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Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories examines Victorian London’s grand hotels as both an institution and a culture intimately connected to the urban landscape. In her new study, Barbara Black argues that London’s grand hotels provided an essential space for socializing, fashioned by concerns relating to class, gender, and nationality. Rooted in Walter Benjamin’s “new velocities” of the nineteenth century and Wayne Koestenbaum’s hotel theory, Hotel London explores how the emergence of the grand hotel as a physical and metaphorical space helped to construct a consumer economy that underscored London’s internationalism and, by extension, England’s global status.

Incorporating the works of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Arnold Bennett, Florence Marryat, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as contemporary depictions of the hotels in Mad Men,American Horror Story, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Black examines how the hotel supported a corporate identity that would ultimately assist in the rise of modern capitalist structures and the middle class. In this way, Hotel London exposes the aggravations of class stratifications through the operations of status inside hotel life, giving a unique perspective on Victorian London that could only come from the stories of a hotel.
 

An anecdotal history published on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Ohio University’s renowned E. W. Scripps School of Journalism.

After its founding in 1924, what is now the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University quickly became one of the premier programs in the country. For decades, it has produced leaders who have reached the highest levels of journalism and communication in their careers, and their success is a direct product not only of the education they get in Athens but of the community the school fosters.

In this book, nearly one hundred alumni, faculty, friends, and students offer their stories of life at and after Scripps. The result is a multilayered, inspiring portrait of the school and how it shapes those who pass through its doors. At the same time, The Scripps School gives a nuanced history of journalism education at Ohio University. From covering assassinations and presidential elections to major moments in sports, alumni have documented the unprecedented and the historic, and here they show just how Scripps prepared them to be there.

The Scripps School, edited by former director Ralph Izard, is a love letter to the people and the institution. At a time when journalism is more important than ever, this book humanizes and contextualizes the profession in ways that will resonate in the Scripps community and beyond.