Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Michael Trebilcock
The long fight to end slavery, led by William Wilberforce, among many others, culminated in Britain with the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. This Act made provision for a payment of £20 million (almost 40% of the British budget at the time) in compensation to plantation owners in many British colonies — about US$21 billion in present day value.
By Paula A. Michaels
Writing on Saturday in The Age, popular historian Paul Ham launched a frontal assault on “academic history” produced by university-based historians primarily for consumption by their professional peers.
By W. David McIntyre
The rapid dissolution of the European colonial empires in the middle decades of the 20th-Century were key formative events in the background to the contemporary global scene. As the British Empire was the greatest of the imperial structures to go, it is worth considering who signed the death warrant. I suggest there are five candidates.
By William Chislett
The good news is that Spain has finally come out of a five-year recession that was triggered by the bursting of its property bubble. The bad news is that the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at a whopping 26%, double the European Union average.
By Michael H. Hunt
Amidst all the commentary occasioned by Russia fishing in troubled Ukrainian waters, one fundamental point tends to get lost from sight. Like many other recent points of international tension, this one raises the question of what are the rules great powers play by.
By Kate Pais
The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, better known as C-SPAN, has been airing the day-to-day activities of Congress since 1979, for thirty-five years as of this week. Now across three different channels, C-SPAN has provided the American public easy access to politics in action, and created a new level of transparency in public life.
In the 1960s, Coca-Cola had a cocaine problem. This might seem odd, since the company removed cocaine from its formula around 1903, bowing to Jim Crow fears that the drug was contributing to black crime in the South. But even though Coke went cocaine-free in the Progressive Era, it continued to purchase coca leaves from Peru, removing the cocaine from the leaves but keeping what was left over as a flavoring extract.
On 23 September 1840 the wonderfully eccentric Oxford geologist William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1809–1873) left Glasgow by stagecoach on a tour of the Scottish Highlands.
By David Cobham
The standard arguments against monetary policy responding to asset prices are the claims that it is not feasible to identify asset price bubbles in real time, and that the use of interest rates to restrain asset prices would have big adverse effects on real economic activity. So what happened with central banks and house prices prior to the financial crisis of 2007-8?
By Philip Schofield
In 1814, just two hundred years ago, the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) began to write on the subject of religion and sex, and thereby produced the first systematic defence of sexual liberty in the history of modern European thought.
In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, one group of dedicated social work scholars at Rutgers University explored options to offer funding and training programs to assist clients who were hit hard. One of their more recent initiatives provided subscriptions to the Encyclopedia of Social Work Online to seven agency directors who needed access to scholarly research to guide their work in the field. We spoke to Kathleen Pottick, professor in Rutgers University’s School of Social Work, who spearheaded this endeavor to hear the story behind their work.
By David Ellwood
‘The Americanisation of British politics has been striking this conference season,’ declared The Economist last autumn. ‘British politicians and civil servants love freebies to the US “to see how they do things,”’ reported Simon Jenkins in The Guardian in November.
By Jad Adams
Tony Benn has left as an enduring monument: one of the great diaries of the twentieth century, lasting from 1940, when he was fifteen, to 2009 when illness forced him to stop.
Most of us only think about teeth when something’s wrong with them — when they come in crooked, break, or begin to rot. But take a minute to consider your teeth as the extraordinary feat of engineering they are. They concentrate and transmit the forces needed to break food, again and again, up to millions of times over a lifetime. And they do it without themselves being broken in the process — with the very same raw materials used to make the plants and animals being eaten.
The push for performance has never been higher. Students today are faced with a grueling course load, extra-curriculars, and standardized tests. In the wake of this competitive atmosphere, the United States has seen a spike in both ADHD diagnoses and increased demand for prescription medicine. But who’s to blame?
By David Gugerli and Tobias Straumann
In September 1965, Hurricane Betsy devastated parts of Florida and the central United States Gulf Coast. The damage was estimated at $1 billion – so far the costliest natural disaster in US history.