ABSTRACT
Using an anecdote concerning the worldwide distribution of French illustrations of the Crimean War as an illustration, the introduction presents the two main lines of inquiry of the book. First, famous illustrated newspapers were distributed beyond the national level. Publications like the French l’Illustration, the British Illustrated London News, and the German Illustrirte Zeitung had subscribers all over the world, making their audiences far less national than scholars have previously assumed. Second, the images themselves were transnational products. In the mid-nineteenth century, illustrated newspapers in Europe and the United States sold and resold images of the news to each other on a large scale. After a short outline of the state of the research field, the introduction goes on to discuss how the concept of transnational history sheds new light on illustrated newspapers (theory) and how digital and paper forms of nineteenth-century publications can, and should, be studied in conjunction (methodology).
