Fifty years after the event, here is the first full account of an audacious publishing decision that -- with the help of booksellers and readers around the country -- forced the end of literary censorship in Australia. For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple: to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under the censorship regime, books that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned; bookstores were raided; publishers were fined; and writers were charged and even jailed. But in the 1970s, that all changed. In 1970, in great secrecy and at considerable risk, Penguin Books Australia resolved to publish Portnoy's Complaint-- Philip Roth's frank, funny, and profane bestseller about a boy hung up about his mother and his penis. In doing so, Penguin spurred a direct confrontation with the censorship authorities, which culminated in criminal charges, police raids, and an unprecedented series of court trials across the country. Sweeping from the cabinet room to the courtroom, The Trials of Portnoydraws on archival records and new interviews to show how Penguin and a band of writers, booksellers, academics, and lawyers determinedly sought for Australians the freedom to read what they wished -- and how, in defeating the forces arrayed before them, they reshaped Australian literature and culture forever.
Dr. Jonathan Mayhew (1720–1766) was, according to John Adams, a "transcendental genius . . . who threw all the weight of his great fame into the scale of the country in 1761, and maintained it there with zeal and ardor till his death." He was also, J. Patrick Mullins contends, the most politically influential clergyman in eighteenth-century America and the intellectual progenitor of the American Revolution in New England. Father of Liberty is the first book to fully explore Mayhew's political thought and activism, understood within the context of his personal experiences and intellectual influences, and of the cultural developments and political events of his time. Analyzing and assessing his contributions to eighteenth-century New England political culture, the book demonstrates Mayhew's critical contribution to the intellectual origins of the American Revolution. As pastor of the Congregationalist West Church in Boston, Mayhew championed the principles of natural rights, constitutionalism, and resistance to tyranny in press and pulpit from 1750 to 1766. He did more than any other clergyman to prepare New England for disobedience to British authority in the 1760s‑and should, Mullins argues, be counted alongside such framers and fomenters of revolutionary thought as James Otis, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams. Though many commentators from John Adams on down have acknowledged his importance as a popularizer of Whig political principles, Father of Liberty is the first extended, in-depth examination of Mayhew's political writings, as well as the cultural process by which he engaged with the public and disseminated those principles. As such, even as the book restores a key figure to his place in American intellectual and political history, it illuminates the meaning of the Revolution as a political and constitutional conflict informed by the religious and political ideas of the British Enlightenment.
For the past nine years, the ABC has been besieged. Its funding has been slashed. It has been assailed by complaints from ministers and prime ministers. Its board has been stacked with political appointees. It has been relentlessly attacked by commercial media outlets. And it has endured crisis after crisis. Who Needs the ABC? charts how, in its 90th year, the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current plight: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage of constant criticism. This book examines the profound changes that have swept through the Australian media, technology, and political landscapes in the past decade, and explores the tense relationship between the ABC and governments of both stripes over the last 40 years. It dispels any complacency about the ABC’s future by charting the very real threat now posed by the Liberal– National Party coalition, and the damage that it has done to the ABC while in office. Who Needs the ABC? identifies the vital role that the ABC plays in Australia today: in its award-winning journalism, in its vast array of cultural programming on television, on radio, and online, and in the comprehensive service it provides to people across the country. At a time when the truth has to vie with obfuscation and misinformation, this book offers a rejoinder to the ABC’s critics, points to solutions that will see the ABC thrive, and answers the question posed here: Who Needs the ABC? We all do.
For the 250th anniversary of the founding of Dartmouth College, the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth assembled a stellar cast of junior and senior scholars to explore the systemic conditions facing those seeking to found a new college two hundred fifty years ago. What were the key political, economic and religious parameters operating in the Atlantic world at the time of the College’s founding? What was the religious scene like at the moment when the Rev. Samson Occom of the Mohegan nation and the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock of Connecticut, two men from very different backgrounds whose improbable meeting occurred during the Great Awakening of the early 1740s, set about establishing a new school in the northern woods in the 1760s? How were the agendas of contemporaries differently mediated by the religious beliefs with which they acted, on the one hand, and the emerging thought world of political economy, very broadly understood, on the other? These are among the rich and variegated topics addressed in Dartmouth and the World, which breaks the mold of the traditional commemorative volume.
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