Talking and Listening edited

Historians have, until recently, been silent about sound. This collection of essays on talking and listening in the age of modernity brings together major Australian scholars who have followed Alain Corbin’s injunction that historians ‘can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining to auditory perception’. Ranging from the sound of gunfire on the Australian gold-fields to Alfred Deakin’s virile oratory, these essays argue for the influence of the auditory in forming individual and collective subjectivities; the place of speech in understanding individual and collective endeavours; the centrality of speech in marking and negating difference and in struggles for power; and the significance of the technologies of radio and film in forming modern cultural identities

From Victorian Accomplishment to Modern Profession: Elocution Takes Judith Anderson, Sylvia Bremer and Dorothy Cumming to Hollywood, 1912-1918

During the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, elocution was part of the education of almost every Australian girl. This article traces how, from the 1880s, elocution performances became public and competitive, effectively providing training, discipline, self-confidence, and legitimation for middle-class Australian girls to aspire to independence and worldly success. It demonstrates how recruitment for the stage moved from family dynasties to elocution schools that funneled their best, mostly middle-class girls, into the leading theatre companies, and, for some of these girls, such as Francee [Judith] Anderson, Sylvia Bremer and Dorothy Cumming, to Hollywood

"Every-bit-as-good-as-gay": Restyling heterosexuality in 1940s New York

The relationship of novelist Mary McCarthy and her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, is an example of the rise and fall of a particular kind of heterosexuality in 1940s and 1950s urban America: the �nongay, every-bit-as-good-as-gay� male partner. This article describes the course of this marriage and links its unusual aspects to a resistant culture that developed at Harvard during the 1940s, inspired by the life and work of the British novelist Ronald Firbank. It traces the marriage�s failure to the developing hostility, during the 1950s, to the experimental new relationships that were part of that culture

From the President

In its 2004 report, "Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies", The President's Council on Bioethics analyzed ethical issues raised by preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and made recommendations for improvements