander George
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the Korean peninsular environment as the backdrop for the wild animals that live on it. To argue that not all wild animals were equally important to hunters or the state, it categorises the beasts most frequently encountered in the mountains, valleys, plains and pages of the historical records. Some held more significance in terms of protein, others for ritual needs, and yet more for medicinal, economic, or symbolic purposes. Some beasts were outright dangerous and a threat to people regardless of social status. The second half of this chapter studies the social role of animals in premodern Korea. How did people think about and ‘use’ animals in non-material ways? Part of the answer includes the adoption of animals as symbols of legitimacy and power by early political leaders, commoners and the lowborn. These beasts of the wild helped people from all social status groups make sense of their worlds.
Introduction
Authors: Yaghoobi Claudia
Published: January 2024

The introduction delineates the main argument, the theoretical discourse, and methodological approach to Iranian Armenian diasporic experience which the author theorizes as verants’ughi. Theories of diaspora, nationalism and the significance of history, language, literature, religion, and culture for a diasporic nation, identity formation and hybridity, and Iranian Armenian diasporic experience as verants’ughi are discussed. This introduction also maps out the significance of Iranian Armenian diaspora and why it deserves attention, and charts out the structure of the book.
Diaspora, Nostos and Longing
Authors: Yaghoobi Claudia
Published: January 2024

Chapter One describes cultural productions that provide insight into Iranian Armenian diasporic life, the longing for an ideal homeland, trauma and pain, fragmented memories and Iranian Armenians’struggles to maintain ties with their heritage while they resist assimilation to the host nation’s culture. To explore the Armenian presence in Iran, this chapter provides important historical junctures where the Armenians’ minoritised position within their host nations is significant. Armenian repatriation – Nergakht (return migration) – from Iran to Armenia is also discussed in this chapter, as a major turning point for Iranian Armenians.
Maintaining Heritage and Assimilation
Authors: Yaghoobi Claudia
Published: January 2024

Chapter Two explores the Iranian Armenian community’s struggles to maintain ties with their heritage, all the while they resist assimilation to the host nation’s culture. Within these culturalproductions, representations of Armenians who often adopted subordinate social profiles as they were pushed to the margins predominate. This positioning resulted in a cultural practice of destabilising identity categories, embodying the values and practices of multiple identities and forging multiple, overlapping national and historically influenced identities. To explore the ways in which Armenians resisted assimilation or rather assimilated in Iran and in the US, this chapter provides the most important theories of assimilation and examine the Armenian community’s responses to each one of those theoretical perspectives.
History, Memory and Collective Consciousness
Authors: Yaghoobi Claudia
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how Iranian Armenian diasporic correspondence with the homeland is based on a fractured memory that results in the deconstruction and reconstruction of a multifaceted Armenian identity open to diversity. While the dominant concept in this chapter is the trauma of the shared history witnessed around the 1915 Genocide, other references to folk tales, literature, landmarks and so on are also explored, such as Mount Ararat and the Arax River.
Conclusion
Authors: Yaghoobi Claudia
Published: January 2024

The Conclusion explores how Armenian authors and artists tackle questions of agency and empowerment as they attempt to carve out spaces of belonging that diverge from historical origins. Of interest is an analysis of the specific modes of power and representationthat these creators employ to rehabilitate their position as members of a minoritised population. This chapter views creating as a healing space that allows diasporic authors and artists to process trauma through disordered and reordered memories. Through creativity and reflection, they come to terms with the fragmented nature of their thoughts, memories, global dispersion and historical origins.
The Covid-19 Pandemic and Global Climate Change: Comparing Two Long-term Dangers
Authors: Hansson Sven Ove
Published: January 2024

This chapter challenges the common idea that there are short-term problems such as pandemics and long-term problems such as climate change. Hansson argues that both problems have long-term causes and consequences resulting from human actions (and inactions), and addressing these problems will require decision makers to rely on the knowledge and input of scientific experts. However, Hansson identifies several important distinctions between these two problems that cause different types of challenges in dealing with them. He argues that national leaders have stronger incentives to deal with pandemics than climate change because the effects of pandemics are more immediately felt and harder to deny, and there are efficient measures that can be taken against pandemics within an individual country, while addressing climate change will require global coordination.
Future-Regarding Democratic Leadership
Authors: Mackenzie Michael K.
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on future-regarding democratic leadership. Following other democratic theorists, Mackenzie makes a distinction between authoritarian and democratic modes of leadership. Authoritarian leaders act on their followers, while democratic leaders act with them. Mackenzie argues that democratic leadership has at least three functions that are useful (and probably necessary) for initiating and supporting future-regarding collective actions: (1) the aiding thinking function; (2) the forging joint commitments function; and (3) the mobilisation function. The chapter concludes by arguing that we will need future-regarding leaders if we are going to coordinate our actions to achieve specific long-term goals and objectives, but we will also need to make our democratic systems more deliberative if we are going to create the conditions that are necessary for future-regarding democratic leadership to thrive.
Democratic Institutions and Future Generations
Authors: Caluwaerts Didier , Vermassen Daan
Published: January 2024

In this chapter, Caluwaerts and Vermassen conduct a comparative analysis of future-regarding policies in 36 democracies over 6 years (2014–2019). Their findings show that democracies with proportional electoral systems, grand coalitions, and mechanisms for citizen participation are less biased against the future. The analysis also shows that some institutional arrangements, such as federalism, have little or no effect on whether a democracy is short-sighted or future-regarding. Caluwaerts and Vermassen show that a democracy’s most basic institutional structures matter when it comes to future-regarding policymaking. Democracies that foster regular and total alternations of government and exclude rather than include are less likely to produce future-regarding policies in comparison to those with institutions that foster continuity and inclusion.
Voter Myopia Reassessed
Authors: Rapeli Lauri
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents the results of two surveys of political elites and non-elites in Finland. Rapeli’s analysis shows that while non-elites (both voters and non-voters) are more myopic than political elites (both elected and unelected officials), people in each category are more future-regardingthan expected. This analysis also shows us which types of people are more future-regarding in Finland: those with more education, those with higher levels of trust in political institutions, and those with higher levels of empathy for others are significantly more future-regarding. Rapeli’s findings challenge the idea that democracies are short-sighted because voters and elected politicians care only about the present and tend to neglect the future.
Introducing George Craig
Authors: Finlay John
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks at George Craig’s early life in Galashiels, the significance of the burgh, and his family background. His relationship with the Leith Bank is discussed along with a survey of the major clients for whom he acted as local law agent. These include the laird of Gala; the laird of Torwoodlee; the geologist George Fairholme of Greenknowe and the anatomy professor, Dr Alexander Monro tertius. Craig’s relationship with Sir Walter Scott is also considered, as are his working relationships those working in his office, including his partner William Rutherford and his clerks. This chapter also discusses Craig’s correspondence in general and Craig’s political interests. As a Tory political agent, Craig had to understand electoral law and part of his work involved arranging for the qualification of new voters.
Parish Life in the Borders
Authors: Finlay John
Published: January 2024

As a law agent for heritors in various parishes, Craig had a professional interest in parish life and corresponded widely with schoolmasters and local officials. He had a particularly close relationship with Robert Fyshe, the Galashiels schoolmaster, and James Paris in Stow. This chapter focuses particularly the parish poor and the administration of the poor law from Craig’s perspective as a local law agent. This includes the difficulties of dealing with the wandering poor, such as the wives and dependents of soldiers, and unwed mothers who depended on the parish for help. The tension between parishes, keen to offload the poor, was a constant theme of his correspondence which demonstrated the challenges of law agents like Craig who mediated between the rich and the poor.
Baron Bailie and Factor
Authors: Finlay John
Published: January 2024

The baron bailie of Galashiels was an office tied up with acting as factor to the laird of Gala and these roles both imbued their holder with significant authority, although the role of bailie had long been in decline and courts that may once have been held were held no longer. An aspect of the role that had been preserved was the maintenance of order which required the bailie to work with local constables who were employed to assist in that process. Another was looking out for criminal offences, such as poaching, which were a regular occurrence in rural communities. The role of factor included aspects of domestic management, in particular dealing with tax affairs and local surveyors of taxes.
Borders Law Agent
Authors: Finlay John
Published: January 2024

Craig’s correspondence demonstrates the everyday concerns of a local law agent in 19th century Scotland. While little is known of his legal education, Craig had a network of contacts in the legal world across the south of Scotland and north of England as well as in Edinburgh and London. Craig had a chamber practice and did not act in court as a procurator, however he did employ procurators to carry out litigation on his behalf in the local courts. He also engaged in arbitration and as a sub-distributor of stamps was involved with the stamp office in Edinburgh. Much of his time was spent in debt recovery processes b but he was involved in a range of business, including conveyancing and landlord/tenant disputes. His relationships were lawyers were extensive and illuminating.
Furth of Scotland
Authors: Finlay John
Published: January 2024

Law agents in Scotland often had to deal with matters extraneous to their jurisdiction. In Craig’s case this included dealing with solicitors in London, the north of England, Dublin and also attorneys in Jamaica. These dealing related to a variety of issues including probate and debt recovery. There were also financial and other arrangements to be made for clients temporarily overseas, such as those on military service. Craig also made arrangements to assist emigrants to America and, in particular, New South Wales where experienced shepherds, in particular, were in demand. Local practice was not divorced from the imperial context and, in a variety of ways, Craig encountered clients whose experiences abroad affected his legal and banking practice and his network necessarily extended to lawyers and bankers in England and elsewhere.
Conclusion
Authors: Finlay John
Published: January 2024

Lawyers’ correspondence can be a useful source of information about the community the lawyer served, particularly revealing its social and economic circumstances. It can also say much about the nature of the contemporary legal profession. Some of those Craig corresponded with were significant figures and through that correspondence local personalities emerge such as James Curle and Andrew Lang. Craig was forward-thinking, competent, interested in detail but stubborn and often frank in his assessment of others. His life and career reflect the 1820s and 1830s which was a time of economic and social change encompassing the Scottish Reform Act and new directions in the local textile industry. His ultimate sequestration, through no fault of his own, was a sad end to a productive life.
The Caliphate and the Natural and Human Cycles
Authors: Manzano Moreno Eduardo
Published: January 2024

'Īsà al-Rāzī was a court historian whose official annals describe ordinary and extraordinary events in remarkable detail. The regular events are particularly interesting because they provide a fascinating insight into how the Umayyad caliphate systematised everyday life. Annual cycles were narrated through a complex calendar frameworked that included the recollection of natural and religious events. This narrative also shows how the caliphate dealt with unexpected calamities such as droughts, floods and famines, which were also dealt with in Mālikite law.The aim of this chapter is to show how the Umayyad caliphate introduced a sense of order and regulation in the physical and social world.