World

Use of Gregorian calendar begins

This Day in World History – In Roman times, Julius Caesar instituted a calendar reform based on a solar year of 365 and one-quarter days. To accommodate the quarter day, the Julian calendar added an extra day to every fourth year, creating leap years. Unfortunately, a solar year is really a few minutes shorter than 365 days and 6 hours. The Julian calendar’s overestimate meant that over the course of a century, more or less, the beginning of each of the four seasons moved back a day. By the late 1500s, the spring equinox fell on March 11, rather than around March 21.

Conference setting international time begins

This Day in World History – Why does most every country in the world agree on how to determine what time it is? You can thank the International Prime Meridian Conference, which began on October 13, 1884, and lasted nearly ten days. The twenty-five countries that gathered in Washington , D.C., agreed to accept the line of longitude that passed through Britain’s Royal Observatory as the prime meridian—the line of 0° longitude (just as the Equator is 0° latitude). The nations also agreed that the time at Greenwich would be the standard time against which all other times would be compared—Greenwich Mean Time.

Chicago burns

This Day in World History – At eight o’clock at night on October 8, 1871, a fire broke out in Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s barn. Winds were strong that night in the Windy City, and the city itself was largely made of wood—not just the buildings, but even the sidewalks and signs. Every structure served as kindling, and the ferocious fire burned out of control for thirty-six hours, not stopping until it had destroyed 18,000 buildings over an area of three-and-a-half square miles. Three hundred people lost their lives in the fire, and a third of the city’s people were made homeless.

Carlson receives patent for Xerography

This Day in World History – Chester Carlson had everything he needed to invent a xerography machine, or photocopier. He had been interested in printing and chemistry since childhood. He perceived a need—in his job, he found that he always needed more copies of documents than he could obtain cheaply. He reasoned that other businesses would also love to have a way of copying documents inexpensively. He had incentive to invent—he had just gotten married and did not think his job offered much chance for getting ahead. Finally, he had an inspiration.

Birth of Dangun, legendary founder of Korea

This Day in World History – According to Korean tradition, Dangun, the founder of Korea’s first dynasty, was born on October 3, more than 4,000 years ago. The legend of his birth indicates why this king is so important. Hwanung, the son of the king of heaven, wanted to live among men rather than among the gods. He came down the earth with 3,000 followers and settled in what is now North Korea, ruling the humans who lived in the area.

Mitchell discovers a comet

This Day in World History – Each evening that weather permitted, Maria (pronounced Mah-RYE-uh) Mitchell mounted the stairs to the roof of her family’s Nantucket home to sweep the sky with a telescope looking for a comet. Mitchell—who had been taught mathematics and astronomy by her father—began the practice in 1836. Eleven years later, on October 1, 1847, her long labors finally paid off. When she saw the comet, she quickly summoned her father, who agreed with her conclusion.

Some questions about the Great Sea

Situated at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millenia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations of antiquity as well as the rival empires of medieval and modern times.

Chinese philosopher Kongfuzi born

This Day in World History – Few people in history can justly claim the impact of Kongfuzi (often called Confucius), whose teachings have influenced hundreds of millions of people across Asia. Like so many important figures in the world of ideas, the historical Kongfuzi is an elusive figure. While precise date of the sage’s birth is unknown, the Chinese have long celebrated September 28, and to this day, members of the Kong family still live in the family compound in Qufu, China.

Champollion reveals decipherment of the Rosetta Stone

This Day in World History – On September 27, 1822, Jean François Champollion announced a long-awaited discovery: he could decipher the Rosetta Stone. The stone, a document written in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V, had been discovered in Rashid (Rosetta in French), Egypt in 1799 by French troops involved in a military campaign against the British. Deciphering hieroglyphics had frustrated scholars for centuries. Arab scholars, beginning in the ninth century, CE, made unsuccessful attempts, as did Europeans in the fifteenth.

Marking the autumnal equinox in the ancient world

This Day in World History – Sometime around September 23 each year, Earth reaches the autumnal equinox, the point when the sun stands directly above the Equator and daylight and dark are roughly equal. (The day, of course, marks the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. South of the Equator, it is the vernal, or spring, equinox. March 23 is the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the autumnal equinox in the Southern.) These astronomical events did not go unnoticed by ancient peoples.

Six women, two men hanged for witchcraft

This Day in World History – In the fatal climax of months of turmoil, six women and two men were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, after having been found guilty of witchcraft. The eight were the last victims of a witchcraft hysteria that gripped Salem and other towns in Massachusetts in 1692. The tumult began in February 1692, when several young girls began to behave strangely and complained of physical torments. Soon, the girls were accusing women in the village of being witches. Witchcraft was a capital offense at the time, and colonial leaders set up a court to investigate. In all, about 140 people—86% of whom were women—were accused of witchcraft in Salem.

5,000-year-old mummy found in Alps

This Day in World History – While hiking through the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border, Erika and Helmut Simon, a German couple, spotted a brown shape in a watery gully below them. Scrambling down to investigate, they realized that they were looking at a human head and shoulder. Assuming the body was a climber who had been killed in a fall, they reported their find to authorities. The body was removed with a jackhammer and tourists made off with some of its clothing and the tools that were found with it.

A concise overview of the Press

We, the editors of OUPblog, field a lot of questions about “the Press.” Sometimes, these questions aren’t even questions, just statements of misinformation or confusion such as:

I thought you just published textbooks…

But Oxford University Press is in Oxford…

OUPblog is amazing! (Oops, how’d that one slip in there…)

Technological progress and human barbarism: An unheroic coupling

By Louis René Beres

Every time I get on an airplane, I am struck by the contradictions. As a species, we can take tons of heavy metal, and transform them into a once-unfathomable vehicle of travel. At the same time, we are required to take off our shoes, and discard our bottled water, before being allowed to board. The point, of course, is not to make us more comfortable (those days are long gone), but to ensure that we don’t blow up the aircraft.

Phantom states and rebels with a cause

By Daniel Byman and Charles King Three years ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a brief and brutal war over an obscure slice of mountainous land called South Ossetia that had declared its independence from Georgia. Flouting international law, Russia stepped in to defend South Ossetia and later formally recognized the secessionists as a […]

Nazis on the run

Gerald Steinacher is the first person to uncover the full extent of the secret escape routes and hiding places ‘ratlines’ that smuggled Nazis out of Europe, through South Tyrol, across the Alps into Italy, and onward to Argentina and elsewhere. His ground-breaking research in the archives of the ICRC in Geneva brought to light the fact that the Red Cross supplied travel papers to war criminals – amongst them Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.