Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Patricia Aufderheide
What happens to documentary when media goes interactive? It’s not always a welcome question. Documentarians aren’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of someone poking at their precious work on a smartphone, rather than settling into a seat at a theater or on a couch. But they’re going to have to get used to it. Media users want to do more than just watch these days.
By David Potter
This past weekend Olympic superstar swimmer Janet Evans showed up in New York in the company of Olympic sponsor BMW. The London Olympics are unthinkable without their corporate sponsors, both for the site itself and for the teams that are going to compete. But what would a person connected with the ancient version of the Games think?
By Susan J. Matt
Are we lonely because of Facebook? For the last few weeks, sociologists, technologists, and other pundits have debated this question. Facebook’s critics claim the technology isolates its users, while its defenders seem unwilling to concede that their social networking results in loneliness. Largely absent from the conversation has been the historical perspective, which sheds important light on the topic. When one takes the long view, it becomes clear that Facebook has not made us lonely, for Americans have been lonely for at least two centuries, and have often struggled to find ways to assuage these feelings.
By Maury Klein
For Americans in 1869, the driving of the golden spike, which joined the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, carried a significance similar to that of the first moon landing for a later generation. It marked the conquest not only of distance, but of a landscape that was as alien to most Americans as the moon. It bound together the far-flung ends of a nation still licking its wounds from a bloody and divisive civil war. Travelers could now go from New York to California via a series of trains in seven days, a journey that earlier took 35 days across the fever-infested Isthmus of Panama or five months for the perilous sail around Cape Horn. In the process they could also glimpse the West that few of them had ever seen and was already an American mythology in the making.
By Callum Brown
In 1955 Margaret Knight became the most hated woman in Britain. She was vilified and demonised in virtually every British newspaper, and thousands of letters attacking her were sent by ordinary Britons to the BBC, to the papers and to her personally. Parents wrote fearing for the safety of their children, bishops and priests criticised her impudence, whilst well-known authors like Dorothy L Sayers castigated her ignorance. Hounded by journalists and pursued by photographers, the smiling image of Mrs Knight in her ‘Sunday-best hat’ and coat appeared in most newspapers. She was the nation’s number one ‘folk devil’ of 1955.
By Anatoly Liberman
Why don’t good and hood rhyme with food and mood? Why are friend and fiend spelled alike but pronounced differently? There is a better way of asking this question, because the reason for such oddities is always the same: English retains the spelling that made sense centuries ago. At one time, the graphic forms we learn one by one made sense. Later the pronunciation changed, while the spelling remained the same. Therefore, the right question is: What has happened to the pronunciation of the words that give us trouble?
By Hanan El Marroun
Some babies are born four weeks too early and others are born three weeks past the due date. Their timing seems random, but that is certainly not the case. Of all births, around 90% take place between 37 and 40 weeks. There are several theories about how the timing of birth is regulated, but the process is not completely understood.
By Geraldine McCaughrean
As Captain Scott sat in his tent in the Antarctic in 1912, pinioned between the dead bodies of Birdie and Uncle Bill, he wrote countless valedictory notes to people he would never see again, in places half a world away. One was to the godfather of his son, expressing his love and admiration for the man and asking him to look after the boy. A hundred years ago that letter was lying unread in the death tent. But eventually, of course, it was delivered – to J. M. Barrie, foremost playwright and author of his day.
By Gordon Thompson
On this spring morning fifty years ago, Brian Epstein climbed the front steps and passed through the simple entrance of the EMI Recording Studios in St. John’s Wood, London, placing him on the other side of the looking glass. As a retailer, he had sold recordings made in these studios by Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Thomas Beecham, and, more recently, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. The neophyte manager of the Beatles now eagerly anticipated the possibility of watching through the control room window as his “boys” joined that exclusive club.
By Elvin Lim
With the airwaves ablaze with a new controversy about President Obama campaign ad, it may be worth thinking about why it is so difficult for many Americans, even some on the Left, to give Obama credit for anything. To proffer a tentative answer, I’m going to sketch the landscape of the comparison group: how other presidents have been vilified.
The benefits of four centuries of technological and organizational change are at last reaching a previously excluded global majority. To make the most of this epochal transition, the key is entrepreneurship. Our friends at the Kauffman Foundation sat down with Philip Auerswald, author of The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy, to discuss what’s next for the world.
Carole Garibaldi Rogers
Oral histories of American Catholic women religious repeatedly reveal courageous steps out from traditional roles into ministries that serve the poor and marginalized. They also illuminate historical trends in both the church and society.
By Mark Franko
Martha Graham’s work was prominent in the New York dance world of the 1930s in the wake of her innovative Primitive Mysteries (1931). Yet, her reputation grew exponentially beyond the confines of dance and the New York art world after the premiere of American Document (1938) followed by its national tour in 1939. This is, paradoxically, a work that the Martha Graham Dance Company may be reluctant to perform today in a version close to the original. It was related to the political issues of the day, highly anti-fascist and popular front, and critical of the history of the United States. Graham’s national reputation took hold at this time, and she was noted not only for her choreography and dancing but also for her political stance in the pre-war moment.
By Edward Zelinsky
By taking the Giving Pledge, wealthy individuals publicly commit to contribute “the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.” The Pledge was started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, Jr. Recently, twelve more wealthy families signed the Giving Pledge including Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal.
Now that Mitt Romney has established himself as the certain Republican nominee in the 2012 president election, Americans will begin to scrutinize his record and his statements more closely. The economic problems that have beset the United States over the past four years mean that much of the attention will focus on Romney’s economic proposals; so, too, does the ongoing controversy over “Obamacare” assure a focus on the Republican’s stance on health care. However, with an ongoing war in Afghanistan and continuing tensions over the Iranian nuclear weapons program, we also need to consider how Romney understands the role of the president as a commander in chief. Some of the signs are disturbing.
This Day in World History
Back to the audience, facing the orchestra, the composer steadily marked the tempo with his hands. He was not conducting, though — he was deaf. Thus it was that, when the orchestra and chorus finished, he could not hear the applause and cheers of the Vienna audience. When a musician turned him around so he could see the joy on listeners’ faces, Ludwig von Beethoven bowed in gratitude — and wept.