The Royal Institution is generally thought of as an institution devoted solely to scientific research and the Popular exposition of science. In the mid-nineteenth century however it had a wider range of objectives and activities, and should be considered within the framework of the organisation of learning and culture as a whole of which science was still an integral part. In the 1840s it acted as an authority on practical science; it provided both specialised scientific education and what was then termed useful knowledge; it supported experimental scientific research; and it was a literary and philosophical society of an eighteenth-century type, devoted to the cultivation of humane learning in general. As the unity of learning disintegratedv the R. I. was forced to reassess its activities and decide which ought to be its most important function. Formal educative activities were reluctantly abandoned. Prom the early 1850s and more enthusiastically in the 1860s, scientific research was recognized to be its prime function, At the same time its management passed for the first time into the hands of scientific men and any possibility of support from outside interests warded off by a new insistence that research at the Institution must be purely disinterested and independent. Paradoxically however, its nonscientific activities received greater attention than ever before, which may be linked to changes in the Institutionts membership and to ideas of cultivated entertainment. These developments made the 1860s not only a "golden age" of success and popularity, but the decisive decade in fixing the activities and ethos of the Institution for the next hundred years.

This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

This dissertation explores the choices involved in being a composer in Latin America during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. My primary interest is to understand how composers adapted or not- their aesthetics, ideas and careers amid the rapid changes brought to this region between the 1790s and 1850s, a period often described as an “Age of Revolutions” and that saw the end of colonial rule and the foundation of modern independent nations. Composers in the region worked within European forms and styles, and with Europe as a cosmopolitan cultural model; but they also learned, composed and performed in a specific set of historical conditions that differed from those in contemporary Europe. In that sense, my interest is in the specific agency composers -as literate urban citizens- had in appropriating and shaping transatlantic cultural transfers during this period. My study focuses on two musicians working in the Andean region, today’s Bolivia, Peru and Chile, during this period: José Bernardo Alzedo (Lima, 1788-1878) and Pedro Ximénez Abrill Tirado (Arequipa, 1784 - Sucre, 1856). Born in late-colonial times, both composers adapted themselves and their musical styles to the new expectations created by the post-independence period. Through five chapters I explore their specific role as composers, and how their decisions and choices impacted their careers and music, both personally and in context. Some key problems discussed in the dissertation include the definitions of local, personal and national “schools” and styles of composition; the notion of the composer as a postcolonial letrado; the ways in which specific European influences (like printed scores and Italian opera) shaped local musical scenes; and the complexities of adapting colonial musical models to the new “republican” period and its changing values, perspectives and ideals.

“Translated Conquests” recovers the deep linkages between New World texts and territories to offer a new understanding of the relationship of literature to empire in the nineteenth-century United States. When Columbus planted a flag on a Bahamian beach, it was the notary in the background who transformed his performance of possession into legal truth; from this moment forward, Spanish empire relied on paper “instruments” to claim and administer New World territories. I reconstruct the forgotten history of how, as Spain lost its hold on these American territories in the nineteenth century, much of the material archive of its colonization project was relocated from the past seat of New World empire to the future one—the United States. While the hemispheric turn in American literary studies made it a commonplace that the nineteenth-century narrative appropriation of Spanish “discovery” and “conquest” ran parallel to the territorial appropriation of former Spanish possessions, my project reveals that these processes were materially linked through an inherited archive that authorized both truth-claims and land claims. Bringing methods drawn from book history to bear on hemispheric studies, “Translated Conquests” traces the circulation of these material texts—ranging from colonial titles and portolan charts to relaciones and manuscript histories—to demonstrate that their accumulation in the United States underwrote claims to hemispheric history and territory in the expansionist period between the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and the Gadsden Purchase (1854). By grounding hemispheric studies in material flows, my project offers a revised conceptual framework that situates nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism within the longue durée of an entangled Atlantic World. Novelists, historians, and translators including Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Hickling Prescott, and Buckingham Smith refashioned Spanish history as the prehistory of the United States, but their nationalist works emerged from a transnational network that included London antiquarian and bookdealer Obadiah Rich, Spanish scholar Martín Fernández de Navarrete, and Mexican historians Carlos María de Bustamante and José Fernando Ramírez. As they claimed newly-available sources, all of these authors entered into a centuries-old debate over how to write the history of the New World, questioning which genres and media counted as reliable evidence and what kinds of claims they authorized. My readings of how the archive both materially enables and is figured in these works offers a revised understanding of the relationship between claiming history and claiming territory in the nineteenth-century United States.

This dissertation examines the role of the law in the development of photography in nineteenth century America, both as a technology and as a profession. My central thesis is that the social construction of technology and the definition of the photographic profession were interrelated processes, in which legislation and litigation were key factors: I investigate this thesis through three case studies that each deal with a (legal) controversy surrounding the new medium of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Section 1, “Peer Production” at Mid-Century, examines the role of another relatively new medium in the nineteenth century – the periodical press – in forming, defining, and sustaining a nation-wide community of photographers, a community of practice. It argues that photography was in some ways similar to what we would today recognize as a “peer produced” technology, and that the photographic trade press, which first emerged in the early 1850s, was instrumental in fostering knowledge sharing and open innovation among photographers. It also, from time to time, served as a site for activism, as I show in a case study of the organized resistance against James A. Cutting’s “bromide patent” (1854-1868). Section 2, Spirit Photography, Boundary-Work, and the Socio-Legal Shaping of Photography, focuses on the attempts of Oscar G. Mason and other photographers to get “spirit” photographer William H. Mumler behind bars for fraud and deception in 1869. Seeking to uphold the image of photography as a scientific, mechanically objective technology, and that of the photographer as an honest, trustworthy, and honorable professional, these photographers turned the courtroom into an arena for both the social construction of technology and for policing the boundaries of the photographic profession. Section 3, “Privacy, Copyright, and Photography in the United States, is about a question that photographers, publishers, courts and legislators spent much of the nineteenth century struggling to answer: who was the rightful author, and therefore owner, of a photograph? The Section details why that question arose when it did – in the final third of the nineteenth century – as well as the different ways in which photographers, their opponents, and representatives of the law struggled to define the nature of photography along with the meaning of photographic copyright. It also deals with the emergence, around the turn of the century, of a third party claiming ownership in the photograph – the sitter – and with how the “right to privacy” was formulated in part to accommodate that party. Finally, this third Section reveals the sometimes contradictory and often quite resourceful ways in which both the advocates and adversaries of photographic copyright enlisted the right to privacy in order to back up their own property claims, even when the nascent privacy right was meant to curtail the power of both these parties.

This thesis examines the publisher Thomas Nelson’s contribution to the juvenile publishing field in Britain in the period between 1850-1918, and studies Nelson’s development into a specialised publisher of books for children in the same period. The thesis examines the ways in which the children’s book and the juvenile publishing field developed through negotiating the demands of religious and secular education, arguing that it was through the children’s list that Nelson transitioned into a modern educational publisher. The thesis challenges assumptions that the history of children’s books is one from reading for instruction to reading solely for pleasure, thus also expanding our understanding of the types of books which were published in the “Golden Age” of children’s books. Finally, in uncovering the influence of the Nelson firm, the thesis reassesses the role of Scottish companies in British juvenile publishing. The research builds on three types of data: first and foremost information comes from the “Papers of Thomas Nelson & Sons”, a collection of the firm’s business and editorial papers. To allow comparisons with the larger publishing field and with specific publishers, data were also gathered from contemporary trade, professional, government and literary publications. Finally, the material form of selected Nelson children’s books is analysed. In chapter one, the impact that Nelson’s origin as a publisher with evangelical sympathies had on text selection and editorial methods is analysed. The reasons for the adventure tale’s dominant position on the Nelson list is the focus of chapter two, which analyses the editorial treatment of this genre and the diverse opportunities this genre afforded Nelson. Chapter three analyses the development of Nelson series, particularly the implications such diversification schemes had for the demarcations between juvenile and popular fiction. Chapter four examines the educational gift book and its relationship with Nelson’s schoolbooks, and the ways in which the conservatism and innovation of the early twentieth-century print market affected the composition of the children’s book list. The thesis concludes with a comparison of Nelson books from either end of the period studied, and uses the 1921 Newbolt Report on “The Teaching of English” to reflect on Nelson’s position in the publishing field.

The Louisiana Creole community in New Orleans went through profound changes in the first half of the 20th-century. This work examines Creole ethnic identity, focusing particularly on the transition from Creole to American. In "becoming American," Creoles adapted to a binary, racialized caste system prevalent in the Jim Crow American South, and transformed from a primarily Francophone/Creolophone community (where a tripartite although permissive caste system long existed) to a primarily Anglophone community (marked by stricter black-white binaries). These adaptations and transformations were facilitated through Creole participation in fraternal societies, the organized labor movement and public and parochial schools that provided English-only instruction. The "Americanization of Creole New Orleans" has been a common theme in Creole studies since the early 1990's, but no prior study has seriously examined the cultural and social transformation of Creole New Orleans by addressing the place and role of public and private institutions as instruments and facilitators of Americanization. By understanding the transformation of Creole New Orleans, this thesis demonstrates how an historically mixed-race community was ultimately divided by the segregationist culture of the early-twentieth century U.S. South. In addition to an extensive body of secondary research, this work draws upon archival research at the University of New Orleans' Special Collections, Tulane University Special Collections, the Amistad Research Center, The Archdiocese of New Orleans, and Xavier University Special Collections. This thesis makes considerable use of census data, draws upon press reports, and brings to bear a wide assortment of oral histories conducted by the author and others. Most scholars have viewed New Orleans Creoles simply as Francophone African Americans, but this view is limited. This doctoral thesis engages the Creole community in New Orleans on its own terms, and in its own idioms, to understand what "becoming American" meant for New Orleans Creoles between 1896-1949.

The thesis presents the first in-depth study of the role of measuring instruments in a leading scientific society concerned with field science. It draws upon a substantial literature in the history of science, geography, and exploration and makes use of actor network theory. The thesis considers the instruments to have been assimilated into an iterative cyclical process. By studying each aspect of the cycle, a comprehensive understanding of the integration of instruments into the working practices of the Society, the process of exploration, and ultimately the British imperialist endeavour, has been achieved. The start date is that of the founding of the Society. The end date approximates to the retirement of the map curator Edward Reeves, when recording practices at the Society changed. The century has coherence as the instruments remained essentially similar. The thesis therefore draws on a range of archival material: the journal articles, the medal awards, and the maps in addition to the paper archives, minute books and instruments themselves. The empirical findings have been enriched by reference to a substantial literature from historians of science, historical geographers and instrument historians. The thesis documents instrumental activity on behalf of the Society from acquisition to disposal or loss, regarding activity on behalf of the Society as 'added resource'. The thesis argues that the ambitions of the Society were slow to be enacted, and that a collection of instruments for lending was not formed until 1850. The preparation of travellers has been discussed as a complementary activity; systematic provision is likewise found to have been slow. Having studied fifty expeditions with respect to instrument mobilisation, from which excerpts are presented, a number of factors are identified which affected success, and the fallibility of instruments is confirmed. The itineraries of over a thousand individual items have been charted and made available in a database which will assist future research. The agencies of the instruments have been considered to be knowledge creation, individual reputation, empire, and social relations. The RGS developed strategies for militating against the fallibility of instruments in the field to provide credible outcomes. The instrumental data was manipulated by a growing body of professionals which served to moderate results. The instruments conferred social and epistemological authority to some groups more than others, but not necessarily in the manner predicted by existing theories. The geographical endeavour could be subsumed into imperialist demands. The instruments reflected and strengthened existing social hierarchies. The conclusions drawn indicate that historians of science and geography need to look at the role of instruments in more detail than extant models of knowledge creation, including ANT, suggest.

This thesis examines the continuing growth of the House of Murray during the 1820s-1840s. Prior to the 1820s, Murray had enjoyed massive success with the publications of the work of Lord Byron, whose celebrity, and the profits generated, contributed significantly to the House’s prestigious reputation. Murray’s move from Fleet Street to Albemarle Street in 1812 also signified the House’s shift from bookselling to publishing, which enabled Murray to attract an increasing number of high-profile names from the worlds of literature, travel and exploration, the sciences, and politics. Murray’s drawing-room at Albemarle Street became renowned throughout the trade for its gentlemanly gatherings, comprising of the luminaries of the day. The four chapters of this thesis explore how Murray (re)established the House identity in different markets during the 1820s-1840s, as the Romantic epoch diffused into an increasingly commercialised era, with new production methods, an expanding marketplace, and increasing competition. Chapter One considers Murray’s use of the drawing room at Albemarle Street to construct a House identity amongst selected members of his inner circle. It also looks at the importance of the Byronic legacy to the House and the means by which Murray sought to protect it. Chapter Two engages with the contrasting side of the House, namely the ‘cheap’ publications, which Murray published in response to the growth of this market in the late-1820s and early-1830s. During this time Murray used some of his well-established assets, such as Byron, Crabbe and the Quarterly Review, to retain the prestige of the House, while attempting to reach new readers within the burgeoning middle class. Chapter Three examines Murray’s correspondence with some of his female authors to consider how the House responded to authors of both genders, and, with reference to ongoing scholarship regarding ‘women’s writing’, questions the veracity of a gender-centric approach when applied to the study of archival materials; the chapter’s findings suggest that both Murray’s male and female authors were treated similarly. The final chapter explores how Murray strove to retain control over the House’s reputation as international trading possibilities developed. The roots of the 'Handbooks' and the 'Colonial and Home Library' are also traced back further than has previously been considered, and read within the context of the ongoing re-branding of Byron discussed in Chapters One and Two. The House’s literary figures, and the Quarterly Review, were used by Murray in the 1840s to promote the values and prestige of the House in America, Europe and the Colonies. This thesis offers much previously unpublished archival material from the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland. It builds upon previous scholarship on John Murray and seeks to contextualise some of these lines of enquiry through providing a sustained study of the House during the 1820s-1840s. It uses quantitative analysis, where possible, to provide further grounding for some of its claims, and situates the findings within the growing body of research in this area. It is the underlying aim of this thesis to foreground the House’s shift from the ‘Romanticism’ of the early-nineteenth century towards the ‘commercialism’ of the mid-nineteenth century, whilst serving as a point of reference for further scholarship on the John Murray Archive during this time period.

This dissertation is an analysis of the role of the automaton in late-nineteenth century French novels by Émile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde. Designed to resemble naturally produced people and animals, these living machines were animated by steam or electricity and used to explore the changing relationships between humans, animals, and machines. My analysis focuses on a specific type of automaton, the bachelor machine—feminized and sexualized machines that often resemble women and replace them in romantic and sexual relationships. My research is informed by the nineteenth century clinical approach to medicine that assumed that the body, particularly the female body, was a penetrable space to be dissected and diagnosed. By focusing on female sexuality and reproduction, women in the nineteenth century were considered biological machines, valued only for their reproductive capabilities. Under the male scientific gaze, the hysterical female body was a site of diseased sexuality that was replaced by bachelor machines and other mechanized women. I label these fictional bachelor machines “reproductive futurisms” and consider their role in evolutionary debates which increasingly link anthrogenesis and technogenesis. The female automata presented in these novels are examples of a new type of representational text in which artificial femininity is a hybrid of technical mastery and artistry. Female automata are fabricated using technologies of re-production including: sculpture, wax casts, photography, the hologram, the phonograph, and early films. These technologies of re-production change the ways in which the human body and voice are captured and reproduced. Furthermore, many of these technologies of re-production mimic dissection techniques and result in the fragmentation of the female form. This study makes a contribution to the fields of nineteenth century French studies and gender and sexuality studies.