History Of Celebrity Research Articles

History of celebrity branching out

AbstractThis article provides a comprehensive overview of the expanding field of celebrity history. While there was once a debate surrounding the application of the concept of celebrity to the past, historians have recently recognised the importance of exploring transient fame and social distinction, solidifying this line of inquiry. However, our understanding of historical celebrity has since evolved, involving new themes, time periods, and geographical contexts, which has led to a diverse range of approaches and perspectives. By examining how historians have explored the topic in recent years, this article identifies the strengths and limitations of different approaches, offering a fresh and updated understanding of the complexities of studying the role of fame throughout history.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: From Sacrificing Sister to Star Sister: The History of Queer Celebrity in Turkey

RETRACTED ARTICLE: From Sacrificing Sister to Star Sister: The History of Queer Celebrity in Turkey

Statement of Retraction: From sacrificing sister to star sister: the history of queer celebrity in Turkey

Statement of Retraction: From sacrificing sister to star sister: the history of queer celebrity in Turkey

Reciprocal Data Transformations and Their Back-Transforms

Variable transformations have a long and celebrated history in statistics, one that was rather academically glamorous at least until generalized linear models theory eclipsed their nurturing normal curve theory role. Still, today it continues to be a covered topic in introductory mathematical statistics courses, offering worthwhile pedagogic insights to students about certain aspects of traditional and contemporary statistical theory and methodology. Since its inception in the 1930s, it has been plagued by a paucity of adequate back-transformation formulae for inverse/reciprocal functions. A literature search exposes that, to date, the inequality E(1/X) ≤ 1/(E(X), which often has a sizeable gap captured by the inequality part of its relationship, is the solitary contender for solving this problem. After documenting that inverse data transformations are anything but a rare occurrence, this paper proposes an innovative, elegant back-transformation solution based upon the Kummer confluent hypergeometric function of the first kind. This paper also derives formal back-transformation formulae for the Manly transformation, something apparently never done before. Much related future research remains to be undertaken; this paper furnishes numerous clues about what some of these endeavors need to be.

Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome: Military Perioperative and Perianesthesia Nursing Support to the Afghan Evacuation Mission

Nursing has a long and celebrated history of providing life-saving care during crises and periods of great need. Following the government collapse in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of US troops, a severe humanitarian and human rights crisis emerged. The US military participated in one of the largest and most complex humanitarian missions in history to aid Afghan relief efforts. US and coalition forces evacuated more than 130,000 people in the chaotic Allied airlift from the Kabul Airport. The overarching missions, Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome, provided humanitarian support to at-risk Afghan nationals who contributed to the Global War on Terrorism efforts, as well as US citizens living in Afghanistan. Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC), an overseas military treatment facility located in Germany, supported the healthcare needs of Afghan evacuees and injured US service members during the humanitarian crisis. LRMC clinicians provided emergent, urgent, and specialty care while advocating for evacuee health, wellness, and living conditions. Perioperative and perianesthesia nurses were essential to the humanitarian response, as many evacuees and injured US service members arrived in Germany requiring immediate surgical interventions. In this article, we describe the vital contributions of military perioperative and perianesthesia nurses to the Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome missions, and share our experiences providing humanitarian relief. Military and civilian healthcare planners can learn from our humanitarian relief contributions, experiences, and lessons to strategically prepare their health systems to respond to future crises.

The Public and the Private on the Construction of a Celebrity: The Case of Émile Zola

In this article, it is intended to reflect about the concept of celebrity, mainly in the end of the XIX century, departing from Émile Zola. In this context, the main goals are both the understanding of the construction of the concept “celebrity”, and how and if it may fit to a literary figure as Zola as a public person, based on the analysis of a specific medium, the letter, as a means of communication situated between the public and private spheres. We propose to analyse a corpus of letters, available on the Eman platform, sent from the Ibero-American area to Zola at the end of the 19th century. This corpus does not constitute a uniform object of analysis, given the diversity of letter writers who take the liberty of writing to Zola during this period when the novelist and his work are already well known and had been the target of numerous polemics on art and literature in the decade preceding the writing of these texts. From a theoretical point of view, we place ourselves in the perspective of studies concerning the history and culture of celebrity, as well as studies concerning comparative literature. In the light of these achievements, we will seek to study this corpus as an expression of an audience that reflects the image of Zola as a public figure and, at the same time, achieves a literary and cultural self-reflection. The methodologies used will be a qualitative analysis applied to the content of the letters, in order to show that, although correspondence have traditionally been allocated a secondary status, in fact the correspondence method, as a primary data-gathering technique, may present unique advantages circumventing the embarrassment that participants may face otherwise.

Sympathy for the Criminal: The Criminal Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London

This article investigates the rise and fall of the criminal celebrity in London between 1660 and 1790. It explains how, through the dramatic expansion of print culture and the rise of sensibility, a small number of highwaymen, thieves and a bigamist were able to seek and receive substantial public sympathy, despite widespread concerns about the extent of crime in London. However, in the early nineteenth century, changing attitudes towards crime and new penal practices led to the disappearance of this type of positive criminal celebrity. These findings contribute to our understanding of both changing attitudes towards crime and the wider history of celebrity.

New Directions in the History of Celebrity: Case Studies and Critical Perspectives

This paper provides an introduction and overview for this special issue's collection of important new work in the history of celebrity. It sets the scene by explaining the main difficulties that have beset the development of a historiography of the very contemporaneous phenomenon of celebrity. A key issue is how one understands the historical emergence of the sphere, and how confident one should be that the historical narrative concerning the public sphere and celebrity should begin in the 18th century, rather than in earlier periods. It outlines what is particularly significant and innovative about the contributions to this special issue, and draws out their implications for the ever-expanding scope of the history of celebrity.

Ethics–Comparing Ethical Egoism with Confucius’s Golden Rule

Both the Eastern and Western societies have an extensive and celebrated history of ethics education. Although normative ethics have been rigorously studied epistemologically and vigorously debated, abstract ethics theories are very difficult to interpret or apply. On the other hand, applied ethical standards can usually provide more direct guidance on specific personal or business conduct in determining whether it is ethical. In this paper, we will focus on the Ethical Egoism principle. Five examples of real-world personal and/or business conducts will be provided to demonstrate how to apply this ethical standard. We will also apply Confucius’s Golden Rule to the same examples in determining whether the similar ethical evaluations can be observed.

Beyond celebrity history: towards the consolidation of fame studies

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the current perspectives on celebrity history, following the varied theoretical understandings of historicisation in particular. The critical analysis of different approaches allows for the distinguishment of the major problem entailed by historicising celebrity. In order to avoid it, I propose a broader perspective of fame history. As presented later, the shift of focus towards fame rather than celebrity was foreshadowed in many milestone works on celebrity history before. The final part of the text offers a methodological tool that could serve as a bridge between different traditions dealing with celebrity and other kinds of fame.

Teaching Note—Fostering Political Awareness in Students Through the Use of Genograms

ABSTRACTDespite the celebrated history of social workers engaging in the political realm for the purposes of fostering social change, students sometimes seem ambivalent regarding the essential nature of their political engagement while also doubting their ability to make a difference through these efforts. How can social work educators combat feelings of disinterest or inadequacy as it relates to policy practice? This manuscript describes the use of an experiential activity that called third-year BSW students in a social policy course to create a genogram detailing the political and civic engagement of their family of origin. This was assigned with the aim of providing students an opportunity to better understand potential assets and barriers to their engaging in the political sphere.

On the equatorial Ekman layer

The steady incompressible viscous flow in the wide gap between spheres rotating rapidly about a common axis at slightly different rates (small Rossby number) has a long and celebrated history. The problem is relevant to the dynamics of geophysical and planetary core flows, for which, in the case of electrically conducting fluids, the possible operation of a dynamo is of considerable interest. A comprehensive asymptotic study, in the small Ekman number limit $E\ll 1$, was undertaken by Stewartson (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 26, 1966, pp. 131–144). The mainstream flow, exterior to the $E^{1/2}$ Ekman layers on the inner/outer boundaries and the shear layer on the inner sphere tangent cylinder $\mathscr{C}$, is geostrophic. Stewartson identified a complicated nested layer structure on $\mathscr{C}$, which comprises relatively thick quasigeostrophic $E^{2/7}$- (inside $\mathscr{C}$) and $E^{1/4}$- (outside $\mathscr{C}$) layers. They embed a thinner ageostrophic $E^{1/3}$ shear layer (on $\mathscr{C}$), which merges with the inner sphere Ekman layer to form the $E^{2/5}$-equatorial Ekman layer of axial length $E^{1/5}$. Under appropriate scaling, this $E^{2/5}$-layer problem may be formulated, correct to leading order, independent of $E$. Then the Ekman boundary layer and ageostrophic shear layer become features of the far-field (as identified by the large value of the scaled axial coordinate $z$) solution. We present a numerical solution of the previously unsolved equatorial Ekman layer problem using a non-local integral boundary condition at finite $z$ to account for the far-field behaviour. Adopting $z^{-1}$ as a small parameter we extend Stewartson’s similarity solution for the ageostrophic shear layer to higher orders. This far-field solution agrees well with that obtained from our numerical model.

Book Reviews

LORD BYRON AND SCANDALOUS CELEBRITY. By Clara Tuite. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xxv + 312. ISBN 978-1-1070-8259-5. £65.00.For a long time, Byron's celebrity was an embarrassment to his academic critics, even though it was an enticement to his many enthusiastic non-academic readers. New Critics and their descendants, who aspired to engage with 'the poem itself ', found it impossible to disentangle Byron's writing from the circumstances of his fame in Regency culture, and their accounts of Romanticism often tended to marginalise his poetry as a result. Others were put off by a vague feeling that the populist superficiality of celebrity culture meant that it could not be a serious subject of study. In the last ten years, however, Byron's critics have stopped being embarrassed by his celebrity. In fact, they have shown how his celebrity is essential to any understanding of his poetry, and they have located Byron at the historical emergence of the modern celebrity culture that now structures almost every aspect of public life. Studies of the history of celebrity have extended the historical reach of cultural-studies approaches to contemporary celebrity, and fostered interest in the forms of recognition available in earlier periods.In Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, Clara Tuite builds on these developments to offer one of the most thorough and sophisticated accounts of Byron's place in Romantic celebrity culture that has so far appeared. Her book is ambitious: rather than using celebrity as a key to unlock Byron's works, it uses Byron's life and works as a window onto the scandalous celebrity culture of the Regency. The book is divided into three sections. The first and largest, called 'Worldlings', examines four individuals who were arguably celebrities in their own right and whose histories intersect personally or symbolically with Byron's: Caroline Lamb, Stendhal, Napoleon and Castlereagh. The second, briefer section on 'Writings' examines Childe Harold IV and Don Juan. The final and shortest section, 'After-Warriors', examines the cultural field of Byron's reception. In tackling life, writing and reception by turns, the book inevitably has to sacrifice sustained discussion of individual poems. While there are many valuable insights along the way, for example into Cain, The Deformed Transformed, and the 'Ode to Napoleon', readers of The Byron Journal may wish there were more substantial readings of Childe Harold I and II, the tales, or the plays.In Tuite's account, celebrity emerges in relation to a large number of historical shifts and cultural permutations. It is a form of secular divinity reflecting and reinforcing secularisation. It renegotiates understandings of royalty. It mediates between older forms of heroic fame and newer forms of notoriety. It is bound up with the emergence of print capitalism as described by Benedict Anderson. It employs forms of ritual as theorised by Erving Goffman. It reflects and advances a shift from literal to symbolic forms of violence, identified by Foucault. It participates both in an aristocratic form of face-to-face sociability and a new kind of mediated sociability connecting media stars to mass audiences. It marks the transformation of aristocratic libertinism into bourgeois sexual transgression. It facilitates the emergence of 'public opinion' as a force in the public sphere. These different but interlinked historical and interpretive frameworks combine to produce a rich 'thick description' of Romantic celebrity. By combining them, Tuite shows how deeply celebrity culture is woven into the history of modernity, and how much is at stake in understanding it. But Tuite also seems reluctant to say that any one of these frameworks is more important than another. Her approach attempts to synthesise these different possibilities rather than adjudicating amongst them.Lamb, Stendhal, Napoleon and Castlereagh provide oblique ways of approaching Byronic celebrity from different angles. …

Livy's political philosophy: power and personality in early Rome

This volume explores the political implications of the first five books of Livy's celebrated history of Rome, challenging the common perception of the author as an apolitical moralist. Ann Vasaly argues that Livy intended to convey through the narration of particular events crucial lessons about the interaction of power and personality, including the personality of the Roman people as a whole. These lessons demonstrate the means by which the Roman republic flourished in the distant past and by which it might be revived in Livy's own corrupt time. Written at the precise moment when Augustus' imperial autocracy was replacing the republican system that had existed in Rome for almost 500 years, the stories of the first pentad offer invaluable insight into how republics and monarchies work. Vasaly's innovative study furthers the integration in recent scholarship of the literary brilliance of Livy's text and the seriousness of its purpose.

Figures publiques: l'invention de la célébrité, 1750–1850

Celebrity as an object of academic study has steadily been gaining currency in recent years. It remains, though, an ambiguous term: at one extreme, it is employed to denote a very modern state, specifically linked to audio-visual media; while at the other it is considered to encompass the whole spectrum of fame, from the glory of emperors, to the fascination of the beautiful starlet, to the charisma of a religious cult. Antoine Lilti sets out to navigate a course between these two points, considered respectively as too reductive or too broad. Instead, he investigates the birth and development of a very precise phenomenon: namely, a widespread interest in the private lives of public figures, which resulted from the elision between public and private worlds that took place from the mid eighteenth century. In order to better define this form of fame, Lilti usefully makes brief reference to associated contemporary notions, including reputation (related to honour), glory (generally posthumous), and popularity (most often associated with politics). Celebrity, in his definition, refers to the process by which the colleagues, admirers, or neighbours among whom a reputation might exist are replaced by a public that has no prior association with the famous individual. The illusion of intimacy is acquired through the close attention paid to the mundane, private details of the celebrity's life: curiosity is the defining feature of this one-way relationship. Lilti argues that this served the further purpose of creating communities of interest that defined themselves by whom they admired, quite distinct from the rational public sphere of earlier accounts. The book proceeds through a series of case studies, ranging from Voltaire, Rousseau, Garrick, and Mozart through Mirabeau, Marie-Antoinette and Franklin, to Byron and Napoleon. The central consequence of examining these varied figures is to underline what, for Lilti, is one of the key features of his version of celebrity: it is an egalitarian process, to which the actor or the writer is just as susceptible as the emperor or politician. But the different figures also allow for discussion of different facets of this developing trend: the media for creating celebrity, the drawbacks of being a public figure, the relationship between man and work, and celebrity as it is linked to power. Although Lilti does describe how the phenomenon he studies relates to modern celebrity culture, this is not, I think, his only concern. Rather, he is interested in a particular moment; a combination of sociopolitical circumstances that resulted in the development of a very specific form of fame. There are many pathways he is forced to leave untrodden, not least the complex relationship between his version of celebrity and the posthumous glory to which he only gestures. It is inevitable, too, that those wedded to the idea of a much longer history of celebrity will dispute the historical specificity of this account. However, Lilti contends that his aim is to make celebrity a useable tool for researchers, and in this regard this meticulously researched and engagingly written account is immensely valuable.

The history of television celebrity: a discursive approach

This article makes a critical contribution to recent discussions of television celebrity. In particular, the article argues against the use of ‘celebrity’ as a general concept (with, in some accounts, a 250-year history) – of which the ‘TV personality’ is a particular variant. The focus here is on specific meanings of ‘celebrity’ alongside other terms that have been used to define ‘media people’ on television. Taking as its case study the UK TV listings magazine TV Times between 1955 and 1964, the analysis shows that the term ‘celebrity’ was used, alongside ‘personality’ and the much more ubiquitous ‘star’, to describe TV performers sometimes interchangeably but, as the nascent TV culture developed, with meanings that became increasingly specific. In this context, the term ‘celebrity’ was used to characterise the relationship between media performers and outsiders/ordinary people – where these people encountered TV performers or were themselves involved in TV programmes. Here ‘celebrity’ is not a general historical concept, but rather a term used to define an emerging popular culture, with TV a key focus for the development of contemporary ‘media rituals’.

A ‘Political War of Words and Bullets’: Defining and Defying Sides of Struggle for Housing in Crossroads, South Africa

This article looks at contemporary activism in Crossroads, South Africa – a famous symbol of women's defiance as one of the longest-surviving squatter camps under apartheid. In 1998 the Women's Power Group staged a four-month sit-in at City Council offices, demanding accountability for undelivered housing and public services. This was one of the first and most prolonged of what have become known as the post-apartheid or neoliberal period ‘new social movements’. The occupation unravelled into a year of violent conflict in the township and a subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the events. Official documents – even those that revolve around actions taken by women – focus on men acting violently. However, life histories of Women's Power Group (WPG) members tell a very different story about what women were thinking and doing. I first piece together the unfolding events through archival and oral history research. I then turn from looking at the history of struggle to looking at the struggle over history, where women's struggles were reframed in an official discourse of naive pawns of shacklords at best, and undeserving, impatient troublemakers at worst. Women's leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women's mobilising in Crossroads. The case of the Women's Power Group history points to how silences around complex processes of the demobilisation of women's movements – the reconfiguration of power that is not named or acknowledged – plays out in subsequent attempts to mobilise. The article aims to document and extend an important piece of post-apartheid history, and to spark discussion on processes of demobilisation, the significance of the gaps between multiple versions of women's protest over time, and the implications for ongoing struggles today.

Should 16-Year-Olds Be Allowed to Vote in Westminster Elections? Public Opinion and Electoral Franchise Reform

Britain has a long and often celebrated history of progressively expanding the electoral franchise. In recent years, the idea has been advanced to allow 16-year-olds to vote in general elections. This article uses data from a July 2013 national survey to examine public attitudes on this topic. These data show that less than one person in six favours lowering the voting age, with a large majority preferring the status quo. Younger—but not the youngest—people, men, working class and lower income persons, self-identified members of the ethnic majority and Scots tend to be most favourably disposed towards lowering the voting age. Multivariate analyses confirm these socio-demographic relationships and demonstrate that views about reducing the voting age covary in theoretically expected ways with several attitudinal variables prominent in the literature on voting, political participation and support for democratic political systems. Although statistically significant, none of the relationships of interest is especially strong. Thus, an effort to lower the age of majority would lack widespread popularity and be only weakly leveraged by the demographics of the British electorate. If franchise change occurs, it likely will be the result of an elite-driven project that succeeds because of widespread public indifference.

Dynamic empirical Bayes models and their applications to longitudinal data analysis and prediction

Empirical Bayes modeling has a long and celebrated history in statistical theory and applications. In particular, in insurance rate-making, linear empirical Bayes models have provided a basic framework for credibility theory. However, evolutionary credibility models, in which the individual risk profiles evolve over time, have not used the empirical Bayes framework but have relied on minimum-variance linear estimation via Kalman filtering. After a brief review of the literature, we propose a new dynamic empirical Bayes modeling approach which provides flexible and computationally efficient methods for the analysis and prediction of longitudinal data from many individuals. This dynamic empirical Bayes approach pools the cross-sectional information over individual time series to replace an inherently complicated hidden Markov model by a considerably simpler generalized linear mixed model. We apply this new approach to evolutionary credibility theory and to the well-known statistical problem of predicting baseball batting averages studied by Efron and Morris and recently by Brown.

ACCOUNTABLE CARE ORGANIZATIONS: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR SYNERGY

With the reelection of President Obama, full enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is all but certain. Part of that legislation is the establishment of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). These large networks require a minimum of 5,000 Medicare patients, and will assume the total costs for their care in many cases. Over 140 ACOs are already established with over 130,000 physicians and 2.2 million beneficiaries.1 Much of the broad legislation governing ACOs has yet to be converted to specific regulations, which will vary between states. Because so much of this change has yet to be decided, and large systems will have to rapidly adapt, ACOs may become a sudden order of business for family medicine program directors. ACOs are a model of shared risk for costs and savings of a defined population. The more patients a network has, the more easily they can spread the costs of expensive care of the relatively few. In the ACO model, hospitals will shift from revenue centers to cost centers. ACOs have the potential to shift systems to embrace wellness rather than reactive illness care. In the future, we may get reports on how much our patients cost the system, rather than how much revenue we generated with our level-4 visits, inpatient billing, and procedures. Many systems will need to increase their primary care workforce as more patients have health coverage, and systems shift their emphasis to outpatient and preventive care. Insurance and payment reforms are the first 2 steps in health care reform. The third phase is delivery system reform.1 A need to educate those making ACO formation decisions will exist, regarding the value of family medicine residency programs to ACO networks. One of the fundamental objectives of the National Institute of Program Director Development (NIPDD) training is to understand the worth of your program; in the world of ACOs, our 2 principal strengths to promote will be cost-effective care and workforce generation. To truly provide population health care (rather than just those who come to see us) will require a fundamental shift in perspective for our systems, and most of us as well. Many of us will need to learn new skills; we will need to strongly advocate for resources such as case managers, chronic disease registries, and searchable electronic health records to provide high quality, cost-effective health care to a population. We also need to advocate for payment reforms that truly reflect our value to our systems. If we are not involved in the early formation and leadership of ACOs, we risk maintaining the status quo of huge payment disparities between procedure-based specialists and diverse primary care practices. These disparities discourage future medical students from entering primary care, which eventually will hurt all of our patients. Residency education about cost-effective care is optimized if the system can provide each resident with clinical quality and cost data on their own panel of patients, rather than having them subsumed under the faculty patient panel. We need to advocate for not just teaching about quality improvement, but doing it in our residency practices. Family medicine has a long and celebrated history of advocating for our patients. With the formation of ACOs, there is a moral imperative that we advocate for systems that reflect our values as a specialty. In the next few months, many decisions will be made that will affect both process values (the rules that govern decision-making processes such as transparency, accountability, and participation) and content values (clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, justice/equality, and autonomy).2 We all need to ensure that family medicine has a voice at the table, and that we are proud of the end result. After all, the ACOs created in the next few months will be the ones our graduates will be practicing in for the foreseeable future.