Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Audrey Ingerson
“I, who love women, wanted to give her clothes in which she could drive a car, yet at the same time clothes that emphasized her femininity, clothes that flowed with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well dressed.”
By Jennifer Moore
On the 19th of August, World Humanitarian Day, we honor the contributions of humanitarian workers around the world, especially those who have lost their lives helping people in war-torn societies. This day was first marked in 2008 through a Swedish-sponsored resolution in the United Nations General Assembly
By Gina Heathcote
On 25 June 2013, the United Nations Security Council issued its sixth resolution on women, peace, and security: Resolution 2106. In line with three of the preceding resolutions on women, peace, and security – Resolutions 1820, 1889 and 1960 – the Council focused on the issue of sexual violence in armed conflict.
By Dr. Robert V. McNamee
In July, Electronic Enlightenment (EE) updated with materials taken from the Virginia Historical Society and the correspondence of Adam Ferguson, amongst others. These apparently disparate historical correspondences (and others already published in EE) are brought together within this unique digital framework so that students, scholars and the public can read, in this instance, “across the Atlantic”.
By Brenda Stevenson
Those who followed the Trayvon Martin case this summer did so not just because of the conflicting details of the shooting deaths of these two unarmed black youth, but because these cases, like too many others, have played out in our public consciousness as markers of American justice. Does “liberty and justice for all” actually exist; or are these words from our Pledge of Allegiance just part of the grand American narrative that is more myth than reality?
Long before it was first spotted in 1820, Antarctica has captured imaginations, and the many quests undertaken to explore it never fail to be dramatic adventures. Although Antarctica has been and continues to be studied, many do not know the continent’s past and the challenges it will face in the coming decades.
By Susan P. Fino
Bankruptcies of state governmental entities are relatively rare. Until the Detroit bankruptcy the largest example was a county. In the 1970s, two cities came close to the edge—New York and Cleveland—but both managed to find a way back from the precipice.
An inscribed marble throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis offers us a rare window into the fateful events comprising what has come to be known as the “Red Sea Wars.”
By Jay Albanese
We’ve divided our planet into nearly 200 countries with sovereign borders and laws designed to preserve mutual self-interest. It is not surprising, therefore, that many countries are suspicious of their cross-border neighbors and sometimes outwardly hostile to them. Simply put, the adage “good fences make good neighbors” applies on the international scene as well.
By Justine McConnell
The death of Martin Bernal in June attracted less media attention than one might have hoped for the man who brought an unprecedented attention to the contemporary study of Classics. His 1987 work, Black Athena, was not the first to argue for a strong, pervasive African influence on the culture of ancient Greece, but it was the first to receive widespread notice.
When we consider two obvious facts – that virtually everyone becomes a fluent speaker of at least one language, and that language is central to social life – we can see that most of us are quite sociolinguistically talented. Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we know quite a lot about many of the intricacies of “the social life of language.” This doesn’t mean, however, that our knowledge is complete or wholly accurate. Here are ten illustrations of the point.
By Anne Marie Jukic, Donna Baird, Clarice Weinberg, and Allen Wilcox
Pregnancy begins with conception – an event that is practically invisible. Since we can’t measure the beginning of pregnancy, it’s hard to know how far along a woman is in her pregnancy. We guess the beginning of pregnancy either from the woman’s report of her last menstrual period or from fetal size on ultrasound, both of which have errors.
An intriguing post popped up in my Tumblr feed recently, called “The all-white reinvention of Medieval Europe” from the blog Medieval POC. Both in this post and generally throughout the blog the author makes the point that “People of Color are not an anachronism.”
By Ian Duncan
One of Sir Walter Scott’s creations has been much in the news lately: his country house at Abbotsford was formally reopened to the public by Her Majesty the Queen on 3 July 2013, following a £12 million restoration.
By Anatoly Liberman
The phrase put the kibosh on surfaced in texts in the early thirties of the nineteenth century. For a long time etymologists have been trying to discover what kibosh means and where it came from. Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Gaelic Irish, and French have been explored for that purpose.
By Laura Crombie
In the popular imagination, tournaments feature prominently as the greatest spectacles of the Middle Ages. If archery competitions are thought of, it is probably in the context of Robin Hood films or the great English longbow (and the successes it brought, particularly Agincourt).