Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Jenifer Glynn
If Rosalind Franklin had lived, she would have been 92 today. But she died at 37, five years after the discovery of the structure of DNA had been announced by Watson and Crick. As Crick confessed later (but never confessed to her), “the data which really helped us to obtain the structure was mainly obtained by Rosalind Franklin”.
The Kent Archives have a cache of Dering letters — begging letters, affectionate letters, letters full of gossip and news. One of them came with an enclosure that caught my attention: it was the handwritten transcript of a conversation, almost a playlet. It rang bells; I remembered reading it years back, although most of the details were beyond recall. The document recorded an encounter between Queen Elizabeth I and William Lambarde, a legal theorist and pioneering antiquarian
By John Welshman
At the time of the collision, Hanna Touma was standing in the doorway of the family’s cabin. She was talking to one of the other migrants from her village. It was just a jolt, but it made the door slam shut, cutting her index finger. Two of the men went to find out what had happened while Hanna went to the Infirmary to get her hand bandaged. Everyone she passed wondered what had caused the jolt and why the ship had stopped.
By Gill Bennett
On Friday, 13 July 1962, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Lord Chancellor, the Ministers of Education, Defence, Housing and Local Government, and the Ministers for Scotland and without Portfolio all lost their jobs in an episode that became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. This dramatic phrase, most frequently used to describe Hitler’s bloody purge at the end of June 1934 of the leadership of the Sturmabteilung (his paramilitary Brownshirts), has since become political shorthand for any ruthless political manoeuvres and unexpectedly brutal reshuffles.
By Jack Copeland
Germany’s Army, Air Force, and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during the Second World War. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war, such as weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands — sometimes within an hour or two of its being transmitted.
By Andrew Hadfield
A particular anxiety/curiosity of any author who undertakes a work of biography is whether they have discovered anything new about their subject. I’m not sure that I have any ‘smoking gun’ for Edmund Spenser (1554?-1599) that conclusively proves something that no one knew before, and there is no one single archival discovery that can be trumpeted as a particular triumph. But I think I have rearranged and rethought Spenser’s life and its relationship to his work in some new ways. Here is a list of my top ten favourite Spenser facts and conjectures, some known, some less well known.
This Day in World History
On 28 June 1919, in the famous Hall of Mirrors of the French palace at Versailles, more than a thousand dignitaries and members of the press gathered to take part in and see the signing of the treaty that spelled out the peace terms after World War I. American President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau were the among the leaders in attendance.
By Julian Lindley-French
Years ago I was sleepless in Seattle having just flown in from Europe. I flicked on early morning TV and was greeted with a very American spectacle; an F-15 flying down the Grand Canyon against the ghostly backdrop of the stars and stripes and the US Army choir singing “Star-Spangled Banner”. It all seemed so, well, American; and I could not for a moment imagine such on-yer-sleeve patriotism ever catching on in Britain.
By Dr. Martin Maw
The life of Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532-88) was every bit as opulent and complex as one of the grand dresses in which Elizabeth I was pictured wearing in her pomp, a Gloriana presiding over the vast hive of the Tudor court. Dudley knew that hive inside out: its drones, its honeyed talk and the potentially lethal stings of its intrigues, and most of all its Queen. Perhaps the most ambiguous figure in English royal history, Dudley was more than a friend but less than a full consort to his virgin monarch, a male confidant on intimate terms with the most powerful woman of her age.
By Keith M. Martin
I’ve always been intrigued by the appeal of cryptography. In its most intuitive form, cryptography is the study of techniques for making a message unreadable to anyone other than the intended recipient. Why is that so intrinsically interesting to so many people?
By Troy Bickham
As North America begins to mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812, it is worth taking a brief moment to reflect on those who opposed the war altogether. Reasons for opposing the war were as diverse as justifications for it. Ideology, religious belief, opportunism, apathy, and pragmatism all played roles. Unlike Europeans caught up in the Napoleonic Wars ravaging that continent, the vast majority of free males in North America had — whether by right of law or the by the fact that military service was easy to avoid — choice of whether or not to participate.
This Day in World History
In a day-long battle near Brussels, Belgium, a coalition of British, Dutch, Belgian, and German forces defeated the French army led by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo led to his second and final fall from power, and ended more than two decades of wars across Europe that had begun with the French Revolution.
By Bill Schwarz
Enoch Powell was born one hundred years ago on 16 June 1912. His was a provincial, Birmingham family, his parents — both schoolteachers — still retaining a hint of Lloyd George radicalism. The young Enoch, nicknamed by his mother ‘The Professor’, was given to ferocious study. Gradually, as he grew into his teens, the family’s historic radicalism came to be increasingly attenuated as loyalty to King and Empire took on life as a moral absolute. This shift from radicalism to loyalism was not peculiar to the Powells; it signified a deeper political shift in the lived experience of Birmingham itself.
By Lydia Carr
In my last blog post, I looked at my research into the inter-war archaeologist Tessa Verney Wheeler (1898–1936) and the biography it led to. Today I’d like to present something she might have penned herself. Tessa and Rik Wheelers were both preoccupied with making the British past accessible, interesting, and even familiar on a local level. They used children’s activities, lectures, concerts, contests, newspaper articles, and even fiction on occasion to accomplish that.
One of the intriguing aspects of the Titanic story is the way it offers insights into particular locations. A particularly good example is Oxford Street in Southampton. Southampton became established as England’s main passenger port following the transfer, from 1907, of the White Star Line’s transatlantic express service from Liverpool. By 1912, the city was home to steamship companies that included the Royal Mail, Union Castle, and American Lines.
A lot has changed in the past 100 years, but certain stories stay with us, such as those of the people aboard the RMS Titanic. One of the greatest disasters in maritime history, its sinking sent over one thousand people still aboard into the Arctic waters. Leading political figures and servants, teachers and children, wireless operators and engineers, layered the hulking ship. We sat down with author John Welshman to discuss the people on this star-crossed voyage.