This chapter examines doctors’ writings and unionization. It demonstrates how the Palestinian printed press contributed to professionalization and popularization of medicine and created new modes of doctor-patient interactions. Doctors’ publications exercised professional, social, and moral authority over their community and claimed prestige within the medical community. The chapter then explores local, national, and regional medical associations, following the formation of local associations in Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Nablus; the participation of Palestinian doctors in regional conferences and associations; and finally, the formation of Palestine’s Arab Medical Association.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

The guitar was in high fashion in Britain during the first third of the nineteenth century, but this ‘Great Vogue’ for the instrument as a solo and concert resource was over by 1850. This has led to a widespread misunderstanding of the guitar’s Victorian history, even to the point where it may seem to have none. The trajectory of the guitar in the England of Queen Victoria actually shows a continual process of ascent and rehabilitation based on the art of guitar-accompanied singing. The scope for exploring this return to favour has been immeasurably enhanced by the advent of databases offering many thousands of pages of Victorian newspapers in a digital and word-searchable form. Even the most severe critics were prepared to admit that the guitar offered a very serviceable accompaniment to an untrained (or indeed a trained) voice. That will be the secret of its success under Victoria, as the newspaper record abundantly reveals.

Chapter 1 recounts some of the main events of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Compared to other historical reconstructions, the chapter emphasizes the influence of the end of the American Civil War and debates about Reconstruction on the rebellion and its coverage in the press. The chapter offers a basic narrative framework within which to understand the arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 6.

Having been found guilty of treason, George William Gordon spent his last hour writing to his wife a letter containing personal goodbyes, business notes, and a firm protestation of innocence. Thanks to the newspaper-savviness of his mother-in-law Ann Shanon and his acquaintance Louis Chamerovzow, the letter was published in dozens of papers around the world. It fell like a thunderclap, helping to turn the tide of public opinion against the Jamaica government and the island’s White English governor, Edward John Eyre. Chapter 3 examines Gordon’s use of biblical language in his final letter. Enslaved at birth on the Cherry Garden estate, and rising to become an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest legislative body, Gordon invoked 2 Timothy 4:17 – “I have fought a good fight” – to present an alternative to Paul Bogle’s vision of a Black alliance prepared to meet White violence with a violent Black response. For Gordon, Black advancement would come only through what he considered legitimate forms of protest, namely political agitation and the shaping of public opinion in newspapers.

Chapter 6 sets the book’s four detailed case studies within broader patterns of public discourse around Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Jamaican Jewish newspaper editor Sydney Levien, White American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Black American Baptist missionary Samuel Ward, White English Baptist leader Edward Bean Underhill, Black American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond, and dozens of others this chapter mentions appealed to biblical slogans as they discussed race relations in Jamaica and their implications for the United States. The chapter illustrates the range of opinions expressed and affirms the importance of the Bible to debates about race relations after emancipation.

Having opposed Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy as an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest elected legislative body, and as a journalist and publisher, mixed-race Jamaican Robert Alexander Johnson migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the Tribune. Chapter 4 recovers Johnson’s body of writing on Jamaica and the Morant Bay rebellion published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–6. Johnson adopted the position that the events of October 11 were a riot, not a planned, organized rebellion. How, then, could Johnson account for the brutal government suppression? He quoted Hebrew 11:4 – “he, being dead, yet speaketh” – which summarizes Cain’s murder of Abel. Johnson, like a long line of Black interpreters this chapter traces, looked to the Cain and Abel story to provide an etiology of the inexplicable savagery of White violence. Johnson warned readers contemplating Reconstruction not to entrust the rights of free Black Americans to their former White enslavers.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.

This chapter examines a US Central American experience at the end of the long nineteenth century, as reflected in Centro America, a newspaper established by the Comité Unionista Centroamericano de San Francisco in support of the final, formal effort to establish an isthmian nation in 1921. A rare literary text, Centro America provides a cultural account of the complexities and contradictions that shaped the transnational lives of an early Central American diaspora in the US. The weekly paper published unionist essays, the latest local and global news, literary reviews, poems, society columns, and passenger arrival and departure notices that catered to an audience composed of primarily Central American coffee and other elites. However, Centro America also published a letter written by Abel Romero, a Salvadoran, working-class machinist, urging the paper to speak out against El Salvador’s authoritarian government. By allowing different forms of writing to cohabitate, a complex imaginative space emerges in the paper wherein clashing political and class interests create conflict among Central American communities. Print culture, I contend, visibilizes ruptures that emerged in Centro America when elites were confronted by the economic precarity that burdened their countrymen in San Francisco, from whom they asked and largely received unionist support.

As judged by our three proxy measures of corruption, the fifty states vary greatly in terms of the pervasiveness and types they experience. We analyze those contrasts employing a range of empirical measures and find the political, economic, and institutional factors matter greatly. Particularly intriguing are the ways contrasts in corruption relate to Daniel Elazar’s three major political subcultures – Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditionalistic – and to the ways they differ and mingle state by state. Contrasts in our corruption measures are linked to a range of explanatory variables in ways consistent with theory. Such links to fundamental influences not only point to the systemic nature of corruption, its causes, and consequences, but also help explain its tenacity and the difficulties we face when we attempt to implement reforms.

In Chapter 7, we discuss how best to analyse mediated political monologues. As news and other forms of media present political events, they are important to study, and for the pragmatician a key issue is how to tease out the dynamics of such monologues, making them pragmatically relevant. We believe that it is important to consider how such monologues gain interactional effect with the public because gaining such effect is the goal of these monologues. Thus we focus on textual features through which a monologue covertly interconnects the readers with politicians and political entities. Here we will refer to the concept of alignment, proposed by Goffman, arguing that many seemingly ‘innocent’ phenomena in political monologues aim to trigger the alignment of the public with politicians or political entities represented by the monologue. As a case study, we examine a corpus of political monologues published in Chinese newspapers in the wake of a national crisis. Following our cross-cultural pragmatic contrastive view, we will compare various types of political monologue, in order to tease out the interactional dynamics through which they trigger the alignment of their readers.

Seen from Europe and America, exhibitions reinforce our understanding of World War I as watershed, marking a turn from the confident embrace of industry and empire to a world of economic anxiety, colonial ambivalence, and modernist experiment. Japan shared in these too, but the evidence of exhibitions also points to continuities, of municipal aspiration, ongoing commercialization, and colonial development. This chapter shows how ongoing urbanization and continental empire increased the demand for exhibitions from private companies, local governments, and colonial authorities, both to tie themselves to the nation and to find a distinctive place for themselves on the imperial map. They were also eager to cater to the emerging middle-class demand for the things that would provide them with a cultured but moral urban life. The demand, in turn, provided employment for a new breed of showmen (rankaiya), who were able to provide the attractions and advertising to make sure the visitors would come.

In United States v. Alvarez, the US Supreme Court ruled that an official of a water district who introduced himself to his constituents by falsely stating in a public meeting that he had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor had a First Amendment right to make that demonstrably untrue claim. Audience members misled by the statement might well be considered to have a First Amendment interest in not being directly and knowingly lied to in that way. Other members of the community might be thought to have a First Amendment interest in public officials such as Xavier Alvarez telling the truth about their credentials and experiences. Nevertheless, as both the plurality and the concurring justices who together formed the majority in Alvarez viewed the case, it was the liar’s interest in saying what he wished that carried the day. Why is that? Crucial to answering this question is whether ‘the freedom of speech’ that the First Amendment tolerates ‘no law abridging’ is understood to be primarily speaker-centered, audience-centered, or society-centered.

Chapter 4 is an extensive study of runaway slave advertisements that mention that a slave speaks Dutch. For this chapter, I have compiled a database of 487 enslaved persons, coded by year of flight, name, age, Dutch language ability, name of master, county, and original source. I demonstrate that runaway slave advertisements in New York City and environs plateaued in the period 1760–1800, but peaked later in the Hudson Valley, with exceptional growth in the 1790s and 1800s. The data provide evidence for the persistence of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey and contribute to a picture of Dutch-speaking slaves presenting a sharp economic challenge to the institution of slavery. By the 1790s, Dutch-speaking slaves were running away at a rate of at least 1 per 500 per year. For Dutch slave owners, this meant a significant loss of capital and, moreover, a risk on their remaining slave capital. Runaway slaves tended to be prime working-age males, and the loss of the best field workers frustrated New York Dutch farmers. The pressure of runaway activity also lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly in general. Runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most labor possible from them before agreeing to let them go.

This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.