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This book covers the late Victorian and Edwardian peace movement, the campaigns of which made a significant impact on political debate, especially during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the Bulgarian Atrocities campaign (1876–1878), Britain's conflict with Egypt (1882), the South African War (1899–1902), and the intensifying international crisis before 1914. The movement's activists included Richard Cobden, Herbert Spencer, Keir Hardie, J. A. Hobson, and Norman Angell. Among the first to benefit from the opening of the Peace Society Archive, the book focuses on the specialised associations at the heart of the peace movement. It identifies the existence of different programmes for the achievement of a just, permanent peace, and offers a new interpretation of the reaction of peace campaigners to war in 1914.

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.

This study guide is intended to provide a starting point for those seeking to use film as a source. It is aimed at those who want to use film and moving image as the basis for research and offers advice on research methods, theory and methodology, archival work and film-based analysis. Everything included here is also intended to be good practice, whether it be conducting an interview, visiting an archive, undertaking textual analysis or defining a research question. It draws on the disciplines of film and history to offer advice for students and researchers in these fields.

This book traces the evolution of the archive across the centuries by looking at primitive, Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary archives. Crucially, the book evidences the fluidity and potential inter-changeability between libraries, archives and museums. A number of case studies offer an insight into the operation of a variety of different types of archives, including cabinets of curiosity, archival artforms, architectures, performances, road-shows, time capsules, social media documentation practices, databases, and a variety of museological web-based heritage platforms. The archive is shown to play a crucial role in how individuals and social groups administer themselves through and within a burgeoning social memory apparatus. This is why at the heart of every industrial revolution thus far, the archive continues to contribute to the way we store, preserve and generate knowledge through an accumulation of documents, artifacts, objects, as well as ephemera and even debris. The archive has always been strategic for different types of economies, including the digital economy and the internet of things. Shown here to increasingly affect to the way we map, produce, and share knowledge, the apparatus of the archive, which allows us to continuously renew who we are in relation to the past, so that new futures may become possible, now effectively pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when they consider the story of race and racism in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), black baseball was a long-standing, if underdocumented, staple of African American communities. This book examines creative portraits of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Divided into three literary waves, the book is especially attentive to the archival contributions (and at times drawbacks) of imaginative representations of black baseball. Specifically, the book argues that African American and Euro-American novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers fill in gaps and silences in recorded baseball history; democratize access to archives by sharing their research with readers; and advance countermythologies to whitewashed baseball lore. Reading representations across the literary color line also opens up a propitious space for exploring black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Thus, while this book’s particular focus is black baseball, the comparative, archival mode of analysis utilized herein provides a model for analyzing literary interventions in other marginalized cultural histories as well.

The Past Is a Moving Picture is a cultural analysis of how and why people have rescued, protected, and restored old film and how their efforts have created a massive memory bank of life in the twentieth century. Focusing on the film archives at the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Archives and UCLA Film and Television Archives, The Past Is a Moving Picture interprets the dominant film preservation practices and archiving principles of the nation's renowned film archives and analyzes how old movies and their advocates have shaped the way we see and understand film history and our cultural heritage. It chronicles the film archive while reflecting on cultural memory and complexities of preserving our nation's past by saving cinema.

The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on stories of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a literary geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of historias, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discourses on Amazonia as rooted––if rarely discussed––in different quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The intimate interactions between one human being and another, or between men and animals, plants, or the natural space more generally as we see it, are not, as one might expect, comforting. Instead they are often disquieting, uncanny, or downright violent. This book argues that the Amazon’s “gigantism” lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness that inhabits its archive of historias in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

Amateur film: Meaning and practice 1927–77 traces the development of non-professional interests in making and showing film. It explores how amateur cinematography gained a following among the wealthy, following the launch of lightweight portable cine equipment by Kodak and Pathé in Britain during the early 1920s. As social access to the new hobby widened, enthusiasts began to use cine equipment at home, work, on holiday and elsewhere. Some amateurs made films only for themselves while others became cine club members, contributors to the hobby literature and participated in film competitions from local to international level. The stories of individual filmmakers, clubs and the emergence of an independent hobby press, as well as the non-fiction films made by groups and individuals, provide a unique lens through which contemporary responses to daily experience may be understood over fifty years of profound social, cultural and economic change. Using regional film archive collections, oral testimony and textual sources, this book explores aspects of family life, working experience, locality and social issues, leisure time and overseas travel as captured by filmmakers from northern and northwest England. This study of visual memory, identity and status sets cine camera use within a wider trajectory of personal record making, and discusses the implications of footage moving from private to public spaces as digitisation widens access and transforms contemporary archive practice.

Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing provides a seemingly inevitable model for computing. This book explores the implications and contradictions of this metaphor. Writing not only provides a way to think about the operation of the computer, it also embodies the way that we think about the work that we do on the computer (programmers “writing code”) and how the often muddy line between our home and work life today. In the last decade, scholarship on digital media has sought rigor by limiting its work to particular hardware and software platforms. This book argues, instead, that we should embrace the power and muddiness of the writing metaphor for computing. Because computing isn’t simply a discipline or set of technologies, but also an idea that plays a role in contemporary culture, the cross-disciplinary migration of the writing metaphor is so important. This book seeks out the unlikely places where computing and writing, creativity and corporations converge—from debates about the scope of patent law in the U.S. to design trends within computer user interfaces to the representations of archaic writing technologies in the video games. These kinds of cross-disciplinary comparisons are only possible if we are willing to tolerate a broad understanding of the digital and the ways that it can invoke writing.