Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
What value does the story of Henry George, a self-taught economist from the late nineteenth century, hold for Americans living in the early 21st century? Quite a lot, if we stop to consider the ways in which contemporary American society has come to resemble America in the late-nineteenth century, a period popularly known as the Gilded Age.
Health care reform in the United States has promoted policies and practices that are evidence-based. Prevention, diagnoses, and treatment decisions are to be guided by the best available empirical evidence. Decisions about what treatments are to be provided are to be informed by findings of randomized, controlled, research studies when such evidence is available.
On a blustery St. Martin’s Eve in 1619, a 23-year-old French gentleman soldier in the service of Maximilian of Bavaria was billeted near Ulm, Germany. Having recently quit his military service under Maurice of Nassau, he was new to the Bavarian army and a stranger to the area.
What can the history of medicine tell us about food allergy and other medical conditions? An awful lot. History is essentially about why things change over time. None of our ideas about health or medicine simply spring out of the ground. They evolve over time, adapting to various social, political, economic, technological, and cultural factors. If we want to know anything about the health issues that face us today and will face us in future, the very first thing we should do is turn to the history of such issues.
We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Kathy Battista as the new Editor in Chief of the Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Director of the MA program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute, she has dedicated her life to furthering knowledge of art history through a teaching career, one that has taken her from London to New York City. From issues in contemporary art to dramatic changes in the art market over the past decade, Battista addresses all our burning questions regarding the state of her field.
Although most historians of the French Revolution assign the French queen Marie-Antoinette a minor role in bringing about that great event, a good case can be made for her importance if we look more deeply into her politics than most scholars have.
What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week and Academic Book Week with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Following on from our list of academic books that changed the world, we’re looking to the future and how our current publishing could change lives and attitudes in years to come.
From peace missions and cyber attacks, border disputes and disarmament treaties taking place across the globe, there’s no doubt that 2014 was a tumultuous and eventful year for foreign affairs and international relations. Which government declared itself feminist in 2014? Do you know which countries spend the most on their military? Who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize […]
How much do you know about the history of publishing at Oxford University Press? The first book was printed just two years after Caxton set up the first printing press in England. Fell type moulds were introduced two centuries later to make Oxford’s publishing comparable with the finest in Europe.
How readily someone may be understood when using a new word will depend on several factors: the intuitable transparency of meaning, its clarity in context, the receptiveness of the audience, and so on.
In September 2010, the OAPEN-UK research study set out to investigate the potential of open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences disciplines, which was, at the time, a relatively unknown concept. The collaborative study aimed to contribute to the evidence base and understanding of open publication models, in order to inform the direction taken by the scholarly community.
Sturdy idiophone ubiquitous among dress shoe-wearing cultures. Rising to prominence during 15th century England, the shoehorn has today become one of the most widely used instruments in the world. This notoriety had lead many scholars to suggest that the shoehorn stands as Britain’s crowning contribution to contemporary music culture.
What was happening in the world last year? Events such as the the devastating protest-turned-conflict in Ukraine, or the maritime disputes between states in the South China Sea, have wide-reaching repercussions – from the amount a country spends on its military, to the direction of foreign policies whole regions take.
The conspirators in what we now know as the Gunpowder Plot failed in their aspiration to blow up the House of Lords on the occasion of the state opening of parliament in the hope of killing the King and a multitude of peers. Why do we continue to remember the plot? The bonfires no longer articulate anti-Roman Catholicism, though this attitude formally survived until 2013 in the prohibition against the monarch or the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic.
Depending on your tastes, bagpipes are primal and evocative, or crude and abrasive. Adore or despise them, they are ubiquitous across the city centers of Scotland (for tourists or locals?). In anticipation of St Andrews Day, and your Robert Burns poetry readings with a certain woodwind accompaniment, here are 10 facts you may not have known about the history of the bagpipes.
The term fragile state originated as an alternative to “failed state” – a worldview predominated by assertions about “weak” or “strong” states, with very weak states referred to as “failures”, “failed states”, etc. A lot of critics rightly pointed out the naivete of a single dimension in conceptualizing the myriad ways in which states and societies can go wrong.