Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Writing a volume for the Oxford History of the United States is an exercise in both synthesis and ambition. The series has long set the standard for American historical writing, and to join it is to enter a multigenerational conversation about how the story of the nation’s past should be told.
Jon Parshall has spent his career asking big questions about how wars are remembered, argued over, and ultimately understood.
Navigating the vast number of opinions about what matters most for children’s healthy development can be a daunting and seemingly endless task.
For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing.
It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from.
When one reads thousands of pages of transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s phone conversations from his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, as I did, one gets a pretty good sense of his personality, temperament, and character.
About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder.
Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis.
My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.
One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation.
The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches?
This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy.
It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure.
As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States.
In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies.