Around the world there are thousands of pet statues and memorials with fascinating stories behind them. Some reveal insights into our social history, such as the little brown dog in Battersea that was a focus of suffragette riots. Others have wonderfully quirky origins, like the twenty-three cats of York: sculptures added to buildings designed by a cat-loving architect. Many more reveal tales of courage, loyalty, myth, and legend. From Egyptian cat goddesses and the heroic dogs of war, to search-and-rescue canines on 9/11 and Tombili the Turkish moggy who became an Internet sensation, this book brings together a selection of the most surprising, amusing and illuminating stories, complete with dozens of full-colour photographs. Anyone with an appreciation of pets, the varied roles they play in our lives, and the ways in which our relationships with them have evolved over time, will find much of interest in this book.

The enormous task of preserving the world's heritage in the face of war, natural disaster, vandalism, neglect, and technical obsolescence. The monuments—movable, immovable, tangible, and intangible—of the world's shared cultural heritage are at risk. War, terrorism, natural disaster, vandalism, and neglect make the work of preservation a greater challenge than it has been since World War II. In The Monumental Challenge of Preservation Michèle Cloonan makes the case that, at this critical juncture, we must consider preservation in the broadest possible contexts. Preservation requires the efforts of an increasing number of stakeholders. In order to explore the cultural, political, technological, economic, and ethical dimensions of preservation, Cloonan examines particular monuments and their preservation dilemmas. The massive Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban in 2001, are still the subject of debates over how, or whether, to preserve what remains, and the U. S. National Park Service has undertaken the complex task of preserving the symbolic and often ephemeral objects that visitors leave at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—to take just two of the many examples described in the book. Cloonan also considers the ongoing genocide and cultural genocide in Syria; the challenges of preserving our digital heritage; the dynamic between original and copy; efforts to preserve the papers and architectural fragments of the architect Louis Sullivan; and the possibility of sustainable preservation. In the end, Cloonan suggests, we are what we preserve—and don't preserve. Every day we make preservation decisions, individually and collectively, that have longer-term ramifications than we might expect.

A portrait of the newspaper proprietress shares details of her high-profile family life, her famous merger of the "Washington Herald" and "Washington Times, " and her considerable role in influencing period politics and society.

In the hypermediated world of Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody studies how “news events” are made. Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a “news event” is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event, Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports.