Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Some people love libraries so much, they never leave. Though no living human being knows exactly what happens—or doesn’t happen—after death, certain library patrons have reported unnatural, paranormal events occurring within the walls of these four supposedly haunted libraries. Could they be ghosts attempting to check out a new Sci-Fi novel or mischievously disrupting the organized stacks?
From tales of Medusa’s wretched gaze turning men to stone to the cunning Sphinx torturing the city of Thebes, supernatural creatures and beings have long been a part of poems and children’s stories for centuries. The Greeks’ and Romans’ fears and superstitions informed their culture, and have long fascinated scholars intrigued by the extant corpus of mentions of witches, ghosts, and monsters in Greek and Roman literature.
Sherlock Holmes is literature’s greatest rationalist; his faith in material reality is absolute. In his certainty, he resembles his creator; but not in his materialism. From the beginning of his writing career, Doyle was fascinated by the spirit world. One of his favourite literary modes, the Gothic, allowed him to explore the world of spirits and the supernatural, of vengeful mummies and predatory vampires, of ghosts and necromancers.
The UK government has wanted to leave to their dramatic fate children, teenagers, refugees and migrants who find themselves in Calais and elsewhere in Europe. To much fanfare, a dozen children (legally meaning a person under 18) were finally allowed to cross the Channel on Monday 17 October to be reunited with members of their families. As the same paltry number of children arrived the next day, an uproar was started by the likes of David Davies MP and Nigel Farage.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and pink is everywhere. Corporate-connected activists have branded breast cancer as pink—feminine, hopeful, and uncontroversial. They worked with businesses to sponsor walks and runs and to create cause-marketing products (like the bagels) to raise awareness of and money for breast cancer. These messages have changed the way Americans think about breast cancer.
When Best Buy, the American multinational consumer electronics corporation, declared 30 October 2008 “National Vampire Awareness Day,” they were cannily exploiting a metaphor that, within Western culture at least, was over 200 years old. Here, though, the vampires to be arrested, staked, and vanquished were not the suave, velvet-cloaked aristocrats of Old-World Europe, but the electronics and electrical appliances…
The UK’s retail sector is going to be a particularly sensitive indicator of the effects of the Brexit referendum decision. Retailers, whether they are store-based, online or both, are intermediaries at the end of the value chain – and as such are very close to both consumers and suppliers – so they’ll be at the receiving end of Brexit effects in other sectors ranging from agriculture to car production to financial services.
The Oxford Philosophy and History teams are excited to see you in Atlanta for the upcoming 2016 History of Science/Philosophy of Science Biennial Meeting. We have some suggestions on sights to see during your time in Georgia as well as our favorite sessions for the conference.
After studying the Reformation for over four decades, I’ve found myself alongside many other historians in pulling down one great Protestant myth: all you needed to do was put a little finger on the structure of the medieval Western Church, and it would fall over and collapse. Not so: the old religion satisfied most people and satisfied consumer demand.
Hacked corporate emails that expose Coca-Cola’s efforts to quash local health initiatives, a long-awaited statement from the World Health Organization expressing strong support for taxes on sugary drinks, and upcoming votes on four local soda tax proposals are keeping the grassroots movement to protect health over beverage industry profits front and center this fall.
The internet is arguably the most important invention in recent history. To recognize its importance, World Internet Day is celebrated each year on October 29, the date on which the first electronic message was transferred from one computer to another in 1969. At that time, a UCLA student programmer named Charley Kline was working under the supervision of his professor Leonard Klinerock, and transferred a message from a computer housed at UCLA to one at Stanford.
For many of us, the prospect of Halloween is scary enough without the presence of roaming spirits. Those with children must weigh the risks of letting them trick-or-treat unsupervised—the familiar danger of “sugar overload”. Those with teenagers must consider the damage their brood are capable of doing, whether with eggs, toilet paper, or worse. Horror film goers will struggle with the walk home through darkened streets after back-to-back screenings.
It’s dark and warm and chaotic. The people in my group are screaming and scrambling to get away from the maniac who’s lumbering toward us with a roaring, smoke-belching chainsaw.
The most recent issue of the OHR includes an article about the Australian Generations Oral History Project and the importance of “aurality” to oral history
Peter Gilliver has been an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary since 1987, and is now one of the Dictionary’s most experienced lexicographers; he has also contributed to several other dictionaries published by Oxford University Press. In addition to his lexicographical work, he has been writing and speaking about the history of the OED for over fifteen years. In this two part Q&A, we learn more about how his passion for lexicography inspired him to write a book on the development of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Rarely has there been a time in which military justice has loomed so large, or in such diverse ways. Certainly at any given time there are likely to be one or two high profile cases around the world, but lately it has seemed that the subject is never long out of the public eye. Consider the following kinds of issues: A Russian soldier stationed in Armenia murders a local family. Who should prosecute him for the murder, Russia or Armenia?