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"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]

The paper investigates the role Rabbi Nathan Adler played in the institutionalisation of the English Chief Rabbinate. It focuses on his appointment to Chief Rabbi and on his activities in instituting the various roles of Chief Rabbi in the post-emancipation Anglo-Jewish community. Rabbi Adler's complicated relations with early Reform Judaism in England are also dealt with. When Rabbi Adler came to London he had an image of Reform Judaism as he knew it in Hanover, where he came from. In a short period he understood the uniqueness of the English Reform Movement, and adjusted his politics towards it accordingly. Continuing the dominance of German Rabbis heading the English Chief Rabbinate, Rabbi Adler brought with him to England a new mode of modern German Rabbinate, established in the mid nineteenth century. Rabbi Adler adapted, with considerable success, the German model to the British reality. Rabbi Adler was a very close associate of Sir Moses Montefiore. Their close relationship was an important factor in Rabbi Adler's success in the formulation of the Chief Rabbinate in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom. [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]

The article argues that the significance of the nineteenth-century comics character Ally Sloper cannot be understood without reference to the parallel career that this fictional celebrity developed across other media, most notably music hall. The history and evolution of the textual character, and of his various incarnations on stage and screen, are chronicled, with the aim both of documenting the expansion of working-class leisure culture and of demonstrating the centrality of Sloper to the development of a specifically British theatrical tradition that moved away from earlier continental models. Contemporary responses to Sloper, including moral outrage, are discussed, and the article concludes by analysing the skilled commercial exploitation of the character which would influence later practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines issues of masculinity in the life and work of 19th century British poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The author uses aspects of Victorian music to inform his analysis of Rossetti's masculinity. Popular concepts of music during this era defined it either as an aesthetic ideal or as a feminine art.