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BACK IN 2015, the English scholar Lisa Ruddick wrote an article for The Point magazine that I've been thinking about ever since. In 'When Nothing Is Cool,' she attempted to [...]

abstract:This article explores the circulation of periodical material between metropolitan and regional locations in early twentieth-century North America. It asks how the globalized consumer technology of the household magazine was being taken up outside of cosmopolitan centers through the framework of local, regional, or national concerns. For example, mainstream Canadian monthlies such as The Western Home Monthly and Maclean's frequently engaged with, or re-used, content and formats taken from New York publications. To understand these transnational publishing dynamics, we argue, it is crucial to attend to the material practices of magazines. The article analyzes several such practices, including both editorial and sales strategies. We look at the reprinting or reframing of complete features and of excerpts from other periodicals. We examine the simultaneous serialization of novels in American and Canadian publications, using a case study of Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese. And we offer the first critical discussion of "bundling," whereby US and Canadian titles were packaged together as a single subscription. It argues that the affordances of seriality, particularly timeliness and increased circulation through decreasing prices, allowed editors to redeploy metropolitan print materials for a regional readership eager to imagine themselves as participants in the new project of modernity.

ABSTRACTThe EGD Murray collection consists of approximately 500 clinical bacterial isolates, mainly Enterobacteriaceae, isolated from around the world between 1917 and 1949. A number of these “Murray” isolates have subsequently been identified as Klebsiella pneumoniae. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing of these isolates showed that over 30% were resistant to penicillins due to the presence of diverse blaSHVβ-lactamase genes. Analysis of susceptibility to skin antiseptics and triclosan showed that while the Murray isolates displayed a range of MIC/minimal bactericidal concentration (MBC) values, the mean MIC value was lower than that for more modern K. pneumoniaeisolates tested. All Murray isolates contained the cation efflux gene cepA, which is involved in disinfectant resistance, but those that were more susceptible to chlorhexidine were found to have a 9- or 18-bp insertion in this gene. Susceptibility to other disinfectants, e.g., H2O2, in the Murray isolates was comparable to that in modern K. pneumoniaeisolates. The Murray isolates were also less virulent in Galleriaand had a different complement of putative virulence factors than the modern isolates, with the exception of an isolate related to the modern lineage CC23. More of the modern isolates (41% compared to 8%) are classified as good/very good biofilm formers, but there was overlap in the two populations. This study demonstrated that a significant proportion of the Murray Klebsiellaisolates were resistant to penicillins before their routine use. This collection of pre-antibiotic era isolates may provide significant insights into adaptation in K. pneumoniaein relation to biocide susceptibility.

Shigellosis (previously bacillary dysentery) was the primary diarrhoeal disease of World War 1, but outbreaks still occur in military operations, and shigellosis causes hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in developing nations. We aimed to generate a high-quality reference genome of the historical Shigella flexneriisolate NCTC1 and to examine the isolate for resistance to antimicrobials.

This paper serves as a report from the field in the midst of the collaborative digitisation of The Western Home Monthly(1899–1932), a Winnipeg-based middlebrow magazine. It reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that face periodical scholars and on how those challenges are sometimes addressed and sometimes exacerbated by digitisation. Most importantly, it explores the unique reading perspective afforded by the process of digitising an archive, and asks how this process might help to develop new methodologies for reading periodicals that are more attentive to the media-specificity of the middlebrow magazine.