Boom or bust? What was the truth of the great land booms that swept Australia in the 1880s and 1890s? How was it that some speculators amassed prodigious fortunes, while others went so spectacularly broke? Seventy years after the events, historian Michael Cannon began sifting through thousands of records and documents, long since filed and forgotten. He pieced together an incredible trail of corruption and roguery, rarely if ever equalled in any parliamentary democracy. When the bare bones of this expos were first published in 1966, it caused an immediate sensation as the forebears of many well-known families were involved. Never before had any Australian historian been able to document such unbridled greed and over-riding ambition. Extended and revised, The Land Boomers is generously illustrated with cartoons, photographs and etchings of the time, and includes an introduction by the author on how he came to research and write the book.

A glance over the back pages of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals published in London reveals that Wellington Street stands out among imprint addresses. Between 1843 and 1853, Household Words, Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the Examiner, Punch, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Morning Post, and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor, to name a few, were all published from this short street off the Strand. Mary L. Shannon identifies, for the first time, the close proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, examining the ramifications for the individual authors and for nineteenth-century publishing. What are the implications of Charles Dickens, his arch-competitor the radical publisher G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew being such close neighbours? Given that London was capital of more than Britain alone, what connections does Wellington Street reveal between London print networks and the print culture and networks of the wider empire? How might the editors’ experiences make us rethink the ways in which they and others addressed their anonymous readers as ’friends’, as if they were part of their immediate social network? As Shannon shows, readers in the London of the 1840s and '50s, despite advances in literacy, print technology, and communications, were not simply an ’imagined community’ of individuals who read in silent privacy, but active members of an imagined network that punctured the anonymity of the teeming city and even the empire.

A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.

This edited collection invites the reader to enter the diverse worlds of Australia’s migrant and minority communities through the latest research on the contemporary printed press, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to our current day. With a focus on the rare, radical and foreign-language print culture of multiple and frequently concurrent minority groups’ newspaper ventures, this volume has two overarching aims: firstly to demonstrate how the local experiences and narratives of such communities are always forged and negotiated within a context of globalising forces – the global within the local; and secondly to enrich an understanding of the complexity of Australian ‘voices’ through this medium not only as a means for appreciating how the cultural heritage of such communities were sustained, but also for exploring their contributions to the wider society.

Nobody sings like Melba, and nobody ever will, proclaimed the impresario Oscar Hammerstein in 1908. Like many others of his time, he considered her the world's greatest singer. The wild acclaim showered on her by American fans led to the coining of the word Melbamania. Year after year she toured America on the Melba train, bringing opera and concerts to out-of-the-way cities and towns; thanks to the new gramophone, she could also be heard in the remotest locales. Ann Blainey's beguiling life of Nellie Melba tells the story of a woman who-in an era when no woman was prime minister, chief justice, head of a church or financial firm, or a universal film star-became perhaps the most famous woman in the world. Ms. Blainey's Marvelous Melba punctures many of the myths surrounding Melba's life and career, and offers a new portrait of the great diva.