Beyond Charles Knight: Women paleoartists at the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT Under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Charles Knight helped shape popular images of the prehistoric past in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies. Although he was the most famous, Charles Knight was not the only paleoartist working at the American Museum of Natural History at this time. Behind the scenes, there were several women paleoartists who made significant contributions to museum displays and publications illustrating the prehistoric world. Often overlooked, this chapter highlights the contributions of Elisabeth Rungius Fulda, Helen Ziska, Lindsey Morris Sterling, and Margret Joy Flinsch Buba.

A Tale of Two Bridges: The Poetry and Politics of Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Wales

Drawing on Brian Larkin’s concept of ‘infrastructural poetics’, this article considers and compares a selection of English- and Welsh-language poems, by writers including Eliza Mary Hamilton, Frederick Faber, Richard Llwyd, and Eben Fardd, about two nineteenth-century infrastructures that transformed North Wales and Great Britain’s relationship to Ireland: the Menai Suspension Bridge (1826), and the Britannia Tubular Bridge (1850). I argue that these non-canonical poems complement perspectives derived from parliamentary records, official reports, technical planning documents, scientific manuals, and journalism, enhancing our understanding of the nineteenth-century infrastructural imagination. Specifically, building on the association of infrastructural development and modernity, I explore how the poems under discussion participate in nineteenth-century negotiations about Wales’s place and future in the United Kingdom, and how these negotiations evolved between 1819 and 1852. I show that, although Wales was the site of impressive engineering feats and accelerating industrial extraction, English-language poems present the Menai Bridge in picturesque terms, drawing on popular images of the Celtic fringe that evoke timeless, ideal beauty. Anglophone verse about Britannia Bridge, by contrast, focuses explicitly on the infrastructure’s technological modernity but claims it as an English landmark. Both strategies, I suggest, effect an erasure of Wales – as a distinct cultural and political entity – from a future conceived as Anglo-British. Poems written in Welsh, and the work of Welsh writers in English, complicate this picture, not because they reject British nationalism and imperialism, but because they seek to embed a modern Welsh nation more centrally within those political and ideological frameworks.

Magic in the Graeco-Roman World

Magic in the Graeco-Roman world is a disputed concept among modern historians, whose interpretation has changed significantly over the last 200 years of study. In studying it we may either focus on terms from ancient languages translatable as “magic,” or examine materials and practices that may be classified as “magic” according to modern definitions. Ancient terminology centers around terms such as the Greek word mageia, and its Latin cognate magia, referring to superhuman practices that often involved the manipulation of the natural and divine worlds through secret knowledge and ritual. Objects identified by modern scholars as magical include curse tablets, written objects intended to injure, bind, or render harmless their victims, magical handbooks written on papyrus, providing instructions for rituals, and amulets, often in the form of semiprecious stones inscribed with images of deities and short texts. While some of these practices are reflected in ancient literary sources discussing magic, literary texts also show an exaggerated discourse, in which magic-users may be stereotyped according to their ethnicity (exotic magicians from Egypt, Syria, or Judaea) or gender (lurid images of witches), and practices are depicted as fantastical and extreme, involving acts such as human sacrifice. Popular images of magic and actual practice come together in laws and regulations against magic and its users, primarily from the period of the Roman Empire. These may be in the form of imperial law, or else Christian and non-Christian cultic rules, which prescribe social exclusion or even death, so that accusations of magic could be a potent tool in social conflicts.

The Sunshine State In Color : The Autochromes Of Charles Zoller

Charles C. Zoller (1856-1934) was prolific photographer and native of Rochester, New York. His archive is held at George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film and consist of over 8,000 photographic objects, just under 4,000 of which are autochrome plates. This thesis focuses on the approximately 317 Zoller autoochromes of Florida that make up a small fraction of the fonds This thesis furthermore considers the visual representatin of Florida in color in the early twentieth century and compares tropes in this imagery to Zoller's representation of the Sunshine State. Traveling and photographing extensively in North America and Europe, Zoller produced both color images with Lunière Autochrome plates and black-and-white images with various photographic products. Upon return to Upstate New york, Zoller gave lectures on a variety of topics, illustrating these lectures with projected autochromes and lantern slides. Since there are few know autochromes of Florida, Zoller's series are some of the earliest examples of color photographs of the state. While Zoller's images are often predictable representations of Florida, they nevertheless provide a window into how Florida was presented in the early part of the last century. This thesis compares Zoller's autochromes to other popular images of Florida in that time.

The Sunshine State In Color : The Autochromes Of Charles Zoller

Charles C. Zoller (1856-1934) was prolific photographer and native of Rochester, New York. His archive is held at George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film and consist of over 8,000 photographic objects, just under 4,000 of which are autochrome plates. This thesis focuses on the approximately 317 Zoller autoochromes of Florida that make up a small fraction of the fonds This thesis furthermore considers the visual representatin of Florida in color in the early twentieth century and compares tropes in this imagery to Zoller's representation of the Sunshine State. Traveling and photographing extensively in North America and Europe, Zoller produced both color images with Lunière Autochrome plates and black-and-white images with various photographic products. Upon return to Upstate New york, Zoller gave lectures on a variety of topics, illustrating these lectures with projected autochromes and lantern slides. Since there are few know autochromes of Florida, Zoller's series are some of the earliest examples of color photographs of the state. While Zoller's images are often predictable representations of Florida, they nevertheless provide a window into how Florida was presented in the early part of the last century. This thesis compares Zoller's autochromes to other popular images of Florida in that time.

Digitizing Ibadan: explorations of the photoblogosphere as a site of resistance

The camera has been actively involved in the framing of African people. Popular images of the African continent seldom deviate from the normalized visual rhetoric, primarily depicting exoticized images or the extremities of civil unrest, famine and disease. Digitizing Ibadan is a photographic exploration of the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. Residents of lbadan were invited to visually (re)present their perceptions of the city. Over a period of four weeks, hundreds of digital images were recorded and stored on www.picturingnigeria.com- a website designed for the project. The website was designed to display everyday life and everyday sights, allowing for the interpretation of these ordinary acts (of recording and displaying images) as democratic and meaningful. The idea is that a website hosting digital images (in photoblog format) could be established as a site of resistance. This website represents an endeavour by the everyday citizen to recontextualize photography as a social discourse.

Digitizing Ibadan: explorations of the photoblogosphere as a site of resistance

The camera has been actively involved in the framing of African people. Popular images of the African continent seldom deviate from the normalized visual rhetoric, primarily depicting exoticized images or the extremities of civil unrest, famine and disease. Digitizing Ibadan is a photographic exploration of the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. Residents of lbadan were invited to visually (re)present their perceptions of the city. Over a period of four weeks, hundreds of digital images were recorded and stored on www.picturingnigeria.com- a website designed for the project. The website was designed to display everyday life and everyday sights, allowing for the interpretation of these ordinary acts (of recording and displaying images) as democratic and meaningful. The idea is that a website hosting digital images (in photoblog format) could be established as a site of resistance. This website represents an endeavour by the everyday citizen to recontextualize photography as a social discourse.