19C Rumours from Britain January 20, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernIn his search for Victorian urban legends, Beach has recently been chasing the word ‘rumour’ through the Victorian press. He did not find much in the way of urban legends but he did find lots of inexplicable international gossip. Of course, in the age of the internet the rumour that the Prince of Wales had drowned […]
British Truth and American Lies? March 14, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernIf you look through the American press from the 1800s you will sometimes come across outrageous stories about ghostly happenings, about strange sightings and about impossible creatures. The most famous example of this is, of course, the moon hoax of 1835. In Britain you have similarly outrageous stories about, say, fairy encounters, about sea serpents […]
Academic Quotations from Aged Newspapers May 8, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite, ModernThere follows what may be the most boring post ever put up here. Apologies ahead of time: I tried to make the title as tedious as possible to keep thrillseekers and glue-sniffers away. First, some background. In the last two years I have published half a dozen academic articles that include or, in two cases, […]
Newspaper Archives as Controls or Filters April 18, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, ModernBeachcombing spent more time than was strictly necessary last summer looking at nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspaper archives. It is an extraordinary world. You constantly find yourself caught up on headlines (‘Sea-monster seen in the Channel’, ‘Germans eat the French’) that cannot easily be ignored and then you take one last look over the page and […]
Plagiarism, Sock Puppets and Wikipedia September 18, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ActualiteHere follows one of those contemporary japes which may have escaped the attention of Beach’s non-British readers: excuse the lack of history, bizarreness there is though a plenty. The story so far: Johann Hari, gifted English journalist jobbing for the rather boring but worthwhile Independent has been caught taking quotations from other authors and inserting […]