Print and Politics offers a cultural history of a late Qing newspaper, Shibao, the most influential reform daily of its time. Exploring the simultaneous emergence of a new print culture and a new culture of politics in early-twentieth-century China, the book treats Shibao as both institution and text and demonstrates how the journalists who wrote for the paper attempted to stake out a “middle realm” of discourse and practice. Chronicling the role these journalists played in educational and constitutional organizations, as well as their involvement in major issues of the day, it analyzes their essays as political documents and as cultural artifacts. Particular attention is paid to the language the journalists used, the cultural constructs they employed to structure their arguments, and the multiple sources of authority they appealed to in advancing their claims for reform.
In Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, a collection of writers explore Ford's view of politics, popular culture, and civic virtue in some of his best films: Drums Along the Mohawk, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, How Green Was My Valley, and The Last Hurrah. John Ford, more than most motion picture directors, invites his viewers into a serious discussion of these themes. For instance, one can consider Plato's timeless question 'What is justice?' in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, vengeance as classical Greek tragedy in The Searchers, or ethnic politics in The Last Hurrah. Ford's films never grow stale or seem dated because he continually probes the most important questions of our civic culture: what must we do to survive, prosper, pursue happiness, and retain our common decency as a regime? Further, viewing them from a distance of time, we are subtly invited to ask whether anything has been lost or gained since Ford celebrated the civic virtues of an earlier America. Is Ford's America an idealized America or a lost America?
An engrossing and powerful story about the influence of printers, who used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Honorable Mention, St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, Bibliographical Society of America During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Going into the printing offices of colonial America to explore how these documents were produced, Adelman shows how printers balanced their own political beliefs and interests alongside the commercial interests of their businesses, the customs of the printing trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. Adelman describes how these laborers repackaged oral and manuscript compositions into printed works through which political news and opinion circulated. Drawing on a database of 756 printers active during the Revolutionary era, along with a rich collection of archival and printed sources, Adelman surveys printers' editorial strategies. Moving chronologically through the era of the American Revolution and to the war's aftermath, he details the development of the networks of printers and explains how they contributed to the process of creating first a revolution and then the new nation. By underscoring the important and intertwined roles of commercial and political interests in the development of Revolutionary rhetoric, this book essentially reframes our understanding of the American Revolution. Printers, Adelman argues, played a major role as mediators who determined what rhetoric to amplify and where to circulate it. Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.
Introduction -- The politics of loyalty -- Negotiating freedom -- Responsibility on trial -- Selling scandal : The Mysteries of the Inquisition -- The business of nation building -- Workers of thought -- Criminalizing the printing press -- Conclusion.
This collection aims to correct the imbalance of London-dominated periodicals by investigating the development, maturation and persistence of the provincial political press in the British Isles in the modern era. Chapters covering aspects of the Irish, Yorkshire, Welsh, Scottish and Midlands political press are included to redress this imbalance.
In The Politics of Print During the French Wars of Religion, Gregory Haake examines how, in late sixteenth-century France, authors and publishers used the printed text to control the terms of public discourse and determine history, or at least their narrative of it.
The Labottières were the largest printing and bookselling dynasty in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. From the 1680s to the sale of their business in 1794 three generations of this family acted as major cultural brokers in this booming Atlantic port, serving the rapidly expanding commercial and legal sectors with books, pamphlets, and newspapers. The lives and businesses of this family are heavily entwined with the histories of the Enlightenment, French colonialism in the West Indies, and the French Revolution. We find the final generation, welcoming the Revolution, printing a pro-revolutionary newspaper that framed the revolts in Haiti and Martinique in pro-revolutionary terms. They would come to establish their shop as a Jacobin centre and, along with their workers and journalists, navigated the forces of popular censorship and state control. However, despite these activities, the Labottière printing and bookselling enterprise would, eventually, be destroyed by the very Revolution it had supported. Through this lively microhistory of the Labottières, Jane McLeod presents the important role played by the flourishing Atlantic port economy in supporting the expansion of printing and bookselling. Furthermore, from McLeod's extensive archival research into over thirty members of the Labottière family, emerges a new understanding of the role played by printers and booksellers in the spreading of the ideas and concerns that underpinned some of the landmark social, cultural and political changes of the eighteenth century.
