The Eighteenth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: Novelists and Things: George Eliot in a Victorian Perspective

I am privileged as a historian of Victorian England to deliver this Memorial Lecture on the occasion of the 170th anniversary of George Eliot\u27s birth. The future Queen was born on May 24th 1819, described by her father as \u27 a model of strength and beauty combined\u27: George Eliot was born at five o\u27clock in the morning on November 22nd. This was the year of the Massacre of Peterloo, when discontent and repression drove the Lancashire radical Samuel Bamford to ask in his poem \u27The Lancashire Hymn\u27 \u27Have we not heard the infant\u27s cry And mark\u27d its mother\u27s tear; That look, which told us mournfully That woe and want were there?\u27 Infants born in 1819 had very different life chances; George Eliot soon became aware of this. And although \u27woe and want\u27 were not to be the main themes in Queen Victoria\u27s long reign, which started eighteen years later, they were never to be absent. A more familiar theme was to be \u27plenitude\u27. There were more \u27things\u27 around than there ever had been before - and more new things: \u27novelty\u27 went with \u27plenitude\u27. At the end of the reign even among socialists the theme was less \u27woe and want\u27 than \u27poverty in the midst of plenty\u27

Procurement Of Housing In Depressed, African-American Homeless Patients In A Large Urban Federally Qualified Health Center: A Pilot To Improve Workflow Processes, Identify Best Practices And Impact Outcomes

Homelessness is a chronic issue in the United States (US)-impacting individuals from every socio-economic class. African Americans in the US disproportionately experience rates of homelessness higher than those in the general population. These individuals are vulnerable to poor physical and chronic mental health problems, chief among them is depression. African-American homeless individuals have high rates of depression and experience disparities in utilization and access to health care. To address this problem within a healthcare systems level context, this Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP) project examined the association between homelessness and depression in African-Americans. A pilot project focused on the targeted and efficient procurement of housing in depressed, homeless African-American patients in a large urban Federally Qualified Health Center was implemented. The project is a first, exploratory step in an initiative to improve workflow processes, identify best practices, and impact clinical outcomes in this highly vulnerable group of patients

The sound of revolution: BBC monitoring and the Hungarian uprising, 1956

Radio played a vitally important role during the 1956 Hungarian uprising: as an information service, diplomatic interlocutor and cultural mediator. Broadcasters and the authorities that stood behind them on both sides of the Iron Curtain mapped, interpreted and, at times, appeared to influence the course of events on the ground. The BBC Monitoring Service Transcription Collection offers an essential and unexplored perspective on the mediated experience of the Hungarian uprising, in the context of the wider political warfare battle of the cold war

Clogging the machinery: the BBC's experiment in science coordination, 1949–1953

In 1949, physicist Mark Oliphant criticised the BBC’s handling of science in a letter to the Director General William Haley. It initiated a chain of events which led to the experimental appointment of a science adviser, Henry Dale, to improve the ‘coordination’ of science broadcasts. The experiment failed, but the episode revealed conflicting views of the BBC’s responsibility towards science held by scientists and BBC staff. For the scientists, science had a special status, both as knowledge and as an activity, which in their view obligated the BBC to make special arrangements for it. BBC staff, however, had their own professional procedures which they were unwilling to abandon. The events unfolded within a few years of the end of the Second World War, when social attitudes to science had been coloured by the recent conflict, and when the BBC itself was under scrutiny from the William Beveridge’s Committee. The BBC was also embarking on new initiatives, notably the revival of adult education. These contextual factors bear on the story, which is about the relationship between a public service broadcaster and the external constituencies it relies on, but must appear to remain independent from. The article therefore extends earlier studies showing how external bodies have attempted to manipulate the inner workings of the BBC to their own advantage (e.g. those by Doctor and Karpf) by looking at the little-researched area of science broadcasting. The article is largely based on unpublished archive documents

BBC Experiments in local radio broadcasting 1961-62

In the early 1960s, the BBC was given the opportunity to demonstrate that it had the skills and resources to create localized broadcasting, by organizing a series of experimental stations across the UK. Although the output was not heard publicly, the results were played to the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, who were deliberating about the future direction of radio and television. Using archival research, featuring contemporary BBC documents, this paper argues that these experimental stations helped senior managers at the BBC to harness technological innovation with changing attitudes in society and culture, thus enabling them to formulate a strategy that put the BBC in the leading position to launch local radio a few years later in 1967

From AAA to Junk: Credit rating agencies as news sources in the Irish print-media during the economic crisis, 2008–2013

From AAA to Junk: Credit rating agencies as news sources in the Irish print-media during the economic crisis, 2008–201

Making science at home: visual displays of space science and nuclear physics at the Science Museum and on television in postwar Britain

The public presentation of science and technology in postwar Britain remains a field open to exploration. Current scholarship on the topic is growing but still tends to concentrate on the written word, thus making theorizing, at this stage, difficult. This paper is an attempt to expand the literature through two case studies that compare and synthesize displays of scientific and technological knowledge in two visual media, the Science Museum and television, in the 1950s and 1960s. The topics of these case studies are space exploration and nuclear energy. The thesis this paper explores is that both media fleshed out strategies of displays based on the use of categories from everyday life. As a result, outcomes of large-scale public scientific and technological undertakings were interwoven within audiences’ daily life experiences, thus appearing ordinary rather than extraordinary. This use of symbols and values drawn from private life worked to alleviate fears of risk associated with these new fields of technological exploration and at the same time give them widespread currency in the public sphere

Intermedial Relationships of Radio Features with Denis Mitchell’s and Philip Donnellan’s Early Television Documentaries

Writing of the closure in early 1965 of the Radio Features Department, Asa Briggs identifies one of the reasons for the controversial decision as ‘the incursion of television, which was developing its own features.’ ‘[Laurence] Gilliam and his closest colleagues believed in the unique merits of “pure radio”. The screen seemed a barrier’ (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 5, p. 348). Rather than the screen being ‘a barrier’ for them, a number of the creators of the emerging television documentary were from the late 1950s onwards able to transfer and transform distinctive techniques of ‘pure radio’ into highly effective visual forms. Two key figures were the producers of ‘poetic’ documentaries Denis Mitchell and Philip Donnellan, who employed layered voices, imaginative deployments of music and effects, and allusive juxtapositions of sound and image, to develop an alternative (although always marginal) tradition to the supposedly objective approaches of current affairs and, later, verité filmmakers. And a dozen years after the dismemberment of the Features Department, Donnellan paid tribute to it in his glorious but little-seen film Pure Radio (BBC1, 3 November 1977). Taking important early films by Mitchell and Donnellan as case studies, this paper explores the impact of radio features on television documentaries in the 1950s and early 1960s, and assesses the extent to which the screen in its intermedial relationships with ‘pure radio’ was a barrier or, in the work of certain creators, an augmentation