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The Arctic region has been the subject of much popular writing. This book considers nineteenth-century representations of the Arctic, and draws upon an extensive range of evidence that will allow the 'widest connections' to emerge from a 'cross-disciplinary analysis' using different methodologies and subject matter. It positions the Arctic alongside more thoroughly investigated theatres of Victorian enterprise. In the nineteenth century, most images were in the form of paintings, travel narratives, lectures given by the explorers themselves and photographs. The book explores key themes in Arctic images which impacted on subsequent representations through text, painting and photography. For much of the nineteenth century, national and regional geographical societies promoted exploration, and rewarded heroic endeavor. The book discusses images of the Arctic which originated in the activities of the geographical societies. The Times provided very low-key reporting of Arctic expeditions, as evidenced by its coverage of the missions of Sir John Franklin and James Clark Ross. However, the illustrated weekly became one of the main sources of popular representations of the Arctic. The book looks at the exhibitions of Arctic peoples, Arctic exploration and Arctic fauna in Britain. Late nineteenth-century exhibitions which featured the Arctic were essentially nostalgic in tone. The Golliwogg's Polar Adventures, published in 1900, drew on adult representations of the Arctic and will have confirmed and reinforced children's perceptions of the region. Text books, board games and novels helped to keep the subject alive among the young.
board games also became exceptionally popular. 46 There are some excellent geographical and topical examples from earlier in the century, but these were expensive and cannot have had a wide circulation. By the end of the century they were being produced very cheaply, and were used as teaching aids, often reflecting the military and imperial preoccupations of the age. Many used maps as the setting over
simulation-game – like, for instance, D-Day (Avalon Hill, 1961) – then certainly seems, in some part, a simulation of whatever these rule-models reference, i.e. the historical event of D-Day. In reasonably complicated board-games such as D-Day , game outcomes are determined with constant reference to (and often in lengthy conferral with) the game rules. And when game players engage game rules in this manner, those rules indeed seem to function as formal “models” of what they reference. Composed of rule-models of this sort, the game as a whole might then serve
). 32 Scenes were also created for younger children in blocks; the 1855 Events of English History contained coloured blocks with scenes on one side and text on the other, including the ‘Death of Wat Tyler’, the Great Fire of London, and King Charles I and his children before the king's execution (a domestic scene that was popularised in the Victorian era). 33 Race, card and other board games (of chance) offered an opportunity for game-makers (and children
games. Sidonius describes the Gothic King Theodoric’s fondness for board games (maybe an early form of backgammon) and gambling with dice (Sid. Apoll., Epist. 1.2.7) and people playing dice at a bath-resort (2.2.13). When Theodoric played these games, he let his hair down a bit and encouraged people to have fun (1.2.8). Sidonius himself encouraged students to play with dice and the dice-box as a break from their studies (5.17.1). POPULAR BOARD GAMES Games and board
textbooks to support history and geography within the school curriculum, the distribution of photographic images for use with lantern-slide projectors, the invention of the adventure story and its subsequent popularity, 3 and the publication of historical romances and biographies. In addition board games and new publications such as the Boy’s Own Magazine (1855) and Boy’s Own Paper (1879) were
was never short of colouring pencils and god knows what else. And art classes. I’m sure I went to art classes. Everybody went to art classes as a child, didn’t they? Something to do on a Saturday morning … Didn’t we all? Didn’t we all do papier-mâché at some point in our lives? I did piano and horse riding. But yes, lots of books, lots of art materials, lots of trees, lots of animals. All of it, just all of it. Very, very fortunate. Oh gosh, we went to the museum weekly … An awful lot of things. I mean, I consider board games quite cultural given the right context
both sides. The British Empire was being portrayed to the British public as never before, and the public thrilled at the exotic tales of imperial campaigns in India, China, and Africa. Military success appeared to prove British racial superiority over inferior peoples, and this myth was perpetuated in a variety of media, from newspapers to novels, from parades to postcards, from school textbooks to societies, from board-games to biscuit tins. As John Mackenzie has written, this wide-ranging imperial propaganda campaign ‘was concerned to glorify the combination of
” consumption. This type of consumption seeks fun, amusement, fantasy, arousal, sensory stimulation, and enjoyment. … Surely, any meaningful attempt to model such relatively pleasure-oriented consumption must pay attention to its hedonic components. (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982 , p. 135) These “hedonic components” of consumption are similar to what we might call non-instrumental components of games – as distinguished from a game's instrumental components. For instance, in traditional board games such as chess and Monopoly , there
competition; chariot racing and gladiatorial games; baths and swimming; comedy theatre; dinner parties; music and dance; sexual entertainment and prostitution; gambling, dice, and betting (with a primer on a couple of board games). The final topic that this guide considers in Chapter 7 is religion and religious practice. Religion of some form or another was inextricable from other aspects of Roman culture – public service to the state gods out of a sense of tradition, duty, civic responsibility; philosophy and intellectual study might take the