Portrayal of lobotomy in the popular press: 1935-1960

This study analyzed the content of popular press articles on lobotomy between the years 1935 and 1960. Both a qualitative and quantitative analysis provided evidence that the press initially used uncritical and sensational reporting styles, with the content of articles on lobotomy becoming increasingly negative through time. The initial positive bias occurred despite opposing views in the medical community, which provided a basis for more balanced coverage. These findings support the theory that biased reporting in popular press articles may have been a factor influencing the quick and widespread adoption of lobotomy as a psychiatric treatment.     

From Husbands and Housewives to Suckers and Whores: Marital‐Political Anxieties in the ‘House of Egypt’, 1919–48

This article traces the transformation in the symbolic role of the modern, bourgeois Egyptian home and the political and personal relationships it allegedly engendered, showing that what had originally appeared as promising became the potential site of treason and deceit. The article relies on archival materials, political caricatures and articles from the popular press. Beginning with an assessment of the political discourse of 1919, it then illustrates how, by the 1930s, home life and marriage appeared as zones of crisis rather than promise. By the late 1940s, as a stand‐in for political commentary, the domicile appeared as a space from which men had to escape at all costs, presaging a revolution in which a new political order would restore the household to its previous order and centrality.     

论美国报刊媒体的大众化(1865-1914)

19世纪下半叶,美国社会开始从“精英时代”进入“大众时代”。当时的报刊杂志恰当地映照了这种变化,主要表现在主观性的政党报刊转向客观性的独立报刊;廉价又通俗的报刊杂志的兴起等。     

Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public History, and Representations of Poverty, Crime, and Race in New York City

The past is never truly past, nor are historians/archaeologists privileged stewards of a city's memory. The moment ground was broken at Five Points, researchers encountered a public avidly interested in the history of New York's legendary nineteenth-century slum. From the 1840s this Manhattan neighborhood provided journalists with grist for lurid tabloid tales, creating a grim literary legacy that lingers in popular historical memory into the twenty-first century and also continues to shape public perceptions of poverty and antipoverty policies. New York's press remains steeped in memories of a crime-infested Five Points. Even as researchers uncovered nineteenth-century accounts of gangs, prostitution, and sweat-shop labor at the Five Points, our own newspapers arrived with blaring headlines drawing on nineteenth-century stereotypes of poverty, race, and place. The struggle to create alternative accounts of life in Five Points based on archaeological evidence clashed with these tenacious narratives and the class interests informing them.     

Peru's image as a culinary destination

Destination image is the cumulative product of individuals processing information about a destination over time. This image comes from different sources, like media articles intended to inform a general audience and promotional materials intended to persuade potential tourists to visit. Various aspects of a destination can provide the focal point for its image, including its unique foods. With the growing interest in food in the media and in tourism, the image of places around the world is increasingly centered on this topic. Peru offers a timely case study to investigate this issue; in recent years, it has gained an international reputation as a culinary destination. The research discussed in this paper examines both popular media articles and official tourism promotions to understand the devices used to construct Peru as a culinary destination. It uses quantitative and qualitative content analysis of magazine and newspaper articles targeted at an American audience and the U.S./English version of the Official Travel and Tourism Portal. This research finds that the image of Peru as a culinary destination is consistent between sources, but there are some differences in the meanings of this content based on type of source, intended audience, and expectations about that audience.     

The Cultural Construction of Contemporary Satanic Legends in Israel

This paper is based on a text analysis of the contents of sixty-three newspaper articles published in the local Israeli press covering “Cult of Satan” activities. The response in the form of an anti-satanic movement in Israel and its rhetorical narrative are compared with phenomena in other western countries. Analysis focuses on why Satanism has remained more on the level of emergence and awareness in the press, and has not resulted in any grassroots mobilisation or official intervention in Israel.     

The Stereoscope and Popular Fiction: Imagination and Narrative in the Victorian Home

The stereoscope was a popular parlour toy that provided a powerful psychological viewing experience in the heart of the domestic space. In this article, I consider the stereoscope’s position as an instrument that was experienced, and often represented, in relation to the imaginative narrative processes of memory and fantasy. By reading the stereoscope’s position within popular fiction, the article seeks to uncover the way in which the stereoscope was consumed. The article shows that for many in the mid-Victorian period, the stereoscope operated as an everyday narrative-forming experience with a strong relation to the popular periodical fiction that was read alongside it in the domestic space. The first section of this article considers the cultural and psychological position of the stereoscope within the home, reading this alongside a number of short stories published in the popular periodic press. The second section consists of an analysis of the stereoscope’s involvement with psychological dualism and self-doubling, issues which stem, in particular, from the device’s reliance on photography. These aspects of the device are explored in relation to a nineteenth-century short story which draws a problematic relation between one’s self and one’s portrait. Finally, the article draws these issues together to show the importance of imaginative narratives within the stereoscopic experience. The viewing conditions of the stereoscope encouraged viewers to engage in an anticipatory, open-ended, and imaginative fantasy narrative. It is this unique narrative character of stereoscopic viewing experiences which most prominently distinguishes the device from other visual media.     

Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

A country's budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique data set of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK budgets (2008–2012). These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. On the basis of a multivariate negative binomial model, we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost, whether it is negative (i.e., tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive, the income group that is the most affected by it, and the level of attention given to it by the government.     

Psychosurgery in Sweden 1944-1964

This study presents results on hitherto unknown data on lobotomies performed at the former State Mental Hospital of Umedalen (from here on called simply "Umedalen") in the north of Sweden. More than 700 operations were carried out from 1947 through 1960, and we calculated the average rate of postoperative mortality to 7.4 percent, and that 63 percent of those who were operated were women. By considering annual hospital reports to the National Board of Health (Medicinalstyrelsen), we also made the first mapping of early psychosurgery in Sweden; approximately 4,500 lobotomies were performed between 1944 and 1966. Statistical analysis, qualitative content analysis, and discourse analysis were used. The study supports earlier findings of female preponderance in the number of lobotomy operations.     

贝壳与贝壳形盒

贝壳被当作货币、工具和装饰品使用的历史悠久,也被直接用做容器。秦汉以后贝壳器物很流行,隋唐时期更多,深受人们的喜爱,广泛出现在各地,还出现用白银为材料仿造的现象。贝壳盒在墓葬中的出土位置、共出遗物表明,它们在唐代似乎比较珍贵,主要是用于盛装化妆品,女性墓出土较多。无论是天然贝壳还是银质贝壳盒,除了使用价值,其流畅优美的造型也具有观赏、把玩的艺术功能。     

Place and the Politics of Virtue: Clerical work,corporate anxiety,and changing meanings of public womanhood in early twentieth-century Montreal

Women's entrance into corporate offices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided a focus for debate about changing meanings of public womanhood in the 'Modern' city. Working in the financial district, in the heart of downtown, women in clerical professions challenged formulations of respectability which posited public, urban space as threatening to female virtue. Yet the corporations for which these women worked traded quite literally on their reputations, and as such had a great need that their employees of both sexes be understood as respectable and upstanding citizens. Drawing on the popular press and employee files from a selection of key corporations in early twentieth-century Montreal, I examine how women's presence in, and use of urban space was mediated through ideas about 'respectability'. I submit that both corporations and women seeking clerical employment drew on ideas about respectable womanhood based in expectations of corporeal control and sexual restraint, even as these ideas were changing.     

‘What say you to free trade in literature?’ The Thief and the Politics of Piracy in the 1830s

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade, The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work.     

Miss Moriarty,the Adventuress and the Crime Queen: The Rise of the Modern Female Criminal in Britain, 1918–1939

This article demonstrates the reconceptualisation of female criminality in interwar British popular culture. It argues that in fiction and the popular press, the period signalled the rise of the strategic female career criminal who challenged traditional gendered patterns of law-breaking, appropriated wider notions of fashionable modernity and transgressed social and geographic boundaries as poorer women embraced new opportunities for masquerade and used crime for upward social mobility. The article shows that the modern female criminal reflected broader shifts and changes in opportunities and roles for women, suggesting that she functions as a prism through which to explore wider debates and anxieties around femininity, 1918–1939.     

Public opinion,the press and the failed Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations of 1939

For nearly 80 years, historians have debated whether the western powers or the USSR should be blamed for the failure of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in 1939. This rather tired debate features here, but only in the background. Instead, these negotiations provide a case study for exploring the interface between the press, public opinion, and foreign policymaking, identifying an example of how policymakers’ perceptions of popular opinion wielded a tangible impact on diplomacy. The article will show that, from late April through to early June 1939, British and French public opinion, as mediated by the press, demanded a ‘Grand Alliance’. The popular pressure needed to facilitate a Soviet alliance was in place, and, combined with broader diplomatic and strategic imperatives, nearly delivered one. Perceptions of public opinion also help explain why this alliance remained elusive. Emboldened by their own readings of western newspapers, the USSR increased their demands, confident that domestic pressures would compel London and Paris to yield. But this was a fatal miscalculation. From mid-June, Western opinion turned against Moscow, and familiar anti-Soviet tropes resurfaced. By charting this evolution in public sentiment, this article provides a fresh perspective on the factors contributing to the failure of these negotiations.     

Women Readers as Agents of Social Change among Eastern European Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century

This article draws on autobiographies and memoirs, polemical articles from the contemporary press, and bellestristic literature to illuminate the growth of a female reading public in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society. The exclusion of women from religious study and the emphasis on women’s responsibility for managing family businesses which characterized traditional Jewish culture created conditions that permitted some women to receive a secular education. Reading canonic literature in European languages and non-canonic literature in Yiddish, some women became catalysts of socio-cultural change toward the modernization, Europeanization and secularization of Jewish society.     

A Relocated Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?

The idea that the public needs enlightenment is generally formulated by people who consider themselves in possession of the enlightenment the public supposedly needs. Herein lies the paternalism problem of popular enlightenment. Some seventy years after Immanuel Kant formulated his famous answer to the question What is enlightenment?, a Norwegian philosopher reaches for his pen on a similar errand. The Norwegian context, however, is different, and the reflection takes a different turn. The questions become: What is popular enlightenment? Who is in a position to decide what kind of enlightenment ‘the people’ need and to define what is enlightenment as opposed to darkness? The text takes a closer look at the Norwegian reflections, published as three articles in two newspapers in 1852 and 1855. The newspaper articles are written by the philosopher Marcus Jacob Monrad (1816–1897). He finds support in Kantian insights when reflecting upon how a concrete initiative for the enlightenment of the public, in which he himself participates, should be understood. Monrad addresses the problem of paternalism in popular enlightenment, and he does this by using his reason publicly, which is what is required, according to Kant, in order for man to escape from tutelage.     

Location of Memory versus Space of Communication: Presses,Languages, and Education among Czernovitz Jews, 1918-1941

Abstract

The history of Czernovitz, chief city and former capital of Bukovina, has long been veiled in a mythology based largely on romanticized accounts. In order to understand the background to this city’s rich literary production better, we have evaluated the German-language press which flourished in Czernovitz during the interwar period, when the city remained an enclave of German-language culture, highly intellectual, and predominantly Jewish, long after Bukovina itself came under Romanian rule in 1918. In this article, we challenge the romantic mythology of Czernovitz, stressing the city’s function as a modern space of communication rather than a location of memory. Our research is based on press articles, contextualizing archival material and testimonies of contemporaries born between 1908 and 1936. Its underlying conceptual framework is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production.     

The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality and Representation of a Pacific Frontier

ABSTRACT

The United States Exploring Expedition into the Pacific launched in 1838 was marked, like the continental expansion westward, by violent encounters with Native peoples. By examining the record of the expedition's kidnapping of the Fijian Ro Veidovi, the fate of his body after death, and the ways his story came to be invoked in the official narrative of the expedition, the popular press, the ‘National Gallery’ and, more recently, the Fijian press, this paper demonstrates how violent contacts on the Pacific frontier were remembered, effaced, and reconceived. The changing story of Ro Veidovi permanently bridged distant locales in an emerging ‘Pacific World’, setting in motion transcultural negotiations that continue to this day.     

The Holocaust and the birth of Israel in British,Swedish and Finnish press discourse, 1947–1948

This article examines the way in which the Holocaust was linked to the process of the birth of Israel between 1947 and 1948 in the mainstream British, Swedish and Finnish press. By utilising a framework of comparative cultural history, this essay seeks to understand why different countries responded to the suffering of the Jews during the Second World War in such diverse ways. This essay also seeks to question the popular belief that the two events were intimately linked, and that the link was recognised in a straightforward manner. Hence, the study argues that although the press coverage sometimes managed to establish the connection between the two events, more typically the news was domesticated. In other words, the news had a transcendental and meta-historical character, working as an extension to each country's own self-understanding of Jews, Zionism and the Holocaust.