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Priština, Kosovo 

Coordinates: 42 40 N 21 13 E

Population: 564,800 (2000 est.)

Since declaring their independence from Serbia on Sunday, this little landlocked corner of the Balkans has made headlines around the world, earning praise from some countries such as the United States, and condemnation from others. (more…)

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George Weisz is a Professor of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. In his book, Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization he traces the origins of modern medical specialization to 1830s Paris and examines its spread to Germany, Britain, and the US, showing how it evolved from a feature of academic teaching and research into the dominant mode of medical practice since the 1950’s. In the excerpt below we look at the beginning of specialization in America.

Few of the conditions that produced specialization in early nineteenth-century Paris existed in the American states of this era. Neither hospitals nor the few medical schools in existence at the time were publicly controlled or very large. Consequently they faced few of the pressures for administrative rationalization that promoted specialization on the European continent. Nor was there much incentive to create research communities on the Paris model. As Tocqueville famously perceived, Americans valued practice over theory, and this applied as much to doctors as any one else. (more…)

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On January 29, 7:30pm the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas will host a panel on “Military Blogging and America’s Wars.” The guests will include John Donovan, one of America’s leading milbloggers (who was invited to meet President Bush in the White House); Ward Carroll, a retired Navy Commander who flew F-14s and editor of www.Military.com; and Charles J. “Jack” Holt, chief of New Media Operations for the Department of Defense. David D. Perlmutter, a professor in the KU School of Journalism & Mass Communications , and author of Blogwars, will moderate the session.

In Blogwars Perlmutter examines the rapidly burgeoning phenomenon of blogs and questions the degree to which blog influence–or fail to influence–American political life. In the post below Perlmutter introduces us to Military Blogs.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is supposed to have said that “war is the father of all things.” It is absolutely true that where we live, the language we speak, the flags we fly, the beliefs we hold, the land we live on, and even our genetic heritage have been affected by who won and lost wars. Likewise, much of our technology was created for or improved toward making war. (more…)

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By Kurt Hettler, Marketing Director, Special Projects

In recent years, climbing Everest has become something of an industry (on one single day in 2003, nearly 120 people reached the top), and today when I learned of Sir Edmund Hillary’s death at 88, in his native New Zealand, I marveled at his extraordinary accomplishment. High Adventure is one of my favorite Oxford books. It brings to life all the unforgiving conditions the adventurers endured—the unstable snow ledges, the brutal weather, the chaotic icefalls—and shows how, with relatively low-tech equipment, but an indomitable will to conquer, they succeeded where many others had failed. Hillary recounts the two-year odyssey that began with the discovery of a new Southern route up Everest in 1951, continued with grueling training in the Himalayas the following year, and culminated with Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, triumphing atop the summit in 1953. It’s the thrilling and remarkable story of risk and adventure, and a fitting final testament to a man that spent his life seeking new challenges. We here at OUP tip our hats at the passing of this simple man who climbed to the top of the world and came back down.

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Oxford Islamic Studies Online brings together the best current scholarship in the field and promotes accurate and informed understanding of the Islamic world.  Editor-in-Chief John L. Esposito is University Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. A past president of the Middle East Studies Association, he is editor-in-chief of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Islam, and the author of numerous books, including What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, Unholy War, Islam: The Straight Path and The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? He lives in Washington, D.C.  In the article below he reflects upon Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and what it means for Pakistan.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and its aftermath are an instructive lesson in the checkered history of Pakistan and its critical situation today. Both President Bush and President Musharraf were quick to blame al-Qaeda and other Muslim extremists and to simply place the assassination within the context of the war on global terrorism and the forces opposed to democracy. But as dangerous as these forces are, especially with the growth of Pakistani rather than foreign fighters, this facile single-minded scenario ignores the long-standing conflicting currents in Pakistani politics. (more…)

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Every once in a while I get a blog piece from an author that I am so excited about I am compelled to post it immediately, today’s piece fits that bill. Philip Pullman, best known as the author of The Golden Compass, which is in theaters now, also wrote the introduction to the Oxford edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Today, it is my great honor to post Pullman’s thoughts on Milton in 2008.  Enjoy!

Four hundred years after the birth of John Milton, he still lives, his example still inspires, his words still echo. Paradise Lost is played on the stage, is sung to music, is choreographed for a ballet; it is an audiobook, it is the subject of countless theses and dissertations, and on the very morning that I’m writing this, an invitation arrives to the private view of an exhibition of paintings and prints called The Fall of the Rebel Angels, whose iconography is unmistakable. (more…)

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James B. Rule, author of Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience is Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley and a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a winner of the C. Wright Mills Award. Privacy in Peril looks at the legal ways in which our private data is used by the government and private industry. In the article below Rule reflects on an article that claims that the average American is caught on film 200 times a day.

China is gearing up for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing—determined to ensure that no demonstrations, terrorist events or unruly crowds mar the bright face it intends to show the world. To that end, the Party leadership is mobilizing sophisticated technologies to keep track of potentially disruptive personalities. Relying on IBM and other western companies, the authorities are planning to monitor the movements of crowds by computer and to respond instantly to any hint of trouble. (more…)

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Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer are the authors of Shattered Dreams?: An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic which uses interviews to tell the story of how physicians and nurses in South Africa struggled to ride the tiger of the world’s most catastrophic AIDS epidemic. They wrote such a compelling piece for World AIDS Day that I thought it would be nice to delve deeper into their book. The excerpt below looks at how doctors responded to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

Coming to AIDS (more…)

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Saturday is World Aids Day. We asked authors Gerald M. Oppenheimer and Ronald Bayer to help us commemorate this important holiday, to help us remember why AIDS research, awareness and education is so very important to our society. Oppenheimer and Bayer are the authors of Shattered Dreams: An Oral History of the South African AIDS Epidemic which uses interviews to tell the story of how physicians and nurses in South Africa struggled to ride the tiger of the world’s most catastrophic AIDS epidemic. In the original article below they reflect on the progress made and work still to be accomplished.

Once again it is almost World AIDS Day and in cities and communities around the world, there will be commemorations marking the date, December 1. But this year may be different. Some will begin to say, as they did in the United States, “Enough!” Too much energy, too many resources, have been devoted to an epidemic whose dimensions may have been exaggerated. They will point to a recent report from the United Nations suggesting that the global burden of HIV have been overestimated. Instead of the approximately 39 million people, as the world body previously reported, it is now thought that the numbers are closer to 33 million individuals. The number of newly infected, said the report, is declining where it is not leveling off. Seizing on these numbers, we will be urged to breathe a collective sigh of relief. (more…)

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For the first time since his death in 1322 BCE King Tut’s face was seen in early November when he was unwrapped in Egypt. King Tutankhamun has fascinated the masses since his intact tomb was first discovered on this day in 1922. Below, in an excerpt from the Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt by Rosalie David, we learn why tombs were so very important in ancient Egypt.

Importance of the Tomb

Because tombs and temples were built of stone, evidence relating to burials and sate religious customs has survived better than evidence relating to domestic buildings, which were constructed primarily of mud brink. This tends to present an inaccurate and partly misleading view of Egyptian society, perhaps placing undue emphasis with its preoccupation with death and preparation for the afterlife. Nevertheless, funerary beliefs and customs were obviously extremely important and influenced many of the concepts and developments of the civilization. (more…)

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By Kirsty OUP-UK

We are all familiar with the term “iron curtain”, and it is arguably the most powerful political metaphor of the 20th century. Winston Churchill is credited with coining the term during a speech in Fulton, Missouri, USA, in March 1946, but in his latest book, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War, Patrick Wright argues that the metaphor has been in existence for much longer than that. In this excerpt from the book’s introduction, Patrick Wright explains how it is that he came to write on this fascinating subject. (more…)

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Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine. Davis has written the first full-length biography of Malamud, a self-made son of Jewish immigrants who went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Come hear Davis speak at New York’s 92 Street Y on October 31st at 7:30 pm. This post originally appeared in Moreover.

The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is “Otherness”, and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying Alterity as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe. (more…)

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Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University and the author of God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. Check out his past posts on this blog by clicking here. In the post below Jenkins reflects on the Lancaster House conference on “Islam and Muslims in the World Today.”

The angelic-faced cleric looked bemused as the police guard insisted that he could not be admitted to 10 Downing Street without photo identification. “But I am a mufti!” he said, puzzled. “We do not carry identification. In Bosnia, everyone knows we are muftis”. (more…)

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Yesterday, Peter Heather the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Roman and the Barbarians taught us about the Battle of Hadrianople. Today he has kindly answered a few questions for OUP.

OUP: Have you always been interested in Roman history? What inspired you to write this book about the fall of Rome, rather than tackle an easier Roman period? (more…)

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Below Paul Collier the author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It and a Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University explains why guilt is no solution for poverty.

To date policy towards the bottom billion has been driven predominantly by guilt: America’s guilt about slavery, Europe’s guilt about colonialism. (more…)

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Peter Heather, a leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians, a teacher at Worchester College, University of Oxford and author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians is our guest on the OUPblog this week. Heather’s book proposes that centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling the Roman empire. In the article below Heather looks at The Battle of Hadrianople. Be sure to come back tomorrow when Heather answers a few questions for OUP.

(more…)

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Oxford, England

Coordinates: 51 46 N 1 15 W

Population: 149,800 (2005 est.)

Coffee and college; in many ways, an ideal pairing. How many pre-dawn epiphanies or witching hour discoveries can be at least indirectly attributed to the stimulating properties of the ubiquitous beverage? It’s fitting then, that the first European coffeehouse can be traced back to the seventeenth century, at Oxford University. (more…)

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Shlomo Ben-Ami, the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, is an Oxford-trained historian, a former member of the Knesset, Minister of Public Security, and finally Minister of Foreign Affairs. He has been a key participant in many Arab-Israeli peace conferences, most notably the Camp David summit in 2000. In the post below Ben-Ami looks forward and backwards at the peace process. (more…)

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Rebecca OUP-US

Hanna Diamond, author of Fleeing Hitler: France 1940, is Senior Lecturer in French History at the University of Bath. She lived and taught in Paris for many years and has spent her career researching the lives of the French people during the twentieth century. Fleeing Hitler shows how the mass exodus from Paris was a defining moment in the war for the French. In the original piece below Diamond reflects upon how difficult it was to get into the French psyche.

When I was approached by OUP to write a book on the exodus in France I had already read Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise and I jumped at the chance. Aware that official archives, police reports and other documents drawn up by officials were not likely to be available since most had left their posts along with the rest of the population, oral history seemed an ideal way of reaching this experience. (more…)

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Kate OUP-US

It’s King Henry VIII’s birthday on June 23 and I have a confession to make: I’m a huge Tudor nerd. I think it’s the most interesting period in history, so much drama and intrigue, it’s the ultimate soap opera. (more…)

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Today we are proud (and a bit sad because it’s over) to present part 5 of Lynne Viola’s piece on her archival research for her book The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. Check out her previous posts here.

It would have been impossible to write this book without access to the archives. The archives, however, tell only a part of the story. (more…)

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Everyday this week we are posting part of a series from author Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. Check out part one and part two and part three.

Luck and serendipity combined to provide unique and rich sources for the book. I was continually amazed at the degree of detail in the documents. Essentially, the Soviet secret police had documented some of its worst atrocities. The Soviet archives were marvelously intact.

(more…)

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Everyday this week we are posting part of a series from author Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements.  Check out part one and part two.

Some of my most important sources on the special settlements are contained in provincial archives. In the early 1990s, researchers produced a series of documentary publications on the special settlements in Siberia, the Urals, Karelia, and several other key regions of exile. (more…)

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Yesterday we presented part 1 in a 5 part series about The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynn Viola. Today Viola takes us inside the archives in Moscow.

I could not have carried out the research for this book without access to archives, for the entire terrain of Stalin’s special settlements had remained a state secret throughout the Soviet era; even use of the term special resettlement was forbidden. Neither the word, nor the world of the special settlements, existed officially. (more…)

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