Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Soon after the Flinstones’ cartoon period, formally called the Stone Age, humans started to use metals for constructing tools, weapons, or ornaments which tremendously boosted human development. Since then, metal utilization has been evolving and nowadays, metals are a central pillar for all kind of routine and technological uses. You can find aluminium in most of your pots and pans
One area of research in Foreign Policy Analysis is the study of war. In contemporary wars strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict in persuading story lines to win over various audiences – both in the area of operations and at home. The point of departure for scholars utilizing the concept of strategic narrative is that people make sense of war by means of stories through which shared sense is achieved.
Moustafa Bayoumi presented his book This Muslim American Life as part of the Oral History Workshops at the Columbia University Oral History MA Program.
Suicide is a major health problem. In England, around 5,000 people end their own lives annually – that is one death every two hours and at least ten times that number of attempts, according to the Office for National Statistics. Suicide is a tragedy that is life altering for those bereaved and can be an upsetting event for the community and local services involved. Our previous research demonstrated the:
By the best available estimates, between one in 162 and one in 400 people currently alive is trapped in a situation of slavery or forced labour. Mauritanians are born into hereditary or ‘chattel’ slavery. Indian families suffer in debt bondage in brick kilns. Migrants from Myanmar are forced to work on Thai fishing boats.
I came across Oral History and Childhood Memories by Evan Faulkenbury on the Oral History Review’s blog. His emphasis on narrators’ earliest memories caught my eye.
The assessment of sperm morphology, determined by the cells’ shape and size, is an important part of male fertility testing. Previous research has suggested that only sperm with good sperm morphology are able to make their way to the egg in the woman’s body and fertilise it. Our knowledge of factors that influence sperm size and shape is very limited
The surge in asylum seekers and refugees arriving in Europe over the last two years is regularly described as a crisis. Certainly the numbers are significant: in 2015 there were about 1.2 million asylum applications in Europe, double the number in 2014 which was already a record year. The human suffering should also not be underestimated; almost 4,000 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe in 2015.
Recent advances in technology have led to great developments in many fields – especially the field of medicine. In particular, better image detection has vastly improved electron microscopes, allowing for closer study of macromolecular complexes. The ability to visualize macromolecules in more detail, however, has raised even more questions to explore in the field of microscopy.
Reproductive medicine is a rapidly progressing field which generates a wealth of original and innovative research. As the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) gets ready to welcome a new open access journal to its prestigious family, we meet the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Siladitya Bhattacharya, to find out how he sees the field developing in the future
This year, we have focused on people and institutions using oral history in innovative ways, discussing the challenges they face and their motivations for using oral history to make positive changes in the world.
Recently, INTERPOL announced it had coordinated the shutdown of close to 5,000 websites illegally selling medicines online. Dubbed “Operation Pangea IX”, this ninth annual international week of action against illicit online pharmacies boasted the participation of over 103 countries from a multi-stakeholder coalition, led to 393 arrests, and resulted in the seizure of $53 million dollars worth of potentially dangerous medicines.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month is celebrated annually in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots. The Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village was one of the city’s few gay bars or nightclubs at that time.
The annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) begins this week in San Diego. Are you caught up on your reading? If not, have no fear! We’ve put together a list of your SHAFR “must-reads,” including Diplomatic History’s most popular articles from the past year and a selection of recent books and blog posts on US foreign relations.
Current statistics show a startling lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. In February 2014, Fortune reported that just over 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs were minorities, a classification including African Americans, Asians, and Latin Americans. This is particularly disturbing given that these classifications of minorities comprised 36% of the United States population, and that many top business schools boast that ethnic or racial minorities comprise 25% or more of their student bodies.
Music is everywhere and nowhere in Jane Austen’s fiction. Everywhere, in that pivotal scenes in every novel unfurl to the sound of music; nowhere, in that she almost never specifies exactly what music is being performed. For film adaptations this absence of detail can be a source of welcome freedoms, since the imaginative gap can be variously filled by choosing more or less appropriate historical repertoire