Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. On Tuesday 27 August 2013, writer David Gilbert leads a discussion on Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
By Douglas Bruster
Why should we think that Shakespeare wrote lines first published in the 1602 quarto of The Spanish Tragedy, a then-classic play by his deceased contemporary Thomas Kyd? Our answer starts 180 years ago, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge—author of ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—said he heard Shakespeare in this material.
By Jessica Harris
On 4 August 1693, Dom Perignon invented champagne, or so the story goes. The date is no doubt made up, sparkling wines had existed long before the 17th century, and the treasurer of the Abbey of Hautvilliers actually did everything he could to prevent wine from refermenting. But who wouldn’t mind a glass of bubbly to celebrate?
The historic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 may have buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under a thick carpet of volcanic ash, but it preserved what is surely our most valuable archaeological record of daily life in Ancient Rome to date.
By Gordon R. Thompson
As the summer of 1963 drew to a close and students prepared to return to school, the Beatles released what may have been their most successful single. “She Loves You” would top the British charts twice that year, remain near the top for months, and help to launch the band into the American consciousness.
By Rebecca Sager and Keith Gunnar Bentele
This August marks the 10-year anniversary of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s suspension for refusing to comply with a federal court order to remove a display of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court building. Judge Moore, rather famously, erected the statue in the middle of the night and created a controversy that stirred up emotions about what role religion should play in our public spaces.
By Elliot Antokoletz
To mark the anniversary of Debussy’s birth today in 1862, a list of little known facts about the composer.
What is a student to do with a list of citations? Are an author’s sources merely proof or can they be something more? We often discuss the challenges of the research process with students, scholars, and librarians.
August in National Panini month, honoring the lightly grilled, trendy sandwich that Americans have come to love over that past few decades. Instead of just focusing on just one sandwich though, we would like to present the entirety of the sandwich universe.
By Daniel Parker
It’s that time of year again; Edinburgh is ablaze with art, theatre and music from around the world. For the month of August, Edinburgh is the culture capital of the world, as thousands of musicians, street-performers, actors, comedians, authors, and artists demonstrate their art at various venues across the city. Listed in Who’s Who and Who Was Who are some of the most famous names to have performed at the festival since its inception in 1947.
I was a sophomore in college, sitting in my morning music history course on the Romantic period, and my professor was discussing the concept of program music, which Grove Music Online defines as “Music of a narrative or descriptive kind; the term is often extended to all music that attempts to represent extra-musical concepts without resort to sung words.”
By Kate Pais
Best known for its cross referencing system, helpful commentary in the margins, and highlighting quotations from Jesus in red, the Scofield Study Bible provides many resources for modern readers of various backgrounds. The Scofield Reference Bible, as it is also known, is used by millions of readers around the world from numerous denominations of Christianity and academic fields.
By Audrey Ingerson
“I, who love women, wanted to give her clothes in which she could drive a car, yet at the same time clothes that emphasized her femininity, clothes that flowed with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well dressed.”
An inscribed marble throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis offers us a rare window into the fateful events comprising what has come to be known as the “Red Sea Wars.”
By Justine McConnell
The death of Martin Bernal in June attracted less media attention than one might have hoped for the man who brought an unprecedented attention to the contemporary study of Classics. His 1987 work, Black Athena, was not the first to argue for a strong, pervasive African influence on the culture of ancient Greece, but it was the first to receive widespread notice.
An intriguing post popped up in my Tumblr feed recently, called “The all-white reinvention of Medieval Europe” from the blog Medieval POC. Both in this post and generally throughout the blog the author makes the point that “People of Color are not an anachronism.”