A Note on Photographic Archival Collections on Northern Ghana

The secret scalpel: plastic surgery for wartime disguise

This panel will feature presentations from faculty from three universities with programs that offer study abroad opportunities for master’s-level Library and Information Science (LIS) students. This panel is designed to open a larger discussion pertaining to study abroad and will focus on the following objectives: To provide examples of creative study abroad initiatives. To generate discussion on the value of international experiences. To discuss the importance of cultivating an experience that fosters understanding of the “other” culture(s) through engagement and learning. To provide examples of in-person extended experience for students who may be in online programs. Marie L. Radford and Lilia Pavolvsky will describe study abroad opportunities at Rutgers. Radford leads a Master of Information (MI) hybrid course “British Collections and Archives.” This is a three-credit summer session course with nine days at Wroxton College in England in addition to online modules. It includes visits to libraries and archives in London and surrounding areas, such as the British Library, The National Archives, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Library and Archives of the Shakespeare Center at Stratford-upon-Avon, and Bletchley Park. The course involves lectures by noted British scholars and librarians on trends in academic and public libraries, digital preservation, and archival studies. Students learn about how libraries and archives function with different systems of government, different funding models, and different credentialing practices. Additionally, Rutgers offers study abroad for an International Children’s Literature course, that includes a visit to the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair, in Italy. This event attracts global book publishers and member organizations of "ibby" the International Board on Books for Young People. Graduate students have the unique opportunity to explore ways of creating text, art, and design for children and teenagers while meeting experts on youth literacy from many nations. Also, we will share plans to offer international experiences to graduate students that include professional conferences and other opportunities for open discourse to discover many truths beyond the boundaries of their local professional and scholarly communities. These experiences will be designed to offer travel to environments in which students have the opportunity to engage in dialogue that is not only inclusive of perspectives of international LIS scholars, practitioners, and students, but which also enables an exchange of cross-cultural ideas to promote mutual understandings. Lisa O’Connor will discuss the origins of her study abroad course to Northern Ireland and Ireland, which she first developed at the University of Kentucky. Frustrated with her predominately white, middle-class students’ intractable view of their culture as innocuous, she hoped that a study abroad experience would help students gain the distance and objectivity they needed to see patterns of domination and repression in another culture and, as a result, better see these patterns in their own. Her course examines whose culture is preserved and whose is not, and who controls the dissemination of information (and thus the narrative) surrounding cultural conflict. Students examine the narrative on “The Troubles” as it was promulgated by mainstream, pro-British American media prior to their in-country experience. Students are able to contrast (1) the treatment of indigenous Irish culture with colonized British culture, and (2) messages disseminated about Irish resistance with those of the colonizer, in order to understand the roles information and information policy play in reproducing cultural hegemony, Data gathered from students indicate that the study abroad experience does in fact increase cultural humility and provide a transformative experience that helps them see “truth” as conditional rather than absolute and to ask, “who controls the narrative” in cultural conflict. Matthew Saxton will describe the International Exploration Seminar program and how MLIS graduate students have engaged in study abroad for over 10 years in multiple countries (Netherlands, South Korea, New Zealand, Ghana, Denmark, United Kingdom, Austria, Ethiopia, and Portugal). Themes of seminars have included urban informatics, cross-cultural adoption of information technology, polarization and inclusion in different societies, information literacy, and children’s literature and “own voices” in publishing. The presentation will focus in depth on the South Korea seminar as a case study that has run for 12 years and engaged over 180 US students and an equal number of Korean students. Students examine the interaction of culture, adoption of information technology, and use of social media, and consider such questions as: Do US and Korean students use social media in similar or different ways? How do they communicate, share, and validate information? We examine the cultural, economic, social, and political factors that shape the online information environment of both societies. Presenters will engage the audience in lively discussion and exchange of ideas. Discussion topics will center on the purpose and value of international experiences in graduate study, planning and investment on part of the institution, incentives for student recruitment, preparation of faculty, and building effective international partnerships.

The 2007 presidential elections in Sierra Leone passed largely unnoticed by the British media. What reports there were in the months before the polls spoke of angry and disillusioned people and the...

Explorations in the Icy North contributes an original transnational and comparative study of Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. In four chapters, Kaalund draws from archival sources in Britain, Canada, Denmark, and the United States to track changes in Arctic travel narratives between 1818 and 1883. She investigates these changing narratives to spotlight broader shifts in the financial sponsors of expeditions, technologies of travel and field research, and cultural expectations of how explorers ought to present their work in print. Anyone interested in Arctic history, Arctic exploration, travel writing, nineteenth-century imperial history, or field science will find this work valuable. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be Kaalund’s integrative analysis of primary-source documents across several national contexts.As a vast geographical region carved into more than a half-dozen nation-states and many more Indigenous settlement areas, the Arctic presents serious barriers to comprehensive historical inquiry. Yet, as Kaalund points out, the majority of historical scholarship about Arctic exploration remains constrained to national boundaries, rarely venturing into international or transnational waters. In contrast, the archival research supporting Explorations in the Icy North spans four significant repositories that have rarely been treated together—the U.S. National Archives, the Royal Society Archives in London, the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and the Statsbiblioteket at Aarhus Universitet in Denmark. Kaalund deliberately mobilizes this collection of sources to scrutinize and de-center British experiences in the Arctic, which historians have sometimes treated as a model or benchmark for imperial ambition in high latitudes. Kaalund finds that American, Canadian, and Danish travelers did not always emphasize heroism, “gentlemanly” behaviors, or mourning for lost expeditions as the British itinerants did. This comparison leads Kaalund to conclude that science in the Arctic is far more contingent than even the British example suggests. Authority, in Kaalund’s view, is dependent upon the physical location of field sites, audience, instrumentation and technology, and the political and economic power of funding organizations.Any comparative study must deal with the inevitable challenges of breadth, depth, and emphasis. Although Kaalund’s transnational approach helps to provide a better explanation of the complexities in Arctic science during the nineteenth century, the reader deserves more information about how and why she selected her particular case studies. In each chapter, Kaalund focuses the analysis on a handful of expeditions that she asserts to be the most revealing about explorers’ relationships, travel accounts, field sites, and intellectual communities. Yet she does not cover or quantify the other expeditions that she opted to leave out of her analysis. Nor does she regularly qualify or substantiate claims with evidence from the extensive existing literature about Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century.The tradeoff in this book should be familiar to practitioners in interdisciplinary history, especially transnational history. On one hand, the book covers a wider range of actors than typically appears in “national” Arctic history—missionaries, fur traders, researchers working at Arctic field stations, and both amateur and professional explorers dashing to the North Pole. Pointing to this diversity, Kaalund concludes that the category of explorer and the nature of Arctic science was highly unstable during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the book begs the question about the extent to which this conclusion reflects the selection of sources rather than the full record of Arctic expeditions during the period. Moreover, because travel accounts were not always read by the same audiences—even within Kaalund’s own chapter-by-chapter groupings—systematic or consistent comparisons of narrative devices is not possible. How can transnational analysis—notwithstanding the richness in its characterization of agency and historical contingency, especially in this work—defend itself more robustly against charges of selection bias?Even with this lingering question, Exploration in the Icy North gives readers much to consider about the nature of field science, exploration, intellectual authority, travel writing, and transnational history. Kaalund’s book advances our understanding of the Arctic, particularly how and why its nineteenth-century explorers, as well as the imperial powers behind them, recorded their efforts to enter, research, and exploit the region.

Introduction 1. 'Just a Boyish Habit'...? British and Commonwealth War Trophies in the First World War Paul Cornish (Imperial War Museum) 2. Shaping Matter, Meaning and Mentalities: The German Steel Helmet from Artefact to Afterlife Fabio Gygi (University College London) 3. The Great War 'Trench Club': Typology, Use and Cultural Meaning Daniel Phillips (University College London) 4. The Journey Back: On the Nature of Donations to the In Flanders Fields Museum Dominiek Dendooven (In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium) 5. 'Brothers in Arms' - Masonic Artefacts of the First World War and its Aftermath Mark Dennis (Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London) 6. Subversive Material: African Embodiments of Modern War Richard Waller (Bucknell University, USA) 7. Medals, Memory and Meaning: Symbolism and Cultural Significance of Great War Medals Matthew Richardson (Manx National Heritage) 8. Distinguishing the Uniform: British Military Heraldry and Group Identity Alan Jeffreys (Imperial War Museum) 9. The Consumer Sphinx: From French Trench to Parisian Market Gulya Isyanova (University College London) 10. 'The Returned Soldiers Bug': Making the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne Catherine Moriarty (University of Brighton) 11. Exploring a Language of Grief in First World War Headstone Inscriptions Sonia Batten (University of Birmingham) 12. 'P'raps I Shall See You...': Recognition of Loved Ones in Non-fiction Film of the First World War Roger Smither (Imperial War Museum) 13. 'A Few Broad Stripes': Perception, Deception and the 'Dazzle Ship' Phenomenon of WWI Jonathan Black (Kingston University) 14. Message and Materiality in Mesopotamia, 1916-17: My Grandfather's Diary, Social Commemoration and the Experience of War John Schofield (English Heritage) 15. Postcards from the Past: War, Landscape, and Place in Argonne, France Paola Filippucci (Cambridge University) 16. 'Calculating the Future': Panoramic Sketching, Reconnaissance Drawing and the Material Trace of War Paul Gough (University of the West of England) 17. Archaeology of the Great War: The Flemish Experience Marc Dewilde (Institute for Archaeological Heritage, Flanders, Belgium) and Nicholas J. Saunders (University College London) 18. 'Slowly Our Ghosts Drag Home': Human Remains from the Heidenkopf, Serre, Somme, France Martin Brown (MOD) 19. Great War Archaeology on the Glaciers of the Alps Marco Balbi (Societa Storica per La Guerra Bianca, Italy) 20. Training for Trench Warfare: The Archaeological Evidence from Salisbury Plain Graham Brown and David Field (English Heritage)

Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK

Volume 1: Preface Summary of contents 1. Chartulary of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin (MS Rawlinson B. 495, Bodleian Library, Oxford) 2. Chartulary of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin (MS Cotton Tiberius A. XI, British Museum, London). Volume 2: Preface Summary of contents Part I. Chartularies (continued): 3. Excerpts, by Sir James Ware, from register of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin, compiled AD 1525 (Add. MSS 4787, 4789, British Museum, London) 4. Proceedings between the city of Dublin and St Mary's Abbey, AD 1516-17 5. Catalogues of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin (Add. MSS 4796, 4813, British Museum, London) 6. Account of lands, possessions, and revenues of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin, at period of its dissolution, AD 1539-40 7. Register of St Mary's Abbey, Dunbrothy (MS Rawlinson B. 495, Bodleian Library, Oxford) 8. Account of lands, possessions, and revenues of St Mary's Abbey, Dunbrothy, at period of its dissolution, AD 1540-41 9. Cistercian establishments, Ireland Part II. Annals: 1. Annales monasterii Beate Marie Virginis, juxta Dublin (MS Trinity College, Dublin Add. MS 4787, British Museum, London 2. Annals of Ireland, fragment: AD 1308-10 and 1316-17 (Add. MS 4792, British Museum, London) 'Annales Hibernie' 1162-1370 (MS Laud 526, Bodleian Library, Oxford) Appendix Index.

Readers of this journal might ask why there is a need to dedicate an entire issue to the study of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization famously tasked by Churchill to ‘set Europ...

The following article covers testimonies of former military and associated personnel fighting the Mau Mau 1 insurgency in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. Three questions underlie the study: How did British officers and others view what became labelled as an emergency? What was their impression of Mau Mau rebels? And how did they judge African soldiers of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) who carried a large share of the military effort? The memories reveal a rather technical view of the conflict. According to the personnel quoted in the paper, an archaic movement was pitched against disciplined but ruthless ‘Askaris’ 2 in a conflict whose roots their officers struggled to fully understand. The article relies to a large degree on interviews and private papers held at the Imperial War Museum (London) and the Bodleian Library (Oxford).

This article explores the practice of ‘virginity testing’ by British immigration officers in the late 1970s through the internal documents of the Home Office held at the National Archives in London. By analysing these documents, we argue that the ‘virginity testing’ controversy demonstrates the intersectionality of discrimination faced by migrant women from the Indian subcontinent attempting to enter Britain in the 1970s. Previous discussions of the practice have focused on either the dimension of ‘race’ or gender as the determining factor behind this invasive procedure, but this article shows that both dimensions are of equal importance in explaining why immigration officers undertook ‘testing’ for virginity during border control investigations. The emphasis within the immigration control system on preventing ‘bogus’ migration informed how immigration officers processed potential migrants and this framework of suspicion allowed the practice of ‘virginity testing’ to occur.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the declining British Empire, this thesis explores how the Hong Kong government handled the Vietnamese refugee crisis of the 1970s. The Vietnamese refugee influx started after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and temporarily stopped after the Geneva Conference on Indochinese refugees in 1979. Drawing extensively upon recently declassified files from the National Archives in London and the National Archives in Maryland, the thesis discusses several important themes, for example, international concerns about human rights during the Cold War era, interpretations of humanitarianism, and Hong Kong’s autonomy in the age of decolonization. It argues that Britain exerted its international influence by forcing Hong Kong to be a first asylum for refugees. Hong Kong played an important role in demonstrating Britain’s contribution to resolving the refugee crisis. The colony served as a place for Britain’s proxy humanitarianism. This thesis shows that international expectations of human rights conflicted with local politics in Hong Kong. Unlike studies that stress Hong Kong’s increasing autonomy, this thesis shows that the colonial authorities played a passive role in the refugee crisis, and the British government still had the final say on Hong Kong’s refugee policy.
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\nThis thesis comprises three chapters. The first chapter investigates the case of two freighters that rescued Vietnamese refugees in 1975 and 1976. The Danish-registered Clara Maersk arrived in Hong Kong on 30 April 1975, marking the beginning of the refugee crisis. As the British and Hong Kong governments were uncertain about the scale of the influx and had different expectations about Britain’s contribution to ending the refugee problem, the Clara Maersk incident triggered heated debates. The incident demonstrates how Britain’s domestic affairs led to the British government’s reluctant assistance to Hong Kong. The Burmese-registered Ava that arrived in Hong Kong on 6 July 1976 with ninety-eight refugees reveals the unclear responsibility for shipwrecked refugees rescued by foreign vessels. The Ava incident shows how Hong Kong’s refugee influx was treated as an American problem. The U.S. government saw Hong Kong’s regional role of strengthening Southeast Asian countries’ involvement in America’s refugee program. The second chapter investigates the second wave of Vietnamese refugees. The deteriorating Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1978 led to an exodus of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam. The Vietnamese government officially permitted the ethnic Chinese to leave in return for payment. This chapter examines the pre-arranged vessels that transported refugees to other countries under collaboration with the Vietnamese authorities. The final chapter focuses on how the British government relieved Hong Kong’s refugee burden as cheaply as possible. On the one hand, the British government wanted to show its contribution to resolving the refugee crisis by maintaining Hong Kong’s humanitarian policy. On the other hand, it did not want to take the Vietnamese refugees because of Britain’s own immigration problems. By initiating an international conference on Indochinese refugees, the British government internationalized the refugee problem and minimized its responsibility for the crisis.

During the Seventies, in the stormy Mediterranean theatre, many events endangered NATO’s positions all along the Southern flank and threatened to jeopardize the stability in Europe and thus the Détente itself. In this scenario, Italy played a dual role. On the one hand it contributed to increasing the risks of instability with its own internal instability. During the so-called Years of Lead, Italy was affected by social turbulence, political terrorism, and violence, while at the same time going through economic decline and skyrocketing inflation. In the meantime, a sharp increase of votes for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) ignited fears that the PCI might be close to taking power, thus being able to further weaken the Atlantic Alliance by pushing Italy out of it. On the other hand, Italy was pivotal in serving the interests of the Alliance in the Mediterranean, avoiding an alteration of the military balance in Southern Europe by keeping Malta from shifting towards the Soviet Union. The Italian-Maltese agreement signed in August 1980 was the climax of this process. In addition to literature, this paper relies on documents, both edited (Foreign Relations of the United States) and unedited (held by The National Archives in London, the NARA II in Washington D.C., the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, and the National Archives in Rabat, Malta). Keywords: Italy, NATO, Mediterranean, Malta, United States, Cold War; Communist Question

This research explores the nexus between the Second World War (World War II) and the episode of communal riots that broke out in Ilesa, Western Nigeria in 1941. Ilesa a town populated by the Ijesa, a sub-group of the Yoruba was an extremely vibrant town during the colonial period. It provided opportunities in commerce and industry for both local inhabitants and settlers. However, in 1941, in the face of dwindling resources and acute competition occasioned by the World War II, the Ijesa people descended on the visitors and settlers in their midst. This work, using undocumented oral reconstruction of popular memory in Ilesa and other parts of Western Nigeria, private papers, newspaper accounts and colonial official reports in the National Archives at Ibadan, National Archives in London and secondary sources provides extensive interpretation of the consequences of World War II on identity and inter- group relations in an urban milieu in colonial Nigeria.

The research problem discussed in this article centers on the historical role of George Ekem Ferguson, a 19th-century Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) figure, in the abolition of slavery. Despite Ferguson’s significant contributions as a colonial civil servant, cartographer, surveyor, and other roles, his potential involvement in anti-slavery efforts has been largely ignored in academic literature. Meanwhile, there is a local perception of him as an abolitionist in modern Ghana. This paper aims to reassess Ferguson’s legacy and specifically examine his reported anti-slavery activities. The study utilizes Ferguson’s colonial reports and community reflections to explore his advocacy against slavery in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, challenging the traditional narrative that predominantly highlights European contributions to abolition efforts in the region. The research utilizes archival records from The National Archives in London, including George Ekem Ferguson’s colonial reports, and field interviews with Ferguson’s family in Anomabo and residents of Wa, where he died and was buried in Ghana. These sources provide insights into Ferguson’s anti-slavery activities and local perceptions of him as an abolitionist.Part 1 outlines George Ekem Ferguson’s origins, education, and career within the colonial administration of Ghana. Born in Anomabu to a family involved in the colonial establishment and the church mission, Ferguson was educated in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom, becoming a skilled cartographer and civil servant. Ferguson’s role in the Gold Coast was multifaceted; he was a teacher, a clerk, and eventually a political agent involved in treaty negotiations. Ferguson’s views diverged from those of other educated Fante contemporaries such as Casely-Hayford, who were influenced by James Hutton Brew’s advocacy of a greater African voice in colonial governance. Ferguson is presented as a proponent of expanding colonial rule for civilization purposes, in contrast to the Fante nationalist aspirations of his peers. The part provides essential background on Ferguson’s life, establishing his position and networks. It sets the stage for examining Ferguson’s reported activities in the northern hinterlands.Part 2 of the paper delves into George Ekem Ferguson’s diplomatic efforts in the Northern Territories and his engagement with local leaders, which may have led to his reputation as an abolitionist. While treaties of protection included anti-slavery clauses, treaties of friendship did not, focusing instead on preventing alliances with other European powers. Ferguson’s writings highlight the Asante tributary system’s contribution to regional slave sourcing and how British intervention reduced such practices. He emphasized the importance of the British defeat of the Asante, which led to a reduction in slave raiding and encouraged the replacement of the slave trade with legitimate trade to further curb slavery. Despite the lack of explicit anti-slavery provisions in many treaties, Ferguson implied to local rulers that treaties with Britain would provide protection against slave raiding. His efforts to prevent slave raids and to promote trade as an alternative to slavery contributed to his reputation as an abolitionist among local communities.Part 3 argues that community memory in Anomabo and Wa intersects with the historical record to portray Ferguson as an initiator of anti-slavery measures beyond his official colonial duties. His relatives in Anomabo maintain that Ferguson’s opposition to slavery was a personal initiative, not a colonial directive, thus affirming his status as an abolitionist. In Wa, where Ferguson is buried, the local community honors his memory as someone who defended their interests against slave raiders, with his grave site reflecting traditional customs for honoring respected strangers. The community’s view of Ferguson as an abolitionist is linked to his personal interventions against slave raiding and his efforts to establish boundaries that helped protect against slavers, reinforcing the narrative of Ferguson as a pivotal figure in the fight against slavery in Northern Ghana.The conclusion of the article presents George Ekem Ferguson as a pivotal figure who possibly contributed to the fight against slave raiding in Northern Ghana. It also outlines opportunities for future research to confirm the impact of Ferguson’s treaties on the reduction of slave raiding and to explore the perspectives of local African rulers and slave raiders of that era.

The successful preservation of digital assets requires maintenance, continuity of service, and proactive stewardship.1 An ongoing challenge for Bodleian Libraries (of Oxford University) and Cambridge University Library (CUL) has been taking outputs from time-bound digital preservation projects and turning them into ongoing uninterrupted services. This is not a challenge which is specific to Bodleian Libraries and CUL, but it has been recognized as a difficult transition for many organizations to make. The Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge (DPOC) project (2016–2018) is a collaboration between Bodleian Libraries and CUL which is supported and funded by The Polonsky Foundation. Bodleian Libraries and CUL have historically strong ties, and have previously collaborated on digital preservation projects. Both organizations also have experience creating digital preservation resources, for which stewardship at the end of projects has been transferred over to staff within the libraries for maintenance. However, siloed preservation activities have so far not translated into institution-wide, ongoing programmatic digital preservation activities.