Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Anne Secord
White’s classic text can be read as a shrewd exercise to encourage readers to follow a startlingly novel approach to studying the natural world. Most naturalists at that time based their natural systems and classifications of all living beings on the study of dead specimens in collections.
Perhaps no speech in the canon of American oratory is as famous as the “Dedicatory Remarks” delivered in a few minutes, one hundred and fifty years ago, by President Abraham Lincoln. And though school children may no longer memorize the conveniently brief 272 words of “The Gettysburg Address,” most American can still recall its opening and closing phrases.
By Ashley Jackson
All around the world the British built urban infrastructures that still dominate towns and cities, as well as developing complex transport networks and the ports and railway stations that gave access to them. The Empire’s creation of cityscapes and lines of communication is easy to overlook, so much has it become part of the fabric of the world in which we live that it has been rendered unremarkable.
By Jared Orsi
Today marks the anniversary of an event little remembered but well worth noting. On 15 November 1806, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike paused on the high plains in what is now Colorado, peered through his spyglass, and saw the mountain that would later bear his name, Pikes Peak.
Oxford University has been involved with the printing trade since the 15th century and our Archive holds the records of the University’s printing and publishing activities from the 17th century to date. This week our archivists have generously unearthed some pictures to share with you.
It’s no wonder that the Mediterranean basin—centered on the world’s largest inland sea, blessed by a subtropical climate, and host to nurturing rivers—gave birth to several ancient civilizations. What many don’t realize, however, is that the Mediterranean’s pre-classical history was just as rich as its geography, and just as instrumental in priming the region for success.
By Ian Gadd
No visit to the Sheldonian Theatre would be complete without craning your neck to admire Robert Streater’s painted ceiling. Entitled Truth Descending upon the Arts and Sciences and comprising thirty-two panels, the painting was completed in Whitehall in 1668–9 and shipped to Oxford by barge. We don’t know the terms of the commission but Streater’s personification of Truth triumphing over Envy, Rapine, and Ignorance fitted well with a University looking to reassert its cultural ambitions in the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum.
After meeting this summer, the OUP Blog suggested Miles Hollingworth, author of Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, catch up with fellow Augustinian scholar Todd Breyfogle about the timeliness and relevance of Augustine in order to celebrate the saint’s birthday, 1,659 years to the day later.
By Ian Gadd
Determining the precise beginning of Oxford University Press is not as easy a question as it may seem. It’s not enough to brandish triumphantly the first book printed in Oxford, Expositio in symbolum apostolorum, as all that proves is that there was a printing press in Oxford in 1478…
In eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England prisons were popular tourist sites for wealthy visitors. They were also effectively run as private businesses by the Wardens, who charged the inmates for the privilege of being incarcerated there. Indeed prisoners from the higher ranks of society, who had the means to pay for better accommodation, routinely expected to be treated better than lower class or “common” criminals.
By Ian Gadd
‘This Lane is commonly called Pie Lane, but I will call it Winking Lane’. So noted the Christ Church canon, Leonard Hutten, in his perambulatory Antiquities of Oxford, written at some point in the early seventeenth century.
By Steven Casey
Just over forty years ago, President Richard M. Nixon ran a successful reelection campaign based partly on a simple insight. Americans, he believed, were not opposed to the Vietnam War as such; they were simply opposed to their boys dying in Vietnam.
To celebrate the publication of the first three volumes of The History of Oxford University Press on Thursday and University Press Week, we’re sharing various materials from our Archive and brief scholarly highlights from the work’s editors and contributors. To begin, we’d like to introduce a silent film made in 1925 by the Federation of British Industry.
Porcelain, sealskin, powder-horn, buckskin, silk, and parchment: these are what history is made of. Celestial histories — subway, radio, or Internet histories. Histories found in stick charts and ordnance surveys. From the Paleolithic Period to digital age, maps have illustrated and recorded history and culture: detailing everything from wars and colonization, to religious and jingoistic worldviews, to the textures of the heavens and the earth.
If you watched the World Series this year, you may have noticed a trend in the nightly renditions of “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch: all five performances were by soldiers in uniform.
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.