Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Carole Garibaldi Rogers
Oral histories of American Catholic women religious repeatedly reveal courageous steps out from traditional roles into ministries that serve the poor and marginalized. They also illuminate historical trends in both the church and society.
By Mark Franko
Martha Graham’s work was prominent in the New York dance world of the 1930s in the wake of her innovative Primitive Mysteries (1931). Yet, her reputation grew exponentially beyond the confines of dance and the New York art world after the premiere of American Document (1938) followed by its national tour in 1939. This is, paradoxically, a work that the Martha Graham Dance Company may be reluctant to perform today in a version close to the original. It was related to the political issues of the day, highly anti-fascist and popular front, and critical of the history of the United States. Graham’s national reputation took hold at this time, and she was noted not only for her choreography and dancing but also for her political stance in the pre-war moment.
This Day in World History
Back to the audience, facing the orchestra, the composer steadily marked the tempo with his hands. He was not conducting, though — he was deaf. Thus it was that, when the orchestra and chorus finished, he could not hear the applause and cheers of the Vienna audience. When a musician turned him around so he could see the joy on listeners’ faces, Ludwig von Beethoven bowed in gratitude — and wept.
By Carole Garibaldi Rogers
As women religious in the US once again stand accused of misdeeds by the hierarchy, it is worth asking: What have these women done? They have said over and over with their lives that they are simply following the Gospel message to serve the poor. And that deep-rooted conviction underlies almost all of the 94 oral history interviews I conducted with American Catholic nuns, first in the early 1990s and most recently in 2009-2010.
By Carole Garibaldi Rogers
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church could have selected any number of unifying actions to mark the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). They have chosen instead a divisive path: to reprimand the leadership of American Catholic nuns.
By Ellen Gruber Garvey
May 5 is National Scrapbooking Day. Like National Fig Newton Day or National Golf Month, its purpose is mainly commercial. It was unsurprisingly started by an album company. Scrapbook making is hugely popular and profitable. Stores that sell scrapbooking supplies use the day to sponsor scrapping gatherings or crops where scrapbookers — nearly all women — get together to spread their projects out at tables with equipment for diecutting, embossing, distressing paper to make it look old, and sharing tips about layout and technique as they paste family pictures and memorabilia into their scrapbooks.
By Philip Carter
On Saturday 5 May, Chelsea face Liverpool in this year’s FA Cup final, the culmination of what (despite its relative, recent decline) remains the world’s most famous domestic football, i.e. ‘soccer’, tournament. If you cut your Cup teeth before the 1990s — since then the competition has been partially eclipsed by Premiership football — you’ll remember Final day as a national, indeed international, occasion when millions tuned in to events on a 115 x 75 yard field in north-west London.
By Kandice Rawlings
For anyone who’s taken (and remembers) a survey course in Western art, today’s date surely brings to mind a canonical work — Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s Third of May, 1808. The picture’s fame can be traced both to Goya’s masterful portrayal of drama and political martyrdom, and to its position as one of the first modern depictions of war. Painted some six years after the events it commemorates, this picture, and the circumstances under which Goya painted it, speak to the political instabilities of 19th-century Europe and the resulting tensions these raised for many of its artists.
By Chris Stray
When we are unsure of the meaning of a word, or want to know when it was first used, or what alternative spellings it has, we consult the dictionary. People often refer to “the dictionary,” in fact, as if there were only one, or as if it didn’t matter which one was consulted. But then most households probably only have one dictionary of any size, though consultation via computers, tablets, or smartphones is becoming increasingly common.
By Gordon Campbell
The celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible were in one respect a surprise. As the Archbishop of Canterbury commented at the end of the year, the KJB had not been treated “simply as a possession of religious believers”, much less as a “preserve of the Church”, but rather as part of a wider cultural legacy throughout the English-speaking world. This did not reflect, in the Archbishop’s tolerant view, a diminution of the Bible’s standing as a sacred text, but rather extended its significance beyond the spiritual to the cultural sphere.
By Kathryn Sutherland
As a novelist, Jane Austen dealt in the little things that loom momentous in the everyday routines of an ordinary life: preparations for an outing, the choice of partners at a dance, the chance for intrigue in a game of cards. What we know of her life is drawn to the same miniature scale: small facts and slender insights hoarded, vetted, and handed down by a protective family who memorialized and effaced their famous aunt in equal measure.
Joe Muranyi, the American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and singer — perhaps best known as the last clarinetist to perform with Louis Armstrong and his All Stars — passed away on April 20th at the age of 84. Muranyi was a working musician for over 60 years, from his time as a teenager playing in an Air Force band to his recordings with the Orient Dixieland Jazz Band in the 1990s and for years afterward. He toured with the All Stars in the heart of his career, from 1967 until 1971, the year of the eponymous bandleader’s death.
By Jeffrey Magee and Benjamin Sears
On 11 May 1888, somewhere outside Mogilyov in Belarus, Irving Berlin was born. The son of a poor Jewish family who fled the pogroms to New York City, Berlin went on to pen some of the most memorable American classics from the patriotic “God Bless America” to wistful “White Christmas.” Without any formal training in music composition or even the ability to notate melodies on a musical staff, he took a knack for music and turned it into the most successful songwriting career in American history. Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater, and Benjamin Sears, editor of The Irving Berlin Reader, composed this quiz to celebrate the composer’s life and work.
By Peter Miles
As every schoolchild knows, never give more than one explanation: rather than uncertainty, it suggests a conscious or unconscious smokescreen. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Sigmund Freud demonstrated as much by reference to a “defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.”
By Kathleen Riley
I am writing this on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23rd April, and it strikes me how apposite are Beatrice’s words in Much Ado to the birth, on 10th September 1896, of Adele Marie Austerlitz, later Adele Astaire, a personality and a performer of infinite, inextinguishable and irresistible mirth. In London in the 1920s, she was depicted as a misplaced Shakespearean sprite who ‘should be dancing by glow-worm light under entranced trees on a midsummer eve with a rout of elves, after drinking rose-dew.’
Jason Rosenhouse is Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University. His most recent book is Among The Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Lines. After years of emersion in creationist culture, Rosenhouse shares his feelings on what it was like to finally stand amongst his fellow non-believers at the Reason Rally.