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Pt. 1. Singer in Japan. Meiji machines -- The American way of selling -- Selling and consuming modern life -- Resisting Yankee capitalism -- pt. 2. Sewing modernity in war and peace. War machines at home -- Mechanical phoenix -- A nation of dressmakers

Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.

This article studies the intersection of verbal and visual culture in the early modern period through a case study of the inn sign. Using historical and literary materials it uncovers the place of the inn sign in the urban experience of early modern Londoners and its appropriation in the drama of the period. The display of visual signs before inns, shops and private houses presupposes a series of specific cultural practices which this paper looks to interrogate. Locationally the use of spatial descriptors such as 'at' or 'near' 'the sign of', invokes a radial logic of spatial signification, operating at a neighbourhood level. In contradistinction to the precision of rtographic co-ordinates, negotiation of the urban environment by means of the sign, is dependent upon instances of social interaction. Further the visual sign is dependent upon the recognition and standardisation of visual imagery, a process further complicated in the transition to verbal description, and one which raises interpretative questions for the scholar attempting to access the cultural uses of the sign from textual resources. In addition, their presence in the visual environment meant that they were available to be read in a variety of other ways, offering possibilities for the play of signification, and for occasionally subversive readings in the context of religious and political upheaval. I argue that the early modern theatre allows for a full realisation of the spatial, visual and interpretative potential of the inn sign, helping to account for its widespread appearance in the drama of the period, and go on to analyse the specific uses to which it is put.