Recent Books
- Recent Books
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This book is based on a British Academy-funded postdoctoral project, ‘Popular Publishing and the Construction of a British Archaeological Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. As the title implies it deals with popular publishing and not learned publications. However, the chronological scope is effectively much narrower. Apart from reporting earlier research on the work of the Religious Tract Society in publicizing archaeology in the 1840s the story only really starts in 1870 with the formation of the Society of Biblical Archaeology. The story peters out, rather than concludes, by the 1950s, so we do not learn about Thames & Hudson’s Ancient Peoples and Places series which started in 1955, which is only mentioned in passing in the epilogue. The geographical coverage is equally restrictive. The archaeology of the British Isles is rarely mentioned, as the focus is on the Middle East, and to a lesser extent the ancient Greek world. The book gives a history of the rise of the archaeologist as a profession and has a chapter on women’s interest and involvement in archaeology. In keeping with a study which stresses the popular image there is a chapter on fictional archaeology both on the printed page and on the screen, and remarks on biographies and autobiographies of archaeologists. Some archaeologists were reluctant to put down their trowel in favour of the pen, and only then for technical reports. Others took every opportunity to promote themselves and their finds in the periodical press such as the Illustrated London News and in part-works such as the Harmsworth Universal History of the World. Demonstrating the potential of newspaper digitization projects Thornton traces the rise and fall of news about Charles Petrie’s Egyptian expeditions in the 1890s. Citing the availability of company archives for her choice Thornton devotes a chapter each to studying the some times fraught relations between archaeologists and publishers at John Murray, Macmillan, and Penguin. The focus of the chapter on John Murray is restricted to the 1890s, while that on Macmillan is generally restricted to the same decade. The Penguin chapter also includes some details of earlier cheap archaeological books produced by Ernest Benn, but only covers the first two decades of Penguin. The activities of other publishers with archaeological lists and series such as T. Fisher Unwin, Kegan Paul, and Chatto & Windus are referred to but not analysed in any depth. A list of Archaeologist-Authors concludes the book.
This volume had its origins at a 2014 Cambridge symposium on ‘Information Technologies and Transfer, 1450–1850’ which aimed to investigate how ‘from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth’ and to ask ‘how did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change?’ Readers of The Library without specialist Slavic interests will find at least some of these articles of particular interest. In their essay ‘Muscovy and the European Information Revolution: Creating the Mechanisms for Obtaining Foreign News’, Daniel C. Waugh and Ingrid Maier deal with the importation of newspapers in the seventeenth century. Because these were mostly German and Dutch papers, English diplomats were worried that the Russians would receive unfavourable views of English policy. In the next chapter, ‘How was Western Europe Informed about Muscovy? The Razin Rebellion in Focus’, Maier looks at the transfer of news in the other direction, showing how news of the 1671 rebellion was successfully handled by Muscovy. Both these articles show that print had not entirely superseded manuscript. Alison K. Smith’s ‘Information and Efficiency...
