Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Neil Prendergast
A century ago, the turkey was in truly poor shape. Its numbers had dropped considerably during the late nineteenth century, largely due to overhunting, habitat loss, and disease. In 1920, there were about 3.5 million turkeys in the United States, down from an estimated 10 million when Europeans first arrived in North America.
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (pronunciation here) celebrated his 80th birthday over the weekend. As Tom Service has pointed out in the past, you’ve probably already heard some of Penderecki’s famous pieces from the 1960s, which feature in several films from directors such as David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese.
Marie Therese Southgate, MD, a senior editor at JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association for nearly five decades, died at her home in Chicago on November 22 after a short illness. She was 85.
By Travis McDade
In a desk donated to the Vermont thrift store at which he worked, Tim Bernaby was pleasantly surprised to find several letters and cards written by Robert Frost. He took these missives and sold them for $25,000. When asked about it, he said he found the items not in the desk, but in the trash.
By Alice Northover
Self-portraits are as old as their medium, from stone carvings and oil paintings, to the first daguerrotypes and instant Polaroids. Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013 – selfie – indicates the latest medium: a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.
Thanksgiving is a time for reflection on the past, present, and future. In our final week of voting for Place of the Year, here’s a look at some of the many changes undergone by the nominees. Which of these will steal the crown from Mars, the 2012 Place of the Year?
By Naomi Roht-Arriaza
What is the key, and often fraught, relationship between transitional justice (TJ) and international criminal justice (ICJ)? How, if at all, do the two fields fit together: do they coexist, create synergies, occupy the whole space, or simply inhabit parallel universes?
By Richard Roberts
The mounting diplomatic crisis in the last week of July 1914 triggered a major financial crisis in London, the world’s foremost international centre, and around the world. In fact, it was the City’s gravest-ever financial crisis featuring a comprehensive breakdown of its financial markets. But it is virtually unknown.
By Mark Peters
I recently wrote about the proliferation of the lexical formula “X-shaming,” launched by slut-shaming and body-shaming and taken to preposterous extremes by words such as filter-shaming and fedora-shaming. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about shaming. The hyphen is optional, but the topic is increasingly mandatory.
Polling data is ubiquitous in today’s world, but it is is often difficult to easily understand the accuracy of polls. In a recent paper published in Political Analysis, Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans developed a new methodology for assessing the accuracy of polls in multiparty and multi-candidate elections.
For nearly four decades, Dr. Andrea Farbman has worked in disability and arts advocacy, legislative policy analysis, and non-profit management. Her career with the American Music Therapy Association (National Association for Music Therapy at the time) began in 1988 and this year she is celebrating 25 years with the association.
By Karen Harvey
Venturing into new areas of research can be exhilarating. But it can be incredibly daunting when the subject boasts a concentration of great scholarship and formidable expertise. In my case, the decision to embark on the subject of Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy, meant taking a step not just into a new subject but a new discipline: from history to literature.
Every generation and culture needs its own version of The Iliad — one that capture the spirit of the original for a contemporary audience, whether Alexander Pope’s rhymed verse of the 18th century or dense Dickensian prose of 19th-century translations. Barry B. Powell’s new free verse translation of The Iliad was written with the modern English speaker in mind, and with the idea that the language Homer uses was colloquial and accessible to his contemporaries.
By Michael Gerhardt
There are few presidents more forgotten – and perhaps worth forgetting than – Franklin Pierce. To the extent he is remembered at all, historians and others dismiss him as a weak president who allowed strong-willed senators sympathetic to slavery interests to force him to take actions, which helped to provoke a near civil war in Kansas and bring the nation itself closer to the Civil War that formally broke out in 1861.
By Dr. Sheri Robb
There is a saying in American English when a home is attractive to view from the sidewalk or edge of the road. That is, we say it has “curb appeal”. As an integral part of everyday life, music has great curb appeal.
Doctor Who was first broadcast by BBC Television at 5.16pm on Saturday 23 November 1963. This weekend the BBC marks the fiftieth anniversary with several commemorative programmes on television, radio, and online—as well as a ‘global simulcast’ of the anniversary adventure, which places the two actors who’ve most recently played ‘the Doctor’…