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The transformation of written imperial documents into monumental inscriptions in the Greek-speaking provinces owed more to local agency than central direction. Local interests ensured public display of an emperor's instruction curbing abuses by imperial officials, and ancient treaties were kept on public view centuries after they were enacted. Only in a few cases were there explicit instructions requiring public and prominent display. Dissemination of even major historical documents appears to have depended on local initiative. Copies of the Deeds (Res Gestae) of Augustus (d. ad 14) are known from only three cities in Asia Minor, and Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices (ad 301), despite its universal application, is known from only two provinces of Asia Minor and the province of Achaea.

This chapter focuses on the polis, and considers the value placed on its past, the importance of the proper telling of history, and its use in inter-polis diplomacy. It examines not only the comic theatre and public occasions such as the epitaphios, but also inscriptions, such as the Lindos Chronicle and the Parian Marble, which offer publicly displayed history and may reveal shared opinions and values. The chapter concludes by examining the striking honorific inscriptions for local historians, often itinerant rather than native, and considers issues of status, historiographical authority, and the implications of a semi-professional Mediterranean network of local historiography, recalling the Artists of Dionysus, for the close relationship between the polis and the telling of its past.

This chapter examines the development of the different forms of religious commitment expressed by women who lived in the Byzantine Empire between the sixth and eleventh centuries AD—a development predicated on their gradual exclusion from displays of public religiosity. Over this long period, as the church consolidated its organization through an administration grafted on to Roman imperial government, the ecclesiastical hierarchy of male bishops effectively excluded women from prominent public positions. This development can be traced through canonical rulings laid down at ecumenical and local church councils, which defined the Christian practice appropriate for women. It is also documented by women's participation in religious activities as recorded in a variety of sources, especially the lives of female saints.

This chapter highlights the relevant jurisprudence of Hungary, a post-Holocaust, post-communist, Central European democracy, and shows that the search for effective law and policy on ‘hate speech’ benefits from a fresh, open look at the best practices wherever they have developed. It provides a short description of the social context in Hungary, the most important elements of which are: the Hungarian freedom struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries which always passionately advocated freedom of speech and freedom of the press; decades of totalitarian censorship; the largest Jewish community remaining in Central Europe after the Holocaust, mostly concentrated in Budapest; antisemitism; and the hatred against Roma Hungarians. It analyses how the Hungarian Constitutional Court and the other courts in Hungary have adopted the ‘clear and present danger test’ of the Supreme Court of the United States. Finally, in light of related Hungarian jurisprudence, the chapter explores what might be the most helpful policy on this issue, the most difficult of all questions of free speech theory.

This chapter examines pre-twentieth precedents for big screen displays in public spaces to demonstrate how media culture has never been segregated from outdoor milieus of distraction. It addresses largely ignored histories of public displays, including trade signs, banners, broadsides, billboards, and early dynamic displays including magic lantern shows. The chapter contextualises outdoor screens within this history to argue that public media culture is a peculiar mode of spectatorship that must be apprehended as element among many that vies for the attention of individuals within public spaces, including aural, physical elements, and other visual elements. It argues that the tendency to characterise large screens as an incursion of the private into the public fails to address the history and context of public displays, which are instead more productively apprehended as sites where the distinction between public and private is renegotiated.

This chapter examines the salt merchants’ role in constructing chastity arches—stone structures honoring women who maintained chaste widowhood—in She county in Huizhou. In the High Qing era, the Manchu court systematically patronized the construction of monumental objects, such as stone arches, with the dual object of inculcating Confucian morality in their illiterate subjects and displaying their imperial legitimacy. The Huizhou salt merchants, seeing an opportunity to expand their influence, devoted themselves to chastity arch construction in the local community of Huizhou, thus publicizing the virtuous deeds that the court rewarded. While these merchants used their economic prowess to participate in the state’s cultivation project, their financial support of these arches was itself a product of the court’s salt monopoly policies. At the same time, these monuments gave these wealthy businessmen the opportunity to bolster their reputations, display their wealth, and lay claim to legitimate dominance in local society.

Chapter 6 discusses the practices of dating, sex, and marriage amongst the café culture crowd. Though marriage continued to be the norm and a family matter, the young generation had found ways of negotiating the when, how and who–not least with previous generations paving the way. Romantic love, dating, courtship, personal happiness, compatibility, and the expression of individual preferences were not only more acceptable but had found their way into arranged marriages. There was a move observable from patriarchal—or at least gerontocratic— arrangements, towards more negotiated practices which included the children in decision-making and promoted equality.

This chapter focuses on the period from the 1960s to the 1970s, which saw the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) fight for sexual civil liberties on the foundation of a right to privacy. It considers the relationship between emerging rights to sexual privacy and the increasing exposure of sexuality in public before turning to the debate over access to wanted versus protection from unwanted sexual expression. It also examines the ACLU's support for the rights of homosexuals as well as the campaign launched by moral reformers, feminists, and other consumers demanding greater protection from unwanted sexual expression, including unsolicited mail, public sexual displays, rape, and sexual harassment.

In the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War, the cadavers of cloistered nuns were exhumed and placed on public display throughout Republican Spain, an event the insurgents prominently featured thereafter in their propaganda. This chapter explores the motives and significance of this event, showing that similar episodes figured in many previous outbreaks of Spanish anticlerical violence. After entertaining several possibilities—millennial antinomianism, rituals of collective obscenity, and iconoclasm—it is shown that perpetrators regularly sought to find and exhibit evidence of sexual depravity behind cloistered walls, which would discredit the Catholic Church’s claims of sanctity. This sort of effort, that is, the attempt to demonstrate the (moral and physical) corruption of those who claim to be sacred and holy, is termed a profanophany.

Much of the archaeological work was conducted in a specialized laboratory for the cleaning, consolidation, and stabilization of waterlogged materials. During these treatments, recovered objects were studied and recorded to determine their role in telling the story of the Tristán de Luna expedition. Objects were prepared for interpretive public displays. Much of this work was undertaken by staff and local volunteers.

This chapter shows how, during the eighteenth century, the orangutan began to appear in plays and novels, and later in short stories. Most of the early authors had not seen an orangutan, even in captivity, but the writings of travelers such as Daniel Beeckman and of scientists such as Edward Tyson were so widely circulated, the illustrations of Jacobus Bontius and Nicolaes Tulp so often redrawn, and public displays of orangutan-like creatures so common that a knowledge of the term “orangutan” and a sense of what it stood for was widespread within the literate elite of western Europe by the second half of the eighteenth century.