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In the 1900s as Edwardian women musicians moved from music teaching into public performance, cinemas offered a safe place: out of the spotlight and in the relative anonymity of the darkened auditorium. The rapid growth in cinemas from the 1910s also meant that women were needed to fill the demand for ensembles, pianists, and vocalists, a demand that greatly increased during World War I however, women faced successive waves of backlashes and debates about their abilities played out in the music and popular press, in trade and fan magazines, and in the Musicians’ Union. Evidence of women’s experience can also be gleaned from personal testimony, diaries, and autobiography, but this is piecemeal and represents only a fraction of what was a considerable occupation for women. Focusing on cinema musicianship, this article will examine the battles for women entering the profession between 1900 and 1930.

Why do early films present the Netherlands as a country full of canals and windmills, where people wear traditional costumes and wooden shoes, while industries and modern urban life are all but absent? Images of Dutchness investigates the roots of this visual repertoire from diverse sources, ranging from magazines to tourist brochures, from anthropological treatises to advertising trade cards, stereoscopic photographs, picture postcards, magic lantern slide sets and films of early cinema. This richly illustrated book provides an in-depth study of the fascinating corpus of popular visual media and their written comments that are studied for the first time. Through the combined analysis of words and images, the author identifies not only what has been considered Ÿtypically DutchŒ in the long nineteenth century, but also provides new insights into the logic and emergence of national clichés in the Western world.

A presentation at the University of Nottingham on 28 Feb 2017 organised by the Music Dept. The development of silent film music between the 1900s and 1920s up until the coming of sound cinema, largely reflected popular tastes and musical styles of the period. But many performances were improvised and not documented and there are very few extant examples of full music scores composed specifically for silent film. The majority of film music was compiled by music directors from library music, however this presentation will use a key examples of original music scores such as that for The Battle of the Somme, and compare these to recent scores for silent films by contemporary composers, including Laura Rossi's new score for the Battle of the Somme, which sheds light on changing musical tastes and attitudes towards the visual material which the music accompanied

Between 1914 and 1919, elite white people erected monuments across Virginia, permanently transforming the landscape of their communities with memorials to the Confederacy. Why did these Confederate memorialists continue to build monuments to a conflict their side had lost half a century earlier? This thesis examines this question to extend the study of the Lost Cause past the traditional stopping date of the Civil War semicentennial in 1915 and to add to the study of memorialization as a historical process. Studying the design and language of monuments as well as dedication orations and newspaper coverage of unveiling ceremonies, this thesis focuses on Virginia's Confederate memorials to provide a case study for the whole South. Memorialization is always an act of the present as much as an honoring of the past. Elite white Virginians built memorials to speak to their contemporaries at the same time they claimed to speak for them. Memorialists turned to the Confederacy for support in an effort to maintain their status at the top of post-Reconstruction Southern society. Confederate monuments served as permanent physical role models, continuing sectional reconciliation, encouraging women to maintain prescribed gender roles, and discouraging African Americans from standing up for their rights. American involvement in World War I exacerbated societal changes that threatened the position of the traditional white ruling class. As proponents of the Lost Cause squared off against the transformations of the Progressive era, Virginia's Confederate memorialists imbued monuments throughout the Commonwealth with messages meant to ensure their continued dominance. Master of Arts

Ernst Lubitsch, the German film director who left Berlin for Hollywood in 1923, is best remembered for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as TROUBLE IN PARADISE and NINOTCHKA, featuring Greta Garbo. Kristin Thompson's study focuses on Lubitsch's silent films from the years between 1918 and 1927, tracing the impact this director had on consolidating classical Hollywood filmmaking. She gives a new assessment of the stylistic two-way traffic between the American and the German film industries, after World War I each other's strongest rival in Europe. By 1919, Lubitsch had emerged as the finest proponent of the German studio style: sophisticated, urbane and thoroughly professionalized. He was quick to absorb 'American' innovations and stylistic traits, becoming the unique master of both systems and contributing to the golden ages of the American as well as the German cinema. Utilizing Lubitsch's silent films as a key to two great national cinemas, Thompson's meticulously illustrated and extensively researched book goes beyond an authorial study and breaks new ground in cinema history.