A new concept of childbirth ‘experience’ emerged in late twentieth-century Britain, crafted by an erratic yet powerful mesh of interest groups. Experience is a powerful and malleable concept, that has been mobilised in different ways over time. In this case study, discussions of ‘experiencing’ childbirth were first the grounding for a culture of complaint, and birthing people were typically spoken for. In later years, to ‘experience’ childbirth was increasingly named, as a term and a concept. Indeed, the idea of a ‘birth experience’ became aspirational, and linked to distinctive and new cultures of celebration. This article’s analysis of the history of ‘birth experience’ traces this shift through archival methods, while also insisting that ‘experience’ does not simply exist for historians or geographers to ‘uncover’. Rather, experience must be closely attended to. In this case, these contested concepts of experience had significant implications for women’s lives and the ways in which they have made sense of childbirth in subsequent decades.

This article aims to chart out a cultural history of the voice in conversation in the nineteenth century. Often understood as a period of decline of the ‘art’ of conversation, as it was defined in the eighteenth century (and studied by historians of the period), the nineteenth century was witness to a shift away from conscious cultivation. Conversation, in the nineteenth century, became the counterpoint to more formalized modes of speech like oratory and debate, and was defined as ‘natural’. As such, it also became an object of study for experts specializing in vocal health, who saw this ‘natural’ form of vocal expression as a place to see the voice in action at its least artificial. Based on the work of these experts – scientific treatises, early forays in laryngoscopy, educational work and self-help manuals – I propose an analysis of their largely normative texts that focuses on sound and vocal practice, rather than the development of scientific discourse and its disciplinary character. I borrow central concepts from sound studies, like that of the audile technique and aurality in order to do so, and place the vocalizing body at the center of this analysis.

This article deals with the of whether contemporary concepts of corruption can be usefully applied to the study of Roman society in the late republican period. First , it shows that specific problems arise if we equate modern semantics of ‘private’ and ‘public’ with the dichotomy between ‘privatus’ and ‘publicus’ in the sources. These areas were interconnected and, thus, the Romans did not identify overlaps between the two spheres as deviant in itself. Nevertheless, the article next argues that the Romans did identify illegitimate interferences between the spheres; the identifier was the question of whose interest actors represented. The article concludes by showing that the evaluation of corruption phenomena was subject to the dominant paradigm of social stratification. It explains why these individual evaluations sometimes appear as contradictory to the modern observer, even though they follow the internal logic of Roman society.

Roman Republican elections especially during the Late Republic were a ubiquitous phenomenon. The small number of higher magistracies in comparison to the growing number of eligible candidates often led to a fierce competition within the political elite. To secure a win, competitors running for office made use of a whole spectrum of methods which often overstepped the legal and moral boundaries and eventually resulted in legal measures. The lex Licinia de sodaliciis enacted in 55 BCE is one of these measures. This article studies the lex by raising questions about its historic background, its target – electoral misconduct by organising sodalicia that is political associations within the voting districts – the trials conducted under the law, the effect associations had on Roman politics, and the Senate’s effort to regulate them thorough legislation.

This article traces the cultural history of a portrait format popularised through the global expansion of lithographic printing. This format combined a traditional portrait vignette with a lithographic facsimile of the sitter’s signature. Such ‘facsimile-autographed’ portraits evoked the notion that sitters had physically signed their own likenesses – testifying not only to the veracity of the depiction, but displaying an indexical trace of embodied agency. The article argues that this format afforded a particularly cogent way to conceptualise and communicate ideas about selfhood and society in liberal, romantic, and nationalist political programmes. Such lithographic portraits did not simply ‘encode’ or ‘reflect’ these new ideas, however, but were part of a technological revolution that decentralised the production of mass media and thereby reshaped the societies in which such novel ideas flourished. By connecting the various expressions of public selfhood found in facsimile-autographed portraits to the way lithography expanded audiences and reshaped modes of conceptualising public and private life over the course of the nineteenth century, this article argues that established scholarly concepts like the ‘romantic self’ or ‘liberal self’ might be reconsidered through a new, technomaterial heuristic: the ‘lithographic self’.

Globally, one of the most significant trends in theme park development over the past decade has been the increasing focus on intellectual properties as sources of theming. While theme parks in China have also participated in this trend, cultural history in general and Chinese cultural history and heritage in particular have continued to be popular sources of theming. Chinese theme parks, whether public or private enterprises, have thus contributed to the state-led ‘heritage turn’ in China, which from the 1980s onwards has used cultural history and heritage to foster cultural nationalism. The articles gathered here examine the specific motifs and strategies of the commercial, ‘unauthorized’ heritage turn in Chinese theme parks and, by bridging the gap between English- and Chinese-language research on theme parks, seek to foster interdisciplinary and intercultural scholarly exchange in the field of theme park studies.