Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Alia Brahimi
“The air freight bomb plot should be understood as part of al-Qaeda’s pervasive weakness rather than its strength. The intended targets, either a synagogue in Chicago and/or a UPS plane which would explode over a western city, were chosen as part of the attempt to re-focus al-Qaeda’s violence back towards western targets and pull the jihad away from the brink.”
By A. David Moody
[Pound] was going back to his old master not so much to learn as to argue with him and assert his independence. He was taking Browning’s Sordello as a point of departure for his cantos, as ‘the thing to go on from’. He had to start there because he thought it ‘the best long poem in English since Chaucer’, and the only one with a ‘live form’. But that form was not right for what he had to do, and he would be finding his own in breaking free from Browning’s.
In 2004, workmen digging in Greenwich, near London, uncovered a sealed stone bottle that rattled and splashed when they shook it. It was sent to a laboratory where X-rays revealed metal objects wedged in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down, and a scan showed it to be half filled with liquid. Chemical analysis confirmed this was human urine containing nicotine and brimstone. When the cork was removed, scientists discovered iron nails, brass pins, hair, fingernail parings, a pierced leather heart, and what they believed might be navel fluff.
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
It was an ordinary enough London winter’s evening: chilly, damp, and churning with crowds. I’d arranged to meet a friend at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, and after my packed tube had been held up between stations – ten sweaty minutes during which my fellow passengers had fumed silently, tutted audibly, and in one or two cases struck up tentative conversations with the person whose shopping was digging into their shins – I was late.
By Keith Gandal
Want a quick, but apparently reliable measure of how elitist you are? Go see the 7-hour production of Gatz, in which all 47,000 words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are, in the course of the play, enunciated on stage. (If you dare and can afford to.) If you love every minute of it and find time flying by, you’re probably, well, an arts snob; if you find your reaction mixed, your mind drifting in and out, and your body just plain giving out, well, you’re likely more of a populist.
By John A. Neuenschwander
Last fall the Oral History Association approved a new set of ethical guidelines. The goal of the task force that prepared the new General Principles for Oral History and Best Practices for Oral History was to provide a more condensed and usable set of guidelines. The leadership of the Association stressed that the new ethical guidelines would be reviewed periodically to determine if they needed to be amended and/or expanded. To that end
By Ulinka Rublack
I will never forget the day when a friend’s husband returned home to Paris from one of his business trips. She and I were having coffee in the huge sun-light living-room overlooking the Seine. We heard his key turn the big iron door. Next a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew through the long corridor with its beautiful parquet floor. Finally the man himself appeared. “My feet are killing me!”, he exclaimed with a veritable sense of pain. The shoes were by Gucci.
Yesterday, Cathy Cohen published an article with the Washington Post titled, Another Tea Party, led by black youth?” In it, she shares,
In my own representative national survey, I found that only 42 percent of black youth 18-25 felt like “a full and equal citizen in this country with all the rights and protections that other people have,” compared to a majority (66%) of young whites. Sadly, young Latinos felt similarly disconnected with only 43 percent believing themselves to be full and equal citizens.
In the video below, Cohen further discusses the involvement of black youth in American politics.
By Roberta Bivins
As a historian who writes about the controversial topic of ‘alternative medicine’, I get a lot of questions about whether this or that therapy ‘works’. Sometimes, these questions are a test of my objectivity as a researcher.
By Alec Ryrie
My book started out as a bit of fun, trying to tell a rollicking good story. I did that, I hope, but I also ended up somewhere more controversial than I expected: caught in the ongoing crossfire between science and religion. What I realised is that you can’t make sense of their relationship without inviting a third ugly sister to the party: magic.
By Craig Robertson
1) The passport in its modern form is a product of World War I. During the war most countries introduced emergency passport requirements that became permanent in the 1920s under the guidance of the League of Nations. Prior to World War I in the absence of required passports and visas immigration and government officials along the U.S. border used people’s physical appearance to determine if they were entitled to enter the country. Inspectors were confident they
By Andrew R. Murphy
There are any number of ways to interpret the [recent] events on the National Mall: the dueling rallies, the competition over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream,” the intertwining of piety, politics, and patriotism. Many of these have already been blogged and commented on ad infinitum. And so first, to the obvious
The Atlantic City celebrated in “Boardwalk Empire” was not just a city of mobsters, speakeasies, and brothels. It was, in the words of a longtime resident born in Georgia, a “Jim Crow for sure.” Its schools, clubs, neighborhoods, and movie houses were segregated. In 1923, just three years after the start of Prohibition, the city opened a brand new school that included a 1,000-seat auditorium and a 6,000-pipe organ, at a total cost of over $1.75 million. It also included an indoor pool, but rather than have whites and African Americans swim together, officials covered it up.
Craig Robertson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. His new book, The Passport in America: The History of A Document, examines how “proof of identity” became so crucial in America. Through addressing questions of identification and surveillance, the history of the passport is revealed. In the excerpt below we learn about photographs on passports.
By Gordon Campbell
Why all the fuss about an old translation of an ancient book? There are two reasons: first, it is the founding text of the British Empire (including breakaway colonies such as the United States), and was carried to every corner of the English-speaking world by migrants and missionaries; second, it matters now, both as a religious text and as the finest embodiment of English prose. Its history in the intervening centuries has been complex. The text has evolved…
By Katherine van Wormer
She had no children, but for those of us who are social workers, she was the mother of us all. The social action focus, empathy with people in poverty, campaigning for human rights—these priorities of social work had their origins in the work and teachings of Jane Addams. Unlike the “friendly visitors” before her, Addams came to realize, in her work with immigrants and the poor, that poverty stems not from character defects but from social conditions that need to be changed…