In Association with the Friends of the Victoria University Library. Historical and ethnographic research on the role of newspapers in the formation of the public sphere reveals that some concept of publicity is foundational for a number of theories of self-determination, but that the subject of publicity is irrevocably enmeshed in the very technological, linguistic, […]

In Association with Victoria College and the Friends of the Victoria University Library. “Literature is my Utopia,” Helen Keller quotably declared. Today, serious readers often credit the printed book with the power to annihilate space and time. The datelined newspaper and the digital book provide foils for that rapture, so far feebly emulated by e-reading interfaces […]

The New World, so called by sixteenth-century Europeans, had desirable commodities to offer. During the first century of the European invasion of the Americas, music acted as a commodity, or at least as a kind of currency to obtain commodities. This happened mainly in two ways over the course of the sixteenth century. Firstly, Europeans […]

In association with the Centre for the Study of the United States. Protestantism has been the dominant influence shaping both American religious history and the history of American book culture, as the drive for widespread literary, mass book dissemination, and the public school movement were each significantly driven by the religious imperative to access the […]

In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law and the Friends of the Victoria University Library. False attributions of authorship, unauthorized printings, competing editions and complaints about quality were hardly unusual in early-modern printing. But these problems were virtually unheard of in relation to English legal printing after […]

In association with the Faculty of Information. Who knew what when about the origin and development of the alphabet? Answers to this question take us into a history of bibliographical antiquities, paleographical investigation, and graphical modes of knowledge transmission. The various “histories” that emerge from this record have distinct chronological foundations that embody belief systems […]

In Association with the Master of Museum Studies Program (Faculty of Information) and the Department for the Study of Religion Historians of American Indian history have long struggled with the question of sources. Throughout the nineteenth century, many native societies on the Great Plains had neither scripted forms of their own languages nor many members […]