Almost on a daily basis the tabloids and media have some negative comment or observation to make about the dreadful state of the National Health Service (NHS) and the atrocious standards of care that patients receive at the hands of NHS nurses.

There is no escaping the fact that there has been a steady flow of published reports highlighting the dreadful, neglectful and it must be stated downright cruel treatment some patients have received at the hands of nurses. The culmination of such allegations was the publication of the Public Inquiry into The Mid Staffordshire Hospital NHS Trust on 6 February 2013.

However, to brand all nurses as uncaring is unjustified and totally unacceptable. While it would be wrong and indeed naïve to ignore the findings from the reports and the public inquiry there is a need for balance and moderation; the nursing profession has taken a beating, many nurses are feeling disillusioned and fatigued by the constant and relentless barrage of criticisms and negativity. The image and confidence of nursing and nurses has been crushed and is at an all time low.

Not everything is bad on the contrary there is evidence that demonstrates that nurses do care and are caring and that the general public do have confidence in the vast majority of nurse. The National summary of the results for the 2012 Inpatients survey provides valuable evidence that counteracts the negativity offering a a more positive and realistic impression:

“Eighty percent of respondents reported that, overall, they were “always” treated with respect and dignity while they were in hospital, up from 79% in 2011. There was a corresponding decrease in the proportion who said this was “sometimes” the case from 18% in 2011 to 17% in 2012. Three percent said they did not feel they were treated with respect and dignity.”

Similarly, findings from the survey demonstrate that despite the negative image of nurses the general public do have confidence in the nursing profession:

Over three quarters of respondents (76%) said that they “always” had confidence and trust in the nurses treating them, an improvement from 74% in 2011. There had been a corresponding decrease in the proportion who respond “sometimes” (22% in 2011 and 20% in 2012) or “no” (4% in 2011 and3% in 2012).

These findings affirm that the vast majority of nurses do care and that the contribution nurses’ make is valued by a large section of the general public. However, the survey reveals that a small percentage of patients do not have confidence and trust in the nurses caring for them — so what can nurses do to improve the patient experience and patient satisfaction?

We would like to offer the following words of encouragement:

• Despite recent criticism the evidence suggests that the vast majority of nurses do care and are caring. Therefore, nurses need to remain optimistic, recognising and celebrating the positive contribution that they make to people’s lives.
• Caring cultures are created and constructed by those who lead, manage and govern. Nurses must support and value each other and fundamentally organisations must acknowledge and affirm the unique contribution nurses make in the provision of care
• There is nothing basic that nurses do! Nursing needs nurses, individuals possessing the requisite knowledge, attitudes and skills to safeguard the fundamentals of nursing care.
• Nurses need to be allowed to care. There needs to be an overhaul and removal of the unnecessary bureaucracy that stifles nurses preventing them from caring and being with patients.

Finally, watch the following YouTube clip taken from the Royal College of Nursing Congress held in Liverpool 2013.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Molly Case presents the poem titled ‘Nursing the nation’. Molly personifies all the attributes espoused in the new strategy and vision for nursing launched in England in December 2012 — Care, Compassion, Competence, Communication, Courage, Commitment — affirming that the future of nursing is safe and that most nurses do care and want to care!

Wilfred McSherry is Professor in Dignity of Care for Older People, Centre for Practice and Service Improvement at the Faculty of Health Staffordshire University and The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust UK and Part-Time Professor at Haraldsplass Deaconess University College, Bergen, Norway. He is the co-editor of Care in Nursing: Principles, Values, and Skills with Robert MSherry and Roger Watson.

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According to the UK Centre for Economic Performance, mental illness accounts for nearly half of all ill health in the under 65s. But this begs the question: what is mental illness? How can we judge whether our thoughts and feelings are healthy or harmful? What criteria should we use?

This month sees the publication of the latest version of the psychiatrist’s bible: the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM is arguably the definitive reference work on mental illness, used by health services worldwide (though the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases and Health Related Problems is widely used in the UK). Sales of the previous edition, DSM-IV, are estimated at about a million copies — not bad for a book that runs to almost 1000 densely packed pages and retails for around £80.

What’s changed in DSM-5 — apart from the move from Roman to Arabic numerals in the title? Well, terms have been revised (“mental retardation” has become “intellectual disability”, for example). New disorders have been introduced. For instance, “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” has been added to the list of depressive disorders. And, perhaps most controversially, some professionals have worried that the threshold for diagnosis of certain disorders appears to have been lowered — meaning that more people may be classified as mentally ill. Indeed there is organised opposition to the new edition, exemplified by the International DSM-5 Response Committee.

The DSM’s basic approach, on the other hand, has remained consistent for more than 30 years: a painstaking enumeration of symptoms, designed to make the clinician’s task of diagnosis easier and more consistent. This is an objective that it has undoubtedly achieved. But are those diagnoses scientifically valid?

Take clinical depression, for example. Nine possible symptoms are listed in DSM-IV, and you’d need to report at least five of them to warrant a diagnosis. These symptoms must be sufficiently intense to really interfere with a person’s life and they must have lasted for a while.

One effect of this approach is to emphasize the severe end of a spectrum that also includes relatively mild psychological problems. So the DSM criteria won’t capture everyday fluctuations in mental health. And they won’t pick up people with, say, four symptoms rather than five.

Implicit here is a debate about the nature of mental illness. The DSM uses a medical model of psychiatric illness. It thinks in terms of separate, discrete disorders, just like physical medicine. The approach is binary: either you meet the criteria for a particular condition, or you don’t.

Many would argue that this kind of all-or-nothing attitude, with hundreds of separate conditions, doesn’t fit well with people’s real-life experience of psychological problems. Better instead to think of psychological experience as being dimensional — that is, encompassing a wide variety of experiences, from the unproblematic to the severely distressing. The further along that dimension, the more symptoms a person is likely to have and the more upsetting and disruptive those symptoms will be.

This is the psychological model of mental illness. It argues that there’s no binary opposition between disorder and ‘normality’. Psychological disorders are simply the extreme manifestation of traits that we all possess to varying degrees. For example, almost everyone experiences occasional feelings of anxiety. People who develop what the DSM classes as an anxiety disorder aren’t experiencing something qualitatively different. They’re simply undergoing a more intense version of the same thing.

There is a third approach to understanding mental illness: the sociological model. Proponents argue that psychological disorders aren’t illnesses at all. They’re a label used to stigmatize and control behaviour society deems objectionable — such as homosexuality, which featured in the DSM until 1980.

Our view is that psychological problems aren’t illusory. They are real expressions of distress, for which most people — understandably — want help. However there is variability in the validity of individual diagnoses. Therefore it is often wisest not to focus on particular diagnoses. Better instead to adopt a dimensional approach, and to concentrate on the key problems and day-to-day symptoms that lead people to seek assistance. To help us understand these problems, we can look at epidemiological information to see which experiences occur together, and therefore may share common causes. Psychologists call this a data-driven approach.

We can also be guided by our knowledge of how the brain works. For example, basic emotions such as fear or unhappiness are powered by relatively distinct circuits in the brain. So we can understand certain psychological problems as what follow when these emotional circuits don’t function properly. We can match up the emotion and the problem: sadness and depression, fear and anxiety disorders, for example. This is what we might call a theory-driven approach, though given the complexity of brain activity it may – at least at present — be a little optimistic.

Importantly, even such a psychological, evidence-based approach doesn’t get around the need to classify problems. Mental health professionals must still make decisions about how to label the problems people describe to them. Without some kind of classificatory system, we can’t communicate, research, and evaluate treatments.

But the problems inherent in the current systems arguably constitute the greatest obstacle to that work. Given the extent of the burden on society and individuals alike, improving the scientific understanding of psychological disorders remains a priority. And that means DSM-5 certainly won’t be the last word on the classification of mental illness.

Daniel Freeman is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Psychiatry Department at the University of Oxford. Jason Freeman is a writer and editor. Their latest book is The Stressed Sex: Uncovering the Truth about Men, Women, and Mental Health (Oxford University Press).

The OUPblog is running a series of articles on the DSM-5 in anticipation of its launch on 18 May 2013. Stay tuned for views from Donald W. Black, Michael A. Taylor, and Joel Paris. Read yesterday’s post “DSM-5 will be the last” by Edward Shorter.

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What is it about the sounds of baseball that make them musical, and so easily romanticized? In Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, George Plimpton says that “Baseball has these absolutely unique sounds. The sounds of spring and summer….The sound of the ball against the bat is absolutely extraordinary. I don’t know any American male that doesn’t hear that in the springtime and get called back to some moment in the past.” These sounds are especially vivid in a game that’s often so quiet.

It’s been made the subject of numerous songs, many of which are collected and fully digitized in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Each song is freely available to the public to peruse and parody, including one of the most iconic American songs ever written, “Take me out to the ballgame,” written by Albert Von Tilzer, with lyrics by Jack Norworth. (I’ve been wondering lately if all of Norworth’s lyrics make him sound like a freeloader. He doesn’t pay for the game; he doesn’t pay for the concessions. Maybe the fact that he’d never been out to a ballgame when he wrote the song can be explained by the fact that no one wanted to take him.)

Baseball even gave us the first documented use of the word “jazz.” According to the OED, in 1912 a professional pitcher describing his curve ball was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.”

Despite its connections with the musical world, I have to admit now to a long-standing personal indifference towards the sport. My first-hand experience is limited to a third grade T-ball championship and some horrifying moments in co-ed little league. Baseball was never on TV at home when I grew up, and I’d become immediately bored if I even glanced at a game.

I’ve slowly come around to it (thanks in part to my boyfriend, who wrote the article on baseball songs linked above) to the point where I was comforting myself the day after the Boston Marathon bombing by watching the New York Yankees’ home game against the Arizona Diamondbacks on TV. As Plimpton said, the sounds of the game do bring me back to old memories of summer days (though I’m actually an American female, I think it still counts), and watching the game was having a calming effect on me.

After two and a half innings, the commentators told the audience at home that the song “Sweet Caroline” was going to be played in the stadium, and that they’d broadcast it for those watching at home.

I was moved: “Sweet Caroline” is a Boston song. I know next to nothing about baseball culture, but I learned that much from my two years living in Massachusetts. It’s been played at Red Sox games for years, despite the lyrics having no obvious connections to either sports or Boston.

A 2005 story in the Boston Globe traced the origins of the song’s  use there to Amy Tobey, who was in charge of picking the music that would play at Fenway Park from 1998–2004. She’d heard the song at other sporting events and decided to play it in Boston. It was very well-received. The song has been played in the eighth inning of every home game there since 2002; that’s more than 800 eighth-inning sing-alongs over the last decade.

Experience has taught me that, prior to the game on the 16th of April, singing “Sweet Caroline” in Yankee Stadium would probably earn you a few dirty looks, which must be difficult for all those Yankees fans who also happen to be Neil Diamond enthusiasts. So, taking advantage both of an opportunity to show that they were thinking of Boston’s residents and of the only chance they might ever have to yell “So good! So good!” in the stands at Yankee Stadium, the crowd looked like this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I found the gesture incredibly touching. When I described it to other people the next day, I remembered it being exclusively full of joyful, smiling singers-along. When I watch that video now, almost a month later, it feels a little more staid. Maybe a lot of people felt too sad about the attack to express support that way; maybe a lot of people just didn’t like singing. Maybe in my excitement at recognizing this sports-culture event as it was happening, I remembered it being a little more dramatic.

The crowd looked smaller than the reported attendance of 34,107, but there were still thousands of people for the camera operators to focus on. I wonder why they chose the ones they did, the fans who were in turn waving at the camera, leaning on each other, talking, slowly eating an ice cream bar without getting any on their beards, swaying, belting out the refrain, and then, quickly, getting back to the game. They didn’t even play the whole song. In short, it looked like any other baseball sing-along. But the good will coming out of my TV that night was palpable.

The soundtrack of baseball includes an outside score as well as the rhythms created by the game itself, and musical touchstones like “Sweet Caroline” are fascinating. The opening lyrics (“Where it began/I can’t begin to knowing/But then I know it’s growing strong”) might as well be pulled from quotes from the fans in the Boston Globe article about why they sing the song—as far as they knew, Boston fans sing it because they’ve always sung it, despite the fact that the tradition was only a few years old when that article was written.

But the message from the Yankees as they blared their rival’s anthem at home that night was clear to anyone tuned in to the game. And in a situation like the one that week, where it was easy to feel useless and helpless, that simple musical gesture was very deeply felt. The music of baseball is a part of it that even I can appreciate.

Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, including “Glissandos and glissandon’ts” and “Wedding Music”. You can read more about Albert Von Tilzer, Jack Norworth, and popular music in Grove Music Online.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”

In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.” 

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Just when, where, why, and how should American power be used? Current assumptions about the near omnipresence—though far from omnipotence—of US power, its influence and its reach are now shaky. Yet these same assumptions coexist alongside widely shared views that such power could and should be used. Perspectives on the application of US power are hotly contested—ranging from the advocacy of using force and providing “lethal aid” to revolutionaries in Syria, to the idea of strategic (née preemptive) bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. Only idealistic aims—e.g. humanitarian intervention and foreign aid—in the use of power are generally acceptable. Indeed, even as the President and Secretary of Defense aver that “all options are being evaluated,” they do not “foresee boots on the ground.” These choices reflect recent developments. Such alternatives simply did not exist for most of US history. Nor, of course, did the nation always hold the power it possesses today.

For the majority of American history weakness, not strength—and certainly not “power” as we understand it now—defined how American policymakers, thinkers, activists, military leaders, and citizens tended to understand their nation’s place in the world. Protecting the state, not using scarce power or resources abroad, and holding European—especially British—encroachment as far off as possible, were the preferred military and diplomatic strategies of US leaders and citizens through the late nineteenth century and, for many, well into the twentieth century.

Three policy pillars in American foreign relations are the foundation for past as well as present considerations of whether and how to deploy US power. The premise for all three was an understanding of weakness, what we might term cautious realism coupled to a vision of isolation, which sought to stay out of power politics, foreign wars, and binding international treaties and regimes.

George Washington in his Farewell Address of 1796 designed this architecture: “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Yet even before that speech, Washington had established the nation’s neutrality as a formal policy tradition with the Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) and the Neutrality Act (1794). These neutrality declarations ran contrary to the alliance with France, which had helped win the Revolutionary War. They officially distanced the US from allies and enemies alike and asserted the guiding principle that America would pursue “a conduct friendly and impartial towards the Belligerent powers.” Washington’s Farewell Address, partly written by Alexander Hamilton along with James Madison and read in Congress almost every year until quite recently, set the explicitly isolationist tone. It aimed to recognize the nation’s limited power in order to nurture the safety and progress of the state (and hence, national power one might say). These, in turn, became the basis for virtually all subsequent invocations of a “tradition” in American foreign relations. Washington built on this notion of the new nation as neutral and impartial when he put forward the classic formulation:

The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible…. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concern…. Therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

These Washingtonian principles did not turn the nation away from the world. Instead, the ideas formed the crux of foreign policy realism and argued for a cautious sense of America’s place in the world and for choosing “war or peace, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.” Washington took into account the inherent fragility of American power and the nation’s precarious place in the world, emphasizing America’s distant geographical position as a key to strategic separation and as a brake on involvement in Europe’s hazardous political system. These views were then established as precedent by John Adams and reaffirmed by Thomas Jefferson, who allayed the fears of many Federalists when he underscored a shared set of Washingtonian-Adamsian foreign policy principles in his own inaugural address in 1801.

Jefferson asserted this ideal as “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson held a clear belief grounded on the practicality of a type of isolation: enter no enduring alliances with the Old World and steer clear of Europe’s petty squabbles. Jefferson’s daring and farsighted purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 propelled the great mission of continental expansion and improvement, doubling the nation’s territory. And of course the Purchase limited the amount of North American land that European powers could claim or conquer. When regarded in this light, his unilateralist efforts were consistent with the idea of isolation as a guarantee toward maintaining and protecting national sovereignty—of giving the weak, fledgling nation time to develop and grow while avoiding entanglements such as those that Ben Franklin derisively termed Europe’s “romantick Continental Connections.”

A circumspect view of American power still was evident in 1823, when President James Monroe pronounced his doctrine. An ambitious articulation of American hemispheric power, the Monroe Doctrine evolved as the guiding view for later foreign policy advocates of interventionism as well as isolationism, many of whom agreed that unilateral involvement across the Americas was perfectly legitimate, but that beyond the Western Hemisphere the nation should avoid foreign wars and the corruptions of particularly Old World political intrigues. Monroe centered this argument on what he saw as an obvious fact: “With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected,” and therefore he declared that “we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Thus, in three bold strokes, Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe laid out the essential isolationist mode of thinking about their young nation’s most advantageous relationship to the world. As we will be discussing at the Oregon State University American Military and Diplomatic History Conference today, 7 May 2013, these arguments became the benchmarks that a broad range of subsequent politicians, thinkers, and citizens later had to confront as they built their own cases for engagement abroad and justified their developing visions of internationalism. One point is clear about interpreting the meaning of their words in their own time. This dedicated triad of America’s founders articulated a commerce-first form of unilateralism and a sense of cautious realism, which at its most fundamental level sought to protect their young, weak nation by favoring isolation from almost all entangling alliances as well as conflicts abroad, particularly those involving Europe.

Americans today debate possible new interventions, withdrawals, disputes over what does and does not constitute a “red line,” and other applications of power abroad in light of enormous geopolitical changes and challenges. Let the debate consider the long history of cautious realism, the recognition of the limits to power, and the concern about the unintended consequences of foreign policy adventurism. The history cannot be blinked away. It is central to American diplomatic and military policy.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is a professor at Oregon State University and a Senior Editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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According to the Daily Mail, Oi! records were ‘evil’. According to the Socialist Worker, Oi! was a conduit for Nazism. According to the NME, Oi! was a means to inject ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes into popular music.

The year is 1981, and on 3 July the Harmbrough Tavern is set ablaze in the London borough of Southall. Trapped inside the pub are three bands aligned to the Oi! movement initiated the previous year from within the pages of the Sounds music weekly. Therein, by contrast, Oi! is defined as a form of ‘working-class protest’, a ‘loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Oi!, for most of those involved with it, was punk without the art school pretensions; a street-level music that sought to align working-class youth cults in the face of welfare cuts and growing unemployment. And there lay the rub. For Oi! comprised skinheads; and by 1981, skinheads were being recruited as foot-soldiers for the British far right, both the National Front and the British Movement. An Oi! gig in Southall, therefore, where a large Asian community had previously felt the brunt of cowardly racist attacks and witnessed the violent aftermath of an NF election rally in 1979, was a red-rag to a community fed up with being on the defensive and ready to respond. And respond the community most certainly did.

Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2. Source: “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” by Matthew Worley in Twentieth Century British History

The events of July 1981 have forever tainted Oi! Caught in the reductionist media snare, Oi! fell into an equation the broadly read: Oi! = skinheads = racism. In truth, however, Oi! was a rather more complex phenomenon. Though its lyrics and imagery tended to combine social resentment and patriotism in a way that provided a potential pathway to and from the far right, Oi! also contained a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was far more than a musical wing of the NF or BM. Indeed, many involved in Oi! actively (and literally) fought back against right-wing attempts to appropriate their music, a struggle that led eventually to the NF setting up its on ‘white power’ scene circa 1983. Rather, Oi!’s focus and lyrical preoccupations reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’ and formal political organisation. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

As this suggests, an analysis of the bands, audience and ephemera associated with Oi! reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments on-going within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption). Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity. This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’. In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

Oi! then was not a vehicle for ‘evil’, Nazism or any other sort of ‘ism’. Its protest was made in primarily class terms, with its working-class origins serving as a common denominator across those associated with it. True, politics – along with youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries – provided points of tension. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that sought for a political and cultural impact that looked beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union, Daily Mail and NME.

Matthew Worley is a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books and articles on British politics, and is currently writing a study of British youth culture and politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His article “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” is available free in Twentieth Century British History for a limited time.

Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century.

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Answers can be found by using a combination of the following resources:
(1) The Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) “10 interesting facts about Shakespeare” post
(2) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Shakespeare – free to view until 20 May 2013

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.

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Journalists want to report the news not be the news. But in the case of Ann Curry, the former Today show co-host who was pushed into stepping down from the co-anchor slot last June, she has become the news. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s recent feature article about morning television and the toxic culture at NBC’s Today show provides more than enough information to conclude that Ann Curry was a target of workplace mobbing.

Whatever your personal opinions of Curry and her work, she was clearly mobbed out of her Today show job. Workplace mobbing is a process of humiliation and degradation of a targeted worker with the purpose of removing that worker from the workplace or at least from a particular unit of it. It is a dark side of organizational life, involves co-workers ganging up on the target, and includes management’s involvement through active participation in the mobbing or through failure to stop it once it becomes known to them. Mobbing in the workplace includes a characteristic course of events that were first described by Heinz Leymann, the psychiatrist who conceptualized the problem in the 1980s. Let’s look at what Stelter reports as having happened to Ann Curry through the framework of this pattern of events representative of workplace mobbing.

• Today was losing market share, critics were saying the show was stale and that there was no chemistry between the co-hosts Ann Curry and Matt Lauer. Understandably, management was concerned. Their solution, however, is a classic error of logical type. Blame an individual — in this case, Ann Curry — for what was obviously a much more systemic problem. (Precipitating event or situation)
• Once “the problem,” had been identified as Ann Curry, management’s next step, according to Stelter, was to mount a campaign to get rid of her and they even had a name for it, “Operation Bambi.” (Targeting of a worker for elimination and involvement of management or administration)
• Curry was subjected to a series of hostile, negative acts that by most people’s standards would be humiliating and hurtful. Stelter reports the making of a blooper reel that showed Curry’s worst on-air moments and blunders, the gathering of staff to watch a particular on-air gaffe and presumably to talk about it, the collection of boxes of Curry’s belongings in a closet as if she had already left, control room staff making fun of Curry’s clothing choices and “generally messing with her,” and the comparison of a yellow dress that she wore to Big Bird and photo shopping her head on to Big Bird’s image and then asking staff to vote on which one wore the yellow outfit best. (Unethical communication about the target and series of negative acts)
• Such negative acts, tailored to the particular work environment, are characteristic of workplace mobbing and serve several functions. They separate and exclude the target from the rest of the workplace, telegraph to other workers that the target is “damaged goods,” and encourage a general ganging up on the target. Once the target in a workplace mobbing has been cast as “other,” and as “less than” it’s much easier to further objectify that person and treat him or her callously. The negative acts can go on for months, as seems to be the case for Ann Curry, or even years as has been the case for others who have been mobbed in the workplace. It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate the human toll of psychological and physical suffering that such ongoing hostility and abuse causes. (Isolation and exclusion of the target, more ganging up, and resulting escalation of mobbing)
• On 28 June 2012, Ann Curry emotionally announced her departure from the Today show. It was clear to anyone watching her announcement that she was in pain and that she was not happy about leaving. The mobbing of Ann Curry was entirely successful. She was now gone from the Today show. Stelter notes that the executive producer led a group of Curry’s co-workers in a toast to her departure at a nearby restaurant only hours after her announcement that she was stepping down. Such cheering and celebrating after a successful workplace mobbing is common and fairly predictable. (Elimination from the workplace)

For most people who are victims of workplace mobbing, an unfortunate and common workplace event, the aftermath is difficult at best and disabling at worst. Income is lost, health and retirement benefits can be lost, reputation is damaged, professional identity is compromised as is the victim’s career trajectory, family and friendship relationships are strained, and the lingering traumatic effects of the interpersonal abuse and social exclusion at the heart of workplace mobbing can persist for a very long time. It is no surprise at all that Stelter reports Ann Curry as having described her experience as “professional torture.” Heinz Leymann called workplace mobbing “psychological terrorism.”

Ann Curry’s multi-million dollar salary may make the financial side of being a victim of workplace mobbing a lot easier for her than it is for most victims. I would assume, though, that her salary doesn’t ease the psychological and emotional pain she has had to endure and that is most likely her legacy from having been mobbed. While Ann Curry may not like the position of being the news, the story of how she was a victim of workplace mobbing is important. The stories of many others who have been victims of workplace mobbing but who are not public figures might more fully be understood through hers.

Maureen Duffy is a family therapist, educator, and consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, and is the co-author of Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions and the forthcoming book, Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying. Read her previous blog posts “Seven ways schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying” and “Excluded, suspended, required to withdraw.”

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The twenty-third of April 1564, or a day or two earlier, saw the birth of William Shakespeare, and on that same day fifty-two years later, also in Stratford, he died. This congruence of dates lends some credibility to the account given by the local vicar many years later of the way the playwright spent his final hours:

Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

These fellow poet-playwrights were close members of Shakespeare’s social circle. Drayton is recorded receiving treatment in the medical diaries of Shakespeare’s son in law, Dr. Hall, and it was Ben Jonson who composed the leading epitaph on the ‘sweet swan of Avon’ for the complete edition of his plays. There is good reason, then, to imagine this company toasting Shakespeare’s fifty-second birthday on or around 23 April 1616.

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by John Faed

Pure talent will only take us so far as an explanation for this special position. Jonson was a great poet, but grumbled that ‘of all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds’. Professional writers of the age, popular or otherwise, suffered continually from a lack of money. Almost all had acute financial troubles and even successful playwrights such as Drayton or Jonson left no substantial wealth at the time of their death. The reason that Shakespeare would have been able to celebrate his fifty-second birthday in style (and leave a very substantial inheritance afterwards) can be traced to a decision that he had made twenty-four years earlier.

Unlike any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare had invested in London’s public theatre. In an age before copyright, this was arguably the smartest financial decision that an artist had ever made. In the summer of 1594 (already established as a famous poet) he had bought a one-eighth share in a company of actors, becoming a Fellow in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He became a joint decision maker at their meetings and a joint owner of their costumes, performance properties, and plays. Before this time Shakespeare (like Drayton or Jonson) had pitched his plays to multiple acting companies, getting a fixed fee when he made a sale. Afterwards, as a shareholder, he had a continuing income from the performance receipts of his plays and those of others. No literary playwright had ever been in this position. Though Shakespeare must have laid down the equivalent of around a year’s income to make this investment (probably through borrowing), it very quickly made him very rich.

Prior to 1594 there are indications that Shakespeare’s family were suffering from financial problems; there are certainly no signs of growing wealth. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, however, proved a successful venture, growing with speed into the nation’s dominant acting company. The profits from gate receipts and court payments were distributed among the eight sharers, performers who employed hired actors and hired playwrights at fixed rates. All of the founding sharers became wealthy and the great house at which the playwright died in 1616 was one early reward of the decision that Shakespeare made. This mansion (with ten fireplaces, the second largest house in Stratford) was bought for cash in 1597. Shakespeare carried out substantial renovations and had resources enough to extend the garden, buying extra land and demolishing a cottage to get this done. The year after he still had spare money for other investments, including a stock of malt. From 1594 onwards there is a steady record of Shakespeare’s ever-growing prosperity.  Indeed, within two years of becoming a sharer, he had begun the expensive business of procuring a gentleman’s coat of arms.

The contrast between Shakespeare’s wealth and that of those who might have joined him for his birthday party remains oddly under-reported. In 1600—as Shakespeare continued to acquire land, tithes, and additional property (including a 10% stake in the Globe)—Jonson was imprisoned for debt. Debtor’s jail was a common abode for the playwrighting profession: Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton, to name but some, suffered the same fate. While it’s tempting to conclude that Shakespeare’s financial pre-eminence is simply justice (reflecting his superior talent) there is case for thinking of matters the other way round. His position as a shareholder also brought special artistic privileges. After 1594 (unlike his contemporaries) Shakespeare wrote for one company and without immediate financial pressure; he could specify the actors who would perform the roles he created; and he had a long-term stake in the life of his plays on the stage.

If Shakespeare did toast his birthday with Jonson and Drayton on 23 April 1616 he did so from a privileged position. Above all else, he had the year 1594 to thank for that. He could look out over what was now known as ‘the Great Garden’ of New Place, the owner of other property, including a residence in the exclusive Blackfriars district of London. Reason enough to hold a ‘merry meeting’ and ‘drink deep’.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, John Faed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Jane Garnett

Matthew Arnold is probably now most recalled for one phrase, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in his poem “Dover Beach” (first published in 1867), and for having written the lectures which were published serially and then in book form (1869) as Culture and Anarchy. Both are cited more than considered, and the nature of Arnold’s cultural project is often misunderstood. His poem is too readily taken as representative of a general crisis of faith, and his vision of culture has reductively been attached both to a conservative canon of English literature and to the educational arm of the welfare state. It has also been anachronistically and inappropriately absorbed into the “two cultures” science vs. humanities debate fuelled by C.P. Snow in the late 1950s. In fact, Arnold’s idea of culture was a much broader one, and was intended to be dynamic and dialogic. He identified the good of culture through refuting essentialisation of it. It was an approach, a habit of mind, rather than a subject area.

Anarchy, to Arnold, lay in lack of critical reflection. This led to the confusion of means and ends, and the privileging of the simple and dogmatic over the complex. He saw his contemporaries pursuing material wealth as an end in itself, and putting faith in the mechanisms by which government, society, churches, or industries operated, rather than reflecting on whether the machinery in fact activated or inhibited the underlying values which it should be serving. At a time when these values themselves were subject to debate, Arnold wanted people, rather than promoting or defending their individual or sectional interests, to think more about how the whole society could function harmoniously. His role as a critic was to help in developing criteria for action and to argue for culture as an active principle of engagement to combat anarchy.

On the one hand Arnold defined culture as an internal principle, a way of thinking, rather than as an external set of accomplishments or badge of prestige. Culture was a reflective process – a route towards perfection: “not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming.” This certainly involved intellectual self-development, including the development of an understanding of the will of God, as well as that of a moral and social passion for doing good. But the emphasis was on the ways in which the experience of contemplating perfection in these different registers — which he defined as sweetness and light/beauty and intelligence — would naturally enlarge and make flexible people’s minds. This was partly an argument for wider reading (which he personally regarded as a devotional discipline). He was also trying to make an imaginative case for exposing people to the narrownesses and complacencies of contemporary society. The serial publication meant that each essay was in part a response to the developing criticism. The side-swipes at particular critics, the conversational style, the accumulation and repetition of dialectical oppositions all represented a playing out of the critical purpose. The idea was to engage the reader in the tos and fros of the argument, to capture them in its immediacy.

On the other hand Arnold wanted to establish the fundamental importance of this conception of culture as the necessary basis for right action — as he put it, to make the will of God prevail. He argued that the English, especially in the mid-nineteenth century, were too practical, too inclined to act without thought, to confuse means and ends. His emphasis was on confronting difficulty, and here he cited Goethe: “to act is easy, to think is hard.” In returning again and again to this point, he was tackling accusations that the sort of cultural criticism which he was offering was impractical, dilettantish, even effeminate.

Like many of his contemporaries, he moved away from conventional dogmatic faith, but continued to frame his life religiously and to regard religious sympathy as culturally crucial. What he opposed was religion understood as mechanism or as sectional interest. Hence his critique of Protestant nonconformity, to which he was in many respects unfair, and of religious hypocrisy: the ways in which Protestantism could buttress materialism in the “gospel” of free trade economics. Analogously, he was not opposed to science or technology, but to scientism, to absolute claims made for scientific paths to truth. His repeated call was for cultural breadth of outlook and sympathy, and for constant vigilance as to the ways in which such breadth could be threatened by exaggerated particularism.  Hence the different connotations (sometimes confusingly) attached to his critical terms in different contexts, when the cultural balance seemed to be tipping too far one way or another.

In celebrating the study of Celtic literature, Arnold commented: “I don’t want to find myself everywhere”. The power of his own interpretative lens somewhat distorted this aspiration. But precisely because his argument about culture and anarchy was intentionally unsystematic and suggestive, the core challenges identified — of pluralism vs. integration, of how to attain social and moral harmony, whilst incorporating the enriching force of cultural variety — remain fresh. How can tendencies to cultural introversion be modified without loss of positive energy? How can relativism be avoided and hegemonies resisted? How can religious seriousness be treated seriously in a plural society? Arnold’s terms of cultural incorporation were controversial in his day, but his embrace of the creative force of this controversy in literary form retains its capacity to sharpen critical questions today.

Jane Garnett, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Wadham College, Oxford, and editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Matthew Arnold, Project Gutenberg eText 16745. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Celebrate National Library Week with free access to the OED and Oxford Reference, available to everyone in North and South America through the 20^th of April. Visit either site and use

Username: libraryweek / Password: libraryweek

to login and access everything the sites have to offer. Everyone will have access through the same login and no registration of any kind is required.

We are freeing up this unprecedented amount of OUP content in thanks for all the vital work that librarians do to support their patrons and in celebration of the week honoring libraries. In addition, we’ll announce a contest just for librarians on Tumblr, which will bring attention to the events that libraries hold during National Library Week.

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the evolution and use of words and is widely acknowledged to be the most authoritative and comprehensive record of the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary Online gives you the latest content of the full Oxford English Dictionary as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED Online includes more than 600,000 meanings of words using over 3 million quotations; coverage of British, American, and all varieties of English; and is updated 4 times a year with new entries.

Visit the OED National Library Week webpage for helpful tips on exploring the OED during this free week.

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Oxford Reference

Oxford Reference brings together over 2-million entries into a single cross-searchable resource, from subject reference, quotation, and language dictionaries in the Oxford Quick Reference collection to award winning Oxford Companions and Encyclopedias in the Oxford Reference Library.

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First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Thank you to our wonderful contributors, staff, and most of all readers. OUPblog is one of nine 2013 Webby honorees in the ‘Blog – Cultural’ category. I can’t tell you how thrilled we are to be alongside the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner and Perez Hamilton. And further congratulations to the Oxford Islamic Studies Online team or their Religion & Spirituality Websites nomination and the Oxford Music Online team for their Best Writing (Editorial) honor. The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences acknowledges outstanding Webby Awards entries as Official Honorees, alongside their Nominees. With 11,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries, the Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered. Honorees are selected for recognition based on excellence in content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience. Now please get out and vote for Oxford Islamic Studies Online!

How your blog editor reacts to Webby honoree news:

Source: gif.tv

Does access to firearms increase likelihood of suicide?

Judging people by the technology terms they use.

Weird words for taxes. *tithe did not make the list

The Riot Grrl collection to be released in book form.

If only Georges Seurat had bubble wrap…

Tumbling for good.

How libraries respond to disaster.

An analysis of 90s comedy.

What are the best working hours for doctors?

Occupy Wall Street Library wins suit.

Americans still love libraries.

Can someone make a program so that track changes looks more like this?

Religion versus atheism in package delivery.

Reading-mad Mad Men.

So where do those tuition fees go?

NYPL releases API.

Advice for young graduates: big data is trendy, do that.

British Library to archive the UK web.

Business history is a thing now. [Psst. Young capitalist historians. We publish Enterprise & Society on behalf of the Business History conference.]

Your web friends aren’t your friends.

Typographic sculptures and matchstick men.

Your profile picture and revolution.

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Adeline Koh speaks with Duke UP’s Ken Wissoker.

Smoking and the human genome.

What we can learn from medieval scribes.

Commas are rather wonderful when used properly.

Manuscript sleuths alert!

There are no nerds in China.

The British Library’s Curators’ 100.

Testing the hygiene hypothesis.

Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.

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One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form.

I settled on Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003), a feminist literary scholar who also wrote mystery novels under the pen name of Amanda Cross. Her writings on biography and women’s literature have been important to my own intellectual journey as a feminist scholar and I have even toyed with the idea of using her best known book, Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), as the model for a book on feminist biography I hope to write someday. I also love her mystery novels, which bear a strong debt to Dorothy Sayers, whose books had also been a formative influence on me when I was growing up. One of the most important prerequisites for writing good biography, I have learned, is the spark between biographer and subject, and it seemed like Heilbrun and I would make a good match.

Carolyn Heilbrun – the most brilliant. Legenda, 1947. Image courtesy of Susan Ware. Do not reproduce without permission.

Additionally, I had a more personal connection to the subject: Heilbrun had been a classmate of my mother’s at Wellesley College in the 1940s. My mother loved to tell the story of letting “Cacky” (her nickname) Gold into their dorm by a basement window after she had stayed out past curfew with the Harvard student, James Heilbrun, whom she married in February of her sophomore year. I suspect that Carolyn had not officially told college officials about her marriage, because her new husband was about to be shipped off to the Pacific. So in the meantime she managed to steal time with him in Cambridge with the help of her dorm mates who covered for her. By her senior year, he was back from the war and they lived off campus while she finished her degree. Carolyn Gold Heilbrun graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1947, as did my mother, Charlotte McConnell.

A photo of six Freshman from the Class of 1947 at Wellesley, including Susan Ware’s mother, Charlotte McConnell, second from left. Legenda, 1947. Image courtesy of Susan Ware. Do not reproduce without permission.

I always chuckled over this story, because by the time I was a student at Wellesley in the late 1960s, living in the same Severance Hall dorm, it wasn’t so much a question of letting students in through basement windows after hours but trying to sneak in male visitors for the night. I seriously doubt that my mother and her friends would have conspired with Carolyn so readily if she had been sneaking off to see her boyfriend, but the sanction of marriage made it okay.

Tower Court complex – Wellesley College. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Fast forward about forty years to 1987, when I published a biography of New Deal politician (and Wellesley graduate) Molly Dewson, a work very much informed by the feminist scholarship of which Heilbrun was now a leading proponent from her tenured position in the English Department at Columbia. Seeking to make a connection between her and my mother, I sent her an inscribed copy of my book. I never heard a word in return.

Some years later my mother and I were both reading Heilbrun’s Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. One night I got an excited phone call. “Look at page 212,” my mother exclaimed. “She mentions your book!” Sure enough, Heilbrun used the story of Molly Dewson and her partner Polly Porter as an example of how women’s relationships could be just as strong and long-lived as heterosexual marriages. Unfortunately she slightly garbled the title of my book, calling it My Partner and I rather than Partner and I, but I think Heilbrun’s rendition is actually better.

A lot of the background research and preparation for a biographical entry never makes it into the formal essay. It also takes a lot more time to craft a biographical essay than, say, this blog post. Every detail has to be nailed down. Hard choices have to be made about which episodes and events to include versus which to leave out. Should I include quotations to give the flavor of her writing? How much space should I devote to her personal life, when she always claimed that the essence of her life was her work?  So many choices, so few words.

In practically the same amount of space as this blog post, we ask our contributors to craft an interpretation of an entire life, chock full of dates and details accompanied by the larger context in which the subject operated. The experience of writing a biographical essay, and then writing about the process, confirms how challenging – and rewarding — the invitation to contribute an essay to the ANB can be. I plan to draw on this insight in my interactions with contributors in the years to come.

Susan Ware is the General Editor of the American National Biography and celebrated her first year anniversary of working on the ANB this April. She is an accomplished historian, editor, and the author of seven books, including biographies of Billie Jean King, Amelia Earhart, Molly Dewson, and Mary Margaret McBride. She served as the editor of several documentary collections and of the most recent volume of Notable American Women, published in 2004, which contains biographies of 483 women from over 50 fields. Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, Dr. Ware taught at New York University and Harvard. Susan’s article on Carolyn Gold Heilbrun will be added to the ANB Online in October 2013.

The landmark American National Biography offers portraits of more than 18,700 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. First published in 24 volumes in 1999, the ANB received instant acclaim as the new authority in American biographies, and continues to serve readers in thousands of school, public, and academic libraries around the world. Its online counterpart, ANB Online, is a regularly updated resource currently offering portraits of over 18,700 biographies, including the 17,435 of the print edition. ACLS sponsors the ANB, which is published by Oxford University Press.

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The history of American witchcraft is indelibly associated with Salem, Massachusetts, where in 1692 nineteen people were executed as witches after the accusations of two young girls sparked a wave of fear. The village of Salem, the centre of the events of 1692, is now the town of Danvers, with the focus of today’s witchcraft industry centred on Salem city. But there are numerous other Salems in America, born of the country’s religious heritage – Salem in Hebraic means “peace”. But forget colonial Salem for a moment, as on two occasions in America’s more recent past Salem was the scene of trials related to witchcraft.

Salem 1878. In May 1878 the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem, Massachusetts, considered:

That the said Daniel H. Spofford of Newburyport is a mesmerist, and practices the art of mesmerism, and that by his power and influence he is capable of injuring the persons and property and social relations of others, and does by said means so injure them. That the said Daniel H. Spofford has at divers times and places since the year 1875 wrongfully, maliciously and with the intent to injure the plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great suffering of body, severe spinal pains and neuralgia, and temporary suspension of mind.

The charge reads remarkably like the indictments for witchcraft two centuries earlier, and the trial’s location further underscored the association in the minds of commentators.

Profoundly influenced by both mesmerism and spiritualism in her early adult life, the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), conceived a source of spiritual harm that came to be known as “malicious animal magnetism” or “MAM”. This was the malign use of willpower, the projection of harmful thoughts to cause physical damage. MAM become something of a preoccupation amongst early members of the movement.

In 1870 Daniel Spofford and his wife had entered into an agreement with Eddy that she would teach them the healing art for the sum of $100 cash and ten per cent of the commercial income from their future Christian Science healing practice. The Spoffords fell out with Eddy over other matters and declined to pay the tithe. So in 1878 Eddy launched a lawsuit against them. It was one of several legal actions that the litigious Eddy instigated against former followers at the time.

Things got worse for Spofford when, as this case was pending, Lucretia Brown, a 48-year-old spinster who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses in Ipswich, lodged a suit against Spofford that Lucretia had suffered a spinal injury as a child, but while an invalid she was able to run a crocheting agency, employing local women working for pin money. An erstwhile Congregationalist, she was converted to Christian Science in 1876 after successful treatment by a female Christian Science healer from the town of Lynn named Dr Dorcas Rawson, herself a former Methodist. Lucretia was rejuvenated and was able to walk for miles for the first time since childhood, but she had a relapse following several visits by Spofford. She consulted Dorcas again who diagnosed that Spofford had been using mesmerism against her. And so Lucretia decided to take legal action, with some subsequently suggesting that Eddy put her up to it. The case was dismissed.

“The Long Lost Friend” was one of the most widely consulted books on how to deal with witches and witchcraft in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

Salem 1893. The town of Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio, was a thriving settlement founded by the Quakers. Its inhabitants numbered over 6,000 by the end of the nineteenth century, at which time it was described by one observer as displaying “order, prosperity, thrift, and comfort”. But in 1893 the peace after which the town was named was shattered by a virulent witchcraft dispute.

A few miles south of Salem, at a place known as McCracken Corner, lived a farmer named Jacob Culp. Born in Germany around 1839, he and his family emigrated to America when he was a boy. By 1860 the young man had taken up farming and married Hannah Loop, a Pennsylvanian woman fifteen years his senior, becoming step father to two children from her previous marriage. Culp worked hard and became one of the most prosperous members of the community. Sometime during the 1870s Hannah’s mother Mary Loop and her disabled brother Ephraim moved in to the Culp’s home for a few years. When Mary died, some neighbours, including a couple of the Loop sisters, cast accusing glances at Jacob. When Hannah also died sometime around 1887 and Jacob married Hattie, a woman twenty-five years younger, rumour had it he had bumped Hannah off too by his witchcraft.

The principal rumour-monger was Culp’s sister-in-law, Sadie Loop. Sadie was a key member of Hart Methodist Church, having served it as a Sunday School teacher and sexton. In November 1892, following further family misfortunes and illnesses, which no doctor could help, Sadie decided to call upon a herb doctress named Louise Burns. She told Sadie that she had a very bad brother-in-law, and when she was asked which one, Burns replied “the one that came across the ocean.” This could only be Jacob.

Sadie told a farmer and church Class Leader named Homer B. Shelton of her suspicions. He subsequently made a formal complaint about Sadie:

The undersigned a member of the Methodist Episcopal church, complains to you that Sadie Loop, a member of the same church, has been guilty of immoral conduct, and she is hereby charged therewith as follows: Charge, falsehood.

Specification 1. The said Sadie Loop on or about the 27^th day of April, 1893, did utter and publish, contrary to the word of God and the discipline, the following false and evil matter of and concerning Jacob Culp, to wit that he, meaning the said Jacob Culp was a wizard and practiced witchcraft.

H.B. Shelton

A church trial was held in the classroom of Salem Methodist Church. The presiding Judge, Rev. Smith, concluded after hearing all the evidence that he had no alternative but to expel Sadie Loop from the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Hart Church never recovered from these traumatic events. Today it is marked only by a small graveyard along Route 45 a few miles south of Salem.

These nineteenth-century Salem witch trials are a reminder that, two hundred years after the last legal executions for witchcraft in the USA, accusations of witchcraft and malign occult influence could still shake communities to their core, revealing that fear of witchery was as much a part of modern American life as it was in the colonial days.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire and has written extensively on the subject of magic. His new book America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem is the first full history of witchcraft in modern America.

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Image credit: From John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts & Remedies (Harrisburg, 1856). Image provided by Dr Owen Davies. Do not reproduce without permission.

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In 1903, the motto “Deeds not Words” was adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst as the slogan of the new Women’s Social and Political Union. This aimed above all to secure women the vote, but it marked a deliberate departure in the methods to be used. Over fifty years of peaceful campaigning had brought no change to women’s rights in this respect; drastic action was, Emmeline decided, now called for. The “deeds” encouraged by the WSPU, such as stone-throwing, arson, window-breaking, and parliamentary deputations, would all be widely reported over the ensuing years. In the collective memory, it was however not deeds but words — and one word, suffragette, in particular — which came to epitomise this period and its aims.

The (UK) National Archives Catalogue Reference: AR 1/528

-ette and the conflicts of meaning

Suffragette neatly evokes the conflicted history of this time. If some women (and men) campaigned for the female right to vote, others campaigned against it. Even among those who supported female suffrage, there could be marked divides. First used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,  in the Daily Mail in 1906, suffragette was not only new but a deliberate (and deliberately negative) coinage, intended to divide the suffragists, whose campaigns remained peaceful, from those who, as Pankhurst urged, should henceforth adopt more ‘militant’ methods. Suffragette, as a compound of suffrage (“The casting of a vote, voting; the exercise of a right to vote,” as the Oxford English Dictionary would confirm) plus the suffix -ette, was by no means complimentary. On one hand, -ette was a diminutive and was often seen as trivialising in intent, as well as distinctly patronizing; a lecturette (first used in 1867) was “a short lecture,” a meteorette “a small shooting star.” Both were very different from their non-diminutive counterparts.

-Ette had moreover another meaning which had become familiar in recent years. This, as in leatherette, first used in 1880 and cashmerette, used in 1886, signalled the idea of imperfect imitation, as well as inauthenticity. As a result, just as leatherette was a fake version of leather, so too, by implication, were the suffragettes ‘fake’ — and profoundly improper — versions of the suffragists. Densely polysemous, -ette was also starting to emerge as a specifically female suffix, a use which can be seen in forms such as poetette. Defined as “A young or minor poet; (sometimes esp.) a young female poet” in the Oxford English Dictionary, this already indicates the transitions at work, as the diminutive shades into the specifically female — a semantic development which was undoubtedly aided by the prominence of suffragette itself. Here too, notions of true and false, norm and other, intervene. ‘True’ women, as anti-suffrage writers regularly stressed, would never engage in militant activities of this kind. “Woman—or suffragette?” the writer Marie Corelli demanded in 1907. One could not, at least in anti-suffrage rhetoric of this kind, be both.

Lashing the wind

Trying to control meaning, as Samuel Johnson long ago affirmed in his Dictionary of 1755, is, however, rather like trying “to lash the wind.” One might feel better, but little result will be achieved. Suffragette, in fact, offers a precise illustration of Johnson’s point. Intended as a term of derision, it was nevertheless swiftly appropriated by the suffragettes themselves. Rather than a mark of stigmatization, it became a positive badge of identity — of shared aims and aspirations. A magazine was launched, named The Suffragette (copies of which were often left at sites of militant activity). In 1911, Sylvia Pankhurst published a history of the campaign so far. She called it The Suffragette: the History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910. Even the pronunciation could be hijacked for positive ends. Writing in the Observer in 1906, Lady Hugh Bell stressed the genuine appropriacy of the word. The dismissive -ette could, she argued, be converted into -gette, conveying not powerlessness but the “jet of enthusiasm” which united action for the vote across the land. It was also “feminine enough,” she noted — “a fine flowing word.” The Pankhursts suggested another version by which -gette was to be pronounced ‘get’ — succinctly indicating the suffragettes’ determination to ‘get the vote’ on equal terms with men.

Acts of definition

Whether dictionaries can ever capture this complexity of meaning is an interesting question. “A female supporter of the cause of women’s political enfranchisement, esp. one of a violent or ‘militant’ type,” wrote Charles Onions, defining this word in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1915. A single pronunciation appears in the accompanying transcription. One suspects that, had the Pankhursts been asked to define this word, it would have been very different. As the opening of Pankhurst’s The Suffragette extolled: “the adventurous and resourceful daring of the young suffragettes who, by climbing up on roofs, by sliding down through skylights, by hiding under platforms, constantly succeeded in asking their endless questions, has never been excelled.” “Instantly the crowd roared, “Votes for Women!”—”Three cheers for the Suffragettes!”” Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1914 My Own Story records, here describing events in 1907. Words, then as now, can mean different things to different people. Point of view can influence the act of meaning, in dictionaries as well as outside them. Were the suffragettes brave, or foolhardy? Courageous or ‘violent’? Women or suffragettes — or, of course, both?

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of History of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College. She edited the newly revised and updated Oxford History of English. She is the author of Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction and Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. She is the editor of Johnson’s Pendulum (with Freya Johnston) and Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest. She has contributed to The Oxford History of English Lexicography and The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel.

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The dangerous dames, fall-guy private eyes, and psychologically unstable heroes and villains who roam the streets of the 1940s crime film have often been linked with anxieties surrounding changing roles for men and women in the years around World War II. Although appearing less regularly, the evolution of the ‘working-girl’ detective character can also be connected with these shifts in gendered identity. Amateur investigators who take on a ‘case’ to get the man they love out of trouble, these women are usually white-collar office workers whose professional skills and urban familiarity prove invaluable aids to sleuthing. Their activity justified as a means of ensuring conventional romantic happiness, these leading ladies are allowed to occupy the privileged space of the detective — a role that drives the narrative forward and which, despite literary forebears such as Miss Marple, Nancy Drew and the like, remained primarily a male domain.

These agent female detectives therefore pose a challenge to the crime film’s traditional gender politics, and (like other elements of story, mood, and characterisation) music and sound play a crucial role in their construction. The classical Hollywood score consistently draws upon various cultural stereotypes to forge an expressive and easily understood set of musical signifiers of identity. From the jazz, blues, and ‘exotic’ cues associated with the femme fatale, to the strident, brass-driven sound of the hero, and the soaring strings, harps, and flutes of the ‘good wife’, film music encourages us to hear characters as Hollywood wishes. Music therefore provides a significant means through which female characters can be moved between various positions in relation to issues of crime, criminality, and romance. They may be romantic leads, femmes fatales, victims, or detectives — or take on several roles within the same film.

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and The Big Steal (1949) demonstrate some of the dramatic and musical approaches to the characterisation of the working-girl detective. All three are cheaply produced ‘B’ pictures released by RKO Radio Pictures — the smallest of the major studios and a company noted for its relatively experimental approach to commercial filmmaking, as well as its crime and noir films. As the slideshow below indicates, the soundtrack of these films is used to support the activity of the female detective — giving women credibility as sleuths and highlighting the suspenseful nature of the situations they find themselves in — but music is also used to reposition these same women into the more conventional and socially acceptable roles of the love interest or the victim of crime.


• Figure 1

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-1-e1365085798434.png

  Whenever Mike in Stranger on the Third Floor thinks of his girlfriend Jane, we hear a romantic musical theme full of the signifiers of the 'good wife'. We see and hear Jane through Mike, helping to diminish her agency as an independent working woman.

• Figure 2

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-2-e1365085791244.png

  Music and voiceover narration privilege Mike's experience, working alongside striking Expressionist cinematography to depict Mike's nightmarish vision of his trial and imprisonment for a murder he didn't commit.

• Figure 3

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-3-e1365085785677.png

  After Mike's real-life arrest, only Jane will believe his story about the mysterious stranger he suspects of the crime. Accompanied now by taut and suspenseful music, she tracks down and confronts her quarry.

• Figure 4

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-4-e1365085778346.png

  Once Mike is freed, Jane's agency as detective is short-lived. The status quo is reaffirmed: the film finishes with a reprise of the 'good wife' material as the couple head to the registry office.

• Figure 5

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-5-e1365085771588.png

  Deadline at Dawn opens with sailor Alex suffering amnesia. He buys time with June, a cynical and weary dancehall worker and tells her about his troubles. 'Exotic' music and styling characterise June's profession as seedy and demeaning, emphasising her lack of agency at work.

• Figure 6

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-6-e1365085764136.png

  After the duo retrace Alex's steps and discover a murder victim, June immediately takes charge of the case. Sparse, angular, and chromatic 'detective music' accompanies June eavesdropping on a potential suspect, and emphasises Alex's comparative weakness.

• Figure 7

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-7-e1365085757310.png

  But June is soon repositioned as Alex's love interest, when paternal taxi driver Gus gets involved. Slow and romantic descending string lines accompany the revelation of her true feelings, cementing the shift in

• Figure 8

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-8-e1365085750529.png

  When Gus is revealed as the murderer and Alex's memory is restored, he is able to occupy a more conventionally masculine role. The previously feisty, independent June swaps her past lives as a cynical showgirl and cunning detective for a future role as a military wife.

• Figure 9

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-9-e1365085744728.png

  Filmed on location in Mexico, the soundtrack to the The Big Steal heavily features 'Latin'-style music.

• Figure 10

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-10-e1365085736137.png

  Joan's association with Latin sounds initially seems to cement her characterisation as the film's femme fatale.

• Figure 11

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-11-e1365085730736.png

  But as the narrative develops, it becomes increasingly clear that Joan's knowledge of Mexican culture and language empowers her to act as detective, helping Halliday to clear his name and evade his pursuers.

• Figure 12

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-12-e1365085720381.png

  Joan's familiarity and affinity with Mexico, which result from her secretarial work for the head of an international company, mean that the film's Latin soundtrack functions to support and extend her agency.

• Figure 13

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-13-e1365085711163.png

  Joan and Halliday's integration into Mexican culture is complete by the end of the story. They speculate about how big their family will be as the locals dance in the background.

Despite their low budgets, these films demonstrate the complex ways in which music contributes to the classical-era crime film, making use of a range of styles and approaches to both articulate and curtail the agency of the female detective. Music interacts with storyline and structure, image construction, and other elements of the soundtrack as an interlinked and mutually dependent aspect of multimedia narrative. These soundtracks include cues ranging from generic, easily reusable ‘library’ music to expansive themes in the leitmotif tradition — but all are shaped by their interaction with other elements of narrative, and go on to shape the film in turn. What we might ordinarily think of as ‘Jane’s theme’ in Stranger on the Third Floor actually functions to reflect Mike’s possessive paternalism. The Latin rhythms that accompany Joan’s Mexican adventures in The Big Steal serve to highlight the cultural competence that helps her crack the case, rather than passing her off as a typically exoticised and expendable femme fatale.

All three films feature saccharine (and occasionally unconvincing) ‘happy endings’, where the female lead’s agency as detective is exchanged for a less threatening, more conventional positioning as an eager bride-to-be. But this typical 1940s shift in register from the criminal to the romantic cannot entirely negate the pleasurable ways in which these women challenge and extend the more usual characterisations of the classical crime film. Their role as detective may not be as clearly defined as later incarnations of the female cop, for example, but these working-girl investigators play a crucial part in unravelling mysteries, seeking justice, and keeping their men safe from harm. A crucial contributor to the gendered discourse of 1940s Hollywood, the soundtrack mediates between the positioning of women as detectives and archetypal good wives; these city sleuths not only reflect the evolution of the urban workforce, but also articulate the anxiety that surrounded it.

Catherine Haworth is a Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. A member of the Centre for the Study of Music, Gender and Identity, she is interested in issues of representation and identity across various media, with a particular focus upon music for film and television. You can read her Music & Letters article, ‘Detective agency? Scoring the amateur female investigator in 1940s Hollywood’ for free online for a limited time. Follow her on Twitter @CathreeneH.

Music & Letters is a leading international journal of musical scholarship, publishing articles on topics ranging from antiquity to the present day and embracing musics from classical, popular, and world traditions. Since its foundation in the 1920s, Music & Letters has especially encouraged fruitful dialogue between musicology and other disciplines. It is renowned for its long and lively reviews section, the most comprehensive and thought-provoking in any musicological journal.

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Since the 11th of March, Oxford University Press has been running March Madness: Atlas Edition based on statistics drawn at random from Oxford’s Atlas of the World: 19th Edition. Mexico and Indonesia met in the finals while Madagascar and Turkey competed for third place.

To get to this point, we’ve asked:

Sweet Sixteen: 11 March              Which country has the highest GDP per capita?
Round of 8: 18 March                     Which country has a higher level of endemism?
Final Four: 25 March                      Which country’s capital will be more populated by 2015?

To determine the winner, we asked: Which country has a larger industrial output (that includes mining, manufacturing, construction, and energy)?

For Third Place:                               Madagascar vs. Turkey                     WINNER: Turkey

For First Place:                                  Mexico vs. Indonesia

OUP is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2013 March Madness: Atlas Edition is Indonesia!

First place: Indonesia
Second place: Mexico
Third place: Turkey

Indonesia’s industrial output equals $389 billion (US dollars), 10 billion ahead of Mexico. Turkey beat out Madagascar for third place with an output of $209 billion. Indonesia, with its 136,000 islands of which 6000 are inhabited, exports oil, natural gas, tin, timber, textiles, rubber, coffee and tea (to name a few). Mexico, in second place, is largely agricultural, but oil and oil products are its chief export, while manufacturing is the country’s most valuable activity. Mexico is the leading silver producer. In Turkey, agriculture employs 21% of people, and textiles, cars, machinery and paper products are the leading exports. In Madagascar, fishing, farming and forestry employ about 80% of people, but population growth has stressed the region’s forests and the unique wildlife.

Thanks for playing along, either on the courts or in your atlas! May the madness continue…

Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price.

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To certain patients with heart disease, a little salt may not be a bad thing.

Patients suffering from cardiovascular disease are treated with drugs known as a renin-angiotensin system (RAS) blockers, which have been proven to reduce mortality in large clinical trials of patients with hypertension, heart disease, or diabetes. Now, a new study published this week in the American Journal of Hypertension has shown that some patients are concurrently salt depleted and may not benefit from the RAS blocking drugs; in fact, RAS blockers may endanger their health.

The authors of this new paper, Jean E. Sealey, Michael H. Alderman, Curt D. Furberg, and John H. Laragh, show relationships between high levels of plasma renin-activity (PRA), sodium depletion, and cardiovascular mortality. Dr. Sealey answered some questions about their latest work below. She also tells us about a free app she and other colleagues have developed to help train health care professionals to use the clinical PRA test to identify hypertensive patients who can benefit from sodium depleting agents, as distinct from other hypertensives who benefit instead from RAS blockers.

Is hypertension the clinical term for high blood pressure?

Yes. Everyone’s blood pressure varies throughout the day, but the blood pressure of a hypertensive patient varies around a higher level. The conventional level above which patients are described as having hypertension is 140/90 mmHg.

What is plasma renin activity (PRA) and why it is so important with regards to hypertensive patients?

Renin is secreted by the kidneys into the blood stream where it increases blood pressure by reducing the caliber of small arteries, in much the same way that tightening the nozzle of a garden hose increases the force of a stream of water. Plasma renin exerts its effect on the blood vessels through plasma angiotensin. The main function of the renin-angiotensin system is to stop blood pressure from falling too low when the amount of salt in the body becomes depleted. Salt itself does not affect blood pressure, but determines the volume of water in the body. The amount of salt in the body determines the amount of water within the blood vessels and that also affects the level of blood pressure. High blood pressure is caused either by too much plasma renin, or by too much body salt, or by both.

The main type of drugs examined in your paper — renin-angiotensin system (RAS) blockers — what do they do and how do they work?

RAS blockers counteract the effect of the renin-angiotensin system. The most common RAS blockers are ACE inhibitors, such as lisinopril, and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), for example losartan.

Renin-angiotensin blockers are so commonly accepted as a treatment for cardiovascular disease: what led you and your co-authors to question their effectiveness for patients on a low salt diet? How did you make the link between the low salt diet and high levels of plasma renin-activity?

John Laragh and I have spent many years studying the circulating renin-angiotensin system by monitoring plasma renin activity (PRA) levels in normotension, hypertension and various cardiovascular and renal patient groups. We observed that changes in PRA levels coordinate with body salt to support a normal level of blood pressure, and that renin-angiotensin can be life saving in sodium depleted patients. We have been very surprised by the widespread use of RAS blockers in patients whose blood pressure is not high, especially those simultaneously taking diuretics and/or low salt diets. When we observed that treatment PRA levels were extremely high in some such patients, we calculated that they were in fact high enough to overwhelm the effects of the drugs. Therefore, such patients appeared able to shrug off the hypotensive effects of the drugs. However, we became concerned when we read four reports showing that such patients were dying at a faster rate than others with lower PRA levels.

There is a correlation between high PRA levels and low salt diets?

There is a reciprocal relationship between the body sodium-volume content and PRA levels. PRA levels rise as people become increasingly salt depleted by low salt diets and they rise even more when a diuretic drug is added. On the other hand, PRA levels fall just as quickly when salt is restored to the diet and diuretics are reduced or withdrawn.

So are you saying certain cardiovascular patients might benefit from consuming more salt? Are there any possible dangers if patients begin to go this route?

We are saying that a high plasma renin (PRA) test helps to identify those patients who are likely to benefit from a higher salt intake and/or subtraction of diuretics. We are not suggesting an increase in salt intake or subtraction of diuretics from patients with medium or low PRA levels (< 6.5 ng/ml/hr using the Quest Diagnostics PRA assay).

Can you help us understand the numbers a little bit: how many patients in the US are currently in treatment for cardiovascular disease, and can you estimate how many might be affected by what you’ve found in this new paper in the American Journal of Hypertension?

Cardiovascular diseases affecting the heart, brain, and kidney, are the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Many such patients also have hypertension. More than 50 million Americans are being treated for these conditions and the vast majority are taking RAS blockers and/or diuretics and often a restricted sodium diet as well. The percentage of such patients who develop high PRA levels, reflecting volume depletion, is unknown, but in the two trials we reviewed, high PRA levels occurred in less than 20% of the 2913 cardiovascular patients enrolled in the HOPE trial, but in more than half of the 3978 heart failure patients enrolled in Val-HeFT. Many more patients in the Val-HeFT trial were taking diuretics.

The theme this year for World Health Day is hypertension, so we should mention that you and your colleagues have developed an iPhone/iPad app for hypertensive patients. How does it work and what does it do?

Our free app is an approach to personalized medicine. It teaches how to use plasma renin (PRA) testing to control the blood pressure of untreated or uncontrolled hypertensive patients with one, or usually at most two antihypertensive agents. The app takes the user step by step through the process of identifying whether a patient is currently taking natriuretic or RAS blocking drugs and then, based on their current PRA level, recommends stopping drugs that are being used inappropriately and then, if necessary, adding the opposite type of drug. The algorithm is based on the volume-vasoconstriction concept of hypertension control that was developed by John Laragh in the 1970’s. Now, the PRA test is commercially available, reimbursed by most insurance companies (including Medicare), requires no special conditions for drawing or processing the specimen, and patients need not stop their current medications. The app is currently available on the iPhone and iPad and soon to be released for Android devices.

Does your report mean that any patient who is currently taking a diuretic, or an aldosterone receptor blocker, or a low salt diet should not be given a renin-angiotensin system (RAS) blocking drug as well, such as an ACEI (angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor) or an ARB (angiotensin receptor blocker) or a direct renin inhibitor?

No, it does not mean that. Only patients with very high plasma renin levels and normal to low blood pressures might be at increased risk from adding a RAS blocker.

How do you know when a patient has been excessively salt depleted?

Signs of salt depletion are postural hypotension, with high BUN, uric acid, and serum creatinine levels. Our report shows that a high plasma renin level adds strong support for the diagnosis.

Has there been a clinical trial to test your hypothesis?

Not yet. In an accompanying editorial Dr. Ted Kurtz states that such trials are unlikely. However, he also thinks that it is logical to supplement clinical judgment with measurements of plasma renin when considering treating normotensive, high CV risk subjects with RAS inhibitors.

Is it dangerous to suggest increasing salt intake and subtracting natriuretic drugs in patients with hypertension, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease?

Concern about increasing salt intake and subtracting natriuretic drugs is based upon the fear that blood pressure will become too high. Blood pressure should be monitored. Nonetheless, we showed in our report that groups of hypertensives who were already treated with a low salt diet and a daily diuretic were able to increase their salt intake from low to medium without inducing any rise in systolic blood pressure. Moreover, Paterna et al have shown that compensated heart failure patients discharged from hospital on a low salt diet are more likely to be readmitted to hospital than those taking a medium salt diet. In other words, there appears to be an optimal level of salt intake that is neither too high or too low. Monitoring plasma renin levels may assist in determining what that is for each patient.

Jean Sealey is Research Professor Emerita of Physiology & Biophysics in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. A native of Scotland, she received her training at Glasgow University and has been studying hypertension since the early 1970’s. She recently developed an app for the iPhone and iPad to help guide antihypertensive drug selection. She is the co-author with Michael H. Alderman, Curt D. Furberg, and John H. Laragh, of “Renin-Angiotensin System Blockers May Create More Risk Than Reward for Sodium-Depleted Cardiovascular Patients With High Plasma Renin Levels” in the American Journal of Hypertension.

The American Journal of Hypertension is a monthly, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for scientific inquiry of the highest standards in the field of hypertension and related cardiovascular disease. The journal publishes high-quality original research and review articles on basic sciences, molecular biology, clinical and experimental hypertension, cardiology, epidemiology, pediatric hypertension, endocrinology, neurophysiology, and nephrology.

Jeremy Wang-Iverson is a senior publicist at Oxford University Press.

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Derided by a number of major military powers when it was adopted, almost 16 years later the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention is in pretty rude health. No fewer than 161 States have adhered to its provisions — the most recent being Poland in December 2012 – and few outside dare to use anti-personnel mines these days such is the stigmatisation of the weapon, even though a ban has not yet crystallised in customary law. There is little or no transfer of anti-personnel mines, and what little there is consists mainly of small-scale, illicit sales. As a result, large stockpiles in China and the USA lie dormant, and even Russia is no longer laying mines in Chechnya, so far as we know.

Of course, challenges remain in implementing the treaty. Assistance to mine victims has made relatively little headway in recent years, frustrated by trials and tribulations in overcoming institutional weaknesses in health systems in many post-conflict nations. Progress in mine clearance has been especially disappointing, with two dozen States being forced to request extensions to their 10-year treaty deadlines, and this despite the fact that many had to confront only limited contamination. The United Kingdom has even implied that the clearance requirements only apply to developing nations with significant numbers of casualties, a perverted reading of its international legal obligations (which most certainly extend to mined areas on the Falkland Islands). At the same time, non-party States China, Nepal, and the USA have cleared most, if not all of the mines on territory under their jurisdiction, so the treaty has had a broader normative impact.

Furthermore, if donors are as generous over the next decade or so as they have been over the last 20 years, the world should still be all but cleared of landmines by 2022 — only 25 years since the adoption of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. That’s no mean achievement, even though it should have been possible sooner and at a much cheaper cost than the estimated $10 billion or so it will likely have cost. Regrettably many countries and operators still commit precious clearance assets to areas without any contamination as their survey capacity and risk management abilities are lacking. National capacity building has been more a tool of rhetoric than an on-the-ground reality.

So what are the treaty’s broader lessons for disarmament? The Convention, which entered into force on 1 March 1999, was the result of the ‘Ottawa Process’, a freestanding treaty negotiation outside a United Nations (UN)-facilitated forum with the aim of outlawing anti-personnel mines. The process was so called because it was launched in Ottawa in October 1996 by Lloyd Axworthy, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs. Axworthy and his staff had seen that progress towards a ban was doomed to be thwarted by the tradition of consensus within UN disarmament fora, notably the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). After three years of negotiations, the CCW was only able to agree on a complex set of additional restrictions that did not even require all mines to be self-destructing and/or self-deactivating. In contrast, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention was negotiated from start to finish in less than a year.

Party states to the Ottawa Treaty via Wikimedia Commons.

Sadly, two decades later, little has changed in the disarmament world. The only weapon that has been banned since 1997, cluster munitions, was similarly the result of a freestanding process, this time led by Norway, after the CCW had again failed to act forcefully. Ironically, once the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) had been adopted in Dublin in 2008, a number of States, led by the USA, sought to adopt a protocol to the CCW restricting the weapon for those planning not to adhere to the CCM in the near to medium term. But by then it was too little, too late, and some ham-fisted diplomacy resulted in no agreement.

It seems likely that future weapons law treaties will also have to go outside the United Nations if they are to be adopted (unless inroads can be made into the tyrannical consensus ‘rule’). For getting 193 Member States to agree to ban or restrict anything remotely useful in military terms is a challenge that will rarely be met in practice. Anti-vehicle mines, explosive weapons with wide area effects, tasers and other ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and even nuclear weapons are all on the agenda for greater regulation in years to come. But there’s little prospect of any agreement being made in consensus fora, such as the Conference on Disarmament or UN disarmament mechanisms.

Perhaps some normative progress can be achieved under the auspices of the Human Rights Council, notably with regard to the use of certain weapons outside situations of armed conflict. Otherwise, it remains to a State or core group of States to take the initiative, and then it’s every State for itself and the Devil take the hindmost (to paraphrase). In this, the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention just reflects the traditional method of adopting weapons law treaties in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. So maybe it’s just a return to the rule, proving that disarmament within the UN is a mere exception.

Stuart Casey-Maslen is Head of Research at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. He is author of Commentaries on Arms Control Treaties, Volume 1: The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction and co-editor of The Convention on Cluster Munitions: A Commentary.

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In Tijuana, Mexico, 43-year-old tuberculosis patient Maria Melero takes her daily medicines at home while her health worker watches on Skype. Thirteen thousand kilometers away in New Delhi, India, Vishnu Maya visits a neighborhood health center to take her TB meds. A counselor uses a laptop to record Maya’s fingerprint electronically. An SMS is then sent to a centralized control center to confirm that Maya has received today’s dose.

The global burden of TB is massive and such episodes are repeated daily across the world. Although incidence and death rates have been falling in many regions—TB mortality has dropped by 41% since 1990—the WHO estimates that there were 8.7 million new cases in 2011. Deaths totaled 1.4 million people, 30% of whom were also HIV positive. Maria and Maya belong to a growing number of people who suffer from multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB, which is caused by organisms that are stubbornly unmoved by the most effective anti-TB drugs, isoniazid and rifampicin. In 2011 there were about half a million new MDR–TB cases and 9% of these are extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB, failing to respond even to second line drugs such as amikacin, kanamycin, or capreomycin.

The remote and electronic surveillance of thousands of patients like Maria and Maya is part of an attempt to expand and enhance Directly Observed Therapy, Short-course (DOTS), whereby health care workers watch patients take their daily medications—for up to two years in the case of XDR-TB. DOTS, which undoubtedly has saved countless lives, was once believed to hold the key to eliminating the scourge of TB, but it has come in for a great deal of criticism in recent years. As well as focusing on patients who were easiest to treat, the mismanagement of DOTS in India and elsewhere has been identified as a key reason for the rise of MDR-TB, XDR-TB, and most recently, totally drug-resistant (TDR) TB. Reports of TDR-TB have now been made from as far afield as Italy, Iran, South Africa, and India and have prompted responses in the west that paint an apocalyptic future of superbugs run amok.

The Indian cases of TDR-TB were first recounted by Zarir Udwadia of the Hinduja Hospital and Research Center in Mumbai. Dr Udwadia recently described TDR-TB in India “an iatrogenic disease that represents a failure of physicians, public and private, and a failure of public health.” The idea that some illnesses are caused by medical activity isn’t a new one; nor is the notion that medical, pharmaceutical, and public health systems do a gross disservice to the world’s poor. What’s more, the triumphal claims that tuberculosis is a disease of the past and well within the realms of human control are now long gone, rightfully consigned to the dustbin labeled “medical hubris”. But if we consider the historical arc of tuberculosis prevention and therapy from the late nineteenth century onwards, Udwadia’s accusation signifies an important and necessary concession in the long-running blame game of patient “recalcitrance”, “non-compliance”, and “adherence”.

La miseria (1886). Cristobal Rojas (1857–1890)

Medical and public health authorities frequently associated high rates of tuberculosis mortality and morbidity with immoral behaviors and vice. Well into the twentieth century, when some of the social determinants of tuberculosis—such as domestic crowding, under-nutrition, and occupational exposures—were acknowledged (if not fully understood or recognized by legislation), the reasons for heightened susceptibility were often explained away by deploying racial, ethnic, and class stereotypes. As many historical studies in the United States have shown, African-Americans, Chinese, Jews, eastern Europeans, and the poor were portrayed as incorrigible, ignorant, and incapable of acting on the advice of (mostly) white, middle-class public health professionals. Often these critiques were underwritten by eugenic arguments: tuberculosis was a disease that picked off the feeble-bodied, preying on a weak urban residuum that lacked inherited resistance. Such prejudicial attitudes were replicated across the world and were particularly prevalent in the colonized parts of the globe.

Before the wide availability of anti-tuberculosis drugs in the 1940s (the first, streptomycin, was discovered in 1943), treatment options for tuberculosis were limited and of questionable efficacy. Educational campaigns aimed to change behaviors, but lacked direct focus. The emergence of sanatoria in the late nineteenth century offered new possibilities that served two purposes: isolating sufferers from the rest of the community and instilling “rules for health” that centered on diet, exercise, rest, and plenty of fresh air. However, sanatoria only treated a minority of patients with TB and an extended period of sequestration was an unrealistic option for many a working-class family’s main breadwinner. Consequently, the lion’s share of tuberculosis management was home-based and sought to replicate the sanatorium regime as much as possible. Patients were relied upon to perform the rituals of taking their own temperature and weight, regulating diet, and scheduling periods of rest and activity. Placing the responsibility for success firmly in the hands of sufferers, doctors cautioned that this sort of domesticated “preventive therapy” would fail if the patient lacked will-power, strength of character, and an even temperament. As mentioned earlier, these traits were not thought to be abundant in the types of people who usually succumbed to tuberculosis!

Not surprisingly, long-standing tropes of patient delinquency found their way into criticisms about the early versions of supervised ambulatory therapies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet technological interventions such as fluorescent tracers, urine testing, and radioactive pill dispensers that were designed to overcome perceived cultural barriers to taking medicines ended up undermining patient-doctor relationships with secrecy and mistrust. By the late 1960s, direct observation seemed to be a palpable necessity, though it took almost 30 years to become WHO policy in 1995.

It is somewhat ironic that just as the structural, social, and economic barriers to patient “non-compliance” are being taken seriously by the medical mainstream, the chief medical officer for England recently invoked a dystopian scenario of a drug-resistant bacterial rampage reminiscent of the early nineteenth century. If we do indeed spiral towards some sort of pre-antibiotic dark age, then one can only hope that prejudice, discrimination, and infection can be overcome in equal measure.

Graham Mooney co-edits the journal Social History of Medicine, which has released a virtual issue on tuberculosis to mark World Tuberculosis Day on Sunday March 24, 2013. He is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent publication is ‘The material consumptive: Domesticating the tuberculosis patient in Edwardian England’ in the Journal of Historical Geography (2013).

Social History of Medicine is concerned with all aspects of health, illness, and medical treatment in the past. It is committed to publishing work on the social history of medicine from a variety of disciplines. The journal offers its readers substantive and lively articles on a variety of themes, critical assessments of archives and sources, conference reports, up-to-date information on research in progress, a discussion point on topics of current controversy and concern, review articles, and wide-ranging book reviews.

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On 27 April 1942, the Bow Street magistrates convicted The Waldorf Hotel, London, its head chef, and a London horseflesh dealer for ignoring the regulations fixing the maximum price of horsemeat. The chef paid the dealer £6 10s for 78 lb of horsemeat, nearly double the official price of £3 18s. Two American journalists, staying at The Waldorf while reporting on the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, read the news with consternation. According to The Times, the hotel manager told the court that the chef, acting on his own initiative, bought the horsemeat to supplement the meat ration of the hotel staff, most of whom were foreigners “not unused to horse flesh and did not mind it.” (28 Apr. 1942, 2) Few people who read press reports of the case believed the manager’s account, suspecting that the chef diverted the staff’s meat ration onto customers’ plates and bulked out meat products with horseflesh.

One of the American correspondents, Clifford P. Morehouse, author of the memoir Wartime Pilgrimage, felt that he had “probed the secret of the strange tasting ‘sausage,’” which he ate on a tray in his hotel room every morning. Disgusted by the thought of eating horsemeat, a meat that he and many Britons associated with poverty and animal cruelty, Morehouse steered clear of sausage for the remainder of his stay at The Waldorf. His colleague “swore that he would eat no more of it for fear that while he was trying to swallow a bite someone might call out ‘Whoa’ and he would choke to death.” Although eating horse flesh repulsed him, Morehouse did not condemn those involved, appreciating Britons’ craving for red meat. In spring 1942, a British adult received a weekly ration of meat to the value of 1s 2d and 4 oz of bacon and ham. According to Morehouse, an adult American would eat a week’s meat ration for Sunday lunch. For middle-class Britons, it represented a 44 per cent cut in the amount of rationed meat they ate in 1944 compared to what they had eaten in 1936/7. Workers, who ate less meat to begin with, saw their consumption fall by 56 per cent over the same period.

Shoppers at Selfridge’s meat counter in 1942. Crown Copyright. © IWM (D 6587)

With shipping space scarce, the government had to cut imports of meat and animal feedstuffs to make room for essential war materials. This resulted in a dramatic fall in the quantity and quality of imported and home-produced beef, lamb, pork, bacon, and ham. To ensure that civilians received a fair share of limited supplies, the government introduced meat rationing and bacon rationing in 1940, fixing prices so that everyone could afford these foods. In addition they could use food points to buy tinned meats. People supplemented meagre rations by buying poultry, game, offal, sausages and meat pies, all off ration, or by eating coupon-free in restaurants and canteens. Eating out and substitute foods, which were also in short supply, did little to dent the public’s appetite for meat.

Meat became a regular part of the working-class diet towards the end of the nineteenth century as average incomes rose and cheap US and Argentinean imports brought the price of meat down. Workers prized meat highly as a source of energy. As in developing countries today, meat consumption indicated one’s affluence, conferring social status. It also played a role in forming masculine and national identities.

Faced with an apparently insatiable demand for ‘a little bit extra’ from their customers, unscrupulous butchers saw an opportunity to boost their profits by selling mislabelled horsemeat. Apart from fixing the retail price of horsemeat, the government left horseflesh dealers alone. The game was not worth the candle as the pre-war trade catered to a small working-class market. The government did not foresee the effects of war and rationing on the industry. With sales to the continent disrupted by war, dealers profited from a booming domestic market for horsemeat. In 1949 a government committee estimated that the number of horses slaughtered for home consumption in West Ham increased from none before the war to 2,000 in 1942. The peak came in 1947 when slaughterers in the Essex borough killed 19,000 horses. Demand was such that horses realised fantastic prices at auction. Rustlers went so far as to target ponies on Dartmoor and Exmoor.

A pony sale at Bampton Fair in October 1943. Crown Copyright, from the IWM Collections (© IWM D 16901).

Two Exmoor ponies being sold at Bampton Fair. Crown Copyright. © IWM (D 16896)

In wartime Sheffield, horseflesh dealers who combined the trade with butchery mislabelled horsemeat as beef or minced it with pork. This trickery allowed their more affluent customers, disgusted by the idea of eating horse, to deceive themselves as to the origin of their black market meat. It also allowed butchers to increase their profit margin by charging a premium price for a less desirable meat. Despite the best efforts of horse lovers, the Manchester Guardian, and the newsreel company British Pathé to alert Britons to the problem after the war, undiscerning consumers, craving a meat chop, continued to eat black market horsemeat until rationing ended in 1954.

Dr Mark Roodhouse is a Lecturer in History at the University of York. He studied history at Cambridge and Oxford before arriving at York, where he teaches modern British history. Mark is currently writing his second book about organised crime in mid-twentieth-century Britain. His first book is Black Market Britain: 1939-1955, published by Oxford University Press.

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Social workers around the world are being invited to celebrate World Social Work Day on 19 March under the banner “Promoting Social and Economic Equalities”, taken from the Global Agenda (2010). Such a call to arms is sorely needed in the face of the growing influence of neoliberalism on global social work, an influence manifested in marketisation, consumerisation, and managerialisation. These dynamic processes and trends represent neoliberalism on the move as it colonises the world. This is not to suggest that the same detailed and identical neoliberal template for social work is emerging in many disparate countries. Rather, these three developments represent an overall direction of travel. In individual countries the extent to which the developments have progressed and in what combinations they have developed is path-dependent; it depends on political institutions, constitutional arrangements, the extent of opposition to them, and so on. Nevertheless, as a direction of travel neoliberalism is increasingly prominent in many countries as a bounded rationality, governing the limits and forms of what is know-able, say-able, and do-able in social work as a result of the impact of the three developments.

Marketisation

Neo-liberalism tells us that markets are needed in social work and that the role of the state is to create the institutional framework within which the social services market operates. In neoliberal rhetoric the installation of markets is supposed to produce competition on quality and price, with the former going up and the latter going down. All too quickly, markets introduce a race to the bottom on price alone and undermine the sense in which social services previously countered market values by stressing citizenship rights, entitlements, and needs; the market is not an arena of social justice. Conveniently this means that governments are able to hold the consequences of punitive policies and cuts in funding at arms-length because market outcomes are, allegedly, neither fair nor unfair but simply flow from “impersonal” market forces.

Consumerisation

Markets require customers. Neoliberalism promises that markets will liberate the users of social work from their alleged role as passive recipients of social workers’ attentions and turn them into active, rational, self-interested, choice-making customers. Neoliberalism argues that customers have high expectations, forged in consumer culture and carried over into their encounters with social work. However, the neoliberal rhetoric slips all too easily into managerial definitions of what being treated well as a customer means, usually through simplistic and narrow definitions of customer satisfaction such as the use of proxy measures. For example, when I returned to a period of practice as a social worker, the proxy measure of the quality of an assessment was the social worker giving the service user a copy of the written document that resulted. I could have undertaken the worst possible assessment — not listened to a service user, behaved in an oppressive manner, and so on — but as long as I gave her or him a copy of the written document my assessment would be judged to have met the standard laid down to measure customer satisfaction.

Such narrow approaches sidestep questions of justice, inequality and oppression, and ignore the extent to which we have to learn to behave as consumers; proficient consumerism is not a ready-made experience that all possess innately. Our consumer learning is located within a class position that intersects with a range of other social divisions in our biographies (age, disability, gender, “race”, sexuality). In addition, consumerism hides the reality of how most, maybe all, people come into contact with social work. They aren’t making a “customer choice”. They come from stressful conditions, they have lives that seem unbearable, their contact with social work may have been initiated by someone else and may be unwelcome. They are, therefore, likely to be trying to get their circumstances or improved rather than seeing themselves as customers accessing a particular “commodity”.

Managerialisation

In order to move in the direction of marketisation and consumerisation, social work becomes increasingly managerialised. The search for “better” management focuses on the world of private business in the belief in a generic model of management, which minimises the differences between private businesses and social work. This has three main consequences. First, the commodification of services through managerial identification of discrete problem categories and a menu of service options, quantifying and costing service outputs. This results in social workers being deprived of meaningful working relationships with and commitments to service users and reduces social work to a series of one-off transactions. Secondly, cuts in funding and expectation of efficiency gains exert a general downward pressure on costs. Thirdly, greater managerial control is exerted over professional space. An example of this is performance management: organisational objectives are identified, performance indicators are developed to reflect the objectives, targets are set in terms of the performance indicators, and progress is monitored using the PIs. Even its supporters identify a range of dysfunctional consequences, such as tunnel vision (an emphasis on phenomena that are quantified in the performance management system at the expense of unquantified aspects of performance) and gaming (minimising the apparent scope for performance improvement to avoid increased expectations and higher targets in the future). Another example of the extension of managerial control over professional space is the introduction of call centres into social work. This is the epitome of treating users of social work as customers. It introduces a process for dealing with them taken from the business sector that ignores the potential complexity of their “transactions” and jettisons social work’s emphasis on seeking to establish trust with and appreciate the unique circumstances of the service user.

Call centres are much-vaunted by their proponents because they overcome barriers of place and time. However, a sense of place and locality has other connotations in terms of service users’ identities and where and how they want services to be provided. These kinds of concerns were traditionally seen as integral to the nature of social work. In many progressive aspirations for social work, the notion of responsiveness to the ‘local patch’ has had pride of place. With the advent of call centres, the ability of social workers to be aware of and utilise local networks and resources is rendered unimportant.

Think global, act local

Some readings of these three developments suggest that neoliberalism is now indelibly inscribed in the consciousness of service users, social workers and managers so that neoliberal social work is the only form of social work with which it is possible to identify. An alternative is to see service users, social workers and managers as interpellated (being “called”) by neoliberalism. From this perspective, social workers (and others) may be called but may not respond to the call or may respond to it in ways that were not anticipated. This potential gap between neoliberalism’s intentions and accomplishments needs to be exploited not only by individual social workers struggling to work in the interests of service users in their day-to-day practice but also through collective struggles that support World Social Work Day’s Global Agenda at the national and local level (see Social Work Action Network).

John Harris is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was a social worker, training officer, and manager prior to moving into social work education. He is the co-author of The Oxford Dictionary of Social Work and Social Care with Vicky White.

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Romans measured time in months but not in weeks. The Ides simply meant the middle day of a month and it functioned simply as a temporal navigation aid — one that looks clumsy to us. So one might make an appointment for two days before the Ides or for three days after the Kalends (the first day of the month) and so on. A man shouting from the back of the crowd “Beware the Ides of March!” must have sounded about as sane as a heckler yelling to a modern day politician that he should watch out for the third Tuesday in April.

But for us the Ides of March has only one meaning: the date in 44 BC when Julius Caesar was murdered by a crowd of senators led by his protégés Brutus and Cassius. Tyrannicide, treachery, pathos. And the cry “Beware the Ides of March!” is forever the warning that was ignored.

This we owe to William Shakespeare who made his murder the focal point of the tragedy Julius Caesar. The play is punchy and the action moves fast. It opens in the streets of Rome, where the people are preparing to welcome Caesar home in triumph after the defeat of his civil war rival Pompey. Meanwhile aristocrats mutter over the loss of freedom. Brutus agonizes, torn between his love for Caesar and his hatred of tyranny. The murder itself occurs at almost the exact center of the play. The outcome is briefly uncertain — will the Roman people hail Brutus and Cassius as liberators, or condemn them as murderers? Then Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man, sways the crowd with a passionate funeral oration. The rest of the play follows the flight of the conspirators, their defeat in battle at Philippi, at the hands of Antony and Caesar’s heir Octavius, and their subsequent suicides. Brutus earns the shortest of obituaries from his enemies before Octavius’ closing lines “So call the field to rest, and let’s away, to part the glories of this happy day.”

The Ides themselves were not a happy day, according to Suetonius, one of Caesar’s ancient biographers. The Ides of March had been declared the Day of Parricide, and the senate was forbidden ever to meet again on that date. For things had not turned out as Brutus hoped. By Suetonius’ day it was possible to see Julius Caesar as the first of the Roman emperors, all of whom — beginning from Octavius — took Caesar’s name as a kind of title. An entire mythology had grown up of signs that had marked Caesar’s imminent death and even his subsequent transformation into a god. As Caesar’s wife Calpurnia puts it:

When beggars die there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes

“Beware the Ides of March!” was just one prophesy among others that transformed Caesar’s murder from a sordid and ultimately pointless crime into an event of cosmic significance. The deaths of emperors (like their births, when viewed in retrospect) were always marked by omens. Emperors were absolute rulers in their lifetime and gods in waiting. How could their deaths be ordinary? And how could their murder even be justified?

Tyrannicide was no more popular under the reigns of Elizabeth I (when the play was first performed) or of her successor James (when it was first printed). Yet political murder and dilemmas like that of Brutus were definitely still on the agenda. Mary Queen of Scots, for example — Elizabeth’s cousin and James’ mother — had been executed for treason just a decade before Julius Caesar was first staged. These issues still mattered.

And Shakespeare’s audience knew this story in advance. A vast mass of the detail of this play, as of Antony and Cleopatra, was drawn from the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written by Suetonius’ contemporary Plutarch but first translated into English in 1579, a generation before Julius Caesar began to be performed. Plutarch’s Lives, which mined classical history for morally improving tales, were fantastically popular in the early modern period and indeed remained so well into the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s audience knew from the start that Caesar would die, who would kill him, and even that young Octavius would turn out to be a greater tyrant than Caesar had ever tried to be.

So the soothsayer’s cry “Beware the Ides of March” was not a plot-spoiler. For Shakespeare this warning, and all the others, were devices to raise the tension and focus our attention on the pivotal moment of the murder. As in a thriller today, the excitement is in the obstacles put in the way of the plot. Caesar must die. But what if he listens to his wife’s terrible nightmares? or heeds the soothsayer’s warning? or reads the written warning pushed into his hand by Artemidorus “Delay not Caesar, read it instantly!” (Caesar does not.)

Shakespeare has transformed the signs of cosmic sympathy into mood music. His opening scenes are overshadowed by storms. And again before the death of Brutus there is another omen. Plutarch’s Life of Brutus tells how a monstrous figure had appeared in his tent before the final campaign. Asked its name, it replies “I am your evil demon, Brutus, and I will see you at Philippi!” then vanishes. Shakespeare tells the story almost word for word, but add the stage direction reads Enter the Ghost of Caesar. Brutus’ imminent tragedy points back to the Ides.

Shakespeare’s Renaissance audiences and readers knew the history of Rome as a history of violence. They were drawn more to the chaos of the Republic than to the imperial peace that followed it. And they certainly did not believe in closure. The story of Julius Caesar is not self-contained, and the conflicts are not resolved. It opens with two tribunes remembering how Pompey had once been just as much adored by the Roman people, as his conqueror was now. And Octavius’ last words remind us that Antony and Octavius would immediately fall out over how exactly to “part the glories” (that is to divide the spoils). There would be fresh civil wars, more treachery and many, many more murders to come. Beware the Ides of March!

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Rome: An Empire’s Story, Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder and editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World.

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Image credits: La Morte di Cesare. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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The news that sections of the UK public may have been munching on horse, rather than beef, has prompted renditions of an all too familiar refrain from British politicians and their cohorts in the media. “Mafia gangs” and “mobsters” have apparently combined in an “international conspiracy” to doctor the rump of the British menu in the form of cheap frozen meals. However, the assertion that foreigners are at the heart of this problem has a lineage with origins extending far beyond the relatively recent construction of organised crime in the UK.

In the early 20th century, Jewish immigration from the Pale of Settlement was portrayed as a criminal problem connected to the vice trade, in particular “white slavery” with all of its connotations of international trade and global conspiracy. Despite anything approaching viable evidence, the British political class reacted with the Aliens Act of 1905, which was targeted specifically at Jews. They introduced immigration controls and registration for aliens, defining some groups of migrants as ‘undesirable’, and made entry to the UK discretionary rather than automatic.

Alien transgression continued to represent a particularly dangerous threat to British society and one that required extraordinary legislative measures. During the First World War, the threat of foreigners peddling drugs to London-based Allied servicemen caused a moral panic to spread, such that in 1914 the House of Commons passed the Defence of the Realm Act. This was a catch-all ‘ways and means’ law, utilized to impose a wide range of authoritarian measures, including making the possession of both opium and cocaine illegal in the wake of growing fears concerning off-duty soldiers being plied with drugs by foreigners. The Act drove the trade underground, inducing a form of amnesia upon the long relationship that Britain had with opium in particular — a relationship that had included a willingness to fight two wars in order to enforce opium trafficking. Historically, the louche dilettantism of imperially formed self-indulgence ensured that, as long as the working classes refrained, opium smoking had been an acceptable vice, particularly amongst ex-colonialists and London’s literary elite. However, in the wake of jingoistic sentiment instigated by the First World War, opium now became associated with illegal nightlife, and in particular as a substance that assisted devious Orientals in the seduction and degradation of white women. Consequently, opium prohibition was accompanied by a clamp down on the Chinese community as it became an ideal platform for the re-establishment of pre-war patriarchal values. The terrors that had been generated by images of Jewish sexuality were now being replayed against a backdrop of drugs and white slavery, involving international traffic controlled by yet another alien criminal conspiracy, and the moral panic regarding the Chinese provided yet another prototype for the idea of international organised criminal conspiracies.

Post-World War II, concerns about prostitution in London once again focused upon foreigners – this time the Maltese. In 1953 a Sunday tabloid journalist wrote a six-week exposé of “the most complicated and certainly the most powerfully organized gang of vice this nation has ever known” who “controlled vice in London for a period of over ten years” and ran a “vice empire.” Although conveniently labelled as Maltese, the five Messina brothers were of mixed Egyptian, Sicilian, and Maltese decent, and had operated brothels in Sicily, Malta, Egypt, Morocco, and Spain. However, the tabloid journalist was the close friend and biographer of Billy Hill, one of the Messinas’ many rivals in post war Soho, and historian Stephan Slater has recently questioned the notion of London’s vice trade being dominated by a foreign monopoly, pointing out that these “emperors of a vice empire in the heart of London” had, at the peak of their careers, only 20 women working for them. Rather than operating a pervasive, transgressive network, the Messinas were one of many groups controlling prostitutes, and were in fact paying protection money to a wide range of white indigenous predators, including Billy Hill and members of the Metropolitan Police. However, the Messinas’ case confirmed in the British imagination the direct association between vice and foreigners, contributing considerably to the implementation of the 1960 Street Offences Act, which took prostitution off of the streets and into premises owned predominantly by white British “businessmen”.

Back to another kind of meat market, and early in 2013 organised criminals from Eastern Europe were identified as the culprits for making British dinner time a covert equestrian event. The story, occasionally accompanied by pictures of herds of wild Romanian horses, appeared cheek by quivering jowl alongside concerns that Bulgarian and Romanian citizens constituted a gathering wave of criminality, one that was about to break upon these beleaguered shores when they acquire free movement across the EU in 2014. As we can see above, we have been here before, and when the alleged sources of some of the horsemeat was later identified as emanating no further east than West Wales and West Yorkshire, the slaughterhouse owners came across less like Tony Soprano and more like extras from Emmerdale.

Organised crime made its debut in UK policy circles in the 1980s with the end of the cold war, alongside increasing pressure from the USA and the United Nations to engage in the War on Drugs. The problem of organised crime in the UK was constructed during the 1990s and the early 21st century, within institutions designed specifically to police a convenient, demonic catch-all of foreign instigated transgression that is central to both media and law enforcement narratives of unlicensed capitalism. However, this focus upon the alleged international character of the supply side misses the point. The illegal trades that serve market society depends upon the unremarkable quest for a bargain by competent consumers: those seeking an ounce of this, a gram of that, 200 ‘Albanian Marlboro’, and a DVD of a Hollywood blockbuster courtesy of a extremely polite Chinese youth who delivers the goods at 9 p.m. every Friday. But the entitlements of affluence that are central to Western society also value cheap commercial sex, somebody to pick up the kids from school and do a little light dusting, or for the increasingly impoverished population of early 21st century Britain, a cheap frozen lasagne.

Beef, horsemeat, human flesh or temporary oblivion all have a price, but blaming strangers with difficult to pronounce names for their provision merely obscures the banality of our desires and the timidity of our resolve to address the racism that rests at the heart of the UK’s interpretation of organised crime.

Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminology Centre at the University of Essex, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK. He previously held Chairs at the University of Durham and the London School of Economics. An ethnographer by trade, he is sceptical of the rise of criminology and has published widely on the sociologies of deviance, of East London, organized and professional crime, the night-time economy and the 2012 Olympics.

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The songwriting business offered few opportunities to women in the early 20^th century. And jazz bandleaders, despite their own experiences with discrimination, were hardly more tolerant of female talent. Although audiences expected the leading orchestras to showcase a ‘girl singer’, women were rarely allowed to serve in other capacities, either on the bandstand or writing arrangements and compositions.

Yet a handful of women managed to overcome the obstacles, and leave a lasting mark on both fields—gettings songs published that became both commercial hits and successful vehicles for jazz. In honor of Women’s History Month, I’d like to call attention to five women who helped shape the sound of jazz with their songs.

Irene Higginbotham (1918-1988) got so little attention for her contributions to jazz during her lifetime, that many scholars and critics confused her with another lady.  She was often described as the wife of jazz pianist Teddy Wilson, but that was a different Irene—Irene Kitchings (1908-1975). Yet Higginbotham was hardly an amateur: ASCAP has her registered as composer of almost 50 songs. But she is best known for one of them—“Good Morning Heartache,” a poignant ballad first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1946, and enjoying even more popularity when Diana Ross featured it in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues. The soundtrack album topped the Billboard chart in April 1973, and “Good Morning Heartache” was a surprise hit single more than a quarter of century after it was composed. Higginbotham was still alive at the time, but apparently no one thought to ask her what she thought about this unexpected turn of events.

Suggested listening:
Billie Holiday: “Good Morning Heartache”
Diana Ross: “Good Morning Heartache”

Ann Ronell (1905-1993) first encountered the world of songwriting via George Gershwin, whom she interviewed for a student publication when she was an undergraduate at Radcliffe. After her graduation, Gershwin helped her make connections in the New York music publishing industry, but Ronell found it hard for a woman to break into this male-dominated field. However, the success of Ronell’s 1932 song “Willow Weep for Me,” a bluesy pop tune that was a huge hit for Paul Whiteman, established her reputation as both composer and lyricist. Ronell’s next best-known song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”—showcased in the 1933 Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs—has also shown tremendous staying power, and has been recorded by artists as diverse as Barbara Streisand to LL Cool J.

Suggested listening:
Nancy Wilson: ”Willow Weep for Me”
Irene Taylor (with Paul Whiteman): “Willow Weep for Me”

Dorothy Fields (1905-1974) wrote lyrics for over 400 songs, and worked with many of the leading musical talents of her day. She contributed to the Cotton Club revues in the 1920s, where her songs were performed by Duke Ellington. With Jerome Kern, she wrote “The Way You Look Tonight,” which won the Oscar for Best Song in 1936, and with Jimmy McHugh she was responsible for future jazz standards “Exactly Like You,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” At his first presidential inauguration, Barack Obama referred to one of Fields’s most famous lyrics—“Pick Yourself Up” from 1936—when he announced: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Suggested listening:
Betty Carter: “The Way You Look Tonight”
Ella Fitzgerald: “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”

Lil Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971) is probably best remembered as wife to jazz legend Louis Armstrong.  Their marriage lasted from 1924 until 1938, and Hardin played a key role in advancing her husband’s career during these years.  But her place in jazz history would be assured even without this connection.  She was pianist with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, which I rank as the best jazz band of the early 1920s, and her most famous composition “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” has been featured in more than 500 jazz recordings.  Her other songs include “Doin’ the Suzie Q,” “Just for a Thrill” (later recorded by Ray Charles) and “Bad Boy” (featured as title song a 1978 Ringo Starr album).

Suggested listening:
Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five (with Lil Hardin Armstrong): “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue”
Lil Hardin Armstrong: “Doin’ the Suzie Q”

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) was best known as a performer, not a songwriter. But several songs she composed or co-wrote have become standards. The ASCAP strike of 1940, which prevented radio stations from playing the songs of most of the well-known American tunesmiths of the day, presented Holiday with both the necessity and opportunity to develop her own songwriting skills. In collaboration with Arthur Herzog, Jr. she wrote “God Bless the Child,” which was a radio and jukebox hit in 1941. Other Holiday compositions include “Don’t Explain,” also written with Herzog, and the blues “Fine and Mellow.”

Suggested listening:
Billie Holiday: “God Bless the Child”
Dee Dee Bridgewater: “Fine and Mellow”

Ted Gioia is the author of eight books on music. His most recent book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire.

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