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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In its simplest form, the American Dream asserts that success should be determined by effort, not one’s starting point. This is the promise on which most Americans base their hopes and the calculus that is supposed to govern our institutions.
I work at a history museum with vast Native American collections, and I see every day how stubborn narratives of Native “disappearance” in modern America persist in institutions and among the public. Recent activism and art have begun to present a “reappearance,” but non-specialists have been offered few stories of the paths Native people actually took between, to use iconic incidents, the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Best known as the composer of Candide and West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein had an immensely versatile career. Born on August 25, 1918, Bernstein’s career spanned decades, leaving a lasting impression through his work as a conductor, composer, and music educator.
Despite succeeding in reuniting the nation after the Civil War, American Reconstruction saw little social and political cohesion. Division—between North and South, black and white, Democrat and Republican—remained unmistakable across the nation. In the following excerpt from Reconstruction: A Concise History, Allen C. Guelzo delves into the complicated nature of race and politics during this […]
“Globesity” (the global pervasiveness of obesity) is an epidemic issue across both developed and developing countries. For many nations obesity is a major health issue, but especially the United States.
Pride is one of the most widely-recognised animal collectives in the world. We often picture lions among their family unit, whether they be standing proudly together or hunting down a doomed antelope. These famous social groups are usually formed of between three and ten adult females, two or three males, and the pride’s latest litters of cubs, and they live together (most of the time) across Africa and in the Gir Forest Sanctuary.
Are you studying to become a police officer? Perhaps you have considered volunteering as a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO)? Whether you are a student of policing, or simply interested in police theory, you can test your knowledge with our short policing quiz.
As a matter of fact, it is a long story, because the distant origin of hate—the word, not the feeling—is far from clear. As usual, we should try to determine the earliest meaning of our word (for it may be different from the one we know) and search for the cognates in and outside Germanic. At the beginning of the month (see the post for 1 August 2018), a good deal was said about the Gothic language.
Idealizing pre-modern life has a long history in western culture. When Europeans discovered the vast new world of the Americas, new visions and possibilities arose in their imagination, not just of the Native Americans that populated the new continent, but of Europeans themselves. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes understood Native Americans to live in a pre-civil condition, savages ridden with violence.
Since the emergence of autism as a diagnosed condition in the 1940s, the oft-noted musical proclivities of people on the autism spectrum have generated much interest. Reports of savant-like abilities, extraordinary feats of musical memory, and disproportionately high rates of perfect pitch abound, along with a high degree of emphasis on music’s importance in therapeutic interventions.
Privilege has become a serious area of inquiry in recent years. White privilege and male privilege have hit the spotlight, as has racial disparities in police brutality and the #MeToo movement highlighting workplace harassment and sexual assault.
Recently, the issue of single-use plastic and its impact on the environment has come to the fore, with many companies vowing to cut back their plastic use, and increased media coverage across the globe. It isn’t difficult to see why there is a growing passion for addressing the problem of plastic—its environmental significance is truly shocking—and in 2016 the Ellen MacArthur Foundation published a report that concluded there will be as much plastic in the ocean as fish by 2020.
On this episode of The Oxford Comment, we take a look at the challenges faced by humanitarians today. Host Erin Katie Meehan sat down with Health & Social Work editorial board member Sarah Gehlert, Belinda Gurd and Alexandra Eurdolian of the UNOCHA, and esteemed psychologist Robert J. Wicks to explore important questions about humanitarianism.
Judicial photography dates back to Belgium in the 1840’s when the earliest known photographs of criminals were taken within prisons by prison officials. In Switzerland, 1852, Carl Durheim was commissioned by Attorney General Jacob Amiet, and tasked with taking photographs of arrested vagrants in Bern. During this period, judicial photography was used by local authorities to document individuals who travelled, and were unknown to local police.
Who doesn’t like a centenary? Whether solemn, festive, or celebratory, a centenary can be very instructive, whether conducted individually or collectively. It is a way of acknowledging—often honouring—the past and, at the same time, reassessing the present and imagining the future in the context of the previous event or exemplary person.
The Women’s Suffragist movement spans multiple generations. 72 years passed between the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. During that time, women skillfully organized, mobilized, and built a powerful social movement to achieve their long-sought goal. Let’s look back at the events that led up to that […]