This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains how imperial challenges, technological changes and domestic pressures transformed the navy and naval service from the wake of the Crimean War to the First World War. It considers how female-run naval philanthropic organisations domesticated the reputation of naval men by refashioning the imagery of the drunken debauched sailor through temperance and evangelical campaigns. The book argues that late-Victorian portrayals of naval manhood were preoccupied with class distinctions that both elided realities of class tensions and affirmed the patrilineal nature of manhood, in which birthright assured one's masculine stature. It also considers through a case study whether the experience of the First World War, which transformed so much in British society, resulted in noticeable changes in the representations of naval manhood.

Few if any German prelates of the twelfth century had as extraordinary a career as Bishop Otto I of Bamberg. His influence stretched from the shores of the Baltic to the papal see in Rome. As bishop of one of the most important dioceses in the German kingdom, he founded and endowed numerous monastic communities while also pursuing territorial strategies that strengthened significantly his bishopric's control of the region in and around Bamberg. The life of Bishop Otto of Bamberg by a monk of Prüfening survives in three manuscripts from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. All three of these codices include portions of the Magnum Legendarium Austriacum (MLA), an extensive collection of saints' lives compiled and copied at several Austrian monasteries around the year 1200.

The white women who inhabited the slave societies of North Carolina and Barbados were willing and unwilling participants in the extraordinary and peculiar institution that was slavery. Though most of North Carolina's white women enjoyed access to slave labour, the majority were neither slave-owners nor wealthy, and their daily labour was, in many instances, critical to the survival of their families. Albeit constrained by various ideological, legal and social practices, white women were significant social and economic actors in both North Carolina and Barbados. Whiteness in Barbados and North Carolina emerged as a product of specific processes of racialisation and of exclusionary practices, for instance, in terms of property relations. At various times Barbadian authorities also attempted to restrict and limit the property rights of free coloureds.

An Irish accent remained a consistent identifier of Irishness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reproduction of accent continued to be a key component in New Zealand cinema for representing Irish migrants. Dymphna Lonergan points to connections between the Irish language and politics. Unlike depictions of Irish migrants in New Zealand cinema, however, a Scottish accent was not in early years emphasised for humorous reasons, and subtitles do not reflect the Scottish way of speaking English. By contrast with evidence about the Irish and Ulster Scots languages, more references appeared in sources utilised in the study of Scottish Gaelic being spoken in New Zealand. While Gaelic has attracted some attention by historians in studies of the Scots abroad, the Scots language has attracted little investigation. The Scots language also appeared in poetry in the ethnic press throughout the twentieth century.

The construction of Ospedale Maggiore was the culmination of reform efforts. In 1399, Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti pursued the aim of reform by unifying and consolidating hospitals under civic authority, and based his plans on the process of unification already underway in Siena. The Black Death of 1348-1355 placed unprecedented pressure on all institutions but most specifically on hospitals, which were ill equipped to handle such a massive crisis. While the plague crisis and perception of increased poverty predicated an immediate communal response, reform efforts which included unification and centralization of hospitals were also implemented in reaction to mismanagement and jurisdictional disputes. Larger more centralized communal organizations replaced the smaller traditional confraternities and consortia that had been crucial players in the earlier era of foundation and administration of hospitals.

This chapter examines the early days of the Viennese tourist industry and considers the role played by the city's imperial status in the development of its touristic image. The largest part of Vienna's tourist traffic came from within the Austrian lands of the empire. Although Vienna was a well established centre for eighteenth-century grand tourists, the city's role as a modern tourist centre did not begin until the international exhibition of 1873. As the city's tourist culture developed, one of the features of the city's image which most appealed to visitors was that of the 'city of pleasure' and this became more prominent in its tourist publicity. Included amongst the Viennese sights were the representatives of the empire's diverse populations. The end of the First World War saw the collapse of the empire. In the inter-war period, tourism became central to the economy of an Austria.

The fictional Gladys's selfish complaint points to one of the key strategies of child rescue. Like Gladys's mother, writers had to provide the 'ghastly details' in order to create the strong visual images that would haunt the reader. Central to such visual images was a focus on the body which functioned in the literature as the site of both diagnosis and transformation. Child cruelty, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) argued, was not a function of poverty. The child body, the Society argued, needed as much protection as the animal body, adding: 'It is better today to be the pig of an English brute than to be his child. If the law indeed allowed the parent to 'do what I like with my own', then the law had to be changed.

This chapter traces the social history of deviance amongst Europeans in colonial Kenya. In order to contain deviance within manageable bounds, it argues, a practical project of social control was combined with a discursive neutralisation of what might otherwise bring colonial rule into disre¬pute. Combining attention to cultural production with analysis of social control mechanisms reveals the salience of gender and class in the protection of a salutary white settler identity. The chapter approaches critically Kenya’s outstanding reputation as a place of colonial eccentricity. It reconstructs that reputation within a narrative that highlights the changing nature of colonial society through a history of the treatment – by state and society – of deviants themselves.