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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        The Arctic in the British imagination 1818–1914

        by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, Rob David

        The Arctic region has been the subject of much popular writing. This book considers nineteenth-century representations of the Arctic, and draws upon an extensive range of evidence that will allow the 'widest connections' to emerge from a 'cross-disciplinary analysis' using different methodologies and subject matter. It positions the Arctic alongside more thoroughly investigated theatres of Victorian enterprise. In the nineteenth century, most images were in the form of paintings, travel narratives, lectures given by the explorers themselves and photographs. The book explores key themes in Arctic images which impacted on subsequent representations through text, painting and photography. For much of the nineteenth century, national and regional geographical societies promoted exploration, and rewarded heroic endeavor. The book discusses images of the Arctic which originated in the activities of the geographical societies. The Times provided very low-key reporting of Arctic expeditions, as evidenced by its coverage of the missions of Sir John Franklin and James Clark Ross. However, the illustrated weekly became one of the main sources of popular representations of the Arctic. The book looks at the exhibitions of Arctic peoples, Arctic exploration and Arctic fauna in Britain. Late nineteenth-century exhibitions which featured the Arctic were essentially nostalgic in tone. The Golliwogg's Polar Adventures, published in 1900, drew on adult representations of the Arctic and will have confirmed and reinforced children's perceptions of the region. Text books, board games and novels helped to keep the subject alive among the young.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2020

        Knowledge, mediation and empire

        James Tod's journeys among the Rajputs

        by Florence D'Souza, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        This study of the British colonial administrator James Tod (1782-1835), who spent five years in north-western India (1818-22) collecting every conceivable type of material of historical or cultural interest on the Rajputs and the Gujaratis, gives special attention to his role as a mediator of knowledge about this little-known region of the British Empire in the early nineteenth century to British and European audiences. The book aims to illustrate that British officers did not spend all their time oppressing and inferiorising the indigenous peoples under their colonial authority, but also contributed to propagating cultural and scientific information about them, and that they did not react only negatively to the various types of human difference they encountered in the field.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2017

        The souls of white folk

        White settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s

        by Brett Shadle, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        Kenya's white settlers have been alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. The souls of white folk examines settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment. It takes seriously - though not uncritically - what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their world. It argues that the settler soul was composed of a series of interlaced ideas: settlers equated civilisation with a (hard to define) whiteness; they were emotionally enriched through claims to paternalism and trusteeship over Africans; they felt themselves constantly threatened by Africans, by the state, and by the moral failures of other settlers; and they daily enacted their claims to supremacy through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation and violence. The souls of white folk will appeal to those interested in the histories of Africa, colonialism, and race, and can be appreciated by scholars and students alike.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2024

        Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 100/2

        Higher Learning and Civic Cultures of Knowledge: Manchester 1824–2024

        by Stuart Jones

        The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia, have a global reach and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2024

        The Legacy of John Polidori

        The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny

        by Sam George, Bill Hughes

        John Polidori's novella The Vampyre (1819) is perhaps 'the most influential horror story of all time' (Frayling). Polidori's story transformed the shambling, mindless monster of folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat that stalked London society rather than being confined to the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Polidori's Lord Ruthven was thus the ancestor of the vampire as we know it. This collection explores the genesis of Polidori's vampire. It then tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy. Texts discussed range from the Romantic period, including the fascinating and little-known The Black Vampyre (1819), through the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, to contemporary vampire film, paranormal romance, and science fiction. They emphasise the background of colonial revolution and racial oppression in the early nineteenth century and the cultural shifts of postmodernity.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2023

        Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 99/2

        by Stephen Mossman, Cordelia Warr

        The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Colonial frontiers

        by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, Kim Latham

        Colonial frontiers explores the formation, structure and maintenance of boundaries and frontiers in settler colonies. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and post-colonial theorists, the authors in this fascinating collection explore the importance of cross-cultural interactions in the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and America. Taking key historical moments to illuminate the formation of new boundaries and the interaction between the settler societies and the indigenous groups, this book raises many important questions about how the empire worked 'on the ground'. Importantly, the collection attempts to theorise the indigenous experience. As we move towards globalisation, borders and boundaries have begun to fall away. This book reminds us that not long ago the frontiers and boundaries were the key sites for cross-cultural interaction. This collection, which includes chapters by John K. Noyes, Nigel Penn, Kay Schaffer and Ian McNiven, is broad in scope and presents an exciting new approach to the issues surrounding group interaction in colonial settings. Students and academics, from backgrounds such as imperial history, anthropology and post-colonial studies, will find this collection extremely valuable.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2012

        Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation

        Passengers, pilots, publicity

        by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2001

        British culture and the end of empire

        by Andrew Thompson, Stuart Ward, John Mackenzie

        This book is the first major attempt to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture. The sheer range of subjects discussed, from the satire boom of the 1960s to the worlds of sport and the arts, demonstrates how profoundly decolonisation was absorbed into the popular consciousness. Offers an extremely novel and provocative interpretation of post-war British cultural history, and opens up a whole new field of enquiry in the history of decolonisation. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2014

        Engendering whiteness

        White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865

        by Cecily Jones, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities. Engendering whiteness draws on a wide variety of sources including property deeds, wills and court transcripts, and interrogates the ways in which white women could be simultaneously socially positioned within plantation societies as both agents and as victims. It also reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, to challenge the ideological and social constraints that sought to restrict their lives to the private domestic sphere, to protect the limited rights afforded to them, to secure independent livelihoods and to create meaningful existences. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        J. Lee Thompson

        by Steve Chibnall

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2010

        Child, nation, race and empire

        Child rescue discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915

        by Margot Hillel, Shurlee Swain, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        Child, nation, race and empire is an innovative, inter-disciplinary, cross cultural study that contributes to understandings of both contemporary child welfare practices and the complex dynamics of empire. It analyses the construction and transmission of nineteenth-century British child rescue ideology. Locating the origins of contemporary practice in the publications of the prominent English Child rescuers, Dr Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Benjamin Waugh, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and their colonial disciples and literature written for children, it shows how the vulnerable body of the child at risk came to be reconstituted as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. Yet, as the shocking testimony before the many official enquiries into the past treatment of children in out-of-home 'care' held in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada make clear, there was no guarantee that the rescued child would be protected from further harm. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2007

        The French empire at War, 1940–1945

        by Martin Thomas, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie

        The French empire at war draws on original research in France and Britain to investigate the history of the divided French empire - the Vichy and the Free French empires - during the Second World War. What emerges is a fascinating story. While it is clear that both the Vichy and Free French colonial authorities were only rarely masters of their own destiny during the war, preservation of limited imperial control served them both in different ways. The Vichy government exploited the empire in an effort to withstand German-Italian pressure for concessions in metropolitan France and it was key to its claim to be more than the mouthpiece of a defeated nation. For Free France too, the empire acquired a political and symbolic importance which far outweighed its material significance to the Gaullist war effort. As the war progressed, the Vichy empire lost ground to that of the Free French, something which has often been attributed to the attraction of the Gaullist mystique and the spirit of resistance in the colonies. In this radical new interpretation, Thomas argues that it was neither of these. The course of the war itself, and the initiatives of the major combatant powers, played the greatest part in the rise of the Gaullist empire and the demise of Vichy colonial control. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2024

        John Ford's America

        by Jeffrey Richards

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2024

        Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 100/1

        by Fred Schurink, Rachel Winchcombe

        The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia, have a global reach and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections.

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