Using press advisors – and, in Continental Europe, press bureaus – politicians employed repressive and proactive methods for influencing the press. The older, repressive method consisted of censorship, but politicians gradually shifted towards proactively shaping rather than preventing publicity. They wrote and edited newspaper articles themselves and ‘inspired’ content in different newspapers. In Britain, politicians relied on the papers of their political party; in Germany, the chancellor and emperor had to rely on (semi-)official newspapers. Despite Britain’s free press rhetoric, papers like the Times closely interacted with government as well. Newspaper ownership was already more concentrated in the colonies, enabling a politician to gain widespread control there – as did Rhodes in South Africa. Press agencies formed nodes in international communication, subjecting them to politicians’ interference. Politicians’ contacts with the press were smoothed through secret payments, though such secrecy was often exposed, making it counterproductive. Traditional methods of influencing the press lost effectiveness. Censorship became counterproductive, with court cases generating only more publicity for censored content. Commercialization made newspapers financially independent and less susceptible to politicians’ payments. The mass readership was less interested in newspapers that expressed political opinions, or even described politics to begin with. While politicians still managed the press, they thus needed new strategies for attaining favourable coverage.

Seeking publicity proactively, politicians needed a cooperative press. ‘Journalistic behaviour’ became a hallmark of the publicity politician. Politicians began to think and act like journalists, internalizing their media logic. To procure continuous publicity, politicians surrounded themselves with journalists. They interacted with these journalists privately, but also through the journalistic innovation of the interview. The interview evolved from casual conversation to a formal format of communication, and it enabled politicians to present themselves in their own words – without journalists’ interpretative filter. As with mass mediated speeches, this new form of communication created both possibilities and risks. Particularly for political outsiders, speeches and interviews offered an opportunity to build a non-traditional base of political support. In addition, politicians invited (photo)journalists to publicize their events to the public, regulating access and bestowing honours to control these journalists. Journalists noted politicians’ media-savviness and described them as having the instincts of a journalist or press manager – enhancing their image as publicity politicians. Through their journalistic behaviour, however, these politicians shaped new expectations for media politics, which they – and their successors – could not meet consistently. The increasing speed of international communication challenged politicians to ceaselessly feed an ever-hungrier press and to satisfy conflicting local and distant audiences.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, politicians operated within an increasingly hybrid system of media politics. Media became a mass phenomenon, gained commercial and journalistic independence, and assertively claimed to represent public opinion. This chapter sets the scene by describing this diversifying media environment in which politicians operated. It highlights the technological advances that enabled ‘mass’ media; censorship and freedom of the press; media landscapes including political and religious newspapers, as well as regional, national, and transnational news flows; the commercialization of media; and changing journalistic cultures. These developments interconnected with social changes such as increasing literacy and urbanization; democratization and a bolstered notion of public opinion; and a reflexive modernity. Media became increasingly hybrid in terms of interacting media technologies and formats, political and commercial newspapers, and their social and political functions. This media hybridity defined the new transnational system of media politics that political figures inhabited around 1900.

This chapter examines conservative attacks on social media, and their validity. Conservatives have long accused the major social media platforms of left-leaning bias, claiming that platform content moderation policies unfairly target conservative content for blocking, labeling, and deamplification. They point in particular to events during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as President Trump’s deplatforming, as proof of such bias. In 2021, these accusations led both Florida and Texas to adopt laws regulating platform content moderation in order to combat the alleged bias. But a closer examination of the evidence raises serious doubts about whether such bias actually exists. An equally plausible explanation for why conservatives perceive bias is that social media content moderation policies, in particular against medical disinformation and hate speech, are more likely to affect conservative than other content. For this reason, claims of platform bias remain unproven. Furthermore, modern conservative attacks on social media are strikingly inconsistent with the general conservative preference not to interfere with private businesses.

This chapter surveys the centrality of sex and sexuality to Joyce’s modernist experiment. Representing sexuality was vital to Joyce’s creative method because it demanded strategies that would define his prose: ambiguity, ellipsis, opacity, and obscurity. Gaps and silences marked the emergence of an inchoate modernism that characterized Joyce’s writing about sex – the subject of his fiction where form and content were most intimately entangled. A self-consciously radical frankness was essential to his commitment to innovation of subject and style, as he sought to define his creative practice against the ‘prudery’ of an imagined Victorianism. Sexual daring became an important aspect of his success in establishing himself at the heart of experimental international modernism, through little magazines and coterie publishing houses.

Chapter 4 identifies one of the most troubling developments in copyright law over the past generation: the surprising and remarkable story of how its exemption from First Amendment scrutiny has enabled powerful interests to cynically weaponize copyright as a forceful, state-backed vehicle of censorship to silence critics and suppress dissent. Thus, copyright has a growing free speech problem – one that threatens to undermine both the vitality of our regime governing the use of creative works and our most basic free speech rights. After surveying the growing use of copyright law to stifle legitimate discourse on issues of racism, religious discrimination, reproductive rights, gay rights, corruption, torture, and police brutality, the chapter examines the conditions empowering such lawfare and considers how we might better ensure that copyright law stops serving as a transparent censorial proxy enabling the powerful to silence the powerless and, instead, returns its focus to vindicating the appropriate economic interests of rightsholders.

Qiu Jun’s Supplement was meant as a handbook for bringing peace and order to “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia), but it was also intended as a guide to delimit the perimeters of the Ming state. The paired chapters 143 and 144, titled “The Boundary between the Chinese within and the Non-Chinese from Beyond,” are the focus of this chapter not only because they offer an excellent illustration of the fundamental tension that has long existed in the practice of Chinese statecraft between the claim of universality, on the one hand, and the reality of demarcating (and defending) one’s domain, on the other, but also because they provide a clear example of how the traditional rhetoric concerning the divide between “Chinese” (hua) and “non-Chinese” (yi) had to be repressed during the subsequent Qing dynasty when China was under Manchu rule.

In the late eighteenth century, the viceroyalty of New Spain extended its control over Alta California, introducing secular cultural practices like music, dance, and drama which gained popularity among traders, soldiers, and hybrid communities, blurring the traditional boundaries of race, gender, and class. These societal shifts foreshadowed the forthcoming wars of independence (1810–1821) and clashed with missionary liturgy, accentuating the growing divide between monastic orders and secular society. This chapter focuses on the censorship of Fermín de Reygadas’s play, Astucias por heredar, un sobrino a un tío ("Tricks to Inherit: a Nephew and His Uncle"). Initially censored in the viceroyalty, the play was later transported and performed in Alta California, only to be concealed by Hubert Bancroft, who omitted all references to it in his History of California. This play survived two forms of censorship: Spanish colonial moral censorship and Anglo-American disregard towards a text and a performance that did not fit his racialized historiographic narratives. The chapter also explores the play’s staging in Villa de Branciforte near the Santa Cruz mission and concludes by comparing two performances of the play, considering the role of language, location, and early Californio history in contemporary decolonial reenactments.

Chapter 6, Branding Birth Control, examines how birth-controllers used claims about medical works’ vulnerability to destruction under the Hicklin test to distance contraception from immorality, frame its advocacy as a free speech issue, and generate publicity for the cause. Contraception pamphlets first published by radicals in the 1820s and 1830s had long been sold by both social reformers and pornographers. In 1876, a figure with feet in both domains was arrested for selling Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). The following year, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh engineered their own arrest for selling it. The chapter examines the selective publication history that Bradlaugh and Besant constructed to divorce Fruits from its associations with promoscuity and promote contraception advocacy as a respectable, progressive cause, and shows that birth-controllers went on to sell huge volumes of literature on contraception. Although they encountered relatively little legal opposition, they often claimed that selling such works was very risky. These claims operated as a way of generating further publicity for the cause, and branding it as brave, modern, and progressive.

This chapter examines gender and sexuality in the writings of Sean O’Casey, through analysis of three works that demonstrate his preoccupation with the way women’s sexuality intersects with money, class, and sex work. As well as examining The Plough and the Stars (1926) and its reception, the chapter analyses two of his lesser-studied works – the short story ‘The Job’, and the prose poem ‘Gold and Silver Will Not Do’ from Windfalls (1934) – and the chapter highlights certain connections between the short-story writing and Eileen O’Casey’s personal experiences.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

After the Hannibalic war, the leading military role of consulars diminished, though it did not disappear. A significant number of consuls kept their imperium as proconsuls, but only a very small minority held the consulship again. A number of them held intermediate positions as military tribunes or military legates under the command of magistrates with imperium. Consulars played a leading role in international diplomacy and the organisation of newly conquered territories as members of senatorial embassies, especially in the Greek world. Ex-consuls were also common as heads of commissions in charge of implementing the agrarian policy promoted by the Senate during the second century BCE, both for the foundation of Roman and Latin colonies and for the individual distribution of land. The censorship became the coveted culmination of a political career for many consulars. The Senate was the arena in which consulars assumed a leading role in political debate. In contrast, their intervention in popular assemblies was rare. As in previous periods, many consulars were members of priestly colleges. While most of them entered the colleges (long) before they became consuls, others did so at an advanced age after their consulship.

During the crisis that the Hannibalic war provoked, the ‘old guard’ of consulars who had been consuls for the first time in the 230s assumed the leadership role in the military field and in politics. A number of ex-consuls once again held offices with imperium and were placed at the head of the army as consuls, praetors, or promagistrates. The state of emergency in Rome also led to the appointment of dictators, all of them ex-consuls. The military contribution of consulars also took place in intermediate positions, as legates under consuls or consulars, but also under imperatores who had not attained that rank, always with tasks of high responsibility. In 209, we find the last two censors who had not been consuls: from that year onwards, all censors were former consuls, and censorship became the potential culmination of a consular’s political career. From 209, the censors always designated as princeps senatus the man they considered to be the princeps civitatis. As before, the princeps senatus had to be a patrician consular and censorian, but the position was left open to competition. It was very unusual that consulars were co-opted for a priestly college. Two consulars were named triumviri mensarii to face up the economic crisis.

Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

Pepys’s diary was first published in 1825, in a highly selective version edited by Lord Braybrooke. This was a starkly different journal from the versions read today, cutting most of Pepys’s personal life, his details of everyday London and (with the exception of some court scandal) all the sex. This chapter investigates how the diary came to be published, including the shrewd tactics of the diary’s shorthand transcriber John Smith and its publisher Henry Colburn. On release, the diary drew influential admirers such as the novelist Walter Scott and the historian Thomas Macaulay. Early responses focused on the diary’s value as entertainment, on censorship, and on the questions that it raised about historical value. The chapter considers how the diary changed – or did not change – ideas of the Restoration period, the diary’s influence on the writing of social history, and the extent to which its publication followed Pepys’s plans for his library.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.