OUPblog

This old house and these old houses

By Edwin L. Battistella
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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’s fight for affordable housing [timeline]

By Betty Boyd Caroli
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Labor and luck in etymology

By Anatoly Liberman
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Sculptural transformations: destruction and reuse in Roman London

By Penny Coombe

Despite much build-up to the new Star Wars film, one of the lesser-known news stories of 2015 described the transformation of a statue of Lenin, standing in a square in Odessa, into one of Darth Vadar. This metamorphosis was necessary to comply with a law passed by the Ukrainian Parliament in April 2015 that banned communist propaganda. Streets were renamed and monuments removed, though even before the law was passed some statues of Lenin had been torn down or mutilated, possibly in protest against Russian influence at a time of heightened political tension.

La traviata at the Royal Opera House: a period masterpiece

By René Weis

The current La traviata at the Royal Opera House premiered in 1994 and almost immediately established itself as a modern classic. It succeeded a highly successful production by Luchino Visconti and John Copley, which had run for 27 years and had featured legendary sopranos, including Mirella Freni, Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballé, and Kiri Te Kanawa. To follow Visconti was a hard act, but the 1994 Royal Opera House La traviata did just that and with considerable panache.

To blame or to forgive?

By Nicola Lacey and Hanna Pickard

What do you do when faced with wrongdoing – do you blame or do you forgive? Especially when confronted with offences that lie on the more severe end of the spectrum and cause terrible psychological or physical trauma or death, nothing can feel more natural than to blame.

Why we need female brains in CTE research

By Jeffrey Kutcher and Joanne C. Gerstner

US soccer player Brandi Chastain became a household name through her outstanding play in the 1999 Women’s World Cup. She scored the championship-winning goal in the unforgettable final shoot-out in front of the world and 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

Who should be Scalia’s new successor?

By Edward A. Zelinsky

Article III of the Constitution gives the President the right to “nominate…Judges of the supreme Court.” Article III also gives the Senate the right to grant its “Advice and Consent” to such nominations—or not. Both President Obama and Senate Republicans are settling into a protracted political struggle over the appointment of Justice Scalia’s successor.

How filling the Supreme Court vacancy will affect public health

By Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel

Who is selected to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court will profoundly affect key public health issues, including gun control, access to reproductive health services, and climate change. In recent years, the Court has ruled, usually by 5-to-4 decisions, on these issues and will likely continue to do so by narrow margins.

Risen the Movie: a scholarly review and comparison

By Greg Carey

The film Risen retells the story of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension through the fictional Roman tribune Clavius, who supervises both Jesus’ crucifixion and the investigation into what happened to his missing body.

Leap day, giant viruses, and gene-editing

By Dawn Field

2016 is a leap year. A leap year, or intercalary year, is a year with an extra day inserted to keep pace with the seasons. In the Gregorian calendar this falls every four years on Feb 29th. On Leap Day this year a wonderful piece of science was published about an equally rare part of nature – giant viruses.

Latin: the Renaissance’s world language

By Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg

Latin, then, was a ubiquitous and commonplace language in the Renaissance, widely spoken, read, and written across Europe and beyond. If the defining characteristics of what has variously been called a “world language” and a “universal language” are its number of non-native speakers and its international circulation, by the time Erasmus was writing his Colloquies and Shakespeare his comedies Latin had been a paradigmatic world language for well over a millennium.

The business of politics

By Adam Sheingate

Political races in the United States rely heavily on highly paid political consultants who carefully curate the images of politicians, advise candidates on polling and analytics, and shape voters’ perceptions through marketing and advertising techniques. More than half of the $6 billion spent in the 2012 election went to consultants who controlled virtually every aspect of the campaigns

Shake your chains: politics, poetry, and protest

By Matthew Flinders

This year, 21 March marks not just the beginning of the Political Studies Association’s 2016 Annual Conference in Brighton but also World Poetry Day. Formally ratified by UNESCO in 1999 but with antecedents that date back to the middle of the twentieth century, World Poetry Day’s aim is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world and, as the UNESCO session declaring the day says, to ‘give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements.

Militias and citizenship: the eighteenth century and today

By Matthew McCormack

Citizenship is central to our political discourse in Britain today. From John Major’s ‘Citizen’s Charter’ to New Labour’s introduction of citizenship classes for schoolchildren – and citizenship tests for immigrants – it is a preoccupation that spans the political spectrum. Citizenship suggests membership of the national community, membership that comes with both rights and responsibilities.

Early modern drama and the New World

By Gavin Hollis

The so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration. Yet despite the far-reaching impact of the expanding globe, no play is set in the Americas, few plays treat colonization as central to the plot, and only a handful features Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise).

Philosopher of the month: David Hume

By John Priest

Born in Edinburgh, Hume is considered a founding figure of empiricism and the most significant philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment. With its strong critique of contemporary metaphysics, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) cleared the way for a genuinely empirical account of human understanding.

The ethics of war

By George Lucas

People often do not associate war and ethics with one another, given the death, conflict, and senselessness that typically arises. However, in this sampling from Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, author George Lucas argues that ethics are paramount in military service and typically more complex than “good versus evil.”

Why are evangelical voters so ambivalent about Ted Cruz?

By Neil J. Young

When Ted Cruz announced last March he was running for the Republican nomination for president, he did so at Liberty University. The nation’s largest evangelical university, Liberty was an unsurprising spot for Cruz to begin his campaign. More than any other Republican in the race, Cruz has based his entire campaign on winning evangelical voters as the pathway to his party’s nomination.