Tramp: Sentiment and the Homeless Man in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian City

The recent rehabilitation of sentiment as a topic worthy of scholarly engagement tends to focus on the work of Adam Smith and early to mid-Victorian visual and literary cultures. Focusing on the League of Welldoers, a Liverpool charity that catered for houseless men, this essay considers sentimentality as a tool for stimulating compassion for one of the most controversial and potentially unsympathetic groups among the outcast poor. The essay identifies how late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropy deployed sentiment as a tool to motivate practical compassion and demonstrate the ways in which sentiment could be politically charged. The essay examines the League's attempts to imagine the tramp in sentimental terms in a political and social context that regarded male vagrancy as a ‘problem’ and understood able-bodied men as breadwinners. It highlights continuities in the sentimental tradition from the heady days of Dickens's fiction: the emphasis on physiological sensation to advance a notion of common humanity; the reliance on the child as sentimental subject par excellence; and melodrama. At the centre of the League's sentimental project was the confused identity of the tramp. Contemporary commentators knew that when men lost their jobs, especially those who were not members of a friendly society, they often went ‘on the tramp’ in search of work. It was less clear when ‘tramping’ came to define the man himself.     

Cold War Heritage and the Conservation of Military Remains in Yorkshire 1

Over the last few years there has been a growing interest in the future of military remains created in the UK since 1945. This interest has been sparked by debates that have taken place in archaeology, heritage management and conservation. Our purpose in this article is to intersect with these discussions and practice in a number of ways. First the article sets the discussion of Cold War military sites into the wider context of the rise of military archaeology and heritage conservation more generally. Second, it reviews some of the literature relating to Cold War heritage, both in terms of land management and reuse, but more centrally as a potential national heritage asset. Third, it outlines how this potential asset is managed currently within the heritage protection system and the heritage challenges posed by these remains, particularly the attempts which have been made to incorporate them into a mainstream heritage agenda. Finally, the paper considers the successes and limitations of heritage conservation strategies, under the auspices of the Cold War Monuments Protection Programme (MPP).     

A black and white sermon: John Jasper’s capitalization on white exploitation in late nineteenth-century Virginia

Groups within southern society seized on John Jasper’s sermon arguing that the sun moved around the earth in order to reinforce ideas of African American inferiority. Jasper, however, took advantage of these efforts at exploitation. By embodying the stereotype whites sought to promote, Jasper became very popular with white visitors, and tourists to Richmond frequently requested renditions of the sermon. Through preaching his sun sermon on 253 occasions, Jasper was not only able to secure the financial and social independence of his church, but also provided inspiration to African Americans through highlighting that southern white supremacy could be overcome.