Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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By Robert Klitzman
“It’s like Star Wars,” a woman with the Huntington Disease mutation recently told me. This lethal gene had killed her relatives in every generation for hundreds of years, but she could now test her embryos to ensure that her children did not get it. “I don’t understand it all,” she told me, “but the peace of mind is huge.”
From cigarettes to knockoffs, what’s available on the black market? Lecturer in modern history Mark Roodhouse investigates the illegal trade in counterfeit and stolen goods in Britain from the interwar period to today. And there’s always a boom in the underground economy as austerity measures hit, whether with “losses of goods in transit” during the Second World War or horsemeat discovered in packaged meals in 2013. Mark Roodhouse speaks with BBC Wiltshire’s Mid-Morning Show about the history of the black market.
Thank you to our wonderful contributors, staff, and most of all readers. OUPblog is one of nine 2013 Webby honorees in the ‘Blog – Cultural’ category. I can’t tell you how thrilled we are to be alongside the New Yorker’s Page-Turner and Perez Hamilton. And further congratulations to the Oxford Islamic Studies Online team or their Religion & Spirituality Websites nomination and the Oxford Music Online team for their Best Writing (Editorial) honor.
By Caitlin Tyler-Richards
Continuing our celebration of the release of 40.1, today we’re excited to share a conversation between managing editor Troy Reeves and contributors Anne Valk and Holly Ewald. Valk and Ewald are the authors of, “Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact through Digital Tools,” which describes the origins and methods of the Mashapaug Project, a collaborative community arts and oral history project on a pond in Providence, Rhode Island.
By William Sims Bainbridge
Cleora Emily Bainbridge was born 8 November 1868, and passed away on 14 April 1870. Her father was a clergyman, and her mother, Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, was director of the Woman’s Branch of the New York City Mission Society. In 1883, her father, William Folwell Bainbridge, imagined what her life might have been like by casting her as the heroine of his novel Self-Giving, where she became a Christian missionary and died a martyr.
Frank Spencer’s famous assertion to Betty that ‘Every day in every way, I am getting better and better!’ is true. We are indeed getting better and better all the time.
By Susan Ware
One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form.
“Shake Shake Shake Señora”! We’ve all heard that song, but do you know how to dance to it? Should you do the Rumba, the Hustle, or possibly the Merengue? Dancing is a universal form of expression and is also unique to different cultures worldwide. In 1982, the International Theatre Institute created the worldwide holiday known as “International Dance Day” on April 29th. In honor of the upcoming holiday, we’ve gathered information from the Oxford Index to test your dance knowledge. Take our brief “Name that dance” quiz, it’s not as easy as you think!
By Gordon R. Thompson
After the success of the single “Please Please Me” and the release of the album Please Please Me, British fans and the press eagerly anticipated “From Me to You.” Fans had pre-ordered so many copies of the disk that when Parlophone did release R 5015 on 11 April 1963, the single immediately appeared in pop charts where it would stay for an amazing 21 weeks.
By Owen Davies
The history of American witchcraft is indelibly associated with Salem, Massachusetts, where in 1692 nineteen people were executed as witches after the accusations of two young girls sparked a wave of fear. The village of Salem, the centre of the events of 1692, is now the town of Danvers, with the focus of today’s witchcraft industry centred on Salem city. But there are numerous other Salems in America, born of the country’s religious heritage – Salem in Hebraic means “peace”. But forget colonial Salem for a moment, as on two occasions in America’s more recent past Salem was the scene of trials related to witchcraft.
By James Tweedie
The legendary film critic Roger Ebert passed away last Thursday at the age of 70, after a recurrence of cancer. Ebert’s career in journalism spanned almost six decades, beginning when he was named the first movie reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. By 1975 he was a nationally recognized critic and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
By Anatoly Liberman
Within a year, two recent articles on the origin of the word boy have come to my attention. This is great news. Keeping a talent of such value under a bushel and withholding it from the rest of the world would be unforgivable. Nowadays, if a philological journal does not come as a reward for the membership in a popular society, its circulation is extremely low.
By Robert Repino
While interest in Islam has grown in recent years—both in the media and in educational institutions—there remains a persistent misunderstanding of the religion’s practices, beliefs, and adherents, who now number over one and half billion people. Addressing this problem is not simply an academic exercise, for the past decade especially has shown that our understanding of Islam can have enormous consequences on foreign and domestic policies, as well as on social relations.
By Juliet Stone
Is living alone in later life bad for your health? As we get older, the likelihood that we will be living on our own increases. We live in an ageing population and data from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2010, nearly half of people aged 75 and over were living on their own. So the experiences and concerns of older people living alone are increasingly relevant to policy-makers and to society at large.