Search

"Spreading the News: The Illustrated Press," focuses on the new concept of the illustrated universal survey periodical that appeared early in the 1830s, first in England, then in France. It was enabled by technological advances such as the steam press, cheaper paper, wood engraving and stereotypes, as well as greater literacy among the citizenry. The earliest illustrated periodicals were published by social reformers in both countries who were attempting to raise the status of the working classes, but the medium soon attracted wealthier, more educated strata as well; within decades the illustrated press had spread throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians usually analyze changing gender constructions in the criminal courts after World War I through cases involving men and women. Using a different analytical lens, this article explores two well-publicized murder trials involving war veterans and illegitimate children, one of a soldier who murdered his wife's daughter from an adulterous affair and one who killed his own son. Although notions of masculinity had changed, the police, courts, and Home Office used traditional factors to assess punishments, including the degree of provocation, the behavior of the women involved, and the issue of deterrence. The press, however, was more sympathetic to the veterans, regarding them as victims of circumstances, much like women who committed infanticide. This new presentation did not succeed with the Home Office, especially as the war moved further into the past. By 1925, men's war service had less influence on punishment than Victorian ideas of gender and criminal responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. E. B. Du Bois noted that the nineteenth-century US slave plantation corresponded with the factory in its worst conceivable form. This article expands upon Du Bois's insight to consider the emergence of the English working class in correspondence with American settler slavery and colonial projects within the British Empire. From above, elites theorized about the exploitation of labor as a world historical project to compare the enslaved, the colonized, and the English worker against one another. From below, proletarian intellectuals imagined the freedom of English laborers through the condition of the enslaved in the American South and Jamaica and the colonized in South Asia. By placing these histories from above and below together, this article argues that it is impossible to conceive of the English working class making itself and being made at remove from the enslaving and colonizing projects of global capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though a substantial and groundbreaking book, the comprehensiveness of E. P. Thompson's narrative in The Making of the Working Class highlighted its many absences. This article considers the potential for examining the black presence within a Thompsonian framework of class in eighteenth-century England. It focuses on the politics of multiethnic solidarity, considering why black history remains so marginalized when key organizations and political moments, such as the Cato Street Conspiracy and the London Corresponding Society, both present in The Making, were multiethnic in their political ambition and their membership. Through the discussion of a Victorian multiethnic community of antiracist activists, this article also examines how research focusing on the intersecting geographies of race and class can contribute to the foundations of scholarship of English history provided by The Making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the prospects and the reality of British commercial activity in Siberia in the early twentieth century, before the outbreak of World War I, and is based on contemporary comments by travelers, businessmen, and commercial agents. Contemporaries agreed that the dynamic Siberian economy opened up opportunities for British exports and trade. British firms, however, lagged behind commercial rivals, in particular in Germany, and the United States. The article explores the reasons for this and also looks at the subjects of the British Empire who went to Siberia and the conditions under which they worked. The article demonstrates the vibrancy of Siberian economic development in this period and the active participation of Western powers in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]