Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain. In Sound Authorities, Edward J. Gillin focuses on hearing and aurality in Victorian Britain, claiming that the development of the natural sciences in this era cannot be understood without attending to the study of sound and music. During this time, scientific practitioners attempted to fashion themselves as authorities on sonorous phenomena, coming into conflict with traditional musical elites as well as religious bodies. Gillin pays attention to sound in both musical and nonmusical contexts, specifically the cacophony of British industrialization. Sound Authorities begins with the place of acoustics in early nineteenth-century London, examining scientific exhibitions, lectures, spectacles, workshops, laboratories, and showrooms. He goes on to explore how mathematicians mobilized sound in their understanding of natural laws and their vision of a harmonious ordered universe. In closing, Gillin delves into the era’s religious and metaphysical debates over the place of music (and humanity) in nature, the relationship between music and the divine, and the tensions between spiritualist understandings of sound and scientific ones.

Science and Sound in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a four-volume set of primary sources which seeks to define our historical understanding of the relationship between British scientific knowledge and sound between 1815 and 1900. In the context of rapid urbanization and industrialization, as well as a growing overseas empire, Britain was home to a rich scientific culture in which the ear was as valuable an organ as the eye for examining nature. Experiments on how sound behaved informed new understandings of how a diverse array of natural phenomena operated, notably those of heat, light, and electro-magnetism. In nineteenth-century Britain, sound was not just a phenomenon to be studied, but central to the practice of science itself and broader understandings over nature and the universe. This collection, accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, will be of great interest to students and scholars of the History of Science.

Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, huge circular panoramas presented their audiences with resplendent representations that ranged from historic battles to exotic locations. Such panoramas were immersive but static. There were other panoramas that moved—hundreds, and probably thousands of them. Their history has been largely forgotten. In Illusions in Motion, Erkki Huhtamo excavates this neglected early manifestation of media culture in the making. The moving panorama was a long painting that unscrolled behind a “window” by means of a mechanical cranking system, accompanied by a lecture, music, and sometimes sound and light effects. Showmen exhibited such panoramas in venues that ranged from opera houses to church halls, creating a market for mediated realities in both city and country. In the first history of this phenomenon, Huhtamo analyzes the moving panorama in all its complexity, investigating its relationship to other media and its role in the culture of its time. In his telling, the panorama becomes a window for observing media in operation. Huhtamo explores such topics as cultural forms that anticipated the moving panorama; theatrical panoramas; the diorama; the "panoramania" of the 1850s and the career of Albert Smith, the most successful showman of that era; competition with magic lantern shows; the final flowering of the panorama in the late nineteenth century; and the panorama's afterlife as a topos, traced through its evocation in literature, journalism, science, philosophy, and propaganda.

Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this 'national sin' by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the 'Middle Passage', and the Caribbean plantation. For the first time, this collection brings together localised case studies of Britain's history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. These essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examine how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain.