Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By James Downs
An 2 April 2012 New York Times article, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” reports that a new study ratchets up the death toll from an estimated 650,000 to a staggering 850,000 people. As horrific as this new number is, it fails to reflect the mortality of former slaves during the war. If former slaves were included in this figure, the Civil War death toll would likely be over a million casualties.
I’ve seen proud posts on the internet from people who saw five planets with the naked eye this spring. Venus and Jupiter could hardly be missed in the west after sunset, though Mercury was more elusive as it never strays very far from the Sun and is smaller and fainter. Later in the evening Mars and then Saturn have been rising high in the east. That’s a “full house”, comprising all five of the planets recognised by the ancients. Being a geologist, I usually insist on claiming that a sixth planet is easily visible too…
By Emily Wilson
April, says Eliot famously in the Wasteland, is the cruellest month, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead ground, mixing/ Memory and desire”. Spring, in this shocking reversal of common tropes, is bad for precisely the reasons we usually think it good: because it involves a rebirth of what had seemed dead. Eliot’s poem, which will itself enact the rebirth or zombie resuscitation of many greatest hits of western literary culture, begins with a recognition of how horrible, and how spooky, this process is. You try to bury the dead, but they won’t stay in the grave.
By Sarah Gregson
It is often said of military wars that the first casualty is truth. As we approach the centenary of the sinking of RMS Titanic and the war of ideas that often surrounds this tragedy, it is to be hoped that the truth will at least take a few prisoners. Titanic myths have had extraordinary longevity and, as Cox put it, ‘virtually everything that people know, or think they know … can be traced to the press coverage of April-August 1912’. In the lead up to the centenary, however, perhaps some commentators will read some of the work that has been done to challenge these misconceptions.
By Anatoly Liberman
My February blog on dude has been picked up by several websites, and rather numerous comments were the result of the publicity. Below, I will say what I think of the word’s “true” etymology and quote two pronouncements on “dudedom,” as they once appeared in The Nation. But before doing all that, I should thank the readers who pointed to me the existence of some recent contributions to the subject.
By Kirk Curnutt
According to literary legend, the author of The Great Gatsby sold his soul. Perpetually cash-strapped, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent much of his twenty-year career cranking out popular fiction for the Saturday Evening Post and other high-paying “slicks.” While Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner racked up double digits in the novels column, Fitzgerald completed a paltry four and a half, with only one of them (Gatsby, of course) truly great. By contrast, he produced 160 short stories, earning a total of $241,453 off the genre – more than $3 million in today’s dollars.
By Reverend John Piderit, S.J.
In an age of video, TV, camcorders, and iPhones, adept users can capture important events in a digital medium that can be transmitted quickly to people around the world. What would a resurrection appearance of Jesus have looked like if an alert apostle had an iPhone and, assuming the apostle was not immediately told by Jesus to “put that iPhone away”, the apostle captured a minute of Jesus’s appearance with the iPhone video running? Of course, this is a hypothetical and no answer could possibly be definitive. But the question raises interesting issues.
Since 2001, April has been designated as Jazz Appreciation Month. This annual celebration was instigated by Dr. John Edward Hasse, Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and a lifelong jazz advocate. The event has gained momentum with each passing year, and has spurred jazz activities in all fifty states and forty countries.
By Anatoly Liberman
The Latin for “winter; snowstorm” is hiems, a noun related in a convoluted way to Engl. hibernate. It is a reflex (continuation) of an old Indo-European word for “winter,” and its cognates in various languages are numerous. Germanic must also have had one of them, but it lies hidden like the proverbial needle in a hayrick. Old Icelandic (OI) gymbr means “one-year old sheep.” In the Scandinavian area, this word does not have an exotic ring, as follows from Modern Icelandic and Norwegian gimber ~ gymber ~ gimmerlam (the latter refers specifically to a sheep that has not yet lambed), along with Swedish gymmer with its dialectal variants.
By Gerard Toal
Twenty years ago this week, ethnic cleansing began in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Though there were numerous instances of ethnicized violence before this, it was the northeastern town of Bijeljina that became ground zero for a practice the Bosnian war would make infamous. The pre-war population of the municipality was 57,389 (59% Serb), 30,229 (31% Muslim), with approximately ten thousand others who identified themselves as Yugoslavs (the forgotten identity in Bosnia), Croats (only 490) and persons of other or unknown nationality. The recitation of the 1991 census numbers is relevant only because nationality categories mattered to the perpetrators who fell upon Bijeljina and tore it apart.
Many of our readers will have first acquainted themselves with an Oxford World’s Classic as a child. In these videos, Peter Hunt, who was responsible for setting up the first course in children’s literature in the UK, reintroduces us to The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, and Treasure Island.
The 47th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards is this Sunday, April 1st, so we thought it was time to pull together a country music knowledge challenge. Compiled by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Michael McCall, John Rumble and Paul Kingsbury — authors of The Encyclopedia of Country Music — we begin the first of a three-part quiz on the twang of guitars and accents today. How much do you know about the music of “three chords and the truth”?
By Richard Marggraf Turley, Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Howard Thomas
“What if the field in Keats’s ode was (cue drum roll), not an allegorical field, not a cipher for, say, St Peter’s Field in Manchester (the location of the Peterloo Massacre), nor a mythic site of bucolic languor, but an actual Winchester field …
At 5:14 am GMT on March 20th the sun will cross the celestial equator going from south to north, signalling the beginning of spring in the planet’s northern hemisphere and autumn in the southern. We’re celebrating this astronomical event with Ian Ridpath and newly released NASA photos of the Moon.
Imagine luxury hotels during the bygone days when explorers, travelers, and foreign occupying forces mingled. Walk into the lavish lobbies and moonlit terraces of these “gilded refuges.” Mix with delighted high-society, dining and dancing while “wintering on the Nile.” Journalist, editor, and author Andrew Humphreys recreates this world with well-documented accounts, extracts, and anecdotes; vintage photography; and full-color illustrations of travel posters, luggage labels, postcards, decorated letterheads, menus, and invitations in Grand Hotels of Egypt: In the Golden Age of Travel. We sat down with Andrew Humphreys to discuss the glamorous guests, glorious architecture, and regrettable colonialism.
By John Welshman
The latest news for period drama fans is that Julian Fellowes, writer of Downton Abbey, has created a four-part ITV mini-series commemorating the centenary of the Titanic sinking. However, what many viewers may not realise is that there was a real Fellowes on board the ship in 1912. But rather than being an ancestor of the popular writer, Alfred J. Fellowes was a humble crew member and one of the estimated 1,514 people to perish in the maritime disaster.