Communications History

Based on a growing body of recent historical work, this article compares the audiences of two media: the letter and the Internet. Researchers of the digital world have claimed that the net is characterized by a blurring of borders between the one-to-one dialogue (long idealized by literary research), and the one-to-many dissemination (best exemplified by broadcasting). However, the ancient medium of the letter too had long blurred boundaries, from local leaks to full-fledged publications of collections of letters. The article first discusses various types of epistolary disseminations, mainly voluntary ones (for glory, for political aims, for managing communities and for family and community relationships), but also involuntarily disseminations for private or political surveillance. It concludes that in the longue durée of media history, the Internet exemplifies historical trends which started before the digital world: the demand for absolute privacy, and the risk of total political surveillance.

The transition of news and information are the backbone of every larger society. This lecture paper (in German language) is concerning the messenger-mail of the Saxon court and administration around the year 1500.
As much as we know about the imperial Turn-&-Taxis-Post, which is the germ of the Deutsche Bundespost of our days, that less we know about the messenger mail of the smaller countries in ancient Germany. How could rulers in that time control their land and their possessions, which often stretched across several hundred kilometers? What does it mean, when even the most powerful sovereigns were dependent of the speed and trustworthiness of their messengers, which were going by foot or riding several hundred kilometers. The administration, the courts and even princes were waiting for an answers several weeks, fearing that the messenger could be robbed or bribed and confidential letters could be lost.
At least ten important letters were send out from main court of Electoral-Saxony every day, not counting the smaller requests and inquiries or the formal charters. The Saxon court was keeping at least 4-6 messengers with horses ("reitende Boten") and 4-5 running messengers ("fußgehende Hofboten") the handle this task. At the same time in every of the 70 local central castles ("Ämter") there was at least one local messenger ("Amtsbote") responsible for the delivery of letters, often just getting food and beer. These "Amtsboten" were even used by the court, carrying letters from one "Amts-"castle to the next "Amts-"castle in a relay race (Jens Kunze: "Botenstafette").
The performance of these messengers was extraordinary. Books of account show the some of the "Amtsboten" were going 45 km a day, six days in a row, while some "Hofboten" sometimes travelled 183 Saxon miles (~1500 km) on horseback to deliver several letters to the coast towns, receiving not more than 8 pence a mile and refund of their expenses.

This article explores the changes in news agency mechanisms that accompanied the restructuring of Europe after World War I. During the interwar period, a new form of negotiation replaced the pre-World War I conception of English, French and German spheres of influence with a more cooperative vision of the collection and dissemination of news. I argue that the private and business-oriented nature of news agency cooperation enabled it to outlast better-known political attempts at multilateralism. Indeed, it often produced more concrete results by offering different incentives for cooperation to all involved from large global agencies, such as Reuters, down to the small agencies of new Central and Eastern European nation-states. Overall, the agencies' cooperation until the outbreak of World War II suggests alternative periodizations of the interwar period than the division into a fairly internationalist 1920s followed by the increasing bilateralism of the 1930s.

„Manifestation of the Idea of European Unity – Living Magna Charta of Peace“: The Political Dimension of the PRESSA Cologne 1928 and its Reception in the Contemporary German and International Press“

The PRESSA was the most ambitious and comprehensive exhibition ever held to present modern journalism. The exhibition highlighted numerous facets of contemporary journalism, including its historical roots and its cultural, technical, economic and international interdependencies to a professional audience and the general public. In addition, the exhibition also had a political dimension. Its organisers wanted to demonstrate, with the first major international fair held on German soil after the end of the First World War, that the Reich was a great power and willing and capable of contributing actively to international peace and cooperation. The political dimension of the PRESSA found its expression in the speeches held during the opening and closing ceremonies and in the official publications of the exhibition.
As a result of these high expectations the PRESSA became an international media event. The German and foreign press reported extensively the opening and closing ceremonies, and the concept and contents of the exhibition. Furthermore, the press paid particular attention to the political dimension of the PRESSA, and to the crucial role of the Cologne exhibition – and the press generally – in furthering international peace and cooperation. The intensity and euphoria with which this idea was taken up in the press leads to the conclusion that the exhibition with its emphasis on the peace mission of the press had raised an issue that concerned politicians, the public, and the press worldwide.
This essay reconstructs the political dimension of the PRESSA and its reception in the German and international press. The first part analyses the political motivations of the organisers. The second part examines the coverage of the PRESSA in selected German and international newspapers, with particular emphasis on the treatment of the political dimension of the exhibition. The final part is devoted to the question of whether or not the coverage of the PRESSA and its peace mission was too optimistic, in particular in view of the political developments in Germany and Europe after the rise to power of Nazism in 1933.

La comunicación alternativa –también denominada comunitaria, libre, ciudadana, del tercer sector o para el cambio social– es percibida como una hermana menor en las ciencias de la comunicación hasta padecer una triple invisibilización: en la historia social del campo, en relación con los medios públicos y comerciales, y en las propias teorías de la comunicación. Desde esta premisa, el presente volumen se adentra en su conceptualización y en sus principales hitos, debates y prácticas en España desde la Transición democrática hasta la actualidad y poniendo el foco en distintos soportes mediáticos: desde la radio comunitaria al vídeo participativo y el activismo digital. Hasta la fecha, no existe en nuestro país ningún compendio actualizado íntegramente dedicado a analizar los aspectos esenciales de la materia, por lo que esta obra llena un importante vacío investigativo y docente.

In this paper, the writings related to four seventh century individuals will be examined with a hope of better understanding what happened in that time period and how news of events in the eastern Mediterranean reached western Europe.  While two of the four, Isidore of Seville and the Frankish ‘Fredegar’, repeated information they’d gathered at second hand, the other two, Bishop Arculf and Theodore of Tarsus, themselves traveled from the Levant to the British Isles.  As witnesses to the world changing events of their century, all four are certainly important sources.  This study, though, will not focus on reconstructing the truth of events but, instead, will attempt to discover what these four thought they knew, how they knew what they did, and how such information might have been carried from one end of the former Roman Empire to the other.  The purpose will be to seek a better understanding of communications and connections in one of the murkiest and most important eras in history.

This article examines the myriad ways the relay system 驛傳 (yichuan) facilitated the movement of the Ming empire into the borderlands. As the early Ming emperors understood, an efficient relay system was vital to the movement of Ming armies into the periphery, the exercise of political authority over Han and non-Han populations, the rituals of diplomatic relations with foreign emissaries, and the routine exercise of bureaucratic power over the borderlands. By the early 1420s, early Ming emperors had used the relay system to spread and consolidate imperial control over the traditional Han territories, incorporate new, fragile areas like Guizhou and Yunnan into the Ming polity, and lead colonial invasions into upland Southeast Asia, throughout Đại Việt, and all the way into the Siberian forests of Nurgan. In the 1430s and 1440s, however, just as the expensive relay system began to experience its own problems, the Ming presence in the borderlands provoked a series of wars in Đại Việt, Luchuan, and Mongolia that forced the Ming government to withdraw the relay system out of the imperial margins.

The increasing interest in media history within the academic world has not yet resulted in an intensive examination of the relationship between photography and communications media. This article seeks to begin to address this lacuna by examining photography's insertion into the so-called revolution of communication in middle-nineteenth-century America. The first section of the present study links photography to the introduction of telegraphy, the development of the railway and the expansion of the postal system. The second section examines aspects of the reception of photography in nineteenth-century America and argues this is related to improvements in communication and transportation technologies. The conclusion calls for a broader consideration of the links between the history of photography and the history of media.

Over the past decade, journalism studies has become an increasingly prominent area of research within the field of communication. This ascendance, however, coincides with a moment of deep turmoil for journalism itself. Thus far, much research has focused on specific aspects of journalism's transformation, leaving other areas of inquiry less developed. These gaps in the research deserve closer attention, especially as we begin to imagine journalism studies' trajectory into the digital age, with a greater focus on online news. Such a project requires a healthy degree of reflexivity. An examination of how journalism studies makes sense of the profound changes—in some ways dissolution—of its primary research subject brings into focus paucities in specific perspectives and research agendas. In this essay, I suggest that considering these neglected traditions could potentially enrich journalism studies by bringing it into conversation with other subfields and increasing its relevance for constituencies beyond the academy.

Relazione presentata al 20° Colloquio di storia postale “Posta e acqua. Vie di mare, di fiume, di lago e… inondazioni” organizzato dall’Istituto di studi storici postali “Aldo Cecchi” onlus e dall’ASPOT - Associazione per lo studio della storia postale toscana.
Prato, 12 febbraio 2022, Archivio di Stato.
L'intervento evidenzia come l'annessione alla Francia delle isole toscane abbia determinato una revisione dei sistemi di collegamento postale trasferendo il baricentro verso la Francia continentale, per il prevalente tramite della Corsica. Una nuova organizzazione progettata nei dettagli ancor prima della conquista dell’isola d’Elba, sulla linea dei dettami dello stesso Napoleone che nelle sue corrispondenze richiama sovente la necessità di stabilire saldi collegamenti tra le periferie e la capitale per il costante controllo del territorio. Un sistema postale la cui struttura rimarrà in funzione fino alla restaurazione granducale.

In my first book I studied the European dimension of the French Wars of Religion, and their perception in
South-West Germany and Italy in comparison, testing a complex approach of ‘entangled history’ or ‘Histoire
croisée’. While the historiography of the French (as well as other European) wars of religion has nearly always
concentrated on the national perspective, my book takes into account for the first time the strong
interdependency of French events and thoughts with those of neighboring territories in Italy and Germany,
specially Savoy, Alsace and the Palatinate. The work relies on a huge amount of archival and early printed
sources which had never been touched on. I show the military involvement of France’s European neighbors, the
Italian perception which was impregnated with Machiavellism and the German, more theologico-political,
sometimes even apocalyptic vision of the wars. The title words ‘Discorso and Lex Dei’ refer to this: ‘Discorso’
is the name given to early modern political advice and its method; ‘Lex Dei’ refers to the norm aimed at by
political theologians. Like modern and contemporary large wars, the early modern wars of religion were an
international phenomenon and not just situated in a national context. I study military and diplomatic
involvement as well as the perception in early modern media (pamphlets, written newspapers) and I study the
impact on state-building in these areas. To my knowledge, at least since World War II there has been no book
written about the French wars of religion which relies on a comparable amount of unknown European archival
and printed sources.

This paper studies the interaction between clerical and lay English Catholics on the Continent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In contrast with Protestant exiles, who established separate exile churches, Catholic expatriates did not create churches specifically for the exiled laity. Catholics abroad did nonetheless get support from the religious convents, colleges, and monasteries, where they received some pastoral care, and liturgical nourishment. How this interaction gained particular features in the context of expatriate Catholics is discussed in three cases which are attributed great importance in Counter-Reformation Catholicism: sodalities, preaching, and saint veneration.

By presenting a Catholic case of confessional mobility, this essay contributes to scholarship on early modern exiles, which is dominated by work on Protestant migration. It also speaks to the study of the Catholic Reformation, by examining how this was shaped in a situation of mobility. In both cases, and more generally, it nuances the study of institutional and localised confessional lives. The evidence discussed in this article suggests that much of the exiles devotional and liturgical lives, and their sense of belonging, is to be found in informal networks and communal understanding, rather than in focused clear-cut institutions. This has bearing upon the records that have been created and passed on to this day, and their visibility in historical research.

FREELY AVAILABLE ON P&P WEBSITE. Over the last generation, some of our time’s most momentous concerns have transformed the historical study of information in two seemingly opposite directions: the communicational practices that spread the news across specifically located societies; and the media that enabled it to travel at increasing speed over long distances and across continents. Like trade or migration, information is an essential element of global history, both a means and an effect of contacts among distant regions and peoples. Yet a macro approach struggles to explain how information worked on the ground. By contrast, microhistory maximizes the variety of our sources, to take into account both locality and large spaces; it enables us to study how the news travelled as far as it did, why it came to mutate in the process, thanks to whose agency, and with what impact. This article discusses microhistorical approaches to long-distance information, and experiments with one such approach, by analysing in detail one case of how the reports of one event – a naval battle in the Adriatic in 1617 – moved across distances that were vast in both geographical and cultural terms, in the Mediterranean and beyond. Microhistory shows that the movement of information was a transformational process compounded of intensely localized and socially defined activities, by a wide range of people who shaped the news as they relayed it through places that were at once specific and connected. Information was both global and local: its circulation made long distances small, but every small step could make for huge transformations.

La notte tra il 20 e il 21 febbraio 1513 la morte pone fine al decennale pontificato di Giulio II Della Rovere, figura cardine del papato rinascimentale, di cui incarna la grandiosità e le contraddizioni. La popolazione romana gli tributò un omaggio senza precedenti: «da quarant’anni che vivo in questa città non ho mai visto una folla così straordinaria al mortorio di un papa», racconta il cerimoniere pontificio Paride de’ Grassi.
Come sovrano pontefice, politico spregiudicato e sommo mecenate Giulio II rimane uno dei personaggi che maggiormente condizionano l’immaginario collettivo del Rinascimento. Ma quale fu l’immagine che ne ebbero i contemporanei (non solo gli uomini di lettere, i prelati e i professionisti della politica, ma anche il popolo urbano del primo ‘500)?
Questo libro risponde a tale domanda ricostruendo l’immagine di Giulio II nella sfera pubblica e nella comunicazione politica in vari contesti italiani ed europei (Bologna, Ferrara, Roma, Venezia, Londra e Parigi). Intrecciando i racconti dei cantastorie con i dispacci dei diplomatici, le voci e le canzoni di piazza con i trattati degli umanisti, si delinea un ritratto inedito del ‘papa guerriero’, una rappresentazione in perenne oscillazione tra laude e vituperio, tra guerra e beatitudine.

The  present paper  highlights the potential of procuratorial appointments for the reconstruction of ‘communication’ in Venice during the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The approach is twofold: First, to present the advantages of including the procurae in the study of premodern communication precisely because of their suitable characteristics. Special emphasis is laid upon the potential for quantitatively analysing this particular notarial act within the framework of the Venetian Stato da mar. In the second part, a number of examples drawn from the instrument books of the city’s notaries, preserved in the Croatian State Archive in Zadar, serve to illustrate the value of the procuratorial appointments for future studies.

The mediatization thesis maintains that media technologies, beginning with print, have profoundly changed human experience. One of its major claims is that media have allowed a new "disembedding," or "distanciation," from the here and now, in a process which now culminates as a so-called deep mediatization. Relying on cultural history and anthropology, this article questions this claim. It contends that mediatization theory is premised on a modern/naturalist, human-centered view of the world as a homogeneous physical nature, dominated by human beings who must resort to technologies to communicate at a distance. This outlook disregards ancient and/or peripheral non-Western ontologies, and cultural practices such as correspondence, theater, religion, and human language itself, which have long enabled rich forms of distanciation. Such neglected ontologies and practices now combine with modern technology, and could be fruitfully incorporated into mediatization research, both historical and contemporary.

To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda.
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Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad.

Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news.
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News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.
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The book was a #1 new release in international relations, media studies, and journalism on Amazon.

In the historiography of Indonesian nationalism and the press, much has been made of the vernacular press and its role in the emergence of national consciousness. However, this work has not typically distinguished between the vernacular press and the self-identified " revolutionary press, " which emerged during the early communist movement of 1920–1926. This article recovers the tradition of the revolutionary press and situates it in the history of Indonesian national struggles by examining the production and development of the revolutionary newspaper Sinar Hindia. An investigation of the paper's content, production, and distribution practices reveals how Sinar Hindia not only embodied the anticolonial national struggle but also became a voice for a project of enlightenment in the colony. By uncovering this " revolutionary " paper's own discourses of enlightenment and revolutionary struggle, this study sheds light on the role of the press in the production of enlightenment ideas and practices in colonial Indonesia.

The early modern period is characterized by a lively culture of written and printed participation that almost constantly stimulated new streams of commenting, correcting, answering and observing (paper-based) media in extenso. However, at the other end of the increased use of publications we see censoring activities like book burnings aimed to punish certain „unwanted“ voices. This article deals with the material problems of these public book burning ceremonies. Missing books, very small books, reduced numbers of books available, or books subjected to limiting-quotas, and, in general, too fast burning paper made these events to happenings of shortage. Through the use of additional ceremonial aspects, the organizers of book burnings tried to solve the shortages. In so doing, it was almost always the case that the less paper was available, the more effort was exerted in the rituals. As is demonstrated by eighteenth-century Frankfurt (Main), Cologne, Hamburg and Rome, the situations of shortage motivated the organizers to extend the ceremonial procedure by either ripping the publication to pieces before burning or often using gallows or pillories in order to make the ceremony happen at all.


Zusammenfassung
Die europäische Epoche der Frühen Neuzeit ist maßgeblich gekennzeichnet durch eine Publikationsfreudigkeit: Beobachtungen, Meinungen, Widerlegungen, Korrekturen, Anmerkungen oder Antworten auf vorherig Publiziertes führten zu immer neuen Akten der Verschriftlichung und Drucklegung. Am anderen Ende der epochentypischen Publizität stand, wie schon in Antike und im Mittelalter, die zensural-motivierte Verbrennung ausgewählter Publikationen als "ungewollte" Stimmen. In diesem Aufsatz geht es um die typischen materiellen Probleme dieser als Strafe konzipierten und zeremoniell inszenierten Bücherverbrennungen, die sich im Modus des öffentlichen Spektakels vollzogen. Absentes, reduziertes, kontingentiertes oder zu flüchtig verbrennendes (bedrucktes) Papier machte diese symbolisch aufgeladenen Ereignisse nämlich zu Veranstaltungen im Zeichen des Mangels. Mittels zusätzlicher inszenatorischer bzw. zeremonieller Aspekte versuchten die Ausrichter das Problem kompensatorisch zu lösen: Tendenziell galt hierbei, je weniger Papier verfügbar war, desto mehr Aufwand musste betrieben werden. Fallbeispiele aus Frankfurt am Main, Köln, Hamburg und Rom zeigen die Logik des materiellen Mangels in Zeremonie-Verlängerungen (durch separates Zerreißen von Publikationen), Zeremonie-Ausweitungen (durch Galgen- oder Prangernutzung) sowie in angesammelten kollektiven Buchverbrennungen, um überhaupt eine Zeremonie gewährleisten zu können.

A shorter version of this article was published in May 2021 in volume 78 of For the Record, the journal of the City of London Phonograph & Gramophone Society. This version, slightly expanded, includes more illustrations than the print format permitted and incorporates research which has come to light since publication. I have added a Post-script.

Durant une vingtaine d’années, le projet de construction d’une Tour Lumière Cybernétique à Paris a suscité un grand intérêt dans l’opinion publique, dans différents cercles artistiques et scientifiques ainsi que chez de nombreux politiciens et administrateurs. Grandiose, la tour imaginée par l’artiste franco-hongrois Nicolas Schöffer (1912-1992) constituait tout à la fois une œuvre d’art et un média total d’un genre nouveau, capable d’opérer une synthèse des médias de communication de l’époque, mais également d’ajuster et d’équilibrer les activités humaines à l’environnement, qui est considérée comme un média dans tous les sens du terme, c’est-à-dire comme un milieu de vie ainsi qu’en tant que matière artistique à élaborer.  Pour Schöffer, la Tour Lumière Cybernétique constitue l’amorce d’un projet social et politique révolutionnaire. Épicentre de la ville cybernétique, la Tour Schöffer avait pour objectif l’établissement d’une nouvelle forme cybernétique de gouvernement par l’information qui devait pallier les institutions politiques traditionnelles. Mais comment un projet d’une telle envergure et d’une telle ambition a-t-il pu susciter un tel engouement, notamment de la part de la classe politique? Retour sur une utopie oubliée.

Subject of the study is a little-known aspect of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, namely, the propaganda campaign towards the German public from September 1938 until May 1940. Although there is a vast literature about appeasement, Chamberlain’s efforts to reach the German people by way of propaganda have so far received no attention from historians. The thesis reconstructs for the first time the history of British German-language propaganda dur-ing Chamberlain’s premiership. The evolution of the institutional framework, the changing strategies and the contents of this propaganda campaign are described in detail, offering a deep insight into the thinking of the British Government about German society and exposing a naive belief in the power of propaganda.
In the thesis a new methodological approach is adopted by integrating the study of high poli-tics at the diplomatic level with the study of the propaganda campaign towards a foreign pub-lic. Whereas conventional interpretations consider appeasement a foreign policy strategy con-ducted exclusively on the diplomatic stage between the two governments of Britain and Ger-many, the author maintains that appeasement has rather to be viewed as a policy consisting of two equal and complementary pillars. The first pillar was the well-known dual policy of deter-rence and conciliation directed towards the Nazi regime at a governmental level. The second pillar was the propaganda campaign directed towards the German public over the heads of the Nazi regime. The propaganda campaign, while on the whole reflecting Chamberlain’s foreign policy on the governmental level, seems to have been regarded by the British government as an additional deterrent element to the diplomatic pillar: Hitler was to be warned that he would risk serious opposition from his own people if he provoked war, and thus be induced to seek a peaceful solution to his territorial claims. In this sense, the propaganda campaign was a safe-guard for the conciliatory part of appeasement, namely, the readiness to consider favourably Germany’s legitimate territorial and economic claims.
The thesis identifies five phases during which Chamberlain attached varying degrees of im-portance to the propaganda instrument in his dealings with Germany. Thus, the significance of propaganda increased in direct relation to the deterioration of Anglo-German negotiations on the diplomatic level. The propaganda pillar even outlasted the outbreak of war and the col-lapse of the first pillar: After negotiations on an official diplomatic level had come to an end on 3rd September 1939, Chamberlain sought to continue his policy of goodwill towards the German people by means of propaganda in the hope to stir up a revolution against Hitler.
In the end, however, British propaganda proved to be a failure. The author identifies two rea-sons for this. The first was a lack of credibility, i.e. the discrepancy between the picture of events as presented in British propaganda, and the reality as experienced by the German pub-lic. The second, and even more important, reason was, however, a whole host of unrealistic British assumptions about the Nazi state and the character of the German people. In particular, the British political elite unconsciously transferred British democratic traditions onto Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Chamberlain’s propaganda was based on the premise that public opinion did carry some weight in the Third Reich and that the German people, even though living un-der a dictatorship, would cherish similar political ideals of democratic participation and a dis-like of Hitler as British subjects.

During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of Europe during World War II. The event marks a key moment in the secretive expansion of U.S. military power, and this article looks at how mainstream journalism helped create the discursive conditions that abetted this expansion. After an explication of the historical and theoretical rationales for studying the relation between journalism and U.S. military power, this article analyzes Time magazine's coverage of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 and finds that the American press at the time was not discursively configured to critique the U.S. military-diplomatic apparatus. The article analyzes the depiction of Cambodia as a theater of war and argues that most critiques of the bombing were limited to President Richard Nixon's quality of character, providing a locus that prevented more systemic critiques from emerging.

Enlightenment and the revolutionary press in colonial Indonesia. An investigation of Sinar Hindia's content, production, and distribution practices The 1917 revolutions inspired the popularization and radicalization of the nascent anti-colonial movement in the Indies, which is reflected in the history of the revolutionary press which emerged in the subsequent years until 1926-7. This article recovers the tradition of the revolutionary press and situates it in the history of Indonesian national struggles by examining the production and development of the revolutionary newspaper Sinar Hindia. An investigation of the paper's content, production, and distribution practices reveals how Sinar Hindia not only embodied the anti-colonial national struggle but also became a voice for a project of enlightenment in the colony.

"Rival Blueprints for Post-War Europe: British Efforts to Counter National Socialist Propaganda on the „New European Order“, 1940-1941"

Following the defeat of France in June 1940, the Nazi regime announced ambitious plans for the economic and political reconstruction of Europe under German control. Simultaneously, Great Britain was attacked as the backward defender of the old order. The Churchill government, concerned about the evident decline of its political influence in Europe, decided to take on the challenge and try to offer a rival, and better, plan for post-war Europe. This article examines the British response to Hitler’s propaganda for a ‘New European Order’ during 1940-41. Particular attention is being paid to the treatment of the topic in the British propaganda campaign towards the German public.

This international conference is supported by the German Research Association (DFG) and designed to focus on one of the most essential, lucrative, and yet forgotten business activities of early modern Europe: the trading of paper.

For more information contact the organizer of the conference, Daniel Bellingradt (Erlangen- Nuremberg University, Germany, daniel.bellingradt@fau.de), or consult the project’s websites on the conference and on the research network ‘Paper Trade of Early Modern Europe’:
• https://www.buchwiss.uni-erlangen.de/forschung/projekte/the-paper-trade-of-early- modern-europe.html
• https://www.buchwiss.uni-erlangen.de/forschung/projekte/research-network-paper- trade-in-early-modern-europe.html

The great Jewish migration to America in the turn of the 19 th century was researched excessively, specifically concerning its causes and the incorporation of the immigrants into the American society. However, research has scarcely dealt with transatlantuc communication between individuals and communities in the " new world " and communities in the " old world " , especially not with the spatial distribution of such communication. The following paper focuses on the European responsa literature as a source for such communication between the European orthodox world and the American orthodox world. While references to America in European responsa were rarities until the mid-nineteenth century, they became quite frequent along with the turn of the century mass migration. By spatially analyzing a GIS-mapping of these references between 1890 and 1930, we prove that that the existence of communication networks had a direct connection to a seemingly non-relevant parameter, the inner-orthodox debate between Hasidim and Mitnagdim. This conclusion leads to meaningful findings concerning the formation of an autonomous American rabbinical hierarchy, and the changing need of communities to relate to a distant authority. As this study demonstrates, a spatial analysis of the connections between Europe and America in the responsa literature provides some unexpected, even striking finds that may require a re-evaluation of certain historiographic commonplaces concerning the religious, and even the social history of American Jews.

Donald Trump’s election exposed structural pathologies in America’s media system. This commentary addresses three broad media failures that combine to imperil democratic society: the news media’s extreme commercialism; Facebook’s proliferation of misinformation; and the crisis of newspaper journalism. I then outline a policy program that can begin to address these structural pathologies.

Nowadays, one of the most important usages of machine learning is diagnosis of diverse diseases. In this work, we introduces a diagnosis model based on Catfish binary particle swarm optimization (CatfishBPSO), kernelized support vector machines (KSVM) and association rules (AR) as our feature selection method to diagnose erythemato-squamous diseases. The proposed model consisted of two stages. In the first stage, AR is used to select the optimal feature subset from the original feature set. Next, based on the fact that kernel parameter setting in the SVM training procedure significantly influences the classification accuracy and CatfishBPSO is a promising tool for global searching, a CatfishBPSO based approach is employed for parameter determination of KSVM. Experimental results show that the proposed AR-CatfishBPSO-KSVM model achieves 99.09% classification accuracy using 24 features of the erythemato-squamous disease dataset which shows that our proposed method is more accurate compared to other popular methods in this literature like Support vector machines and AR-MLP (association rulesmultilayer perceptron). It should be mentioned that we took our dataset from University of California Irvine machine learning database.

In order to distribute our thoughts and feelings, we must make intelligible and distributable copies of them. From approximately 1375 to 1450, certain Europeans started fully mechanized replication of texts and images, based on predecessor “smaller” technologies. What they started became the most powerful means for the distribution, storage, and retrieval of knowledge in history, up until the invention of digital means. We have scant information about the initiation of print technologies in the period up to Gutenberg, and the picture of Gutenberg that we have has become a great deal more complicated than hitherto. There has not been, however, an approach to the “pre-printing” period in terms of the history of idea or intellectual history. After a brief survey of established approaches, this essay argues that distribution by impression, or print, is bound up with ancient metaphors for understanding communication by the making of multiples. I suggest that there is a rich field of study for printing history in the sophisticated concepts of reality that medieval and late Scholastic philosophy developed. These concepts helped to express and develop a desire or need for communication that led to the technology of replicating texts and images for wide and continued distribution.