Atlantic City: Empire or Fantasyland?

The Atlantic City celebrated in “Boardwalk Empire” was not just a city of mobsters, speakeasies, and brothels. It was, in the words of a longtime resident born in Georgia, a “Jim Crow for sure.” Its schools, clubs, neighborhoods, and movie houses were segregated. In 1923, just three years after the start of Prohibition, the city opened a brand new school that included a 1,000-seat auditorium and a 6,000-pipe organ, at a total cost of over $1.75 million. It also included an indoor pool, but rather than have whites and African Americans swim together, officials covered it up.

Photographs on Passports

Craig Robertson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. His new book, The Passport in America: The History of A Document, examines how “proof of identity” became so crucial in America. Through addressing questions of identification and surveillance, the history of the passport is revealed. In the excerpt below we learn about photographs on passports.

Hold the phone! It’s quiz time!

By Alexander Humez
Phone (from Greek φωνή ‘sound [of the voice], voice, sound, tone’) shows up in English as a prefix (in, e.g., phonograph), a root form (in, e.g., phonetics), a free-standing word (phone), and as a suffix (in, e.g., gramophone) of which A. F. Brown lists well over a hundred in his monumental Normal and Reverse English Word List, though considering that -phone in the sense of “-speaker of” can be tacked onto the end of any combining root that designates a language (as in Francophone), the list of possibilities is considerably greater.

A Modest Addition to the Lexicon of Excuses

By Mark Peters
Before reading, I want you to know, just in case you hate this column, it is not my column. Not my column! These are not my words, not even the prepositions. I think my cousin wrote this—or one of his creepy pals.

Sorry, I guess I just wanted to be as cool as famous folk who use the “not my X” routine whenever the long arm of the law threatens to burst their celebububble. In a nifty blog piece, Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger suggest that “not my X” has become a kind of snowclone

My BFF just told me “TTYL” is in the dictionary. LMAO.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. New words, senses, and phrases have been added to the New Oxford American Dictionary! I’m not going to list every addition, but here’s a sampling I think you’ll all find interesting…. BFF, Big Media, Bromance, Carbon Credit, Cloud Computing and Eggcorn.

Celebrating the King James Bible

By Gordon Campbell
Why all the fuss about an old translation of an ancient book? There are two reasons: first, it is the founding text of the British Empire (including breakaway colonies such as the United States), and was carried to every corner of the English-speaking world by migrants and missionaries; second, it matters now, both as a religious text and as the finest embodiment of English prose. Its history in the intervening centuries has been complex. The text has evolved…

Every week should be fashion week!

By Justyna Zajac, Associate Publicist
New York City’s Fashion Week may have officially kicked off last Thursday, September 9^th, but it was Fashion’s Night Out (Friday, Sept. 10^th) that really seemed to launch festivities. Serving as a celebration of the industry and of anyone with an affinity for dress, FNO encouraged stores and boutiques to partake in one glorious garment party and gift clientele with a variety of freebies and fun. You could listen to DJs spin tunes and play foosball

An Exercise in Material Culture, Part 2

By Anatoly Liberman
Last week I discussed the origin of the word cushion. Our correspondent wonders whether we are perhaps talking about bedrolls here. Judging by medieval miniatures from the East, old cushions were like those known to us, but the broad scope of referents, with the same word serving as the name of a cushion, bedcover, and mattress, does pose the question of the original object’s form and uses. The reconstructed sense “bundle”

Does Obama See a Silver Lining in Losing the House?

By Elvin Lim
The “Summer of Recovery” has failed to materialize, and with that, the White House has had to start planning for 2012 earlier than expected. After all, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had already conceded this summer that the House may fall to Republican hands. (Nancy Pelosi didn’t like the sound of his prescience then, but Gibbs was merely thinking strategically for his boss.) The one thing Democrats have going for them is

Death to Humans! (The Apocalypse Remix)

By Robert M. Geraci
Scientific American recently rocked the Internet with its editors’ piece “Death to Humans! Visions of the Apocalypse in Movies and Literature” but, in doing so, have missed half of the fun. In an article where the sublime (The Matrix) meets the atrocious (The Postman), the chief problem that SciAm’s editors suffer is that, to be honest, they do not know what an apocalypse is.

6 Myths about Teens & Christian Faith in America

By Kenda Creasy Dean
Have you heard this one? Mom is angling to get 16-year-old Tony to come to church on Sunday, and Tony will have none of it. “Don’t you get it?” he yells, pushing his chair away from the table. “I hate church! I am not like you! The church is full of hypocrites!” Dramatic exit, stage right. This story sounds true – but it isn’t.

This Week in History: Happy Birthday, Jane Addams

By Katherine van Wormer
She had no children, but for those of us who are social workers, she was the mother of us all. The social action focus, empathy with people in poverty, campaigning for human rights—these priorities of social work had their origins in the work and teachings of Jane Addams. Unlike the “friendly visitors” before her, Addams came to realize, in her work with immigrants and the poor, that poverty stems not from character defects but from social conditions that need to be changed…

Did you catch the premiere of The Oxford Comment?

We’re excited to announce that it has finally launched – we now have a podcast! It’s called The Oxford Comment (get it?) and each episode we’ll talk to people smarter than us in hopes that it rubs off.

20-somethings: NOT lazy, spoiled, or selfish

By Jeffrey Arnett
How do you know when you’ve reached adulthood? This is one of the first questions I asked when I began my research on people in their twenties, and it remains among the most fascinating to me. I expected that people would mostly respond in terms of the traditional transition events that take place for most people in the 18-29 age period: moving out of parents’ household, finishing education, marriage, and parenthood. To my surprise, none of these…

End Of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research?

By Frederick Grinnell
On August 23, 2010, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction blocking NIH-funded research on human embryonic stem cells (hESC). According to Judge Lamberth’s ruling, NIH-funded research on hESC violates the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, originally passed by Congress in 1996, which prohibits use of federal funds for research in which human embryos are destroyed. The judge rejected the…

Memo from Lower Manhattan: The Mosque

By Sharon Zukin
Of all the mosques, in all the towns, in all the world, why did this mosque cause a furor in this town? I’m speaking about Park51, an Islamic “community center promoting tolerance and understanding,” as its website says, which is being planned to replace an old five-story building in Lower Manhattan that formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory store with a modern, thirteen-story multi-service facility modeled on Jewish community centers and the YMCA. The burning issue…