After listening to this week’s podcast with managing editor Troy Reeves and oral historian extraordinaire Doug Boyd, you might think the Oral History Review has fallen prey to corporate sponsorship. Let me assure you, dear audience, that we are not in bed with Starbucks, E-Harmony, or General Mills. Instead, it seems Doug, guest editor of our special issue “Oral History in the Digital Age” and author of “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” is prone to elaborate metaphors when describing oral history best practices.

In addition to revealing that fun fact, this week’s podcast discusses OHDA, OHMS, and other fantastic acronyms related to the numerous online resources Doug and his numerous collaborators have developed for researchers working with oral histories.

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download a copy of the podcast directly.

Doug Boyd serves as the Digital Initiatives Editor for the Oral History Review. Also, he directs the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and is a recognized national leader regarding oral history, archives and digital technologies. Most recently, Boyd led the team that envisioned, designed, and implemented the open-source OHMS system that synchronizes text with audio and video online. He recently managed the IMLS grant project Oral History in the Digital Age (directed by MATRIX at Michigan State University), establishing current best practices for collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history. His paper, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” is free to read for a limited time.

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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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Image credit: Japanese Nurse. © masahironakano via iStockphoto.

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By Ian Stewart

Symmetry has been recognised in art for millennia as a form of visual harmony and balance, but it has now become one of the great unifying principles of mathematics. A precise mathematical concept of symmetry emerged in the nineteenth century, as an unexpected side-effect of research into algebraic equations. Since then it has developed into a huge area of mathematics, with applications throughout the sciences.

Today we usually think of symmetry as a regularity of visual pattern—the sixfold symmetry of a snowflake, the circular symmetry of ripples on a pond, the spherical symmetry of a droplet of water or a planet. Here the role of symmetry is mainly descriptive. But there is a sense in which a natural process can also be symmetric, and the mathematics of symmetry can predict the results of that process, helping us to understand how nature’s patterns arise.

The key step towards a rigorous notion of symmetry arose not in geometry, but in algebra: attempts to solve quintic equations. The ancient Babylonians knew how to solve quadratic equations, and Renaissance Italian mathematicians discovered how to solve cubic and quartic equations, but here, everyone got stuck. Eventually, it turned out that no solution of the required kind exists for the general quintic equation.

The deep reason for this impossibility lies in the symmetries of the equation, which are the possible ways to permute its solutions while preserving all algebraic relations among them. When an equation has ‘the wrong kind of symmetry’ it can’t be solved by a formula of the traditional type. And equations of the fifth degree have the wrong kind of symmetry.

Mathematicians realised that symmetry is not a thing, but a transformation: a way to move or otherwise disturb something while—paradoxically—leaving it unchanged. For example, to a good approximation a human figure viewed in a mirror looks just like the original. Mixing up the roots of an equation doesn’t change suitable formulas in which they appear. Rotating a sphere through some angles produces an identical sphere.

The collection of all such transformations is called the symmetry group of the object; the structure of this group provides a powerful way to find out how the object behaves. The upshot of this discovery was a new, abstract branch of algebra: group theory.

Groups turned out to be fundamental to the study of crystals; the form and behaviour of a crystal depends on the symmetry group of its atomic lattice. Groups are also vital to chemistry: the way a molecule vibrates depends on its symmetries. The symmetries of a uniformly flat desert determine the possible patterns of sand dunes when the flat pattern becomes unstable. The symmetries of biological tissue determine the possible patterns of animal markings, such as stripes and spots. The symmetries of a cloud of gas determine the spiral form of a galaxy. The symmetries of space and time underpin Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. The symmetries of fundamental particles constrain quantum field theory and affect the possibilities for unifying it with relativity.

Symmetry is such a huge idea, with so many diverse ramifications, that only an encyclopaedia could really do it justice. But it is possible to sketch its origins, give some idea of how the formal theory works out, sample its applications, and witness its diversity and generality. Moreover, the subject has great visual beauty and appeal: here, for once, mathematics can be a spectator sport, and audience participation is not mandatory.

I have spent much of my research career working on connections between symmetries and nature’s patterns, in fluid flow, animal movement, visual perception, and evolutionary biology—and I am just one of many. The well is nowhere near running dry. New applications are constantly being found. Symmetry is one of the truly deep concepts, possessing both visual and logical beauty. Its effects can be seen everywhere, if you know how to look.

Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. He is a well-established communicator of mathematics, and the author of over 80 books, including several on the subject of symmetry, such as Symmetry: A Very Short Introduction. His summary of the problems of mathematics, From Here to Infinity, and collections of his columns from Scientific American (How to Cut a Cake, Cows in the Maze), have been very successful, and his recent book Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, has been a bestseller.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: Symmetrical landscape, By Johann Jaritz (Own work), Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons

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But how much do you know about the people behind the Internet? Who were the founding fathers and mothers of computer science? Do you know who coined the term ‘computer bug’ or who said “We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives”?

Take our computing quiz, compiled from resources in Who’s Who, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Reference, and the American National Biography, to see if you’re a computer genius or if you need an upgrade!

Who’s Who, published annually by A & C Black since 1897, and online exclusively by Oxford University Press since 2008, is the leading source of up-to-date information about over 35,000 influential people from all walks of life, worldwide, who have left their mark on British public life. Written by specialist authors, the Oxford DNB biographies will introduce you to the people behind British history’s great events as well as its literature, science, art, music, and ideas. Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing bringing together over 2 million entries, and more than 16,000 illustrations, into a single cross-searchable resource. Discover the lives of more than 18,700 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — who have influenced American history and culture in the acclaimed American National Biography Online.

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Oxford University Press recently partnered with The Poetry Archive to support Poetry by Heart, a new national poetry competition in England which saw thousands of students aged 14 to 18 competing to become national champion for their skill in memorising and reciting poems by heart. OUP provided free content from OED Online, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the American National Biography Online to support students participating in the competition. Here, 18 year old winning contestant Kaiti Soultana writes about the experience.

By Kaiti Soultana

What impelled me to participate in Poetry by Heart? Like many of the other contestants, I wanted both to galvanize others and to be inspired myself. It seems that poets strive to enhance the minds of those reading and listening, and I find this so philanthropic. Though a cliché, it is true to say that although I won the competition, I would have won even if I had not gained first place; the experience was invaluable and truly irreplaceable.

What Poetry by Heart offered was an opportunity to deliver a poem aloud and consequently for me to retain it. What I think makes the spoken word superior to reading a poem silently is that delivering a poem aloud allows for both the poet’s and the speaker’s voices to truly be heard. Quite often you find that it is not only the words of the poem but also the sound of it that attracts us to it, even before fully understanding the message it is giving.  That is something I experienced when exploring the part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I chose to recite. As competitors, we were provided with an anthology of poems of two categories to choose from and recite: a pre-1914 and a post-1914 list. It was the work of that anonymous 14th century poet that aroused within me such delight, though amusingly I initially understood very little of what I was reading.

It was that yearning to learn, and to explore what would otherwise go unexplored, which I found so inviting about Sir Gawain. I took up the challenge to inspire others through this astonishing, demanding, and somewhat alien ‘old’ English language. The alliterative threads that bound the poem made it easier to immerse both myself and the audience in such an unfamiliar realm, and it was this, I believe, that made my recitation successful.

My choice of post-1914 poetry developed from a somewhat different quality that poetry as a medium triumphs in: the ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Elizabeth Bishop seemed to express such perplexed beauty in her poem The Fish, so much so that it established an abnormal yet completely natural and loving bond between myself as a reader and a mere fish.

I began preparing my recitations by acquiring as much basic contextual knowledge about both poem and author, attempting to understand what message each one was trying to convey, yet interpreting it personally and intimately. My progression in understanding each of my poems grew from a minimal surface reading to one where my own interpretation and ideas worked alongside that of the poet’s. I seemed to gain companionship with a person I had never met or talked with. I began to gain an insight into their minds, into the worlds they had constructed. It wasn’t just a poem by rote I had gained, but the appreciation and understanding of a poet’s imagination.

The competition itself seemed far more like a humble gathering of young literary enthusiasts. Through the stages – from school heats to county contests and finally the regional and national finals weekend – the rounds seemed more like a programme of complementary performances. They allowed for initial introductions to mature into lasting friendships – I have experienced the development of such friendships with people across the country thanks to Poetry by Heart.

Though enjoyable, I was unsuccessful in casting away the nerves I am often plagued with. However, it was participating in a competition that I sincerely valued and appreciated, that motivated and inspired me, and allowed me to at least control those nerves.

In addition to viewing others’ regional heats, Poetry by Heart’s organisers scheduled excursions for participants to the London Eye, the British Library and tours of the National Portrait Gallery, none of which I had been privileged to visit before. I was stimulated to explore a small part of London, an opportunity that was exciting, fun, and invaluable.

The weekend itself was nothing shy of extraordinary. It seems unanimous that what we had gained by offering ourselves as orators of the poems was more than just the memory of the poem itself. What I gained was far more remarkable; I discovered the importance of poetry to human beings, and how this importance has spanned generations. It continues to grow as a form of universal expression, and with great thanks to Poetry by Heart I have truly understood its often unacknowledged value.

Kaiti Soultana is 18 and studying A levels at Bilborough College, Nottingham.

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Image credits:  Courtesy of Poetry by Heart; do not reproduce without permission.

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Spring 2013 marks two significant anniversaries for Alexander Pope, perhaps the most representative and alien English poet of the 18th century. Pope is memorialized both for the 325th anniversary of his birth, on 21 May 1688, and for the 300th anniversary of two significant literary acts: one a publication, the other a proposal to publish.

On the 7 March 1713, Pope published one of his most important poems. Windsor Forest was published the same month as the signing of the multi-stage Treaty of Utrecht, with which, in part, the poem deals: “Hail, sacred Peace! hail long-expected days” (Windsor Forest, line 353). The redistribution of territories determined by that treaty created various, continuing friction points between Protestant Britain and its Catholic adversaries: France ceded vast North American territories to Great Britain leaving French Canada surrounded by English lands, while Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain and acquired the Falkland islands (Islas Malvinas). It was a period of global, territorial conflicts, but passions were inflamed by the Protestant/Catholic schism.

Later that same year, Pope made public, and sought subscriptions for, a proposal for the first major English translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey since that of Shakespeare’s contemporary George Chapman (1559–1634). Pope’s Homeric effort became one of the major cultural accomplishments of the period. In a letter of 4 October 1726, Voltaire praised Pope’s fingers, “which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an english coat”.

As a man, Pope himself has at least two claims on our attention, though his anniversary will undoubtedly rank lower in public attention than would that of many other poets of these Isles. A Google search on English poets by forename and surname lets us plot a rough graph of Internet popularity:

However, there are other digital measures of a poet’s popularity. Pope’s epigrammatic style and his rhyming couplets, which suffered critically at the hands of the Romantics and later generations, now proves to be remarkably popular among the choruses of Twitter, where there are a number of “Pope” persona:

— and endless Pope Tweets, quoting (or misquoting) lines from his verse. Pope’s epigrammatic couplets were crafted to place a succinct thought within a limited number of words:

One of the things that continues to intrigue about Pope, is his extraordinary confidence and ability to focus on his vision of what he should do and be in life. Two years before the date marked by this anniversary, Pope published one of his two great “epigrammatic essays” — An Essay on Criticism (first published anonymously, 15 May 1711). Pope was only 23, and the work does more than mark him out as a singular and singularly memorable essayist on the human condition. It presents us with the noteworthy instance of a young man, still at the beginning of his literary career, publicly admonishing and correcting the established critical community. It reminds me of the equally confident, if often less accessible, manifestoes of the Modernist movement.

For Pope was no social or cultural insider, but what might be thought of as a “corporeal and incorporeal outsider.” Pope was twice marginalized in his world. Marginalized once for his beliefs — as a Catholic, then barred from teaching, attending university, voting, or holding public office on pain of imprisonment. The anti-Catholic sentiment was aggravated by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), which led to a statute preventing Catholics from living within 10 miles (16 km) of either London or Westminster.

These constraints would have pinched especially hard on the ambitions of Pope’s essentially middle class family. They were prosperous enough, however, to be able to escape to the country, moving to a small estate in Binfield (or Bynfield), Berkshire, when Alexander was twelve. Binfield was only a dozen kilometres west of Great Windsor Park, though remains of the ancient royal hunting grounds of Windsor Forest undoubtedly “crown’d with tufted trees” (Windsor Forest, line 27) various plots between the two. On the verges of these forests, you could pretend to be anyone, and one’s beliefs could be recast in the poetic imagery of patriotism and Classical analogy we find in Windsor Forest.

Estates at Windsor, Berkshire — British Library, “The unveiling of Britain”. © The British Library Board Royal Ms. 18.D.III, f.32

Pope could never escape his second marginalization, however, for he literally carried it with him on his back. From the age of twelve, exactly at the time of the family move from London, Pope suffered from a form of tuberculosis that affected the bone, deforming his body, stunting his growth. Pope grew to a height of only 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m), and was left with a severe hunchback.

The disease received its formal medical description in Pope’s lifetime, though too late to help the poet. A decade before Pope’s death in 1744, a Liverpool surgeon, H. Park, wrote an epistolary volume in which characteristics and (painful) treatments of the disease were described: An Account of a new method of treating diseases of the joints of the knee and elbow, in a letter to Mr. Percival Pott. (London: J. Johnson, 1733). The recipient of the “letter”, the remarkable English surgeon Sir Percivall Pott (1714–1788) was one of the founders of orthopedy, and the first scientist to demonstrate that cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen. He published a volume on Some few general remarks on fractures and dislocations (London: Hawes, Clarke and Collins, 1768), providing the first clinical description of extrapulmonary tuberculosis (tuberculous spondylitis), the disease with which Pope suffered, subsequently known as Pott’s disease.

I recommend a re-reading of Windsor Forest with some sense of the twice-excluded author in mind. All good poems can be read in many ways, but one of the things this re-reading proposes is the struggle of an outsider to create a re-vision of the world that contains and excludes him.

Dr. Robert V. McNamee is the Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Electronic Enlightenment is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and is available exclusively from Oxford University Press. It is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world’s great historical “conversations”.

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Image credits: (1) Alexander Pope portrait. NYPL Digital Gallery. (2) Google searches for poets. Copyright Dr. Robert V. McNamee. Used with permission. (3) Screengrab from Twitter by Dr. Robert V. McNamee. (4) Screengrab from Twitter by Dr. Robert V. McNamee. (5) Estates at Windsor, Berkshire — British Library, “The unveiling of Britain.” © The British Library Board Royal Ms. 18.D.III, f.32. Used with permission. (6) From a mid-19th century text book. Out of copyright.

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By Pat Rogers

There’s never been a shortage of readers to love and admire Alexander Pope. But if you think you don’t, or wouldn’t, like his poetry, you’re in good company there too. Ever since his own day, detractors have stuck their oar in, some blasting the work and some determined to write off the writer.  A noted poet and anthologist, James Reeves, wrote an entire book in 1976 to assail Pope’s achievement and influence. But it has never succeeded; Pope, a combative as well as a marvellously skilled author, keeps coming back for more. He produced more first-rate poems than anyone else in the eighteenth century, as we might guess from his fame across Europe and his huge appeal in America before and after the Revolution.

In truth, much of the hostility he faced in his lifetime had to with fear of his scathing wit. “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me,” he wrote late in his career. The stark clarity with which he states the idea must have made quite a few contemporaries shuffle another step backwards.

It doesn’t take much more to enjoy Pope than a reasonably good ear and a feeling for language. To read his works carefully will give anyone a grounding in how lines sing, how to make words bend and let meanings fold into each other. It will spare you a whole module on the creative writing course. Sound and sense are delicately adjusted, rhyme and rhythm subtly integrated, wit and wisdom dispersed with the utmost economy.

The most single brilliant item is The Rape of the Lock, completed in 1714 when he was only twenty-five. On the surface this relates how a brutal upper-class twit attacks an airhead socialite. You can find the tale amusingly retold by Sophie Gee in her novel The Scandal of the Season (2007). Actually the ravishing of a beauty in this ravishingly beautiful poem amounts to cutting off just one of her curls, but the text constantly insists that a more serious violation has gone on.

Queen Anne, whose court is satirized in Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’.

The main trick is to build up this critique from a phrase, a verse, a couplet, a paragraph, and a canto, all serving as fractals which contain within themselves the central paradox announced in the first two lines: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things.” The contrasting terms here form what we call antithesis, borrowing an expression originally used in classical rhetoric. Pope extends antithesis to his grammar, his versification, his metaphors, and his narrative.

A single bit of wordplay encapsulates this process. It comes in the famous pun that describes the queen’s routine at Hampton Court, where she “sometimes counsel take[s] — and sometimes tea.” In the previous couplet, British statesmen plot the fall of “foreign tyrants,” but also of “nymphs at home.” Everything from the tiniest unit up to the overall shape of the work is designed to enforce the same balanced oppositions between the grand and the slight. And none of it ever ceases to be funny.

Pope’s supreme technique meant he could excel in almost every genre available to him. His powerful satire The Dunciad makes mincemeat of the vapid scribblers in Grub Street. You don’t have to know who they were to get most of the jokes. An Epistle to a Lady might have been written as a set text for modern feminists, so provocatively does it raise issues on the gender front for debate and appraisal. An Epistle to Bathurst provides a telling picture of the repercussions of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. While Pope doesn’t forget the investors who lost everything, he bothers less about perpetrators in the financial industry than about the hypocrisy of a corrupt crew in government and parliament whose regulatory touch was so light as to be invisible.

For a long time An Essay on Man was about the most cited treatise worldwide on morals and metaphysics, while An Essay on Criticism wittily expounds – well, criticism. Pope’s version of Homer remains among the few translations of a masterpiece to constitute a major work in its own right when converted to the host language. He also wrote superb prose, for example in his good humoured but damning retorts to the scandalous publisher Edmund Curll.

In case you thought Pope sounds a bit remote, you might recall when you last heard someone use phrases like these: “To err is human, to forgive divine” ; “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” ; “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” ; “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” ; “A little learning is a dangerous thing” ; “Damn with faint praise.” We owe them all to one man. These and many more have entered the stock of colloquial language, an idiom Pope learnt to utilize in sparkling poems that explore the full range of the human comedy.

Pat Rogers, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, editor of The Major Works of Alexander Pope for the Oxford World’s Classics, and author of works on Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, and Austen among others.

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 on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Queen Anne by John Smith (1652–1742) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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In its December press release, the European Commission agreed to reopen the debate on copyright. A dialogue will be launched to tackle several major issues with the current copyright framework, including the topic ‘user-generated content’. The outcome of this open discussion should guide the Commission in its mission to modernize the European copyright framework and adapt it to the digital economy. ‘User-generated content’ is a major bone of contention in the copyright debate. It is also a confusing concept in that it fails to distinguish original content from derivative works, which is the actual point of disagreement between rights holders, providers of online services and their users. Derivative works are based on one or more pre-existing copyright protected works and the right to create them is exclusively reserved to their original creators. The standard practice for rights holders is to license such rights on an individual basis, so as to control the adaptation of their work and to generate income from the commercialization of derivatives. This classic licensing model has arguably lost some of its relevance in the internet age, whereas copyright is at best misunderstood if not simply ignored by most users.

Nowadays everyone has easy access to user-generated content. Recent advances in technology have reduced the costs of creating and sharing derivative works, and the mass popularity of social media such as YouTube, Facebook or Tumblr has prompted the emergence of new social and cultural behaviours, where people are now empowered to become active creators. This phenomenon, called the ‘read/write culture’ by Lawrence Lessig but often referred to as the ‘remix culture’, has radically transformed our creative landscape and favoured the rapid development of social media, which provide the backbone for instantaneous content distribution. Over a few years these companies have also built vibrant audiences eager to consume, create and share, and they have found innovative ways to serve these audiences and to fuel a new type of creativity.

The fast development of social media companies in Europe has also been enabled in part by the ‘hosting’ provision of the e-Commerce Directive, which is loosely based on similar provisions in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and analogously limits the liability of internet service providers for hosting infringing content, provided they swiftly remove that content as soon as they become aware of it, usually upon a rights holder’s notification. Even if it is true that this limitation of liability is indispensable for ISPs, it places the monitoring burden on the rights holders, since the directive clearly states that there is no obligation on ISPs to monitor for infringing content. This is the apple of discord for them, as they strongly disagree with the sheer principle of monitoring their own content. This situation affects in turn social media users who are immersed in the remix culture. That culture does not recognize the complexities of copyright law: for example, crediting the original author is deemed sufficient when a derivative work is created for non-commercial purposes, although this is clearly not sufficient from a legal point of view, absent any fair use defences. Users are often left confused about how and why the content they intend to share is infringing on someone else’s copyright.

It is clear that user-generated content is here to stay. Finding inspiration in the works of others and building upon it has become a socially—if not legally—endorsed process of self-expression and this fact is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, when 72 hours of video are uploaded on to YouTube every minute. One can only welcome the decision of the European Commission to prioritize this issue and hope that its cultural and social dimensions won’t be underestimated. It is in the interest of all stakeholders to closely collaborate, so as to find a solution that works for everyone. Rights holders might want to become more open to the concept of user-generated content and show more flexibility towards the use of their rights. ISPs and social media must act responsibly and go beyond the minimal requirements in limiting their liability in case of copyright infringement. Focus should be put on educating their users, so that they understand basic copyright concepts and feel more secure when sharing content online. Finally, the European Commission should supervise the debate as transparently as possible without neglecting its social and cultural implications. To that extent, the involvement of the digital agenda team and of the Culture Directorate is a sign that advancing towards a balanced copyright framework has been understood as a concerted effort and this acknowledgement alone should be praised.

A version of this article originally appeared as an editorial in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice.

Grégoire Marino is a IP & IT enthusiast who likes to look at copyright and patent issues from a social and public policy perspective. He currently works as a rights and privacy specialist for a leading social sound platform and serves as editorial board member of OUP’s Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice. Feel free to ask him anything here.

Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to intellectual property law and practice. Published monthly, coverage includes the full range of substantive IP topics, practice-related matters such as litigation, enforcement, drafting and transactions, plus relevant aspects of related subjects such as competition and world trade law. Read the JIPLP blog.

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Image credit: Cute woman with earphones and white laptop in the park. Photo by Osuleo, iStockphoto.

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Historically, law was not generally considered an important part of gerontological science. As noted by Doron & Hofman in 2005, the law was, at best, considered part of gerontology in that it played a part in the shaping of public policy towards the older population, or was incidental to ethical discussions connected with old age. At worst, gerontology has simply ignored those aspects of the law connected with the old, and kept lawyers out of its province.

Yet in recent years there have been winds of change. Lawyers and gerontologist have started to work together and have slowly but surely developed what is becoming  known as “Jurisprudential Gerontology” (or “Geriatric Jurisprudence“): a true inter, multi, and trans-disciplinary project that looks into the fascinating interactions between law, society, and aging, in all its different aspects. These changes have become much more relevant as the UN has started to engage in the process to establish a new convention for the rights of older persons.

As part of this attempt to “connect” law, human rights, and gerontology, I have recently conducted a study on the European Court of Justice. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is considered by many to be the most important judicial institution of the European Union today. Nevertheless, despite the potential importance and relevance of the ECJ rulings to the lives and rights of older Europeans, no research has attempted to analyze or study the ECJ rulings in a gerontological context.

Using a mixed, quantitative method (measuring and testing through statistical tools) and qualitative method (understanding the content through textual analysis), a sample of ECJ cases involving older persons were collected and descriptively analyzed. In establishing the sample, an internet-based computerized keyword search was conducted within the ECJ official website. The preliminary search identified 1,325 cases, out of which 123 “direct cases” were found (i.e. cases that included issues directly relevant to rights of older persons).

Analyzing these results found that the 123 cases were spread throughout the period of 1994 to 2009 in the following way:

Number of cases per year

As seen above, there is no clear pattern of either increase of decrease in the number of cases throughout the years, and on average, in most of the time period, each year between 5–10 cases were filed. This equals to 1%-2% of the general annual new case load of the ECJ.

From a legal issue perspective, almost half the cases (58/47.2%) were categorized by the ECJ as “Social Policy” issues, while the two other major legal issues were Free Movement of Persons (29/23.6%) and Social Security for Migrant Workers (26/21.1%). Only very few elder rights cases involved issues like Competition (3 cases), or Principles of Community Law (1 case). Attempting to move beyond the ECJ’s own categorization, and analyzing the actual legal issues, it was found that the vast majority of the cases involved issues of pensions: either state funded pensions (61/49.6%) or employer-based occupational pensions (36/29.3%). The rest of the cases were mostly age discrimination, mandatory retirement, or attendance/home care (all of them 6 cases each).

In conclusion, it could be said on the one hand that the number of elder rights cases brought before the ECJ is very low, and their overall quantitative weight is minor at best.  Yet on the other hand, within these limited numbers of cases and narrow scope of legal decisions, the outcomes are encouraging. In the majority of the cases the court rules in favor of the elderly. Overall then, the findings of this study suggest that the ECJ can potentially serve as an important protector of rights of older Europeans, if, and to the extent that, these cases reach its jurisdiction.

Prof. Israel (Issi) Doron is the Head of the Department of Gerontology at the University of Haifa, Israel, and the Past President of the Israeli Gerontological Society. His research focuses on the relationships between law, aging and human rights, with specific interest in international human rights of older persons. His paper ‘Older Europeans and the European Courts of Justice’ appears in the journal Age and Ageing and can be read in full and for free for a limited time.

Age and Ageing is an international journal publishing refereed original articles and commissioned reviews on geriatric medicine and gerontology. Its range includes research on ageing and clinical, epidemiological, and psychological aspects of later life.

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Image credit: Symbol of law and justice in the empty courtroom, law and justice concept. Photo by VladimirCetinski, iStockphoto.

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The failures of leadership… the destructive power of beauty… the quest for fame… the plight of women… the brutality of war… Such themes have endured for over 2,700 years in Homer’s classic The Iliad — from the flight of Helen and Paris, to the fury of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to the fight between Hector and Achilles. We sat down with Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity, the writer of the introduction and translator respectively, to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad.

How did the Ancient Greek performance tradition inform the text of The Iliad?

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What can you tell us about the writer of The Iliad?

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How is the anger of Achilles portrayed in the poem?

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How is war, violence, and death portrayed in the poem?

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Describe the translation process.

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Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Durham University. She has written extensively on Homer.

Anthony Verity taught Classics in several schools in England, his last job being Master of Dulwich College. He has translated Theocritus and Pindar for Oxford World’s Classics, his OWC edition of The Illiad was published in September, and he is currently working on a version of Homer’s Odyssey. Read his previous blog post: “Who needs another translation of Homer’s Iliad?”

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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The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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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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Image credit: Thinker, created by Auguste Rodin at the end of the 18 century. San Francisco Legion of Honor. © Rafael Ramirez Lee via iStockphoto.

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Sons are eating their mothers’ brains. Brothers are eating each other’s brains, and the baby is eating the brain of the pet cat. It has finally happened. The zombie apocalypse is here. It’s time to put your survival instinct to the test. Tie your hair back, do some stretches, pick up your bloody machete, and join us as we go over the front-line into zombie-occupied territory, armed only with some of Oxford University Press’s finest online products and a ferocious temper. As May is International Zombie Awareness Month, I offer my bloodied hand to guide you through the five things you need to know to survive a zombie apocalypse. Are you ready? Let’s go!

1. Know your enemy

The term ‘zombie’ has seeped into our lexicon and bled into multiple areas of popular culture. For example, a ‘zombie’ can refer to a drink — a cocktail consisting of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice. Alternatively, it could refer to a computer controlled by another person without the owner’s knowledge, or a ‘zombie’ could be a pejorative term for a Canadian soldier conscripted during the Second World War for service in Canada. However, the original meaning of the term ‘zombie’ came from nineteenth century West Africa and means “a corpse said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions.” This is the entity that you have to fear in order to survive the zombie apocalypse.

According to The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, a zombie is “the living dead, a living creature indistinguishable in its physical constitution and in terms of its outward appearance and behaviour from a normal human being, but in whom the light of consciousness was completely absent.”

Therefore, in order to distinguish between the living and the living dead, you need to be able to spot the sentient from the senseless. Use Oxford Dictionaries to identify symptoms: those with a shuffling, lumbering, Neanderthal gait, faintly lugubrious facial expressions, and letting out guttural roars are most likely zombies. Also, if they appear soulless and are hell-bent on devouring your brain, it’s best to run as fast as you can…

2. Prepare your cardio

You now know what these harbingers of death look like but how can you get away from them if you can’t run? So long as you stay fit and exercise as much as you can during the zombie apocalypse, you will have a head-start on the creatures known as the walking dead. Actually, the clue is in the name. They’re called the walking dead for a reason. They can’t jog and they certainly can’t sprint, so provided you stretch before you attempt to replicate Mo Farah or Paula Radcliffe, you should be able to out-run these brain-thirsty zombies.

However, as Chris Cooper explains in Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat, there are other, less honest ways of improving your running ability. It may be unnatural, and cause you to exceed the normal limits of human endurance, but performance-enhancing drugs may help you out run your supernatural enemy. However, you’ll need more than running shoes to keep you safe…

3. Plan your resources

It may have sounded foolish to your neighbours but who’s laughing at your ‘Zombie Apocalypse Emergency Supplies’ now? Certainly not Martin, your overly friendly neighbour: he’s a re-animated zombie and desperately trying to devour Marjorie, the cat-lady next door. Failure to prepare is not an option. Using The Oxford Companion to Food as your guide, you’ve established what foods are the longest-lasting. Now equipped with a lifetime supply of canned meats, you barricade yourself in a DIY fort comprised of SPAM and canned tuna. Fun fact about SPAM: George A. Hormel, the inventor of tinned pork and the reason for its introduction to the food market in 1937, described the shelf-life of SPAM as ‘indefinite’. As you regard the desiccated daemons closing in around you, this might be the only time in your life you would trade places with a can of SPAM for its ‘indefinite’ shelf-life.

If the zombie attack becomes too much for you and all you want to do is sit in a corner, weeping silently and trembling with fear, then perhaps The Oxford Companion to Beer could help you through the dark times.

4. Pick your Weaponry

Don’t deny it; you’ve seen the films. The only way to kill a zombie is to remove the head or destroy the brain. It’s a lesson as old as time (it isn’t). If you’re thinking of a machine gun or a shotgun right now then you’re lucky to still be alive. Not only would the noise ring out like a dinner bell to the zombies, but ammunition would quickly run out and you’d be left with no means of self-protection. Your best bet is a machete, or anything that you can wield around. Reading the section entitled ‘Hand-to-Hand Weapons’ in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology is an excellent way to understand how to build your arsenal. I’m not sure if you can buy a samurai sword in your local newsagents, but it would be worth a try.

5. Write about your experience

‘Combat Gnosticism’ was a term coined by First World War academic James Campbell who advocated that ‘legitimate war literature’ is literature produced exclusively by combat experience; that soldiers have a kind of ‘gnosis’, a secret knowledge that makes writers such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon the exemplars of First World War literature. You, yes YOU, could be the Wilfred Owen of the zombie apocalypse. All you need is a working laptop and you could become the voice of a generation of half-dead souls, documenting your experiences on the front-line. If your very own ‘Combat Gnosticism’ isn’t inspiration enough, Timothy Kendall’s Poetry of the First World War is due to publish October 2013. Let’s just hope the zombies don’t attack until then!

Congratulations brave soldier, you’ve done it! Fearlessly fighting your ferocious foe, you’ve stumbled out of the zombie apocalypse with all your limbs attached. We look forward to guiding you through the next ‘Zomb-pocalypse’!

Daniel Parker is a Publicity Assistant for Oxford University Press and fully prepared to fight off those seeking to eat his brains. You can find more about the Oxford resources mentioned in this article in Oxford Reference, Oxford Index, ODNB, Who’s Who, and Oxford Dictionaries.

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Image credits: (1) Haiti Zombie. Work of art by Jean-noël Lafargue. Free Art License via Wikimedia Commons (2) Blue Eyed Zombie. Photo by Josh Jensen. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons

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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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Image credit: young baseball player hitting the ball. © Tomwang112 via iStockphoto.

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How common is insomnia in older adults, and what are the repercussions of chronic sleep problems?

Insomnia is very common among older adults, and is associated with adverse health outcomes, including cognitive and functional decline. It has been estimated that approximately 40-70% of older adults age 65 and older experience sleep problems, with about 20% experiencing severe sleep problems. Insomnia has multiple causes, but chronic health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and osteoarthritis are among the most common health problems associated with poor sleep. Another common cause of insomnia is depression. Furthermore, insomnia in older adults may exacerbate the severity of pre-existing health conditions, perhaps leading to costly health service use.

Who were your participants in this study?

The sample of our study consisted of middle-aged and older adults aged 50 years or older who participated in the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study. Individuals in our sample were assessed for insomnia symptoms in 2006, and their health service utilization was assessed two years later. At baseline, 55% of participants were women, 88% were non-Hispanic white, 59% had a diagnosis of hypertension, 38% had osteoarthritis, and 21 percent had diabetes. Twenty-four percent reported one insomnia symptom, and 18% reported two or more insomnia symptoms at baseline.

According to your research, what is the link between insomnia and the use of health care services in older adults?

We found that individuals reporting one insomnia symptom, as well as two or more insomnia symptoms at baseline, were more likely to use a number of health services two years later compared to those reporting no insomnia symptoms. This health service utilization included hospitalization, use of home healthcare services, and use of a nursing home. Surprisingly, we found this association was still statistically significant for hospitalization and use of any of the three health services after accounting for a number of common health conditions, and depression.

Image courtesy of the authors.

What do your results suggest?

Our results suggest that insomnia is associated with greater use of costly health services, and that perhaps preventing, or at least clinically addressing insomnia symptoms, might minimize healthcare costs for middle-aged and older adults. Our results also suggest that the assessment and recognition of insomnia by clinicians might help identify individuals at greater risk of hospitalization and other costly services. Medical professionals might be able to target and provide more intensive preventive care to individuals reporting insomnia symptoms. Our study found that if the association between the experience of insomnia symptoms and health service use were in fact causal, we would expect to see a six to fourteen percent decrease in health service use. It should be noted that our findings are based on self-reported insomnia symptoms and health service utilization, which is subject to reporting and recall bias.  Furthermore, we only examined any use of health services, and we did not assess the duration and frequency of use. Our findings need to be confirmed in other population-based studies of older adults, and more research is needed to examine this association using objective measures of sleep quality and measures that capture the intensity of health service use.

What are some ways to prevent and treat insomnia?

Very often, simple sleep hygiene measures such as reducing environmental stimuli at night, establishing bedtime routines, or avoiding day-time naps would be sufficient to address insomnia. Adequately addressing and managing chronic health conditions can also prevent the development of insomnia. If these measures do not improve sleep, behavioral therapy can be effective. In some cases, sleep medications may be used on a short-term basis. However, the use of sleep medications in older adults, if taken for a longer period of time, has been shown to lead to numerous adverse health outcomes, such as falls, hip fractures, and cognitive and functional impairment.

Mr. Christopher Kaufmann is a doctoral student in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research interests are in the utilization of health services related to psychiatric disorders, as well as the use of prescription medications among older adults. Dr. Adam Spira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He studies the link between sleep disturbance and both cognitive and functional decline in older people. Together they are the authors of “Insomnia and Health Services Utilization in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Results From the Health and Retirement Study” in The Journals of Gerontology Series A, which is available to read for free for a limited time.

The Journals of Gerontology were the first journals on aging published in the United States. The tradition of excellence in these peer-reviewed scientific journals, established in 1946, continues today. The Journals of Gerontology, Series A publishes within its covers the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences and the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

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Over millions of years, evolution by natural selection has produced adaptations in humans: biological and psychological traits that improved human survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. For example, ripe fruit was an infrequent but calorically rich part of the human ancestral diet. We therefore have a sweet tooth that rewards us when we eat ripe fruit.

But evolution works slowly and gradually, over many generations. Sometimes, the environment changes so quickly that our adaptations can’t evolve quickly enough in response to these changes. This is called an “adaptive mismatch.” Today, modern society presents us with many sweet-tasting goodies, like candy, that aren’t healthy for us. And yet, we continue to crave these unhealthy treats because they “parasitize” our sweet preference—an adaption that was designed to reward ripe fruit-eating.

But, what do adaptive mismatches have to do with pornography? A lot.

Heterosexual men become sexually aroused from seeing naked, fertile women. This sexual arousal is an adaptation that motivates men to prepare for the possibility of sex.

Like candy, pornography creates an adaptive mismatch. For a moment, try to see the world not from “human eyes” but from the eyes of an animal biologist. You might think that men’s enjoyment of pornography is bizarre: men are sexually aroused by the sight of ink that’s splattered on magazine pages, or computer pixels that display light. Nobody would argue that men evolved to have sex with magazines or computers. Adaptive mismatch? Quite.

Pornography is a formidable industry, with men as the primary consumers. And because pornography exploits slow-to-change adaptations, investigating men’s preferences in pornography can inform us about those adaptations.

A previous study documented that pornography depicting two men having sex with one woman (MMF) was more prevalent than pornography depicting two women having sex with one man (FFM). However, a different study documented that men report viewing FFM pornography preferentially over MMF pornography. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we recently published in Behavioral Ecology a paper documenting that adult DVDs containing more depictions of MMF on the DVD cover achieve better sales rankings than DVDs containing more depictions of FFM. Our results indicate two important things about men’s sexual psychology: (1) The type of pornography men say they view may differ from what they actually view, and (2) men’s greater sexual arousal from viewing MMF pornography may be a consequence of another adaptive mismatch: adaptations to sperm competition.

Sperm competition occurs when a woman has sex with two or more men within a sufficiently brief period of time, and the different men’s sperm compete to fertilize the ova. Men have evolved adaptations to increase their chances of success in sperm competition. Some adaptations to sperm competition involve increasing sexual arousal. For example, when men estimate a greater likelihood that their romantic partner recently had sex with another man, they ejaculate more sperm the next time they have sex with her, report greater interest in having sex with her, and sometimes, sexually coerce her.

To tie this all together, men’s preference for MMF pornography is evidence of adaptations to sperm competition. Men who see MMF scenes are “witnessing” sperm competition unfold between the two men in that scene. And as sperm competition theory predicts, men have adaptations that cause them to become sexually aroused by the risk of sperm competition, motivating them to purchase adult DVDs that contain depictions of it.

Sperm competition theory may help solve other puzzles about male sexuality. Notably, it may inform the question of why men become jealous—yet simultaneously, sexually aroused—by the thought of their romantic partner having sex with another man.

Michael N. Pham is a graduate student in evolutionary psychology at Oakland University. William F. McKibbin is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan—Flint. Todd K. Shackelford is chair and professor of psychology at Oakland University. They are the co-authors of the paper ‘Human sperm competition in postindustrial ecologies: sperm competition cues predict adult DVD sales’, published in the journal Behavioural Ecology.

Bringing together significant work on all aspects of the subject, Behavioral Ecology is broad-based and covers both empirical and theoretical approaches. Studies on the whole range of behaving organisms, including plants, invertebrates, vertebrates, and humans, are welcomed.

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Image credit: Spermatozoons, floating to ovule. By frentusha, via iStockphoto.

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By Kirsty Doole

In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Short Story Month by selecting some of favourite story collections. We have everything here from Gaskell to Cervantes, Fitzgerald to Kafka. But have we missed your favourite? Let us know.

Exemplary Stories by Miguel de Cervantes

While Cervantes is best known for Don Quixote, he also wrote stories, which were actually much more popular in his day than the larger work. The Exemplary Stories range from the picaresque to the satirical, and skilfully draw on colloquial language and farce to create a tension between the everyday and the literary. While Cervantes wants his readers to reach their own moral conclusions, he also paints vivid pictures of the coincidental and the incredible, such as a young nobleman undergoing a change of identity at the behest of a gipsy girl, and two young boys indulging in a life of crime. There are also talking dogs philosophizing in a ward full of syphilitics… and who doesn’t want to read that?

Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone knows that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (especially after the release of Baz Luhrmann’s film) but he was also a short story writer. Tales of the Jazz Age was his second short story collection, and it contains some of the best examples of his talent as a writer of short fiction. These stories demonstrate the same originality and inventive range as his great novels, as he chronicles the hedonistic 1920s. This collection contains two of his greatest stories, ‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’.

Cousin Phillis and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell has long been one of the most popular of Victorian novelists, yet in her lifetime her shorter fictions were just as admired as North and South or Wives and Daughters. This edition’s title story, Cousin Phillis, is a lyrical depiction of a vanishing way of life and a girl’s disappointment in love. The other five stories were all written during the 1850s for Dickens’s periodical Household Words. They range from a quietly original tale of urban poverty and a fallen woman in ‘Lizzie Leigh’ to an historical tale of a great family in ‘Morton Hall’; echoes of the French Revolution, the bleakness of winter in Westmorland, and a tragic secret are brought vividly to life.

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, these stories approach human experience at a tangent: a singing mouse, an ape, an inquisitive dog, and a paranoid burrowing creature are among the protagonists, as well as the professional starvation artist. A patient seems to be dying from a metaphysical wound; the war-horse of Alexander the Great steps aside from history and adopts a quiet profession as a lawyer. Fictional meditations on art and artists, and a series of aphorisms that come close to expressing Kafka’s philosophy of life, further explore themes that recur in his major novels.

A portrait of Katherine Mansfield in 1918, by Anne Estelle Rice [public domain]

Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Virginia Woolf was a keen admirer of Katherine Mansfield’s work, saying it was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”. Other admirers included Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Our edition of her Selected Stories covers the full range of Mansfield’s fiction, from her early satirical stories to the nuanced comedy of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and the macabre and ominous ‘A Married Man’s Story’. Ranging between Europe and her native New Zealand, disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield’s disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism.

The Complete Short Stories by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was already famous as a wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the late 1880s. The stories are full to the brim with Wilde’s originality, literary skill, and sophistication. They include poignant fairy-tales such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’, and the extravagant comedy and social observation of ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’. They also encompass the daring narrative experiments of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde’s fictional investigation into the identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ‘Poems in Prose’, based on the Gospels.

French Decadent Tales

While ‘Decadence’ was a movement that swept most of Europe, its epicentre was Paris.  On the eve of Freud’s early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This selection of tales includes well-known writers such as those mentioned above, as well as lesser known figures such as Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, and the Belgian Georges Rodenbach.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

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 on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (1918). By Anne Estelle Rice [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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When perusing the internet for innovations in the oral history discipline, I generally seek out new voices, intuitive platforms and streamless presentations. Embarrassingly, I rarely consider the basics of oral history collection and production, the act of sharing someone’s story with a wider audience. That is one of several reasons I so enjoyed Brad Rakerd’s contribution to Oral History Review issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss.” In his piece, Rakerd discusses the obstacles people with hearing loss or other limitations on speech understanding face when engaging with oral history, and offers several recommendations to allow scholars to make their material more accessible. Mad with the power of the OUPblog post, I contacted Rakerd to prod him for more information.

What is your relationship with Oral History in the Digital Age?

I am one of the developers and editors of the Oral History in the Digital Age website, and have contributed two tutorials on speech audio to its essay collection. I also worked on the IMLS Field Work Survey and, of course, I wrote my article for the Oral History Review as an outgrowth of the OHDA project. I have very high regard for the work that oral historians do and it has been a great pleasure to be able to contribute in these ways.

And how did you become interested in hearing loss?

I am trained as a speech and hearing scientist, and when I conducted my dissertation research and other early career studies of speech perception, I worked exclusively with listeners who had normal hearing. It was only later, after I joined my current department — the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State — that I had the opportunity to learn about hearing loss and its consequences. I did so through conversations with my very supportive audiology colleagues, and later, through a series of research collaborations with them as well.

When did you first think about your work in relation to oral history?

I first learned about oral histories when a former student of mine introduced me to the MATRIX folks here at Michigan State. It was our discussions about best practices for digitizing oral history collections and improving the audio quality of future oral history recordings that ultimately led to my participation in the OHDA project. Those discussions also prompted my thinking about ways to make oral histories more accessible to persons who have hearing loss.

Which lead to your article in the current issue of the Oral History Review?

Yes. Something about oral histories that has stood out to me from the start is that they must be listened to at great length and with great care if they are to be fully appreciated. Listening in this way can be a challenge for anyone. But the challenge can become especially great if the listener has a hearing loss or other limitation on speech understanding. Therefore, the purpose of my article is to recommend some steps that oral historians can take to ease some of this added difficulty.

There are recommendations for capturing and delivering oral history recordings in ways that can make the audio more accessible to anyone who has a hearing loss and who may use either hearing aids or cochlear implants. And there are recommendations for using video and other technologies to supplement the audio in ways that should make it easier to understand. One example of the latter is to make a video of an interviewee available for viewing in synchrony with the audio so that a listener can have access to lip reading cues. Another example is to allow the pace of an oral history presentation to be adjustable so that it can match the information processing preference of an individual listener.

Between this conversation and your article, you’ve provided a lot for us to mull over. Anything else you would like people to consider when working with oral histories?

There is one point about speech that I would make to everyone who works with oral histories, one that applies equally to those of us that work with speech in the lab: It is almost guaranteed that you are a poor judge of the degree of challenge that your own speech recordings will present to first-time listeners. This is true because you have heard those recordings many times over and, in the process, have become deeply knowledgeable about their content and about the speaking characteristics of your interviewee(s). As a consequence, the speech will almost certainly sound more intelligible to you than it does to anyone else. You might therefore think about working out a “buddy system” with some fellow oral historians, one where you serve as a fresh listener and critic regarding the challenges posed by their recordings, and they do the same for yours.

While Brad’s article focuses on making oral history more accessible to those with hearing loss or other speech comprehension obstacles, this last response demonstrates how working through seemingly “niche” issues can actually benefit the practice as a whole. Now, who needs a buddy?

Brad Rakerd is a professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State University. His speech research focuses on perceptual processing issues, often as they relate to hearing loss. His article “On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss” in the latest issue of Oral History Review is available to read for free for a limited time.

Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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A diagnosis of heart failure can be overwhelming. Here are ten things you can learn to cope with this condition.

(1) Learn how the heart and heart failure works. This series of informative animations can take you on a journey through heart failure and its management.

(2) Learn to navigate an enormous amount of information. You’ll receive advice from cardiologists, nurses, and GPs — not to mention family, friends, and everyone who wants to help.

(3) Learn about the causes, symptoms, and developmentof heart failure.

(4) Learn the warning signs of heart failure, their level of severity, and who to consult and when.

(5) Learn to adjust your lifestyle to get the most out of life when you have heart failure. This condition will have an impact on every aspect of your life including travel, work, and relationships.

(6) Learn to work with your doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. They help patients understand what is wrong: take patients through their medicines, introduce them to the people they need to work with, and describe heart failure clinics. Ask for tools, such as medicine charts or a symptoms and events diary, to help you stay oragnized.

(7) Learn your treatment options and what to ask your doctor. You’ll feel more reassured.

(8) Learn how this will affect your caretakers, who face many problems including depression. They need as much support as you.

(9) Learn how other patients overcome their difficulties. You can gain knowledge from their experiences.

(10) Learn to network with other people who have heart failure. Meeting fellow sufferers can help you feel less alone and more able to cope.

Professor Kenneth Dickstein is the creator and full-time enthusiast of the patient centred website Heart Failure Matters! Designed to meet a global educational need by helping patients understand their complex medical condition, it is available in in English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Russian (with the translation to Arabic happening this year).

The European Journal of Heart Failure, edited by Professor Dirk van Veldhuisen, is the International Journal of the European Society of Cardiology dedicated to the advancement of knowledge in the field of heart failure.

Oxford University Press is supporting Heart Failure Awareness Day with resources from across the press. Read our previous blog posts: “The five big lifestyle changes for heart health” ; “Why do we have a Heart Failure Awareness Day?” ; “Seven things you never knew about heart failure” ; and “More malignant than cancer?”

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When did you first read Jekyll & Hyde?
Well, being Scottish I was brought up with an innate respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, but really fell in love with his books when I was about 17; Kidnapped and Catriona were my first reads. I was becoming really attracted to the romantic and gothic novels — The Mysteries of Udolpho for example — and so turned to Jekyll and Hyde feeling pretty confident of what to expect. It left me shocked. Being a novella it has the ability to really absorb you but with an economy of style and a necessity to get to the essence of the action that leaves you feeling slightly stunned. You are thoroughly immersed in the world and then spat out feeling dazed and, without sounding too melodramatic, grief-struck. I went straight back to the start and read it all again, desperate to re-visit the people and places, and seek to understand more of the hows and whys of Jekyll’s downfall.

Do you think gothic fiction translates naturally to stage adaptations?
There are definitely elements of gothic writing which lend themselves to a theatrical context; strong characterisations and the hugely atmospheric settings for a start. There is always a latent sense of danger too, whether that is danger from an outside source, or an inner conflict within our hero or heroine leading them into nail-biting situations. The fact that Jekyll and Hyde is a gripping thriller, full of suspense, certainly helps to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Do you think it is possible to be completely good or evil? Is it as simple as Jekyll is the hero and Hyde is the villain?
No — is the simple answer! Stevenson puts man’s evil nature centre stage (excuse the pun) and not only that, he makes it flesh; gives that evil a face, a name, and even feelings. It is Hyde who weeps in fear of the gallows in his last few days, Poole the butler even feels pity, so is Stevenson asking us to feel pity for a murderer and abuser? It is a complex interpretation of the baser elements of man’s character — shocking even now. In making Jekyll such a flawed hero, Stevenson forces the reader to question the pillars of society. The letters after Jekyll’s name signal him as a man of the highest achievement and learning in British society and if those at the top can court their evil nature, encourage it, and let it loose on society, then whom can we trust? Stevenson digs deep into the most pressing fears of Victorian Britain and strips it of the facade of gentility. In many ways Jekyll is the villain for giving Hyde life and then shielding his deeds, Hyde is just being Hyde.

What do you think is Stevenson’s conclusion on the concept of good and evil?
Well I reckon Stevenson was a canny Scot and knew that a book too overtly controversial would end up banned and he wanted a bestseller. Of course there is the moral at the end, that man trying to play God and dabbling with evil can only lead to doom and great unhappiness. But he raises so many questions within the book that it is impossible to suggest where his sympathies lay. It would take a thesis to break down these arguments fully but I would tentatively suggest that Stevenson was trying to raise the lid on repressed feelings in a society where people cannot be self-expressed leading to internalisation, festering desires, and therefore greater moral depravity. Early on in Jekyll’s confession he states that his desire to be respected amongst his peers led him to hide his true nature; in essence and quite by accident he became innately a liar and a fraud in all his relations. Stevenson lays the blame at the feet of a society rigid in its conformity. I think it’s a call for change and a call to re-evaluate the nature of man and desire.

What are your thoughts on the physical representation of Hyde written by Stevenson, and how will it be portrayed in your adaptation?
Well, it is a tricky one as there have been so many interpretations of the story over the years. Particularly successful are the film adaptations as the outward transformation is a make-up artist’s and designer’s dream. But I think the challenge in production is to capture the inner essence of Hyde. Stevenson mentions physical traits such as ‘troglodytic’ and ‘deformed’ — although no-one can say quite what the physical deformity is — but what is more important to Stevenson is the feeling Hyde evokes in people. It is almost as if buried deep in our human nature we can sense evil, like a dog can smell fear. Also, Hyde walks the streets of London, he takes hansom-cabs, goes to the bank. (In today’s banking establishments one could argue he would fit right in!) The point is he is not so physically repugnant that he can’t function on a day-to day basis. Utterson summarises that it is the ‘radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent’ — so not too much of a challenge for the actor!

The novel is very descriptive of the Victorian era. How is this incorporated in your adaptation?
It is a brave picture of London that Stevenson paints: brave in that it is very unflattering. It is an isolated, overcrowded, seedy heart of the Empire; the great and the good living cheek-by-jowl with the lowest of the low. It is a dangerous London where a young man can lose himself in the dead of night; absently wandering abandoned streets. It is also a London that is a playground for Hyde to act out all his debased, violent impulses and as Jekyll describes, ‘Pleasures which…soon began to turn towards the monstrous’. So it is that dangerous London, a London that undercuts the Victorian image of middle-class pleasantry that I want to evoke. In a way London becomes a metaphor for Jekyll’s problem, how he wants to appear, and how he really is.

Creation Theatre’s new production of Jekyll and Hyde will be held in Blackwell’s Bookshop from 8 June-6 July 2013.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales is edited by Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London. Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence.

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: Official poster for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ provided by Creation Theatre.

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By Sebastian Amyes

 
Bacteria have achieved many firsts; they were the first cellular life-forms on the planet, they are the primary biomass on the planet; they are the most prevalent cell type in and on the human body outnumbering our own cells; they are responsible for more human deaths than any other infectious agents; and, in some parts of the world, they are the premier cause of all deaths. How did these small, single-cell organisms, that are invisible to the naked eye become so successful? Essentially this has been through rapid evolution leading to adaptability. All living organisms evolve. The speed at which they can do this is dependent on the generation time; for humans this is about 25 years whereas for bacteria it is often measured in minutes, sometimes as little as 20 minutes. It is believed that 99% of the species that have lived on the planet are now extinct; this is often because their generation time was too long for the necessary evolutionary adjustments needed to survive changes in their environment. Every year yet more species of animals and plants become extinct because they have been too specialised to adapt.

The rapid division of bacteria means that they can adapt overnight to changes in their surroundings. A prime example has been the development of antibiotic resistance in clinical bacteria. It has often been reported that the US Surgeon General indicated in the 1960s that the discovery, first of penicillin, and then of the rest of antibiotics heralded the end of clinical bacterial infections. It is now common knowledge that such a view was fatally flawed. Simple mutations in key genes during cell division provided the bacteria with a means of escaping the action of the antibiotic (resistance). Once learned and part of the bacterial DNA, these genes could then be passed on to other bacteria by the process known as conjugation (bacterial sex) so that these new bacteria benefited from the resistance “learnt” in earlier bacteria. Seventy years ago, almost all clinical bacteria were sensitive to all antibiotics; now many bacteria are resistant to some, some bacteria are resistant to most, and a few bacteria are resistant to all antibiotics. Within one human lifetime, clinical bacteria have evolved the means of overcoming all the antibiotics we can produce.

electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae

Witnessing this remarkable adaptive ability, it is hardly surprising that bacteria have been able to inhabit all parts of the planet, from hot springs to the Antarctic, from mountain tops to the bottom of the ocean. The demise of any species is often dependent on the loss of its food supply. Bacteria evolve so quickly that they can adapt to use different nutritional sources. They have evolved so that they can live off virtually any organic matter, they can even adapt to use crude oil. Like some insect populations, bacteria form colonies. Many bacterial colonies comprise one billion individual cells or more. Total eradication of that number of bacteria is difficult and often impossible. Unlike bees, ants, and wasps, for example, the survival of that colony is more egalitarian and is not dependent on a single individual, the queen. If there is a catastrophe, any one of the individual bacterial cells in a bacterial colony can go on to form a new colony if it can survive the eradication of the previous colony. When it has formed a new colony and the next threat comes, the same survival tactic is engaged.

Bacteria preceded mammals by nearly four billion years. It is almost certain that they will be predominant long after humans and other mammals are extinct. There have been suggestions that bacteria arrived on Earth on meteorites; this may be true but it is more likely that they evolved here. However, we have already sent our bacteria into space on satellites and these may, at some time, colonise other planets. Here on Earth, our own bacteria will continue to thrive. As we have unearthed the fossil record, we have classified different eras in geological time, which are often colloquially rephrased as epochs such as the “Age of the Dinosaurs” or the “Age of the Fish”. As they have always been the largest biomass, the truth is that from the Precambrian era, four billion years ago, the Earth has always been in the “Age of the Bacteria” and probably will be forever.

Sebastian Amyes is Professor of Microbial Chemotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. He has specialised on the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He has published more than 500 papers on bacteria and written a number of books on the subject, including Bacteria: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae [Public Domain] via Dartmouth College

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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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By Hal Gladfelder

The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.

As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.

A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]

In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.

Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).

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: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Gooey chocolate and scoops of mouth-watering chocolate ice cream. Steaming hot golden French fries. Children see thousands of commercials each year designed to increase their desire for foods high in sugar, fat, and salt like those mentioned above. Yet, we know almost nothing about how this advertising onslaught might be affecting the brain.

A recent study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan, Oregon Research Institute, and Yale University starts to uncover how the brain responds to food commercials in teens. Thirty adolescents visited a lab to watch a typical television show that included commercial breaks composed of frequently advertised food (e.g., McDonald’s, Wendy’s) and non-food commercials (e.g., AT&T, Ford). But unlike a typical TV viewing experience, these participants had their brain response measured in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

While watching the food commercials, regions of the brain linked with reward, attention, and cognition were more active for all participants. After completing the fMRI scan, teens also remembered the food commercials better than the non-food commercials. Why does this matter? It appears that food advertisements (by far the most frequently marketed product to this age group) are better at getting into the mind and memory of kids. This makes sense because our brains are hard-wired to get excited in response to delicious foods. When these calorie-laden products are combined with $1 billion dollars’ worth of marketing by the food and beverage industry, it creates a potent combination.

Surprisingly, healthy-weight teens had greater brain activity in regions associated with reward and attention than obese adolescents. Why might this be? The study suggests that obese adolescents may have been trying to control their response to the food commercials, which might have altered the way their brain responded.

Yet, what happens after obese teens come into contact with more and more food cues later that day? Their self-control might decline in the face of an environment that pushes consumption of high-calorie foods. If a teen is stressed, hungry, or depressed, his or her willpower might be even more likely to falter. The healthy-weight adolescents might also be impacted by how their brain responds to food commercials, but the consequences might not be apparent immediately. A number of brain regions that were more responsive in the lean adolescents during the food commercials have been linked with future weight gain. It will be important to explore how brain responses to food marketing might be related to increased risk of obesity in the future.

This research highlights the possible ways that food advertising may affect younger generations. How do we prevent food advertisers from being the major driver of what our kids eat? We can rely solely on parents to police what teenagers buy or attempt to educate children about how advertising might impact them. We also may need to set guidelines that prevent marketers from aggressively targeting kids with commercials for unhealthy foods. The road ahead is not without challenges, but action must be taken to turn back the tide of childhood obesity.

Dr. Ashley N. Gearhardt is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on the overlap between addictive and eating behaviors, as well as the role of the environment in obesity. Gearhardt is a co-author of the study ‘Relation of Obesity to Neural Activation in Response to Food Commercials‘, which is published by the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) provides a home for the best human and animal research that uses neuroscience techniques to understand the social and emotional aspects of the human mind and human behavior.

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Image credit: French fries. By dja65, via iStockphoto

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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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