Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Tune in tomorrow morning from 8 to 9 a.m. to see Donald Ritchie on C-Span’s Washington Journal. In the post below Ritchie puts the current Congressional committee investigations into the Bush administration in historical perspective.
With Memorial Day in the U.S. right around the corner, we’re bringing you a glimpse into a handful of oral history projects focused on collecting and preserving the memories of military veterans.
Some of you open a can of soup and tweet about it, others of us would never know about your tweet since we don’t use Twitter. Others at this year’s Oral History Association annual meeting put their phones away for a second to do what they do best: listen.
You may have seen representatives of the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the OHA Annual Meeting this year. We rumbled down hallways in a pack six strong, all twenty-five years old and younger, all smiles, all ears, and all left feet.
Well the time has come for me to say goodbye to all of you lovely readers. Running the OUPblog has been a dream job and leaving is very bittersweet. So I thought before I left we could take a trip down memory lane and review some of the best blog posts of the past. This list certainly is not conclusive, just a few of the thousands of posts I had the honor of sharing with you. Please keep in touch. You can follow my adventures on twitter @FordBecca. Ciao!
A historical look at Scooter Libby’s conviction.
Until the age of 50, Mencken was called “America’s Foremost Bachelor,” praised for being the patron saint of single men. When H. L. Mencken married Sara Powell Haardt in 1930, the press concluded that the author of “In Defense of Women” was probably in the most embarassing position of any fiancee in recent years. They were bent in trotting out the old quotes. How, reporters insisted with glee, will Mencken explain that he had once said “A man may be a fool and not know it –but not if he’s married.” Long before, he had defined love as “the delusion that one woman differs from another.” To these queries Mencken replied; “I formerly was not as wise as I am now….the wise man frequently revises his opinions. The fool, never.”
As calls for “lobbying reform” resound through the halls of Congress this spring, we do well to remember this piece of wisdom from Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Influence peddling, lobbying scandals, and the reporters and newspapers that expose them, have been a part of American political life since the beginning. We […]
In the afterglow of Watergate, Washington journalists’ ever-growing reliance on anonymous sources left both reporters and editors vulnerable to manipulation. As editor of the Post’s Metro section, Bob Woodward failed to challenge a promising young reporter who submitted a sensational article on an eight-year-old drug addict, based entirely on anonymous sources. After Janet Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize for “Jimmy’s World” in 1981, an internal investigation exposed the story as fictitious. The Cooke incident derailed Woodward’s rise within the Post’s management and resulted in his nebulous position as assistant managing editor.
In studying two centuries of Washington reporting, I found only one instance where journalists came forward to name their anonymous sources. It occurred in 1846 after the Washington Daily Times (no relation to the current paper) printed sensational allegations that Whigs were plotting with the British minister to bring about a settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute. When the Senate investigated the charges, the paper’s editor and publisher voluntarily divulged the sources of the story: a naval officer, a Senate doorkeeper, several lobbyists, and a few other journalists. Since those sources had everything to lose and nothing to gain by corroborating the Times’ allegations, every witness, under oath, denied knowledge of a plot. The committee branded the story “utterly and entirely false,” and banned anyone from the newspaper from the Senate galleries. The Washington Daily Times promptly went out of business, creating an object lesson that the rest of the press corps took very much to heart.
Welcome to the OUP blog! Those of you looking for that “original content” we’ve promised can reference: Nancy Sherman’s post on America’s treatment of our Iraq War veterans… Harm de Blij’s post on why geography education really does matter… Jill Quadagno and Jerome Kassirer commenting on the problems in our health care system… And Donald […]
Fifty years ago this past Sunday, the brutal slaying of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, laid bare the raw savagery and blatant disregard for decency and law that permeated the Jim Crow South. When Till’s mother insisted on an open casket funeral and Jet magazine published photos of his […]
At his recent press conference, President Biden said that he came to the Senate 120 years ago. I knew exactly what he meant because I got there three years after him when I joined the Senate Historical Office in 1976, and it was a different world.
The best barometer of political anger is how often the word “impeachment” appears in news stories, editorials, and Congressional rhetoric. These days, the references have grown exponentially, despite the House Speaker’s efforts to keep her members focused on legislation. The constitutional definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is vague enough to have encouraged members of […]
Given our constitutional separation of powers, it seems odd that a presidential inauguration takes place on the Capitol steps. Like so much else in American history, the story begins with George Washington. In 1789, the First Congress met in New York City, where it proceeded to count the electoral ballots, an easy task since the vote had been unanimous.
The primaries, the conventions, and the media have focused so much attention on the presidential candidates that it’s sometime easy to forget all the other federal elections being held this year, for 34 seats in the Senate and 435 in the House (plus five nonvoting delegates). The next president’s chances of success will depend largely on the congressional majorities this election will produce.