This chapter considers what eating out means to people, for what reasons they dine out, and how their orientations towards the activity differ. It draws on in-depth interviews and survey questions about orientations towards dining out. It distinguishes between special meals and impromptu and regularised ordinary meals, identifying popular understandings and the meaning of eating out from the analysis of responses to twenty-five statements included in the survey in both 1995 and 2015. These responses indicate what people like and dislike, hope and fear, think and do. They also give some indication of change over time. The social characteristics which predispose people towards different orientations can be identified. It is concluded that dining out is primarily understood, as it was in 1995, as a substantial meal, paid for in a commercial establishment, eaten with other people, and usually primarily for enjoyment. Basic reasons for wanting to eat out are similar in 2015, but the activity has become more familiar and rather less special. Most meals out now are best considered as ordinary, and occurring in an impromptu or regularised manner which renders them normal.

In 1861, President Lincoln authorised the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) – a body comprising humanitarian volunteers whose purpose was to complement the work of the Union’s Medical Bureau by sourcing supplies, inspecting hospitals and providing general succour to wounded soldiers. Two years later, when news of the first Geneva Conference reached the ears of the USSC’s leaders, they naturally assumed that the Committee of Five had been inspired by the American example to pursue its aims. Historians of the USSC have repeated these claims, despite the comprehensive rejection of the idea of an American origin for the Red Cross Movement by several leading Red Cross scholars. This paper will re-examine the issue of American influence on the Red Cross Movement by turning away from the idea that the USSC inspired the Geneva Convention. Instead, the focus here will be on how the performance of the USSC captured the imaginations of the first Red Cross volunteers, and contributed to the fundamental reshaping of the Committee of Five’s conception of the Red Cross by the dawn of the twentieth century.

The Lipari political colony was one of the largest detention sites for internal exiles. It held over 1,400 prisoners and was operational from 1926 to 1933. The chapter discusses the daily rituals of the exile community, the population’s composition, the system of surveillance, the interactions with the local population, and the perceptions of the colony from outside Lipari through memoirs and archival materials. These primary sources present different and contrasting representations of the experience. This chapter also discusses the women who were exiled to Lipari, the famous escape of Carlo Rosselli, Francesco Fausto Nitti, and Emilio Lussu, and the international criticism of the practice of confino. Closed in 1933, Lipari continued to be utilised as a detention site through to 1945.

The study of local Roman antiquities developed in Spain from the end of the fifteenth century, focusing on the ancient remains of Roman cities such as Mérida, Segovia, Murviedro and Tarragona. Foreign and Spanish scholars contributed with field research and drawings, and architects tried to dig up the past of their respective towns through excavation and interpretation of the architectural remains, and to put into practice what they thought could have been their own local Roman models. Córdoba, the ancient Roman Baetica and Umayyad capital, is one of our best examples for studying the way architecture, orders and ornament could be analysed and interpreted, and how its architects could use Roman and Umayyad models, by the end of the sixteenth century, for their modern local buildings.

Visible material remnants of ancient cultures were, for a variety of historical reasons, not particularly abundant in the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795). The past monuments of these lands were not made in stone and marble but in timber, leaving behind no impressive structures to provoke the interest of subsequent generations. The dearth of material evidence did not, however, prevent generations of Polish historians and antiquarians from assigning Greco-Roman identities to local monuments. They were keen to offer tangible proof of the past glory of the land inhabited by the alleged descendants of the Sarmatians. In this chapter, some of these monuments are explored, especially the mounds of Krakus and Wanda near Cracow as well as an alleged tomb of Ovid in Vohlyna. The narratives fabricated around them as a part of the ideology of Sarmatism, a class discourse that constructed an identity for the Polish nobility as the descendants of the ancient tribe of Sarmatians, are also examined.

In 1631 the Dutch painter and architect Salomon de Bray wrote that it was a common mistake to regard the move towards a more classical architecture as fashionably modern. Instead, he argued, it was actually a revival of the true and oldest manner of building in the Low Countries. The notion that the Low Countries had once been part of the Roman Empire helped inspire scholarly architects to introduce classical models into contemporary architecture. This essay investigates this tendency by asking how and why the Roman past became such an important topic during this period, despite a lack of remaining Roman buildings, and which alternative heroic pasts were available to account for the origins of architecture. Various historical descriptions of Netherlandish towns include references to local ancient history and Roman remains. Some of these antiquities were authentically Roman, even to modern archaeological scholarship (like Brittenburg), while others were certainly not. Antiquarian and archaeological interest focused on the era of the Batavians, a Germanic tribe living in what later became Holland who were politically independent from Rome, as well as on an even older local past, traced in were thought to be the material remains of an ancient tribe of giants.

Through dynastic accident, England and Scotland were united under King James VI and I in 1603. To smooth the transition, officials attempted to create a single state: Great Britain. Yet the project had a narrow appeal; the majority of the English populace rejected a closer relationship with Scotland. Such a strong reaction against Scotland resulted in a revived sense of Englishness.This essay analyses English tactics to distance themselves from the Scots through historical treatises. For centuries, the English had created vivid histories to illuminate their ancient past. It is evident from the historical works written between 1586 and 1625 that authors sought to maintain a position of dominance over Scotland through veiled political commentaries. As such, their accounts propagated an English national identity based on a sense of historical supremacy over the Scottish. This was further supported through the use of language studies and archaeological evidence. After the 1603 Union of the Crowns, these stories did not change. Yet questions arose regarding the king’s genealogy, as he claimed descent from the great kings of both kingdoms. Consequently, historians reinvented the past to merge their historical accounts with the king’s ancestral claims while continuing to validate English assertions of suzerainty.

Ten years ago, I published an article exploring questions of the politics of representation in jazz criticism in which I argued that ‘the death of the author’ actually promotes, in some contexts, some of the abuses of cultural power Michel Foucault most objects to in his 1969 lecture Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? (later published as ‘What Is An Author?’), including the continued dominance of socially legitimated points of view and the continued marginalisation of social commentaries and critiques that oppose themselves to these dominant threads of discourse. Working from recent arguments made by Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely that Foucault’s Iranian Revolution interviews demonstrate his commitment to a ‘political spirituality’, this follow-up chapter reads collections and commentaries on Foucault’s Iranian interviews and considers what enhanced relevance Foucault’s thought and his distinctive approach to broadly political questions might have for performative disciplines like theatre studies and improvisation theory. The chapter concludes that Foucault’s perceived failure to recognise widely acknowledged truths about political power is not the failure to be intellectually responsible that he is charged with, but a provocative invitation to brush aside mainstream discourses and concern ourselves with precisely the kinds of questions that are being silenced.

Early modern folk typecast according to humoral temperaments made manifest by hair colour, facial features, skin-tone, and bodily proportion. Neither the doctrine of monogenesis, nor uncertainty regarding the mechanisms of variation’s inheritance across generations, precluded an embodied inequality. In fact, the very existence of human diversity was testimony of the divine. Yet God’s providence was also believed to bestow immortal, immaterial souls on people’s variously complexioned flesh. When it comes to the perpetration of racism, this belief should have been the saving grace for all early modern English men and women. Unlike the Ancients, who (allegedly) thought that human souls were determined by their bodies’ elemental composition, and that the cosmos was eternal and random, Christian orthodoxy assumed an ordered Creation, and that humans’ rational souls would ultimately bridle the bodily inclinations to which people’s humours otherwise disposed them. However, early modern bodily prejudice became entirely racist among those who denied this dualism and instead favoured a form of organicism; when they assumed that they themselves were wholly the product of an autonomous Nature which was not God’s handmaiden.

The introduction begins with a sketch of the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank, describing how this politically disputed and semantically overdetermined space was emblematic of the mid-century decade which produced it. A playground of ideas and disruptive potential, it told stories about unruly objects that modelled a kind of categorical recalcitrance by which subjects, too, might reassert their autonomy within the overwhelming discourses of commodification and reification which prevailed in mass culture.T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), is cited as an example of the stagnant schema of cultural hierarchy which mid-century gothic opposed, and which this book will dismantle. A discussion of the dialogical relationship between gothicism and modernity situates the book in relation to Freud’s Unheimlich, Lukács’s concept of reification, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s defense of enchantment in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie. This section lays out the principal qualities of mid-century gothic: the troubling agency, and the uncanny intimacy, of the objects of modernity. These ideas are then put into practice in a radical reading of Marghanita Laski’s sentimental 1949 novel Little Boy Lost.Finally, the introduction asks: how would the norms of society be redrawn by the upheavals of the post-war moment? Would value and authenticity lose their meaning? Would codes become illegible? Would objects break free of the present and begin to bleed history?

This chapter shows how the garments of ritual and conquest created gothic disruptions in place and time, and instantiated power and status even while they occluded the humanity of the person wearing them. Questions about power and resistance informed key cultural artefacts of the period, from Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 fairy tale The Red Shoes to Iris Murdoch’s first novel Under the Net (1954); and from the 1951 Ealing Comedy The Man in the White Suit to Benjamin Britten’s Coronation opera Gloriana (1953).In Under the Net, Murdoch teases open fault-lines in the constructed persona of a woman who runs an avant-garde mime theatre, and finds herself literally buried under a deluge of theatrical props and costumes. In The Red Shoes, meanwhile, a dancer’s costume becomes impossible to take off, stitching her into a fatal encounter with the inhumanity of art and spectacle. These stories raise related questions about the materialization of power and presence at the Queen’s coronation in 1953. This intimate imbrication of subject and object sheds light on Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana (1953), which depicts a queen who comes untethered from the material glamour of royalty. The chapter then traces how synthetic fabrics challenged class distinctions in The Man in the White Suit, and the British Everest expedition in 1953.

From 1914 to the early 1920s – the era of the First World War – the American Red Cross (ARC) was best known for its dynamic growth into an organisation boasting tens of millions of members who energetically participated in a wide array of relief and reconstruction initiatives across war-torn Europe. Less is known about the ARC’s profound struggles during the period of American neutrality, from 1914 to 1917. Every major undertaking that the Red Cross leadership initiated when the United States was neutral failed. It failed to orchestrate a national relief movement, to undertake substantive foreign relief operations and to adapt institutionally to America’s military entry in the war. Given its abject ‘failure to launch’ in these ways, it is all the more remarkable that the ARC became the nation’s leading relief society during the period of American belligerency, 1917–18. In order to appreciate that unlikely transformation, this chapter considers the hurdles over which the ARC initially stumbled.

This chapter considers the origins of contemporary practices. It identifies forces accelerating and retarding change including globalisation, informalisation, aestheticisation and commodification. It argues that the principal features of the contemporary ideal of dining out began to form in the 1970s when the appeal of variety and greater flexibility in respect of new foods, procedures, timings and venues grew. Informalisation of manners occurred in parallel. The glimmerings of a new informed appreciation of food appeared in print and visual media which intensified from the 1990s. Familiarisation of dining out, informalisation of manners and the expectation of greater variety in practice sustained the trend towards a gradual revision in orientations towards eating.

Using Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘diverting’ space this chapter analyses the emergence of warehouse parties in the mid-1980s, self-organised club culture in abandoned industrial buildings in the city, and the kinds of culture which emerged there. It discusses the context in which they emerged, the main innovators and the changes in club culture which drove the warehouse phenomenon. It also analyses the genre of rare groove - American soul and funk of the 1970s – which dominated the warehouse parties and discusses some of the key innovations of the era in terms of race and gender, particularly the activity of black women.

In this chapter, the records for New Jersey are mined for details about the relationship between lunacy investigation law and other forms of care and treatment of the insane. The focus here is on how these forms of care intersected with the civil law. The detailed witnesses’ accounts of the New Jersey documents also allow for an analysis of the complex array of treatment, care and management strategies, including the services of professionalising orthodox medical practitioners and the psychiatric services of fledgling lunatic asylums, on the one hand, and the myriad responses that were grounded in the conventions of popular culture, on the other hand. The detail in the New Jersey testimonials also allows for an analysis of the symptoms and causes of madness as understood by the relatives and neighbours of those who were put on trial.