Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Marjorie Swann
The Compleat Angler opens with a man seeking companionship on a journey. “You are well overtaken, Gentlemen,” Izaak Walton’s alter-ego Piscator (Fisherman) exclaims as he catches up with Venator (Hunter) and Auceps (Falconer) north of London. “I have stretched my legs up Tottenham-hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware whither I am going this fine, fresh May morning.”
By Glenn Geher and Gökçe Sancak
When it comes to the psychology of long-term mating, there are important differences and similarities that characterize the wants and desires of males and females. Based on extensive past research on the nature of human mating, it turns out that the sexes are more similar than portrayals of the recent research in this area often suggests.
By Anatoly Liberman
What does it take to be a successful etymologist? Obviously, an ability to put two and two together. But all scholarly work, every deduction needs this ability. The more words and forms one knows, the greater is the chance that the result will be reasonably convincing.
By Susan D. Carle
The story of the NAACP’s founding 105 years ago has traditionally focused on the gathering of a small group of whites outraged by the Springfield, Illinois, race riots of the summer of 1908. In January 1909, they gathered in a small New York City apartment to discuss founding a new biracial organization.
By Nick Rankin
As a production, Fleming is still looking great but sounding terrible, with a plonking script mired in Second World War clichés (‘This is WAR, Fleming!’). The second episode begins in 1940. Commander Ian Fleming (Dominic Cooper) is away in neutral Lisbon, where he squanders Naval Intelligence petty cash gambling at cards against uniformed Germans in the casino.
By David M. Levinson
Shopping trips now comprise fewer than 9% of all trips, down from 12.5% in 2000, according to our analysis of the Twin Cities Travel Behavior Inventories. This is consistent with other results from the American Time Use Survey. They are down by about one-third in a decade.
By Jamie Davies
Embryologists who study the beginning of life, and gerontologists who study its end, interact rather little. This is hardly surprising: the former work with growth, construction and preparation for the long life ahead, while the latter work with loss, decline, and the inevitable journey to oblivion.
February 12th has been coined Darwin Day because it marks the anniversary of the birthday of Charles Darwin. One could come up with several creative ways to celebrate the life of such an influential and revered scientist—baking a cake with 73 candles in honor of Darwin’s 73 years of life, or taking a walk through a local park or nature reserve in an attempt to make observations about wild animals, to name a few.
By Hannah Skoda
When I started in my current post, one of my students, off to a nightclub, very cheekily asked me whether when I was young, they were still called discos. The same sorts of feelings are coming to characterize attitudes towards books – our students find it hard to imagine a time when nothing was available electronically.
By Jared Orsi
Somewhere in the middle of the Great Plains in November 1806, the explorer Zebulon Pike worried that the lateness of the season jeopardized the completion of his expedition. A contemporary of Lewis and Clark, Pike commanded a US military party that was exploring the southwestern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase.
By Hugh Cobbe
The cantata Dona Nobis Pacem by Ralph Vaughan Williams was written at a time when the country was slowly awakening to the possibility of a second European conflict. When invited to provide a work for the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society in October 1936, Vaughan Williams remembered that he had in his drawer an unpublished setting of Walt Whitman’s ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’.
By Kandice Rawlings
The Frick Collection in New York recently closed its Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis exhibition of fifteen seventeenth-century Dutch paintings on loan from the Hague museum, which is currently closed for remodeling. The show (which has already been to San Francisco, Atlanta, and Tokyo, and opens next in Bologna) was a blockbuster.
Just over 250 years have passed since the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763. To look back at this influential contract and a turning point in the history of the United States, we present an excerpt from one of Oxford’s Pivotal Moments in American History series — Colin G. Calloway’s The Scratch of the Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America.
By Michael Ostrove, Claudia Salomon, and Bette Shifman
The choice of where an arbitration is venued, known as the seat or the place of arbitration, has important implications and should not be made lightly. The venue of an arbitration impacts the role of local courts in relation to the arbitration, the conduct of the arbitration, and ultimately the enforceability of the award.
It’s big, it’s red, and it’s here. Valentine’s Day strikes fear into the hearts of men and women around the Western world like nothing else can. But you needn’t run scared of the Hallmark branded teddy bears. Oh no. Follow the sprinkling of rose petals, the sweet aroma of scented candles, and the dulcet tones of Phil Collins up the stairs to the luxury boudoir that is Oxford University Press.
The two most controversial, apparently contradictory Super Bowl ads—Bob Dylan’s protectionist, “American Import” Chrysler ad and Coca-Cola’s multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful”—show the breadth of American civil religion. As religion scholars have long observed, it belongs to the nature of religious language to self-destruct.