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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In February 1933, upon the ashes of the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler swiftly consolidated the political power of the Nazi Party. He wielded the suspect, 23-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist stonemason, as irrefutable evidence for an impending subversive uprising. By appearing to legitimize the sociopolitical paranoia of the Nazi party, the Reichstag fire fueled […]
By George Economides and Thomas Moutos
According to popular belief, economists rarely manage to predict correctly the consequences of important policy actions. Nevertheless, the case of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is one of those instances which economists did get it right.
By Emily Mayhew
I work regularly with wounded veterans and medics from Britain’s wars of the 21st century. Their stories have extraordinary resonance with those from a century earlier. Casualties feel the same fear and dread.
By Tim Allen
Albert Camus, author of those high school World Literature course staples The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, would have been 100 years old today.
By Andrew Pettinger
I was recently invited by Oxford University Press (OUP) to have my book, The Republic in Danger, published on the online open access library OAPEN. After a few general questions, I happily accepted. Why?
By Erik N. Jensen
Let’s get one thing straight about Andy Murray’s Wimbledon singles title: It was not the first one by a Briton in 77 years, despite what the boisterous headlines might have you believe. London’s venerable Times set the tone on July 8 with its proclamation, “Murray ends 77-year wait for British win.”
By Jan Wouters and Sanderijn Duquet
In early 2011, a series of revolutionary chain reactions against uncompromising and authoritarian regimes set the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) in motion. The popular uprisings spread quickly across the Arab world and their effects continue today.
By Paul Jankowski
“And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters.” To a Bavarian infantry officer on the Somme in the early morning hours of 15 September 1916, the rhomboid, tracked behemoths lurching at him amidst waves of attacking enemy infantry had no name.
By David Bradshaw and James Smith
The extent of Ezra Pound’s involvement with Italian fascism during the Second World War has been one of the most troubling and contentious issues in modernist literary studies.
By William Doyle
Two hundred and twenty years ago this week, 5 September 1793, saw the official beginning of the Terror in the French Revolution. Ever since that time, it is very largely what the French Revolution has been remembered for. When people think about it, they picture the guillotine in the middle of Paris, surrounded by baying mobs, ruthlessly chopping off the heads of the king, the queen, and innumerable aristocrats for months on end in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. It was social and political revenge in action. The gory drama of it has proved an irresistible background to writers of fiction, whether Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, or Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novels, or many other depictions on stage and screen. It is probably more from these, rather than more sober historians, that the English-speaking idea of the French Revolution is derived.
By Jean Allain
Today is International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, established by UNESCO “to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of peoples”. That tragedy was the development of, in Robin Blackburn’s words, a “different species of slavery”. One that took the artisan slavery of old (consisting in the main of handfuls of slaves working on small estates or as domestic servants) and industrialised it, creating plantations in the Americas which fed the near insatiable appetite of Europeans for sugar, coffee, and tobacco.
By Laura Crombie
In the popular imagination, tournaments feature prominently as the greatest spectacles of the Middle Ages. If archery competitions are thought of, it is probably in the context of Robin Hood films or the great English longbow (and the successes it brought, particularly Agincourt).
We don’t often discuss book awards on the OUPblog, but this year the inaugural British Academy Medals were awarded to three authors and their titles published by Oxford University Press: Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, edited by Noel Malcolm; The Organisation of Mind by Tim Shallice and Rick Cooper; and The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia (USA only).
Seventy years ago today, in the late afternoon of Sunday 25 July 1943, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini went for what he imagined was a fairly routine audience with the Italian king. The war had been going badly for Italy: two weeks earlier US, Canadian and British forces had landed in Sicily, and met with little resistance. And the previous evening a number of senior fascists had passed a motion calling on the king to assume full military command.
By Robert Gildea
May ‘68 is often used as a shorthand for the protests and revolts that took place in that year, conjuring up images of barricades and Molotov cocktails in the Latin Quarter of Paris. But 1968 did not take place only in one year
By Julie Kalman
This is a piece about subjectivity. And while we’re on the topic, let’s just stop for a moment to talk about me. When the weekend paper delivers its fullness at the breakfast table, I don’t stop to read the travel section.