By: KatherineS,
on 8/28/2015
Greece is not alone in suffering from budget cuts arising from the era of austerity. In the UK, local councils, libraries, museums – all public services have been cut. Criminal Justice has not escaped this cost-cutting. The consequence has been fewer police officers on the streets, less money for legal aid lawyers, and closures of Magistrates courts.
The post Austerity and the prison appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 8/21/2015
Do you know your George Washingtons from your Thomas Jeffersons? Do you know your British tyrants from your American Patriots? Test your knowledge of the American Revolution with this quiz, based on Robert J. Allison’s The American Revolution: A Very Short Introduction.
The post How much do you know about the American Revolution? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 8/14/2015
Daniel Pick, author of Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, introduces psychoanalysis, discusses its role within history and culture and tells us how psychoanalysis is used today. How has psychoanalysis developed from the late nineteenth century?
The post Introducing psychoanalysis appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 7/31/2015
NASA’s New Horizons probe swept past Pluto and its moons at 17 km per second on 14 July. Even from the few close up images yet beamed back we can say that Pluto’s landscape is amazing. Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is quite a sight too, and I’m glad that I delayed publication of my forthcoming Very Short Introduction to Moons so that I could include it.
The post Pluto and Charon at last! appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 7/24/2015
Mary Stewart became Queen of Scots aged only 6 days old after her father James V died in 1542. Her family, whose name was anglicised to Stuart in the seventeenth century, had ruled Scotland since 1371 and were to do so until the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Raised in France from 1548, she married the heir to the French throne (1558) and did not come to Scotland until after he died in 1561.
The post A royal foxhunt: The abdication of Mary Queen of Scots appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 7/17/2015
For four centuries Britain was an integral part of the Roman Empire, a political system stretching from Turkey to Portugal and from the Red Sea to the Tyne and beyond. Britain's involvement with Rome started long before its Conquest, and it continued to be a part of the Roman world for some time after the final break with Roman rule. But how much do you know about this important period of British history?
The post How much do you know about Roman Britain? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 7/10/2015
A few months ago I took part in a discussion of Kafka on Melvyn Bragg’s radio programme In Our Time. One of the other participants asserted that Kafka’s style describes horrific events in the emotionally deadpan tone of a bureaucrat report. This struck me immediately as wrong in lots of ways. I didn’t disagree, because time was short, and because I wouldn’t want to seem to be scoring points of a colleague. But it occurred to me that the speaker, a professor of English Literature, had probably only read Kafka in English, and only the old translations by W. and E. Muir.
The post Carefully constructed: The language of Franz Kafka appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Michael Smith,
on 7/3/2015
Over the past several decades, few fields of American history have grown as dramatically as women’s history. Today, courses in women’s history are standard in most colleges and universities, and historians regularly produce scholarship on women and gender. In 1981, historian Gerda Lerner provocatively challenged, “always ask what did the women do while the men were doing what the textbook tells us was important."
The post The history of American women [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 6/26/2015
If you like your prophecies pin sharp then look away now. The 16th century celebrity seer Nostradamus excelled at the exact opposite, couching his predictions in terms so vague as to be largely meaningless. This has not, however, prevented his soothsayings attracting enormous and unending interest, and his book – Les Propheties – has rarely been out of print since it was first published 460 years ago. Uniquely, for a renaissance augur, the writings of Nostradamus are perhaps as popular today as they were four and a half centuries ago.
The post Look away now: The prophecies of Nostradamus appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 6/19/2015
The latest incarnation (I chose that word advisedly!) of the Jurassic Park franchise has been breaking box-office records and garnering mixed reviews from the critics. On the positive side the film is regarded as scary, entertaining, and a bit comedic at times (isn't that what most movies are supposed to be?). On the negative side the plot is described as rather 'thin', the human characters two-dimensional, and the scientific content (prehistoric animals) unreliable, inaccurate, or lacking entirely in credibility.
The post The Jurassic world of … dinosaurs? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 6/12/2015
On 15th June 2015, Magna Carta celebrates its 800th anniversary. More has been written about this document than about virtually any other piece of parchment in world history. A great deal has been wrongly attributed to it: democracy, Habeas Corpus, Parliament, and trial by jury are all supposed somehow to trace their origins to Runnymede and 1215. In reality, if any of these ideas are even touched upon within Magna Carta, they are found there only in embryonic form.
The post The greatest charter? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 6/5/2015
Some reviewers of the first episodes of the current BBC1 adaptation have dismissed it is over-blown fantasy, even childish, yet Clarke’s characters are only once removed from the very real magical world of early nineteenth-century England. What few readers or viewers realise is that there were magicians similar to Strange and Norrell at the time: there really were 'Friends of English Magic', to whom the novel’s Mr Segundus appealed in a letter to The Times.
The post The real world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 5/29/2015
On this day in 1953, the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and Nepali-Indian Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In the following excerpt from his book, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2015), Stewart A. Weaver discusses why we, as humans, want to explore and discover. For all the different forms it takes in different historical periods, for all the worthy and unworthy motives that lie behind it, exploration, travel for the sake of discovery and adventure, seems to be a human compulsion.
The post Exploring the final frontier appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 5/22/2015
April 2015 will go down in history as the month that the 2016 race for the White House began in earnest. Hillary Clinton’s online declaration of her presidential candidacy was the critical moment. With it America’s two major political parties have locked horns with each other. The Democrats intend to continue their control of the presidency for another four years; Republicans hope to finally make good on a conservative bumper sticker that began appearing on automobiles as early as the summer of 2009 and that read, “Had Enough Yet? Next Time Vote Republican.”
The post Do America’s political parties matter in presidential elections? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 5/1/2015
Light occupies a central place in our understanding of the world both as a means by which we locate ourselves in nature and as a thing that inspires our imagination. Light is what enables us to see things, and thus to navigate our surroundings. It is also a primary means by which we learn about the world – light beams carry information about the constituents of the universe, from distant stars and galaxies to the cells in our bodies to individual atoms and molecules.
The post 6 things you didn’t know about light appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 4/17/2015
Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the two-term precedent set by George Washington by running for and winning a third and fourth term. Pressure for limiting terms followed FDR’s remarkable record. In 1951 the Twenty-Second constitutional amendment was ratified stating: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…” Accordingly, reelected Presidents must then govern knowing they cannot run again.
The post From Carter to Clinton: Selecting presidential nominees in the modern era appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ChloeF,
on 4/3/2015
Easter, commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is historically the most important of all Christian festivals, even though in some Western countries it has largely lost the religious significance it retains amongst the Orthodox; nevertheless it merits discussion in a broader context not only because it is often a public as well as a religious holiday, or indeed because even Christians may be baffled by its apparently capricious incidence, but because the history of its calculation illustrates many complexities of time-reckoning.
The post The origins of Easter appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 3/27/2015
What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) all about? Companies appear to be adopting new attitudes and activities in the way they identify, evaluate and respond to social expectations. Society is no longer treated as a ‘given’, but as critical to business success. In some cases this is simply for the license to operate that social acceptability grants. In others, companies believe that favorable evaluations by consumers, employees and investors (who are, after all, members of society) will improve business performance.
The post What is Corporate Social Responsibility? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Connie Ngo,
on 3/13/2015
March is Women’s History Month and as the United States gears up for the 2016 election, I propose we salute a pathbreaking woman candidate for president. No, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, but Shirley Chisholm, who became the first woman and the first African American to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party for president. And yet far too often Shirley Chisholm is seen as just a footnote or a curiosity, rather than as a serious political contender who demonstrated that a candidate who was black or female or both belonged in the national spotlight.
The post Unbossed, unbought, and unheralded appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ChloeF,
on 2/20/2015
The 20th century has been called ‘the century of psychiatry’, and in many ways one could read that as ‘the century of psychotherapy’. A hundred years ago, at the onset of World War I, psychotherapy had touched the lives of only a tiny number of people, and most of the population had simply never heard of it. Since then it has reached into almost every aspect of our lives—how we treat the mentally ill, how we understand our relationships, our appreciation of art and artists, and even how we manage our schools, prisons, and workplaces.
The post Psychotherapy now and in the future appeared first on OUPblog.
By: PennyF,
on 1/23/2015
The headline reads: “Border State Governor Issues Dire Warning about Flood of Undocumented Immigrants.” And here’s the gist of the story: In a letter to national officials, the governor of a border state sounded another alarm about unchecked immigration across a porous boundary with a neighboring country. In the message, one of several from border state officials, the governor acknowledged that his/her nation had once welcomed immigrants from its neighbor, but recent events taught how unwise that policy was. He/she insisted that many of the newcomers to his/her state were armed and dangerous criminals. Even those who came to work threatened to overwhelm the state’s resources and destabilize the social order.
Indeed, unlike earlier immigrants from the neighboring nation who had adapted to their new homeland and its traditions, more recent arrivals resisted assimilation. Instead, they continued to speak in their native tongue and maintain attachments to their former nation, sometimes carrying their old flag in public demonstrations. Worse still, the governor admitted that his/her nation seemed unwilling to “arrest” the flow of these undocumented aliens. Yet, unless the “incursions” were halted, the “daring strangers,” who are “gradually outnumbering and displacing us,” would turn us into “strangers in our own land.”
Today’s headline? It could be. The governor’s fears certainly ring familiar. Indeed, the warning sounds a lot like ones issued by Governor Rick Perry of Texas or Jan Brewer of Arizona. But this particular alarm emanated from California. That might make Pete Wilson the author of this message. Back in the 1990s, he was very vocal about the dangers that illegal immigration posed to his state and the United States. As governor, Wilson championed the “Save Our State” ballot initiative that cut illegal aliens from access to state benefits such as subsidized health care and public education. He campaigned on behalf of the initiative (Proposition 187) and made it a centerpiece of his 1994 re-election campaign.
Wilson, however, was not the source of the letter cited above. In fact, this warning dates back to 1845, almost 150 years before Proposition 187 appeared on the scene. Its author was Pio Pico, governor of the still Mexican state of California.
The unsanctioned immigrants about whom Pico worried were from the United States. Pico had reason to be concerned, especially as he reflected on events in Texas. There, the Mexican government had opted to encourage immigration from the United States. Beginning in the 1820s and continuing into the 1830s, Americans, primarily from the southern United States, poured into Texas.
By the mid-1830s, they outnumbered Tejanos (people with Mexican roots) by almost ten to one. Demanding provincial autonomy, the Americans clashed with Mexican authorities determined to enforce the rule of the national government. In 1836, a rebellion commenced, and Texans won their war of secession. Nine years later, the United States annexed Texas. And now, claimed Pico, many officials of the United States government openly coveted California, their expansionist designs abetted by American immigrants to California.
In retrospect, the policy of promoting American immigration into northern Mexico looks as dangerous as Pico deemed it and as counterintuitive as it has seemed to subsequent generations. Why invite Americans in if a chief goal was to keep the United States out? Still, the policy did not appear so paradoxical at the time. There were, in fact, encouraging precedents. Spain had attempted something similar in the Louisiana Territory in the 1790s, though the territory’s transfer back to France and then to the United States had aborted that experiment. More enduring was what the British had done in Upper Canada (now Ontario). Americans who crossed that border proved themselves amenable to a shift in loyalties, which showed how tenuous national attachments remained in these years. From this, others could draw lessons: the keys to gaining and holding the affection of American transplants was to protect them from Indians, provide them with land on generous terms, require little from them in the way of taxes, and interfere minimally in their private pursuits.
For a variety of reasons, Mexico had trouble abiding by these guidelines, and, in response, Americans did not abide by Mexican rules. In Texas, American immigrants destabilized Mexican rule. In California, as Pico feared, the “daring strangers” overwhelmed the Mexican population, though the brunt of the American rush did not commence until after the discovery of gold in 1848. By then, Mexico had already lost its war with the United States and ceded California. Very soon, men like Pio Pico found themselves strangers in their own land.
Featured image credit: “Map of USA highlighting West”. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Immigration in the American west appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 1/4/2015
In order to celebrate Trivia Day, we have put together a quiz with questions chosen at random from Very Short Introductions online. This is the perfect quiz for those who know a little about a lot. The topics range from Geopolitics to Happiness, and from French Literature to Mathematics. Do you have what it takes to take on this very short trivia quiz and become a trivia master? Take the quiz to find out…
We hope you enjoyed testing your trivia knowledge in this very short quiz.
Headline image credit: Pondering Away. © GlobalStock via iStock Photo.
The post A very short trivia quiz appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ChloeF,
on 11/13/2014
Please find below a pastiche of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that illustrates what it means to choose rationally:
‘Sit down, dear’, said the White Queen.
Alice perched delicately on the edge of a chair fashioned from oyster-shells.
‘Coffee, or tea, or chocolate?’, enquired the Queen.
‘I’ll have chocolate, please.’
The Queen turned to the Unicorn, standing, as ever, behind the throne: ‘Trot along to the kitchen and bring us a pot of chocolate if you would. There’s a good Uni.’
Off he trots. And before you can say ‘jabberwocky’ is back: ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty, and Miss Alice, but we’ve run out of coffee.’
‘But I said chocolate, not coffee’, said a puzzled Alice.
The Unicorn was unmoved: ‘I am well aware of that, Miss. As well as a horn I have two good ears, and I’m not deaf’.
Alice thought again: ‘In that case’, she said, ‘I’ll have tea, if I may?’
‘Of course you may,’ replied the Queen. ‘But if you do, you’ll be violating a funny little thing that in the so-called Real World is known as the contraction axiom; in Wonderland we never bother about such annoyances. In the Real World they claim that they do, but they don’t.’
‘Don’t they?’ asked Alice.
‘No. I’ve heard it said, though I can scarce believe it, that their politicians ordain that a poor girl like you when faced with the choice between starving or taking out a payday loan is better off if she has only the one option, that of starving. No pedantic worries about contraction there (though I suppose your waist would contract, now I come to think of it). But this doesn’t bother me: like their politicians, I am rich, a Queen in fact, as my name suggests’.
‘On reflection, I will revert to chocolate, please. And do they have any other axes there?’
‘Axioms, child, not axes. And yes, they do. They’re rather keen on what they call their expansion axiom – the opposite, in a sense, of their contraction axiom. What if Uni had returned from the kitchen saying that they also had frumenty – a disgusting concoction, I know – and you had again insisted on tea? Then as well making your teeth go brown you’d have violated that axiom.’
‘I know I’m only a little girl, Your Majesty, but who cares?’
‘Not I, not one whit. But people in the Real World seem to. If they satisfy both of these axiom things they consider their choice to be rational, which is something they seem to value. It means, for example, that if they prefer coffee to tea, and tea to chocolate, then they prefer coffee to chocolate.’
‘Well, I prefer coffee to tea, tea to chocolate, and chocolate to tea. And why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because, poor child, you’ll be even poorer than you are now. You’ll happily pay a groat to that greedy little oyster over there to change from tea to coffee, pay him another groat to change from coffee to chocolate, and pay him yet another groat to change from chocolate to tea. And then where will you be? Back where you started from, but three groats the poorer. That’s why if you’re not going to be rational you should remain in Wonderland, or be a politician.’
This little fable illustrates three points. The first is that rationality is a property of patterns of choice rather than of individual choices. As Hume famously noted in 1738, ‘it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger; it is not contrary to reason for me to chuse [sic] my total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian’. However, it seems irrational to choose chocolate when the menu comprises coffee, tea, and chocolate; and to choose tea when it comprises just tea and chocolate. It also seems irrational to choose chocolate from a menu that includes tea; and to choose tea from a larger menu. The second point is that making consistent choices (satisfying the two axioms) and having transitive preferences (not cycling, as does Alice) are, essentially, the same thing: each is a characterisation of rationality. And the third point is that people are, on the whole, rational, for natural selection weeds out the irrational: Alice would not lose her three groats just once, but endlessly.
These three points are equally relevant to the trivia of our daily lives (coffee, tea, or chocolate) and to major questions of government policy (for example, the regulation of the loan market).
Featured image credit: ‘Drink me Alice’, by John Tenniel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The post Why be rational (or payday in Wonderland)? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Connie Ngo,
on 10/17/2014
Scholars have written a lot about the difficulties in the study of religion generally. Those difficulties become even messier when we use the words black or African American to describe religion. The adjectives bear the burden of a difficult history that colors the way religion is practiced and understood in the United States. They register the horror of slavery and the terror of Jim Crow as well as the richly textured experiences of a captured people, for whom sorrow stands alongside joy. It is in this context, one characterized by the ever-present need to account for one’s presence in the world in the face of the dehumanizing practice of white supremacy, that African American religion takes on such significance.
To be clear, African American religious life is not reducible to those wounds. That life contains within it avenues for solace and comfort in God, answers to questions about who we take ourselves to be and about our relation to the mysteries of the universe; moreover, meaning is found, for some, in submission to God, in obedience to creed and dogma, and in ritual practice. Here evil is accounted for. And hope, at least for some, assured. In short, African American religious life is as rich and as complicated as the religious life of other groups in the United States, but African American religion emerges in the encounter between faith, in all of its complexity, and white supremacy.
I take it that if the phrase African American religion is to have any descriptive usefulness at all, it must signify something more than African Americans who are religious. African Americans practice a number of different religions. There are black people who are Buddhist, Jehovah Witness, Mormon, and Baha’i. But the fact that African Americans practice these traditions does not lead us to describe them as black Buddhism or black Mormonism. African American religion singles out something more substantive than that.
The adjective refers instead to a racial context within which religious meanings have been produced and reproduced. The history of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States birthed particular religious formations among African Americans. African Americans converted to Christianity, for example, in the context of slavery. Many left predominantly white denominations to form their own in pursuit of a sense of self- determination. Some embraced a distinctive interpretation of Islam to make sense of their condition in the United States. Given that history, we can reasonably describe certain variants of Christianity and Islam as African American and mean something beyond the rather uninteresting claim that black individuals belong to these different religious traditions.
The adjective black or African American works as a marker of difference: as a way of signifying a tradition of struggle against white supremacist practices and a cultural repertoire that reflects that unique journey. The phrase calls up a particular history and culture in our efforts to understand the religious practices of a particular people. When I use the phrase, African American religion, then, I am not referring to something that can be defined substantively apart from varied practices; rather, my aim is to orient you in a particular way to the material under consideration, to call attention to a sociopolitical history, and to single out the workings of the human imagination and spirit under particular conditions.
When Howard Thurman, the great 20th century black theologian, declared that the slave dared to redeem the religion profaned in his midst, he offered a particular understanding of black Christianity: that this expression of Christianity was not the idolatrous embrace of Christian doctrine which justified the superiority of white people and the subordination of black people. Instead, black Christianity embraced the liberating power of Jesus’s example: his sense that all, no matter their station in life, were children of God. Thurman sought to orient the reader to a specific inflection of Christianity in the hands of those who lived as slaves. That difference made a difference. We need only listen to the spirituals, give attention to the way African Americans interpreted the Gospel, and to how they invoked Jesus in their lives.
We cannot deny that African American religious life has developed, for much of its history, under captured conditions. Slaves had to forge lives amid the brutal reality of their condition and imagine possibilities beyond their status as slaves. Religion offered a powerful resource in their efforts. They imagined possibilities beyond anything their circumstances suggested. As religious bricoleurs, they created, as did their children and children’s children, on the level of religious consciousness and that creativity gave African American religion its distinctive hue and timber.
African Americans drew on the cultural knowledge, however fleeting, of their African past. They selected what they found compelling and rejected what they found unacceptable in the traditions of white slaveholders. In some cases, they reached for traditions outside of the United States altogether. They took the bits and pieces of their complicated lives and created distinctive expressions of the general order of existence that anchored their efforts to live amid the pressing nastiness of life. They created what we call African American religion.
Headline image credit: Candles, by Markus Grossalber, CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.
The post What is African American religion? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Michael Smith,
on 10/10/2014
Although Alexander the Great died more than two-thousand years ago, his name is synonymous with power, innumerable conquests and incredible leadership. Born in 356 BC, Alexander was tutored in his early years by Aristotle before succeeding his father Philip as King of Macedonia and the mainland of Greece. Early in his reign he set about releasing the Greeks from Persian domination, but continued his campaigns into a programme of imperialist aggrandizement that eventually created a massive, albeit short‐lived, empire from India to Egypt. After his death from fever in 323 BC his hastily constructed dominion fell apart. The most lasting tribute to his achievement being the town of Alexandria, which he founded in Egypt in 331 BC.
How much do you know about one of history’s greatest leaders?
Headline image credit: Alexander the Great in the Temple of Jerusalem, by Sebastiano Conca, 1750. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post How much do you know about Alexander the Great? appeared first on OUPblog.
