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Slides for the magic or optical lantern were a major tool for knowledge transfer in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Schools, universities, the church and many public and private institutions all over the world relied on the lantern for illustrated lectures and demonstrations. This volume brings together scholarly research on the educational uses of the optical lantern in different disciplines by international specialists, representing the state of the art of magic lantern research today. In addition, it contains a lab section with contributions by archivists and curators and performers reflecting on ways to preserve, present and re-use this immensely rich cultural heritage today. Authors of this collection of essays will include Richard Crangle, Sarah Dellmann, Ine van Dooren, Claire Dupré La Tour, Jenny Durrant, Francisco Javier Frutos Esteban, Anna Katharina Graskamp, Emily Hayes, Erkki Huhtamo, Martyn Jolly, Joe Kember, Frank Kessler, Machiko Kusahara, Sabine Lenk, Vanessa Otero, Carmen López San Segundo, Ariadna Lorenzo Sunyer, Daniel Pitarch, Jordi Pons, Montse Puigdeval, Angélique Quillay, Angel Quintana Morraja, Nadezhda Stanulevich, Jennifer Tucker, Kurt Vanhoutte, Márcia Vilarigues, Joseph Wachelder, Artemis Willis, Lee Wing Ki, Irene Suk Mei Wong, and Nele Wynants.

Using visual aids in the instruction of biology is a technique with deep roots. Collections of historical images, many now in the public domain, are currently being digitized and made available online by several academic and commercial organizations. Unfortunately, the original indexes, guides, and catalogs for the materials are frequently inadequate, and in some instances border on the fraudulent. Careful examination of these archives by the skilled eyes of present-day biology educators is needed to uncover historical imagery that will contribute valuable information useful for contextualizing contemporary topics in the classroom.

Historians have well documented the decline of illustrated songs in nickelodeons in the United States from 1909 to 1913. In this article, a close examination of the 1907 and 1908 issues of Moving Picture World shows that several crises occurred before 1909 that help us understand this decline. Here I examine three main crises: the structural crisis of free music, the economic and aesthetic crisis of piracy, and the legal dispute over exclusive illustration rights.

In Projecting Citizenship , Gabrielle Moser gives a comprehensive account of an unusual project produced by the British government’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee at the beginning of the twentieth century—a series of lantern slide lectures that combined geography education and photography to teach schoolchildren around the world what it meant to look and to feel like an imperial citizen. Through detailed archival research and close readings, Moser elucidates the impact of this vast collection of photographs documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire, circulated between 1902 and 1945 in classrooms from Canada to Hong Kong, from the West Indies to Australia. Moser argues that these photographs played a central role in the invention and representation of imperial citizenship. She shows how citizenship became a photographable and teachable subject by tracing the intended readings of the images that the committee hoped to impart to viewers and analyzing how spectators may have used their encounters with these photographs for protest and resistance. Moser shows how the Visual Instruction Committee pictured citizenship within an everyday context and decenters the preoccupation with trauma, violence, atrocity, and conflict that characterizes much of the theoretical literature on visual citizenship and demonstrates that the relationship between photography and citizenship emerged not in the dismantling of modern colonialism but in its consolidation. Interweaving political and economic history, history of pedagogy, and theories of citizenship with a consideration of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of viewing the lectures, Projecting Citizenship offers important insights into the social inequalities and visual language of colonial rule.

One of the earliest and most persistent standards of the motion-picture industry was the rectangle of projected images with a four-to-three ratio. Related media in the late nineteenth century, such as still photography and the magic lantern, advocated for rectangular borders (rather than alternatives such as circular masking), a trend that motion pictures codified with a fixed technical standard. Industry publications provided a powerful rhetorical justification for this standard by presenting the rectangle as an aesthetic preference, a display of skill, and a means of erasing a viewer's consciousness of borders. This rhetoric—and the (slightly wider) rectangle—still influence twenty-first-century media.

This section reprints two rare early texts about the craft of film coloring, dating from 1898 and 1908, by Duncan Mitchell in Britain and Elizabeth Martine in the United States. Mitchell and Martine each describe the meticulous nature of their work as colorists and discuss specific techniques and aesthetic issues that they believe are important in the process of coloring films by hand. The accompanying overview article by Stephen Bottomore summarizes and analyzes the points made by this pair of colorists and compares their accounts with what existing sources tell us about early film coloring. Brief biographies of Mitchell and Martine are also included.

Microscope slides allowed preparations to circulate among scientific and educational contexts. An extension of the circulation of microscope slides was how they became part of lantern exhibition culture. This article considers an early example of the adoption of microscope lantern show conventions by another medium, the cinema. F. Martin Duncan, who was employed by Charles Urban to produce a series of popular-science films beginning in 1903, brought his experience with microphotography to bear on the challenge of adapting cinema to the purpose of public instruction. Duncan's first series of films, entitled \"The Unseen World,\" demonstrated both profound links to the display tradition of the lantern lecture as well as the transformation of that tradition by the cinema's representational possibilities.