Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

April 2013

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Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

15 April 2013 marked the fifth Jackie Robinson Day, commemorating the 66th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, an event which broke baseball’s racial barrier. In each game that is now played on 15 April, all players wear Jackie Robinson’s iconic #42 (also the title of a new film on Robinson). Thirty years ago, historian and ardent baseball fan Jules Tygiel proposed the first scholarly study of integration in baseball, shepherded by esteemed Oxford editor, Sheldon Meyer: Baseball’s Great Experiment.

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A day in the life of a London marathon runner

By Daniel ‘pump those knees’ Parker and Debbie ‘fists of fury’ Sims
Pull on your lycra, tie up your shoelaces, pin your number on your vest, and join us as we run the Virgin London Marathon in blog form. While police and security have been stepping up after Boston, we have been trawling Oxford University Press’s online resources in order to bring you 26 miles and 375 yards of marathon goodness. Get ready to take your place on the starting line.

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Celebrating Bicycle Day

By Amanda Feilding
Albert Hofmann was one of the most important scientists of our time, who through his famous discovery of LSD, crossed the bridge from the world of science into the spiritual realm, transforming social and political culture in his wake. He was both rationalist and mystic, chemist and visionary, and in this duality we find his true spirit.

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Earth Day 2013: dating creation

By Martin Redfern
Attempts to calculate the age of the Earth came originally out of theology. It is only comparatively recently that so-called creationists have interpreted the Bible literally and therefore believe that Creation took just seven 24-hour days. St Augustine had argued in his commentary on Genesis that God’s vision is outside time and therefore that each of the days of Creation referred to in the Bible could have lasted a lot longer than 24 hours. Even the much quoted estimate in the 17th century by Irish Archbishop Ussher that the Earth was created in 4004 BC was only intended as a minimum age and was based on carefully researched historical records, notably of the generations of patriarchs and prophets referred to in the Bible.

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MMR panic in Swansea and policing

By P.A.J. Waddington
I often think that we learn more from the experiences of those whose lives are different from our own than we do from those who share our experiences. Distance often confers clarity and gives a greater appreciation of context, enabling similarities and differences to become visible. This occurred to me recently as the news of the increasing measles epidemic in Swansea began to grow more alarming.

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Our treaties, ourselves: the struggle over the Panama Canal

By Natasha Zaretsky
In March 1978, Ada Smith, a fifty-six-year old woman from Memphis, sat down at her typewriter and wrote an angry letter to Tennessee’s Republican Senator Howard Baker. She explained that until recently, she had always been proud of her country, and “its superiority in the world.” But now her pride had turned to fear: “After coming through that great fiasco Vietnam, which cost us billions in dollars and much more in American blood, we are now faced with another act of stupidity, which, in the years to come, could be even more costly.”

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Singing in a choir is like knitting and bingo

By Barbara Stuart
Joining a choir is all the rage and some say that choir memberships are getting younger. It’s like knitting and bingo — it’s cool to sing in a choir. Not in the choirs around here, not yet! Every English choral society has its stalwarts; ladies (sadly mostly ladies — there are never enough men) who run the committee, enjoy a frisson with the young(ish) conductor, share lifts, and find friendship.

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Sudden cardiac death: what about the rest of the family?

By Mattis Ranthe
Sudden cardiac death is internationally defined as sudden, unexpected death due to natural unknown or cardiac causes, with an acute change in cardiovascular status within one hour of death or, in unwitnessed cases, in a person last seen functioning normally within 24 hours of being found dead. In young people it is most often caused by undiagnosed heart problems that may be hereditary, indicating that there may be genetic mutations causing the condition.

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Does the lily grow in the valet? Is good ballet bally good?

By Anatoly Liberman
This post is an answer to a letter I received from our correspondent Jonathan Davis. Not too long ago, I mentioned the differences in the pronunciation of niche: in the speech of most Americans it rhymes with pitch, but the rhyme niche/leash can also be heard, and it seems to be prevalent in Britain. Mr. Davis is an Englishman living in Texas and, not unexpectedly, favors the vowel of ee and sh in niche, while those around him prefer short i and ch.

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Border Control in America before Ellis Island

By Hidetaka Hirota
On the seventeenth of April 1907, 11,747 immigrants arrived in the Ellis Island landing station in New York, marking a record high in terms of the number of people processed on a single day at the station, where 17 million newcomers landed between 1892 and 1954. This arrival was part of a broader landmark immigration wave.

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Sympathy in modernist literature

By Kirsty Martin
In Virginia Woolf’s 1931 modernist novel ‘The Waves’ her character Neville, looking around in a chapel service at school, is suddenly transfixed by his friend Percival: “But look – he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.” Neville is captivated, and overwhelmed, by Percival’s gesture here. Capturing this moment, Woolf’s language becomes gesturative too…

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Portraying Dusty Springfield on stage and in film

By Annie Randall
As I celebrate the late Dusty Springfield’s 74th birthday on the 16th of April, I am struck by the number of singers who choose to perform as Dusty—complete with wigs, costumes, and the trademark hand gestures—rather than singing Dusty’s hit songs as themselves. It’s no surprise that ambitious and confident singers want to sing Dusty’s hits; many of the songs, like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and “The Look of Love,” are not only beautifully crafted, they’re vocally challenging

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A National Poetry Month reading list from Oxford World’s Classics

In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Poetry Month by selecting some of our bilingual poetry editions. In each of the below books, the poems are laid out as parallel texts, with the original language on the left and the English translation on the right. This means that you can enjoy the works either in the original language, in translation, or even compare the two.

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A vegetable wonder!

By Tatiana Holway
With headlines and taglines and raves such as these fanning out from Fleet Street in the autumn of 1837, it would be hard to overestimate the sensation surrounding the immense water lily found earlier that year in the remote South American colony of British Guiana and subsequently named Victoria regia in honor of the empire’s newly crowned queen.

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Our Henry James

By John Carlos Rowe
As we anticipate the public release this year of Scot McGehee’s and David Siegel’s film, What Maisie Knew, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 7 September 2012, I wonder once again what drives popular fascination with Henry James’s fiction in our postmodern condition? Of course, I love Henry James and have spent much of my scholarly career reading, teaching, and writing about his works.

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Henry Moseley and a tale of seven elements

By Eric Scerri
This year marks the 100th anniversary of a remarkable discovery by an equally remarkable scientist. He is Henry Moseley, whose working career lasted a mere four years before he was killed in World War I shortly before his 26th birthday. Born in 1887 in England, Moseley came from a distinguished scientific family. 

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