Journalists and the ‘Professional Ideal’ in Britain: the Institute of Journalists, 1884–1907*

1999 ◽  
Vol 72 (178) ◽  
pp. 183-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Hampton

Abstract This article examines the early history of the Institute of Journalists as a case study of occupational development in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It argues that disagreements over the putative meaning of ‘professional’ led to widespread belief that journalists’ interests were best served by organizing as a trade union rather than as a ‘professional organization’. Drawing on trade periodicals, memoirs and journalism handbooks, this article illustrates the complexities of the ‘professional ideal’ and underscores the ambiguous position of the ‘mental labourer’ in British society.

2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Pasco-Pranger

This article explores the early history of Roman exemplary literature through the case study of the elder Cato’s account of his imitation of the parsimony and self-sufficiency of M’. Curius Dentatus. I reconstruct from Cicero, Plutarch, and other sources a Catonian prose text that unified the exemplary narrative of Curius’ refusal of a bribe from Samnite emissaries with an evocative location at the hearth of a humble Sabine farmstead, an approving “audience” in Cato himself, and a model for the replication of Curius’ virtue. The narrative itself served as the monumentum for the exemplum, and its details are often evoked in place of the exemplary deed itself. I argue that this narrative is both a very early instance of exemplary literature and a self-conscious reflection on the power of literature to transcend temporal and spatial limitations and to extend cultural models for the familial replication of elite virtues to a broader audience.


1938 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 359-462
Author(s):  
G. D. H. Cole

The best-known episode in the early history of Britsh Trade Unionism is the dramatic rise and fall of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in 1833—1834. Robert Owen's sudden emergence as the leader of a mass movement reported to number a million adherents, the trial and transportation of the unfortunate ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ for the crime of administering unlawful oaths, the presentation of the ‘document’ demanding renunciation of Trade Union membership by masters in many parts of the country, and the complete eclipse of the Grand National within a year of its first foundation, make a story which has been told many times with effect, and does not need telling over again. But though this particular story is well-known, there is a good deal that remains obscure in Trade Union history both during this critical year and, still more, during the few previous years when the idea of an all-embracing ‘General Union of Trades’ was taking hold of one section after another of the British working classes.


1999 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Mutch

This article examines the use of information by British trade unions to react to occupational change. Using a case study of the response to welding by the Boilermakers' Society, it looks at the barriers that prevented the use of information. It then examines the rise of trade union research departments. This leads to an outline of a framework for looking at the ways in which trade unions used information, based on their attitude towards their environment. The article suggests that an “information perspective” is a useful supplement to existing ways of examining trade union history which may shed new light on their development.


Author(s):  
Ruth Sheldon

This chapter provides a brief history of the campus politics of Palestine-Israel in Britain alongside a genealogical account of how the stakes, boundaries and grammars of these struggles have been represented in the media, policy interventions and research. Taking up Nancy Fraser’s emphasis on the injustices produced by framings of justice, I show how these public representations have made liberal, secular and nationalist assumptions so that they have been unable to account for the limits of consensus or attend to students’ complex investments in the Palestine-Israel conflict. In the process, I situate these campus struggles in relation to historically evolving relations within British society, the emergent geo-politics of the ‘War on Terror’, and the legacies of the Holocaust and British imperialism. Finally, I consider how public constructions of this as an ‘imported’, ‘ethno-religious’ conflict have failed to address the role played by the British university in shaping these dynamics. I discuss how, in a post-imperial, globalising world, universities in Britain have become conflicted in their public role, creating different challenges for institutions operating in a fragmented higher education field. I conclude by explaining my multi-sited approach in this study, describing my selection of case study institutions and introducing these field-sites.


1997 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Gomery

The writing of the early history of U.S. television has long concentrated on the rise of dominating national networks. Based on principles of social, demographic, policy, and urban history, I propose we rethink historical analysis, and begin at the local level. To illustrate the power of this approach, I offer a case study of the place of Washington, D.C., as a site for network news. In the mid-1950s, it was also an important example of live locally produced country music. As a community, Washington presents an important site where forces such as migration and suburbanization shaped the early history of television.


1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM A. SMEATON

In the Annual Report of University College London (UCL) for 1946–47 it is stated that ‘the Department of History and Philosophy of Science played a leading part in the formation of the British Society for the History of Science’ and that four members or former members of the department were serving on its Council, one of them as the founder president. A brief account of the early history of the department may therefore be of interest to members of the Society.


Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski

When the cult of relics developed in the mid-fourth century, very few tombs of saints whose remains were to be venerated in the centuries to come had been identified. This chapter presents the early history of the search for and finding of such graves, which started in the last decades of the fourth century. It seeks to explain the reasons which lay behind this process, focusing both on the needs of the congregation and the role of the discovery in church politics. It also analyses the sense of the literary pattern of inventio and tries to find out how much this pattern reflected reality. Finally, it presents a case study: a literary dossier of the discovery of the relics of Gervasius and Protasius by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in 386.


Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham

This chapter examines phobia as a question of psychoanalysis itself, a means to assess its complex and problematic conditions of possibility. In 1929, Alfred Adler produced a case study of ‘Miss R.’ in which he analysed her lupus phobia. Lupus is an auto-immune disease that reached its heights during the nineteenth century. Found at the crossroads between the sprawl of the city and the birth of the clinic, lupus’s historic arc reflects the early history of psychoanalysis. Adler associates Miss R.’s phobias with a desire to avoid her own inferiorization within the family and a fear about life on the outside. The case study offers a clue to the relationship between analyst and analysand: Adler interprets the young girl’s behaviour in terms of an egotistic desire to hold centre-stage; yet the case history is constructed out of extemporized remarks made before a captive audience, presumably to show off Adler’s analytic brilliance (in contrast to Freud’s, whom he takes every opportunity to disparage). We wonder whether Adler might be talking about himself as much as Miss R., and the case study begins to offer some insights not only into the split with Freud in 1911 but indeed the resistances of psychoanalysis itself.


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