Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Tweet By William H. Beezley November 20, Mexicans everywhere will celebrate the centennial of their epic revolution. A century ago, a generation of young, largely provincial Mexican men and women initiated and carried out a social revolution that preceded the Russian Revolution (1917), had greater educational and public health successes than the Chinese Revolution (1948), […]
Tweet By Sharon Zukin Taking a position on Las Vegas is like taking an option on a company’s stock: if you like the place, you’re betting that free markets, human power over nature and boundless shopping opportunities will continue to rule the world. If you don’t like it, you’re a killjoy…or a sociologist. I made […]
This week I had the pleasure of visiting the OUP UK office and spending face time with my wonderful counterpart, Kirsty. [*Waves*]In honor of this, we have done a team Linked Up. (Go team!) Enjoy!
By Thomas Weber
For two years I had been working through pile after pile of archive documents in Bavaria, Northern France, the U.S., and Israel. As I did so, it had become increasingly clear to me that Hitler’s own version of his war experiences – which had never seriously been challenged by Hitler’s many biographers – were close to fictional.
Every year, a group of people at OUP USA put our heads together and come up with a Word of the Year. This is an example of a word (or expression) that we feel has attracted a great deal of new interest in the year to date. It need not have been coined within the past twelve months (although it generally is a new word). It does not have to be a word that will stick around for a good length of time (it is very difficult to accurately predict which new words will have staying power). It does not even have to be a word that we plan on introducing into the dictionary (at least, not unless it seems fairly certain that it will stick around for a while).
By Dan P. McAdams
In the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush launched an American military invasion of Iraq. From a psychological standpoint, why did he do it? Bush’s momentous decision resulted from a perfect psychological storm, wherein world events came to activate a set of dispositional traits and family goals that had long occupied key positions in Bush’s personality. At the center of the storm was a singularly redemptive story that, around the age of 40, George W. Bush began to construct to make sense of his life. After years of drinking and waywardness, Bush fashioned a story in his mind about how, though self-discipline and God’s guidance, he had triumphed over chaos, enabling him to recover the freedom, control, and goodness of his youth. In the days after 9/11, President Bush projected
Defoe’s interest in the subject knew no bounds; natural disaster was for him a favourite ground on which to explore questions of faith and history. In The Storm (1704) he had described the devastation wrought by extreme weather the previous year and the book was in many ways an early dress rehearsal for the Journal, assembling ‘the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters’ that arose from a single, terrifying event.
By Mark R. Warren
We seem to be facing a new wave of racial animosity in our country right now, from the Florida preacher who threatened to burn a Koran unless the Manhattan Islamic center was moved, to Arizona’s new immigration law legalizing racial profiling; from Glenn Beck high-jacking Dr. King’s march anniversary on the Mall in DC with an overwhelmingly white Tea Party crowd, to the New York gubernatorial candidate who won the Republican nomination after sending monkey pictures and tribal dance emails mocking President Obama.
In the face of this divisiveness, we have an urgent need to better understand how to bring Americans together across racial and religious lines.
By Anatoly Liberman
Last week I wrote that one day I would reproduce some memorable statements from Skeat’s letters to the editors. This day has arrived. I have several cartons full of paper clippings, the fruit of the loom that has been whirring incessantly for more than twenty years: hundreds of short and long articles about lexicographers, with Skeat occupying a place of honor. A self-educated man in everything that concerned the history of Germanic, he became the greatest expert in Old and Middle English and an incomparable etymologist. In England, only Murray, the editor of the OED, and Henry Sweet were his equals, and in Germany, only Eduard Sievers. Joseph Wright, another autodidact
If you haven’t heard – well, how haven’t you heard? “Refudiate” is the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 Word of the Year.
By Elvin Lim
These are deliquescent days in Washington. As the Democratic party works out a deal to keep both Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn in the leadership hierarchy, and the Republican party takes stock of what it means to welcome 35 new Tea Party members into its caucus, the President must be wondering, what now?
Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen are advising Obama to not seek re-election. Others are simply predicting a one-term presidency whether or not Obama likes it.
Refudiate has been named the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 Word of the Year! Now, does that mean that ‘refudiate’ has been added to the Dictionary? No it does not. Currently, there are no definite plans to include ‘refudiate’ in the NOAD, the OED, or any of our other dictionaries.
This week I decided not to make the interns do my work. Here’s a Linked Up with a lot of videos and pictures. (Yippee!)
All season, the publicity department has been graced with the presence of two wonderful interns, Hanna Oldsman and Alexandra McGinn. (I tried to do a photoshoot, but they ran and hid in the bookroom.) Hopefully this (incredibly witty and well-written) Q&A will show you just how lucky we are to have them.
By Lorna Speid
The news that prisoners and the mentally ill were deliberately infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in experiments conducted by the US in the late 1940s has sent shock waves around the world. What is most shocking is that this experiment occurred in the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials which brought to light the Nazi experiments that were so abhorrent. The Nuremberg Code of 1948 set basic standards for studies to be conducted in humans. We are told that there may be 40 additional experiments yet to come to light which involved experimentation on people on US soil that were never told that they were taking part in experiments.
By Patrick Wright
On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking. In China to present a statement of friendship signed by nearly 700 British scientists and artists, he was watching a parade that the reporter James Cameron reckoned to be “the greatest show on earth”.