Labyrinths of Deceit : Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong undercurrents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard Walker plumbs the depths of those currents in order to present an alternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, …

Fugitive Borders Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Ce…

Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known as Ontario) and that defy the genre conventions of the classic slave narrative. Instead, these te…

Bally - A History of Footwear in the Interwar Period

Carl Franz Bally founded a shoe factory in Switzerland in 1851. Within decades, the Bally name had achieved worldwide recognition for its high-quality footwear. The history of modern footwear can be traced through the lens of Bally's corporate evolution. This book brings together the results of research on such topics as the economic importance of fashion, Bally's fortunes in the US, the career…

Imagining Unequals, Imagining Equals: Concepts of Equality in History and Law

Why did »equality« become prominent in European societies based on hierarchy during the Enlightenment? What does »equality« imply for societies, politics, or legal systems? The contributors to this volume draw on various historical case studies, from visionary practices in revolutionary France and the collection of data on the poor in 19th-century Germany, to claims raised under the minorit…

Music - Media - History: Re-Thinking Musicology in an Age of Digital Media

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses A…

Van Gogh TV's Piazza Virtuale: The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX …

Piazza virtuale by the group of artists known as Van Gogh TV was not only the biggest art project ever to appear on television, but from a contemporary point of view the project was also a forerunner of today's social media. The ground-breaking event that took place during the 100 days of documenta IX in 1992 was an early experiment with entirely user-created content. This is the first book-len…

Maritime Poetics: From Coast to Hinterland

In the past fifty years, port cities around the world have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and their identities. The increasing intensification of global networks and logistics, and the resulting pressure on human societies and earthly environments have been characteristic of the rise of a »planetary age«. This volume engages with contemporary artistic practices and cri…

Understanding Disability Throughout History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives i…

Understanding Disability Throughout History explores seldom-heard voices from the past by studying the hidden lives of disabled people before the concept of disability existed culturally, socially and administratively. The book focuses on Iceland from the Age of Settlement, traditionally considered to have taken place from 874 to 930, until the 1936 Law on Social Security (Lög um almannatryggi…

Casa Pueblo A Puerto Rican Model of Self-Governance