Toward an Archaeology of Manuscripts

The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing into relief what King terms “the multimedia eighteenth century.” King argues that such methods and theories demonstrate the importance of what Siegfried Zielinksi has called an “archeological” approach that focuses study on moments when, as Zielinksi puts it, “things and situations were still in state of flux, where the options for development in various directions were still wide open, where the future was conceivable as holding multifarious possibilities of technical and cultural solutions for constructing media worlds.

Review of When Novels Were Books. By Jordan Alexander Stein.

But novels ARE books, you might be thinking. Jordan Stein points out that this is true, but not in the way that many of us have thought to be the case. Twentieth- and twenty-first century literary history, Stein argues, has too often failed to deliver a programmatic discussion of the media history of genre. Attention to changes and continuities in the early Anglophone novel’s artifactual status within an evolving, transatlantic media ecology, supplements, and in some cases rethinks, critical understandings of the development of novelistic form. Stein’s method is axiomatic for those working at the intersection of form and format: texts are comprised of what Jerome McGann describes in The Textual Condition (1991) as linguistic and bibliographic perceptual codes. Stein’s story is one of how writers, readers, editors, printers, publishers, and others navigated and contributed to the ongoing reciprocities among these codes. Such material specificity, “ironically,” to quote Stein’s oft-used diction, is vital to uncovering a story not of progressive, causal relation between form and format but rather a story of association and mutation. In this respect, Stein is indebted to the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guttari

Review of Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741-1860. By Heather Haveman

Haveman’s work explores the changing ways that American magazine publishing and distribution helped create and shape local communities and, increasingly during the nineteenth century, the trans-local communities that are a hallmark of modern life. Her narration and synthesis of data and scholarship on the evolving genres, contents, infrastructures, and institutional workings of American magazines in chapters two through four alone make her work an important source on magazine production and distribution. Subsequent chapters provide a series of case studies on how magazines engendered communities around religion, social reform, and economic development. Following her conclusion, Haveman provides rich, detailed appendices on data and method

The Intermedial Politics of Handwritten Newspapers in the 19th-Century U.S.

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based means of communication, and they could become part of a convent’s social and spiritual life. For scholars of Native American studies, the most well-known handwritten newspaper (which might be better termed a literary journal) is The Muz-ze-ni-e-gun, or Literary Voyager, in which appeared works by the Ojibwe writer, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft

Colonial Prehistories of Indigenous North America

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, Welsh-speaking descendants are said to have resettled at Devil’s Backbone, a bluff overlooking the Ohio River on which, legend has it, they built a stone earthwork. Later, many were supposedly slaughtered by local Native people, possibly at Sand Island. The survivors retreated down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi River, joining local Indigenous populations, possibly the Mandan people

Race, American Enlightenment, and the End Times

This chapter examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of apocalypse regarding the future of black lives in the American body politic. It begins with readings of Jefferson’s fear of a black planet in Notes on the State of Virginia and Crèvecoeur’s depictions of racial terror in Letters from an American Farmer. The chapter then investigates the writing of an African American herald of the end times, Christopher MacPherson. The chapter reads the apocalyptic jeremiad of MacPherson’s pamphlet, Christ’s Millennium (1811), as a reparative response to the suppression of black voices and the annihilation of black lives

Cleanliness inspection tool for RSRM bond surfaces

Using optically stimulated electron emission (OSEE), Thiokol has monitored bond surfaces in process for contamination on the Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor (RSRM). This technique provides process control information to help assure bond surface quality and repeatability prior to bonding. This paper will describe OSEE theory of operation and the instrumentation implemented at Thiokol Corporation since 1987. Data from process hardware will be presented

Subtle changes in the flavour and texture of a drink enhance expectations of satiety

Background: The consumption of liquid calories has been implicated in the development of obesity and weight gain. Energy-containing drinks are often reported to have a weak satiety value: one explanation for this is that because of their fluid texture they are not expected to have much nutritional value. It is important to consider what features of these drinks can be manipulated to enhance their expected satiety value. Two studies investigated the perception of subtle changes in a drink’s viscosity, and the extent to which thick texture and creamy flavour contribute to the generation of satiety expectations. Participants in the first study rated the sensory characteristics of 16 fruit yogurt drinks of increasing viscosity. In study two, a new set of participants evaluated eight versions of the fruit yogurt drink, which varied in thick texture, creamy flavour and energy content, for sensory and hedonic characteristics and satiety expectations. Results: In study one, participants were able to perceive small changes in drink viscosity that were strongly related to the actual viscosity of the drinks. In study two, the thick versions of the drink were expected to be more filling and have a greater expected satiety value, independent of the drink’s actual energy content. A creamy flavour enhanced the extent to which the drink was expected to be filling, but did not affect its expected satiety. Conclusions: These results indicate that subtle manipulations of texture and creamy flavour can increase expectations that a fruit yogurt drink will be filling and suppress hunger, irrespective of the drink’s energy content. A thicker texture enhanced expectations of satiety to a greater extent than a creamier flavour, and may be one way to improve the anticipated satiating value of energy-containing beverages

Oleogustus: The Unique Taste of Fat

Considerable mechanistic data indicate there may be a sixth basic taste: fat. However, evidence demonstrating that the sensation of non-esterified fatty acids (the proposed stimuli for “fat taste”) differs qualitatively from other tastes is lacking. Using perceptual mapping, we demonstrate that medium and long-chain non-esterified fatty acids have a taste sensation that is distinct from other basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, and bitter). While some overlap was observed between these NEFA and umami taste, this overlap is likely due to unfamiliarity with umami sensations rather than true similarity. Shorter chain fatty acids stimulate a sensation similar to sour, but as chain length increases this sensation changes. Fat taste oral signaling, and the different signals caused by different alkyl chain lengths, may hold implications for food product development, clinical practice, and public health policy