Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1009

A Halloween ghost story

Looking for a fright ? The ghost stories of M.R. James, considered by many to be the most terrifying in English, have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb. So we’re presenting an extract from ‘Casting the Runes’ in the Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, edited by Darryl Ince, to get you in the mood for Halloween.

Well, the show went on, and the stories kept on becoming a little more terrifying each time, and the children were mesmerized into complete silence. At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park — Lufford, I mean — in the evening. Every child in the room could recognize the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn in pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr. Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered, and what it must have meant to the children doesn’t bear thinking of. Of course this was too much, and he spoke very sharply indeed to Mr. Karswell, and said it couldn’t go on. All he said was: ‘Oh, you think it’s time to bring our little show to an end and send them home to their beds? Very well!’ And then, if you please, he switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling noise which sent the children nearly mad, and of course they stampeded. A good many of them were rather hurt in getting out of the room, and I don’t suppose one of them closed an eye that night. There was the most dreadful trouble in the village afterwards. Of course the mothers threw a good part of the blame on poor Mr. Farrer, and, if they could have got past the gates, I believe the fathers would have broken every window in the Abbey. Well, now, that’s Mr. Karswell: that’s the Abbot of Luff ord, my dear, and you can imagine how we covet his society.’

‘Yes, I think he has all the possibilities of a distinguished criminal, has Karswell,’ said the host. ‘I should be sorry for anyone who got into his bad books.’

‘Is he the man, or am I mixing him up with someone else?’ asked the Secretary (who for some minutes had been wearing the frown of the man who is trying to recollect something). ‘Is he the man who brought out a History of Witchcraft some time back — ten years or more?’

‘That’s the man; do you remember the reviews of it?’

‘Certainly I do; and what’s equally to the point, I knew the author of the most incisive of the lot. So did you: you must remember John Harrington; he was at John’s in our time.’

‘Oh, very well indeed, though I don’t think I saw or heard anything of him between the time I went down and the day I read the account of the inquest on him.’

‘Inquest?’ said one of the ladies. ‘What has happened to him?’

‘Why, what happened was that he fell out of a tree and broke his neck. But the puzzle was, what could have induced him to get up there. It was a mysterious business, I must say. Here was this man — not an athletic fellow, was he? and with no eccentric twist about him that was ever noticed — walking home along a country road late in the evening — no tramps about — well known and liked in the place — and he suddenly begins to run like mad, loses his hat and stick, and finally shins up a tree — quite a difficult tree — growing in the hedgerow: a dead branch gives way, and he comes down with it and breaks his neck, and there he’s found next morning with the most dreadful face of fear on him that could be imagined. It was pretty evident, of course, that he had been chased by something, and people talked of savage dogs, and beasts escaped out of menageries; but there was nothing to be made of that. That was in ’89, and I believe his brother Henry (whom I remember as well at Cambridge, but you probably don’t) has been trying to get on the track of an explanation ever since. He, of course, insists there was malice in it, but I don’t know. It’s difficult to see how it could have come in.’

M.R. James was a brilliant linguist, palaeographer, medievalist, and biblical scholar. He edited works by Le Fanu and wrote several volumes of distinguished ghost stories. The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, edited by Darryl Jones, presents all of James’s published ghost stories, including the unforgettable ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and ‘Casting the Runes,’ plus three uncollected tales. Darryl Jones is Head of the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the

Parents: does size matter?

By Linsay Gray

What can the height of a person tell us about them and their children? Although determined to an extent by genes, the height of a fully grown man or woman can be considered as a ‘marker’ of the circumstances they experienced early in life. These childhood circumstances include illness, living conditions, diet, and maybe even stress. Such early life circumstances have been shown to be linked to health risks later in life. In fact, the height of an individual is also linked with their chance of developing chronic health conditions. Taller people are at lower risk of heart disease, for example.

But what about the height of their parents? One may wonder if that could that have an effect? Evidence from studies of animals indicates that poor health which is caused by challenging circumstances during development early in life may be transmitted from generation to generation. The idea that compromised development in early life leads to negative effects on heart disease risk across generations in humans as well as animals has some support. In previous studies, taller parents tended to have children with favourable health profiles in terms of, for instance, lower blood pressure and less body fat. Also, deprivation – which is linked to small stature – appears to influence risk of heart disease across generations. The effect of the height of parents on risk of heart disease in their adult children has not previously been directly investigated in detail until now. It turns out a mother’s height may affect her child’s risk of developing heart disease in adulthood.

In a recent study, we combined data on 1,456 married couples in two Scottish towns who had their height measured during the 1970s with data on 2,306 of their adult children (the ‘offspring’) who had their health risk assessed in 1996 when aged 30-59 years. The offspring were followed to see if they were admitted to hospital or died from heart disease. This particular family-focussed study is unusual in that the second generation is middle-aged, whereas other similar studies tend to have younger offspring. The advantage of this is that the heights of the offspring reflect accurately the full adult heights achieved and have not yet been greatly affected by declines in height which generally occur at older ages.

We found that taller height in both parents was linked with a lower risk of heart disease in their offspring, but the association was stronger for the height of the mothers. The decrease in risk was 15% for every 5.6 cm increase in height of the mother. The association remained after we accounted for differences in age, sex, the height of the other parent, and factors in the offspring linked with heart disease risk, including their own height.

The stronger link with the height of the mother could be explained by stronger associations between health -elated behaviours of mothers and their children, or the mother’s womb being affected by her own early life circumstances. In today’s world, the possibility of transmission of damaging effects of undesirable conditions during pregnancy from one generation to the next is particularly pertinent to populations of emerging economies. Countries such as China, India and Brazil are moving from traditional lifestyles –with often limited nutrition — to Western-style abundance. Current generations in these parts of the world typically have low birth weight on the one hand but subsequent build up of high body fat on the other hand — a combination known from other studies to be a health hazard. Indeed, these nations are presently experiencing rising levels of heart disease. Moves to improve nutrition in women of child-bearing age alongside measures to reverse the obesity epidemic could be useful in the global containment of heart disease in current and future generations. Yet to be explored are the associations of parent height with alternative causes of death such as cancers. In conclusion, our results indicate there is evidence of an association between taller parent height — particularly that of the mother — and lower risk of adulthood heart disease in their children. So, it seems the height of a person can tell us more than we may have expected.

Linsay Gray is co-author of the paper Parental height in relation to offspring coronary heart disease: examining transgenerational influences on health using the west of Scotland Midspan Family Study. Her co-authors were George Davey Smith, Alex McConnachie, Graham CM Watt, Carole L Hart, Mark N Upton, Peter W Macfarlane, and G David Batty. The paper has been made free for a limited time by the International Journal of Epidemiology.

The International Journal of Epidemiology is an essential requirement for anyone who needs to keep up to date with epidemiological advances and new developments throughout the world. It encourages communication among those engaged in the research, teaching, and application of epidemiology of both communicable and non-communicable disease, including research into health services and medical care.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only health and medicines articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: Father measures height of child. Photo by SquaredPixels, iStockPhoto.

With final debate over, ground game intensifies

By Elvin Lim

Mitt Romney barely passed the bar on Monday night’s debate. He was tentative and guarded, not just because he was being strategic, but because he wasn’t (understandably) in command of the facts of foreign policy of which a sitting president is in command. Barack Obama ‘won’ the debate, but it will have minimal impact on altering the fundamental dynamics of the race.

A number of polls now find Romney’s momentum continuing at the national level. Romney’s team has been playing a national strategy because he needs to swing nearly all the battleground states in his direction, whereas Obama has played a state-by-state strategy because he has a couple of paths to 270. The upshot of this is that Romney is intensifying his lead at the national level, but this movement at the aggregate level has not translated as well to the battleground states. Most importantly, Obama still leads by a razor’s edge in Ohio.

The Obama campaign is making a bet: that in these last two weeks, it is the ground game that matters most because there are more registered Democrats than they are registered Republicans, and the key for Obama is turnout, not ideological conversion (as it has been for Romney). This is why Obama leads in field offices in key battleground states. Both campaigns acknowledge that the Democrats will dominate in this ground game.

And so, in this final stretch, it will be two great partisan armies getting the vote out in the battleground states that will determine the final outcome. The artificial high that Obama was riding through the summer, as Mitt Romney was still battling his compatriots during the primaries, was vitiated as soon as Romney took the national stage and glided back to the ideological center. On the other hand, whatever momentum Romney has today will not easily pierce the Democratic firewall in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This means that silly season in American elections is in full swing. To get the vote, both sides must claim that Armageddon would arrive if one or the other candidate wins. Scare tactics, mud-slinging, and even a Donald Trump surprise are intended to rile people up and get them to the ballot box, or make them so disillusioned that they fail to turn out for their candidate. It is a quadrennial irony we face that everything that is wrong about American democracy is on full, unvarnished display at the same time that citizens prepare to perform one of their greatest acts in a democracy. The good news is this will all be over in a week.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only politics and law articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the

The unquestioned center

By Andrew J. Polsky

The third presidential debate made clear why Governor Mitt Romney has chosen not to wage a campaign based on foreign policy: there is simply no political gain in it. On issue after issue, he took stands effectively indistinguishable from those of President Barack Obama. Romney quibbled over details of timing or emphasis, asserting he would have taken action sooner or more forcefully. But on a wide range of questions — no military intervention in Syria, withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, use of drones, sanctions on Iran — the challenger’s positions are substantively the same as the president. Unfortunately, when the candidates opt not to disagree, the American people are the losers.

Gone was the bellicose Romney of the primary season. That’s no surprise. Candidates tack to the center in most general election campaigns, appealing to the largest swath of voters. So far as the American people are concerned, on foreign policy there is no debate. They back the American exit from Afghanistan; they have no taste at the moment for another military conflict; they worry over China as a rival but not an enemy; they support Israel; and they don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon but worry over the risks of a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Much the same can be said of the foreign policy community. Apart from neoconservatives caught in a pre-Iraq invasion time warp, a strong consensus has formed around the policies the administration has pursued over the past four years.

Vice President Joe Biden and his daughter Ashley Biden watch the third presidential debate from a hotel room in Toledo, Ohio, Oct. 22, 2012. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Where the governor tried to set himself apart, moreover, it came across more as a posture than a coherent policy. He has backed away from many of the conservative stands he adopted leading up to the Republican nomination, but one that he continues to maintain is that he would increase the defense budget:

And our military — we’ve got to strengthen our military long-term. We don’t know what the world is going to throw at us down the road. We — we make decisions today in a military that — that will confront challenges we can’t imagine. In the 2000 debates there was no mention of terrorism, for instance. And a year later, 9/11 happened. So we have to make decisions based upon uncertainty.

It makes no sense to throw money at the Pentagon without regard to potential threats or to the nature of future military conflicts, especially in a time when the national budget is under acute pressure. With the United States already spending close to half of the entire globe’s outlays on defense, more is pointless. So it isn’t surprising that few foreign policy experts agree with his position. It comes across as a gesture to Republican hawks, one unlikely to survive in a Romney administration when the time comes to make the budget math add up.

On foreign policy, then, the American people face an echo, not a choice. That’s unfortunate because we would have benefitted from a serious conversation about many aspects of the foreign policy consensus that has taken hold.

Consider, for example, Afghanistan. Debate moderator Bob Schieffer asked about the aftermath of the projected 2014 date for the withdrawal of American and other coalition combat forces: “[W]hat do you do if the deadline arrives and it is obvious the Afghans are unable to handle their security?” Neither candidate even pretended to answer the question. Romney made an unequivocal commitment to complete the troop withdrawal; the president spoke of the need to do nation-building at home. And neither addressed what purpose is served by the continued presence of outside troops in the face of recurrent episodes of so-called green-on-blue violence — attacks by Afghan troops on Americans and vice versa. The next president, whoever wins the election, evidently believes it is appropriate to ask for continued sacrifice from our troops with no clear explanation of its purpose. But if both Obama and Romney are prepared to accept the collapse of the Kabul regime after 2014, as is apparently the case, why are we not willing to risk that outcome sooner? What objective is served by staving off defeat? An argument might be made for continuing our current policy, but in the present consensus climate none has been offered.

Or take, as another troubling illustration, the lack of serious discussion about the increased use of drones under the Obama administration to attack suspected terrorists and their supporting networks. The American people remain ignorant about the targets and accepting of official claims that few civilians have been among the victims. Media accounts suggest otherwise. Yet despite questions about the morality of drone strikes, the foreign policy consensus invites no discussion of the ethical implications of American policy. Nor, for that matter, do we wrestle with the efficacy of the drone policy—whether it may be generating deeper hatred of the United States across the Islamic world.

Finally, the debate did nothing to unsettle one of the most dangerous conceits that Americans harbor about the wider world, namely, that it bends to American power, forcefully asserted or, if necessary, asserted by force. Although the president doesn’t escape criticism on this score, his opponent went the extra mile in playing to our jingoist spirit. Romney insisted that the United States should take the lead in every situation. By implication, American power must be unlimited. One can only hope that, if he should win, he will demonstrate that he knows better.

Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only law and politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the

Birth control, marriage, and women’s sexuality

By Christina Simmons

Ninety-six years ago, on 16 October 1916, Margaret Sanger opened her first — illegal — birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Human efforts to control fertility are at least as old as written history; ancient Greeks and Egyptians used spermicidal and barrier methods. But Sanger’s action began a new phase. In less than two weeks police shut the clinic down, but the incident heightened the visibility of the fledgling birth control movement. Sanger and other radicals like Emma Goldman had been claiming sexual freedom for women. They rejected patriarchal control over women’s sexuality; they thought only love, not convention, should guide sexual relationships and that women had the right to control their pregnancies.

Political battles over birth control in Sanger’s time engaged central feminist questions still at issue in US politics — namely, whether women may exercise the sexual autonomy customarily allowed to men. Recently, we have seen political struggles over health care regulations that require all employers, even institutions whose religious sponsors oppose it, to provide contraceptive insurance coverage. It is sadly indicative of rightwing desires to control women and sexuality that a panel of male representatives of conservative religious groups testified in Congress last winter about this question. They managed to make the issue about their religious liberty to deny contraceptive coverage to employees rather than about the religious liberty of women employees to choose birth control. Conservatives hoped to maintain, in one of the arenas they still control, the patriarchal ideology that had once forced access to contraception underground.

In Sanger’s time political and religious authorities were outraged by her challenge and labeled birth control as part of a dangerously radical rebellion against marriage and motherhood. Sexually independent women might not marry; they might not center their lives on motherhood; or they might want to leave sexually unsatisfying marriages. As Linda Gordon has argued, however, the decline of the political left, as well as Sanger’s increasing desire to get something practical achieved to help ordinary women, led Sanger and other middle-class supporters of birth control to less inflammatory rationales by the 1920s and 1930s. Their later rhetoric downplayed women’s sexual freedom and argued instead that contraception would support the health of mothers and improve marriage relationships.

Birth control advocates faced what radicals in many times and places have faced: hostile laws and authorities but also the difficulties ordinary people have in acting on new ideas that unsettle social conventions and provoke antagonism. Sanger, for instance, had no luck through the 1930s with a frontal attack on existing law, which would have required members of Congress to stand up against traditional religious authorities (and voters) who still feared birth control was immoral. (Instead, a crucial federal court decision in 1936, United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, opened the way for physicians to prescribe contraceptives.) Ordinary women on the other hand clearly wanted birth control, as attendance at the growing number of clinics in the 1920s and 1930s showed. But publicly proclaiming and openly acting on women’s right to sexual independence through birth control — especially single women’s — remained difficult. In an era when women’s employment paid very little and women’s most respected identity centered on wife- and motherhood, most women needed and wanted to marry. It was how they earned their living. To engage publicly in sexual relationships as a single woman was socially and morally risky to one’s marriage chances; those who did so were usually part of radical and bohemian circles.

In these circumstances, justifying birth control as part of motherhood and marriage was a safer ideological strategy, one that Sanger herself tried with her 1926 book, Happiness in Marriage. At the same time, others were also discussing marriage in a new way. Reformer Judge Ben B. Lindsey provided a new term when he published his 1927 book, The Companionate Marriage. Lindsey originally intended the label to mark an early, childless phase of youthful marriage; he argued it would allow couples to make sure they were compatible before launching into parenthood. However, the term can be applied more broadly to what liberal reformers were calling for in the 1920s — a modern form of marriage that included birth control, assumed smaller families, and was based more fundamentally on sexualized intimacy than Victorian marriage.

The 1873 federal Comstock Law had included contraception in the definition of obscenity, labeling non-reproductive sex as criminal as well as immoral. Rejecting this negative view, 1920s marriage reformers borrowed radical rhetoric condemning sexual repression and rehabilitated non-reproductive sex as healthy and natural. Women’s recent success in gaining the vote in 1920, as well as their agitation for birth control and other causes, brought a feminist tone to the discussions, emphasizing women’s right to sexual pleasure. Yet this recuperation of sex by companionate marriage advocates always led back to marriage. They wanted to sexualize marriage in order to save it. Using birth control to improve marital sex and to space children was one way to do that.

Advice works on how to live out modern marriage, including its sexual aspects, flooded onto the market in the 1930s, following court decisions which allowed the importation and sale of books with serious and scientific, as opposed to prurient, discussions of sex. Books such as British birth controller Marie Stopes’s 1918 Married Love could finally be sold in the United States. Most advice advocated contraception, but only after the 1936 One Package decision could works like Drs. Hannah and Abraham Stone’s A Marriage Manual provide explicit descriptions. Most books recommended Sanger’s method — the diaphragm with spermicidal jelly — as most reliable.

The economic crisis of the Great Depression did much to moderate opposition to birth control as desperate couples sought to limit pregnancies, and many women bought over-the-counter, often ineffective, “feminine hygiene” products covertly marketed as birth control. The Army finally provided condoms to soldiers in World War II. But the definitive US Supreme Court decisions striking down anti-contraceptive laws did not come until 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut (for married couples) and 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird (for the single). From the opening of Sanger’s clinic until the 1960s, many American women read about birth control in marriage manuals and could most easily obtain it when engaged or married. Only in second-wave feminism did women again claim in widespread public ways that all women, single or married, had the right to birth control.

Christina Simmons teaches history and women’s studies at the University of Windsor, in Windsor, Ontario, and is the author of Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the

Image credit: Margaret Sanger, 1922. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division via Wikimedia Commons.

Howard Skempton on composing

By Anwen Greenaway

Composer Howard Skempton is one of the mainstays of British contemporary classical music. He is an experimental composer who writes in a style completely his own, un-deflected by trends in composition or performance. Having developed, under the tutelage of Cornelius Cardew, a musical style characterised by its elegance and simplicity, Skempton’s catalogue of compositions is now extensive and diverse. His music encompasses many genres, from the numerous miniatures for solo instrument which he considers the “central nervous system” of his work, through to works for full orchestra such as Lento, written for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and beautiful choral writing.

Howard Skempton turns 65 on Halloween (31st October) and as he approaches his birthday he shares his thoughts on how he approaches ‘writing down music.’

On what inspires him to start composing:

“Two experiences are crucial in rousing the passion to compose: the impact of live performance and the sight of the score. Both are immediate. One knows in a flash that one is dealing with genius; and, if one is a composer, the urge to compose is quick to follow. We begin with little more than an inkling of what we want and how to achieve it, but an inkling is enough. These two things — what we want and how to achieve it — are engaged in some sort of dance, the product of which is music, which seems both inevitable and miraculous.”

On how he develops an idea into a complete piece of music:

“The technique has to be personal for something as tiny and fragile as an ‘inkling’ to be nourished and protected sufficiently to grow into a real piece. How best to begin? One might sit at a piano or one might switch on the computer. Or one might work in silence. In a wonderful book entitled Instrumentally Speaking, the legendary arranger, Robert Russell Bennett, writes that ‘a blank piece of music paper is a beautiful thing, waiting to take a message from someone to someone, and there’s a certain reward in covering it with anything from a cymbal crash to a symphonic poem’. He ends his Introduction, ‘It’s never easy to decide just what is the most important tone of the harmony, or the second most important and so on. If anyone tries to give you a rule to cover all such cases, listen respectfully and go on struggling. Your inner ear is the final judge. The inner ear is hard to educate but it has a direct wire to the heart.’”

On his preference for writing music by hand:

“Essential Materials: paper, pen and pencils, ink, erasers, rulers, blotting paper, etc.

“Time to compose!”

A Howard Skempton manuscript. Used with permission.

Explore the music of Howard Skempton:

Howard Skempton has worked as a composer, accordionist, and music publisher. Renowned for the distinctive clarity of his musical language, in recent years he has concentrated increasingly on writing choral and vocal music. His choral commissions include works for the BBC Singers and the Belfast Philharmonic Society.

Anwen Greenaway is a Promotion Manager in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press. Read her previous blog posts.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about Howard Skempton and his sheet music on the 

Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the USA by Peters Edition.

Image credit: Composer portrait. ©Sandra Farrow. Used with permission.

Place of the Year: A look back at past winners

Earlier this month, we launched Oxford University Press’ annual Place of the Year competition. For many, geography is just the next vacation, but understanding geography gives much more than fodder for travel fantasies. Geography provides insight into the forces driving people, events, societies, and technology — both past and present. With help from The Atlas of the World, 19th edition, here’s a look at past winning hotspots driving human history.

2007: Warming Island, Greenland

To most people, the effects of global warming are often invisible or minute. But in 2007, a rude awakening occurred when the global warming revealed the truth behind Greenland’s Warming Island. Also known by the less-easily pronounced Uunartoq Qeqertaq, geographers and scientists formerly believed Warming Island to be part of an ice-covered peninsula near the mouth of King Oscar Fjord. Global warming, however, melted the “peninsula” to reveal that water, not rock, lay beneath this ice bridge. Hence, the peninsula was reclassified as an islet. Global warming, disastrous in many ways, has revealed truths about the planet and forced cartographers to redraw the map.

2008: Kosovo

In 2008, Kosovo not only celebrated its declaration of independence from Serbia, but it also celebrated a Place of the Year victory! Since then, recognizing Kosovo has proven a challenge to cartographers, politicians, and policy-makers. Although Kosovo’s independence is acknowledged by many UN member states today, its sovereignty is still contested by many, including Georgia and Russia. In a country of 1.8 million, many Kosovars are subsistence farmers, and Kosovo has the lowest per capita income in Europe.

Kosovo at a glance:

Population: 1,826,000

Capital: Pristina

Government: Republic

Ethnic Groups: Albanian 88%, Serb 7%, Others 5%

Languages: Albanian and Serbian (Both Official), Turkish

Religions: Islam, Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic

Currency: Euro = 100 cents

2009: South Africa

Most readers will fondly remember the 2010 FIFA World Cup excitement that spread out across various locations in South Africa. Six months earlier, Oxford recognized the country as the Place of the Year. We toasted its wine and explored its natural beauty. Now in 2012, 50 years following Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, South Africa is the continent’s most developed country yet economic inequality remains alarming.

South Africa at a glance:

Population: 49,004,000

Capital: Cape Town (Legislative), Pretoria/Tshwane (Administrative), Bloemfontein (Judiciary)

Government: Multiparty Republic

Ethnic Groups: Black 76%, White 13%, Colored 9%, Asian 2%

Languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu (all official)

Religions: Christianity 68%, Islam 2%, Hinduism 1%

Currency: Rand = 100 cents

2010: Yemen

In 2010, Oxford made a prescient selection of Yemen as the Place of the Year. Several months later, Yemen became an active participant in the Arab Spring, with protesters demanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s resignation in response to proposed constitutional changes and economic strife. Saleh left Yemen in 2012 and was succeeded by the vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. Yemen, with a population of 24.1 million, continues to develop, and the future of its revolution is still in question.

Map of Southern Asia and the Middle East from The Atlas of the World, 19th Edition. (c) Oxford University Press USA 2012

Yemen at a glance:

Population: 24,133,000

Capital(s): Sana’

Government: Multiparty Republic

Ethnic Groups: Predominantly Arab

Languages: Arabic (official)

Religions: Islam

Currency: Yemeni rial= 100 fils

2011: Sudan

Since Sudan’s independence in 1956 from Egypt and Britain, the country has fought two civil wars, the first from 1964-1972 and the second from 1983-2005. As part of the peace agreement, South Sudan voted in a referendum to secede, and independence was officially granted on 9 July 2011. As Andrew Natsios, author of Sudan, South Sudan and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know, writes, the world cannot tear its eyes away from this Place of the Year winner as the convergence of humanitarian crises, religious conflicts, and debates over oil and mineral wealth continue to drive conflict.

Sudan at a glance:

Population: 35,680,000

Capital: Khartoum

Government: Federal Presidential Democratic Republic

Ethnic Groups: Arab, Black, Beja and others

Languages: Arabic, Nubian, Beja, English

Religions: Islam, Traditional Beliefs

Currency: Sudanese pound

South Sudan at a glance:

Population: 8,260,000

Capital: Juma

Government: Transitional

Ethnic Groups: Dinka, Nuer, Others

Languages: Local Languages

Relgions: Traditional Beliefs, Christianity

Currency: Sudanese pound

2012: …….

POTY needs YOU!

Where do you think should be Place of the Year in 2012? Use the voting buttons below, or leave us your nomination in the comments. Two weeks remain until we announce the short-list on November 12th!

What should be the place of the year in 2012?




AfricaMyanmar/BurmaSyriaIranGreeceEgyptBelizeTimbuktu, MaliLondon, United KingdomCalabasas, California, USABenghazi, LibyaIstanbul, TurkeyShanghai, ChinaMontauk, New York, USABaltimore, Maryland, USAPass Christian, Mississippi, USAPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, USABed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York, USACERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Switzerland Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, DC, USABryant Park, New York City, USAThe Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, contested by Japan, China, and TaiwanCambridge, New York, USAOne World Trade Center, New York City, USAArctic CircleHalf Moon Island, Antarctica MarsThe Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, California, USAHarry's Bar, Venice, ItalyThe Dokdo or Takeshima islands, contested by South Korea and Japan








View Result



Total votes: 90Africa (0 votes, 0%)Myanmar/Burma (5 votes, 6%)Syria (5 votes, 6%)Iran (0 votes, 0%)Greece (2 votes, 2%)Egypt (2 votes, 2%)Belize (3 votes, 3%)Timbuktu, Mali (0 votes, 0%)London, United Kingdom (25 votes, 28%)Calabasas, California, USA (2 votes, 2%)Benghazi, Libya (1 votes, 1%)Istanbul, Turkey (6 votes, 7%)Shanghai, China (0 votes, 0%)Montauk, New York, USA (0 votes, 0%)Baltimore, Maryland, USA (1 votes, 1%)Pass Christian, Mississippi, USA (0 votes, 0%)Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (1 votes, 1%)Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York, USA (0 votes, 0%)CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Switzerland (8 votes, 9%)Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, DC, USA (2 votes, 2%)Bryant Park, New York City, USA (0 votes, 0%)The Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, contested by Japan, China, and Taiwan (1 votes, 1%)Cambridge, New York, USA (0 votes, 0%)One World Trade Center, New York City, USA (0 votes, 0%)Arctic Circle (3 votes, 3%)Half Moon Island, Antarctica (1 votes, 1%)Mars (20 votes, 22%)The Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, California, USA (0 votes, 0%)Harry's Bar, Venice, Italy (0 votes, 0%)The Dokdo or Takeshima islands, contested by South Korea and Japan (2 votes, 3%)


Vote

And don’t forget to share your vote on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and other networks:

“I voted [my choice] for Place of the Year http://oxford.ly/poty12 #POTY12 via @OUPAcademic”

Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only geography articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the

Journalistic narratives of Gerald Ford

By James L. Baughman

It has been more than 25 years since Gerald Ford narrowly lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter.

Ford’s presidency has become a dim memory. “The more I think about the Ford administration,” John Updike wrote in 1992, “the more it seems I remember nothing.” Taking office after Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford struggled to restore the public’s faith in the presidency, badly shaken by the numerous illegalities associated with the Nixon White House.

Ford also had to contend with another Nixon legacy: a new, unrelentingly critical journalistic style.

I have been working on a book about American political journalism since 1960, focusing on certain candidates and reporters. Political journalism has changed over the past fifty years, mainly for the better. It is more interpretive and searching. Yet not all changes, in my view, have been good.

One change involves journalists’ point of view toward politicians. Reporters always had their opinions. They were not stenographers, even if some of their coverage sometimes appeared stenographic. Yet the post World War II generation of journalists tended as a group to believe they should keep their private judgments to themselves. Even more, they strove to give political leaders the benefit of the doubt.

President Gerald Ford tosses a watermelon in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sep. 1976. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko. Source: Library of Congress.

Some journalists began to question this aspired neutrality in the 1970s. America’s intervention in Vietnam and, even more, the revelations involving the Nixon presidency, encouraged a far more skeptical, even dismissive approach to reporting. Richard Nixon, in that regard, did not only destroy his own reputation, but hugely damaged the prestige of the presidency itself.

To be clear, these more critical journalists were in the minority. Yet they had prominent platforms. Covering the 1972 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hunter Thompson of Rolling Stone made no effort to cloak his contempt for such prominent contenders as Senators Edmund Muskie and Hubert H. Humphrey.

I wanted to explore the growing divide between this new journalistic point of view and the more conventional approach. Ford’s first year in office offered a clear contrast. Writing for the 25 November 1974 New York magazine, Richard Reeves painted a scathing portrait of the new president. Reeves questioned the president’s intelligence. He found him a sometimes incoherent public speaker. At a Colorado rally, “President Ford had nothing to say and said it badly.” In the end, Reeves’s Jerry Ford was a “comfortable mediocrity,” symbolic of a political class that appeared to be taking on the attributes of the fast food industry and network television. Redeeming features were all but impossible to find in Reeves’s account, which he later expanded into a book, A Ford, Not a Lincoln. To take one seasonal example, Reeves mocked Ford’s college football career. Michigan, he noted, had a 1-7 record when Ford was the starting center. Reeves didn’t report that two NFL teams, including my wife’s beloved Green Bay Packers, offered Ford contracts, which he turned down to attend Yale Law School.

A second Jerry Ford appeared in the 20 April 1975 New York Times Magazine. John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer, wrote a long article, based on spending a week with the president. It was a classic “fly on the wall” reporting that Hersey had helped to perfect writing for The New Yorker in the late 1940s. (For The New Yorker, he had written a similar profile of President Harry S. Truman in 1950.)

President Gerald Ford reading the newspaper in the living quarters of the White House, Washington, D.C. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko. 6 Feb 1975. Source: Library of Congress.

To gain such access to the president, The Times made one concession. Ford could select the author, based on a short list the newspaper submitted. (Ford picked Hersey after reading the Truman profile.) Otherwise, Hersey enjoyed considerable freedom. Based on my review of materials at the Ford Library and Hersey’s papers at Yale, Hersey didn’t have to secure approval for the use of any of the quotes in his article. This is in contrast to Michael Lewis’s recent Vanity Fair profile of President Obama, in which Lewis had to submit all quotes for approval. Some were excised.

Hersey is determined to give readers a sense of what Ford is like as a person and leader. “I want to know what I suppose every citizen wants to know,” he wrote. “What is the quality of the person murmuring to his aide?” The author witnessed, with one exception, all of Ford’s meetings, whether with the Secretary of Defense or the Maid of Cotton for 1975. Hersey describes a competent and confident leader, calm. While aides decry Senate Democrats’ efforts to involve themselves in a diplomatic matter, the president remains calm. “Gerald Ford sounds, as always, totally serene.”

Yet Hersey’s profile is hardly fawning. He all but echoes Reeves in concluding that Ford is a poor public speaker. Nor can Hersey, a longtime liberal Democrat, reconcile Ford’s compassionate personality with his conservative fiscal policies. “The man who has been so considerate, so open and so kind to me as an individual,” Hersey wrote, possessed “what seems a deep, hard, rigid side.”

Nevertheless, Hersey crafted a mainly positive profile. And for an American political junkie reading his article, together with Reeves’s reportage, there were two Gerald Fords.

Reeves, for his part, came to regret his treatment of Ford. The growing toxicity of America’s political culture made him realize that he may well have contributed to what was becoming an unhealthy contempt for the political class. In a 1996 American Heritage article, Reeves admitted that his Ford profile was at times “cruel, unnecessarily so.” Politicians and journalists “continue to poison the wells of democratic faith and our political dialogue. I wish I had not been part of the problem.”

James L. Baughman is the Fetzer-Bascom Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of “There Were Two Gerald Fords: John Hersey and Richard Reeves Profile a President” in the latest issue of American Literary History, which is available to read for free for a limited time. He is also the author of four books, including Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941.

[image error]

Recent Americanist scholarship has generated some of the most forceful responses to questions about literary history and theory. Yet too many of the most provocative essays have been scattered among a wide variety of narrowly focused publications. Covering the study of US literature from its origins through the present, American Literary History provides a much-needed forum for the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only law and politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only media articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Stone Age dentistry discovery

By Claudio Tuniz

Advanced analytical methods, based on radioactivity and radiation, have recently revealed that therapeutic dental filling was in use during the Stone Age. As part of the team that performed the study, I worked with experts in radiocarbon dating, synchrotron radiation imaging, dentistry, palaeo-anthropology, and archaeology. Our discovery was based on the identification of an extraneous substance on the surface of a canine from a Neolithic human mandible.

In May 1911, Josef Müller, a naturalist from Trieste, found an ancient human jawbone embedded in a rock inside a cave near the village of Lonche, in present-day Slovenia. It was bearing a canine, two premolars, and the first two molars. The human remains were then taken to the Museum of Natural History in Trieste (where Müller would later become one of the Directors), and remained there out of the spotlights. A study was indeed published in 1936, which included an analysis by x-ray radiography, but nothing special was noticed, at the time, given the poor resolution of the images. The radiocarbon method had not been invented yet; hence the date of the remains was vague. As a general assessment, this individual was thought to be alive during the Stone Ages, in accordance with other archaeological finds, including remains of animals that are now extinct and some clay artifacts.

X-ray images of the Lonche jaw. The dotted yellow rectangles show the position of the longitudinal crack partially filled with beeswax.

When we started our study, exactly one century after the discovery of the mandible, all the tools needed for the non-invasive study of the Lonche Man were finally available.

First we obtained a high-resolution 3D virtual image of the full mandible using X-ray computed micro-tomography, a method similar to hospital CT scanning, but with a much better resolution. The images revealed that the canine had a long vertical crack. In addition, an area of enamel had worn away to create a large cavity, exposing the dentine (and thus producing a terrible pain!). To improve the 3D image we used a particle accelerator, called synchrotron, which was available in Trieste. This large facility, Elettra, produces an intense flux of X-rays, dramatically increasing the imaging performance. When we focused the synchrotron radiation beam on the canine, we noticed that some extraneous material was forming a thin cap that filled the cavity of its crown.

At this point we extracted a minute amount of the filling material from the canine and used a technique called infrared-spectrometry (that you can sometimes see in TV movies for crime scene investigations). This analysis provides ‘chemical fingerprints’ to identify materials of interest. After our visual inspection, we were convinced that the extraneous substance was some kind of natural resin, but infrared spectrometry analysis showed that it was beeswax.

X-ray imaging with synchrotron radiation reveal details of the dental crown: the thickness of the filling material,afterward identified as beeswax, is visible. Beeswax exactly fills the shallow cavity in the exposed dentine and the upper part of the crack).

To rule out a later post-mortem intervention, we had to fix the chronology of the materials under study. When you have organic substances, radiocarbon is the most precise dating method available. Using atom-counting techniques, the so-called accelerator mass spectrometry, only a minute amount of sample is necessary. To be sure, the radiocarbon analysis was performed in two independent laboratories. A bone sample of about one gram was collected from the mandible using a hand drill; its collagen was then extracted and subsequently measured in an Italian laboratory. The tiny beeswax sample (about one milligram) was dated in Australia. Radiocarbon measurements confirmed that both the mandible and the beeswax filling were about 6,500 years old, with a very small error range.

We had found the smoking gun! This was the earliest known example of therapeutic-palliative dental filling, going back to the Neolithic. The so-called Vlaška people, living then near the northern shore of the Adriatic Sea, used beeswax to fix their dental problems. Probably this was a common necessity, as it is well known that in the Neolithic humans were extensively using their teeth as tools, for weaving and other extra-masticatory activities.

Claudio Tuniz leads a programme on advanced x-ray analyses for palaeoanthropology at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He was Assistant Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste . Previously he was Nuclear Counsellor at the Australian Embassy to the IAEA in Vienna and Director of the Physics Division at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization in Sydney. He is co-author of the book The Bone Readers (2009), and the recently published Radioactivity: A Very Short Introduction (2012). Read his blog post: How radioactivity helps scientists uncover the past.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only physics and chemistry articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the  

Image credits: courtesy of ICTP.

When a language dies

By Nancy C. Dorian

When he died recently, Bobby Hogg took the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect out of existence with him, at least as a fluently spoken mother tongue, and the media took notice. The BBC reported on his death, celebrating the unique nature of his native dialect. In an Associated Press report originating in London, his dialect was spoken of as “a little fragment of the English linguistic mosaic.” A knowledgeable University of Aberdeen linguist spoke of this as “the first time that an actual Scots dialect has so dramatically died with the passing of the last native speaker.”

By all accounts (and by a brief sample offered in the BBC article), it was indeed a fascinating dialect, a form of Scots with recognizable Gaelic influence. And it represented, just as a local county councillor and historian said of it, “part of a way of life which is now gone.”

But it’s not alone. Just a little to the north along the Scottish coast, the decline of the fishing industry between the two World Wars left many populations of fisherfolk in decline and left their unusual, strictly local dialects headed for foreseeable extinction. But these were dialects of Gaelic, not of Scots. That is, they were Celtic, rather than speech forms related to English. Balintore, Shandwick, and Hilton, along the south coast of the Fearn Peninsula, still had residual populations of Gaelic-speaking fisherfolk in mid-twentieth century, as did Inver on the northern coast of the same peninsula. Former fisherfolk and their descendants still spoke Gaelic fluently in Embo, Golspie, and Brora on the east coast of Sutherland, the next county to the north, well into the second half of the twentieth century. But the native Gaelic dialects of these areas have vanished entirely as fluently spoken mother tongues, as surely as has the Cromarty dialect of Scots. Each of these forms of Gaelic was highly distinctive, and each could accurately be said to have been a fascinating fragment of the Gaelic linguistic mosaic.

Cromarty Harbour, 2006. Photo by Chris Wilson. Creative Commons License.

Why were these unusual dialects not mourned and celebrated in their passing in the way that the Cromarty dialect is currently being mourned and celebrated? What has changed, our sensitivity to language loss, our perception of growing homogenization, our search for rootedness, some blend of all of these? Or do we accept (even expect) the loss of dialects of ‘small’ indigenous minority languages without those losses rousing the degree of regret that is felt at the loss of distinctive local dialects of a ‘major’ language like English? The native Gaelic-speaking population in Scotland has long been dwindling, with many local dialects already lost. Various regional forms of Gaelic are severely threatened at present and will almost certainly be lost, too, as fluently spoken native speech forms (on the northern coast of Sutherland, for example, or in parts of northwest Wester Ross). Perhaps in view of the frequency of past losses and the likelihood of losses still to come, Gaelic dialects can not be afforded the degree of concern and attention that Cromarty’s Scots fisherfolk dialect is receiving.

In 1967 I made a number of linguistic field trips in and around the Black Isle, the peninsula on which Cromarty is located, searching out widely scattered and elderly Gaelic speakers from agricultural parts of the peninsula. For several years after that I worked occasionally with two of the speakers I had located, almost certainly the last fluent native speakers from Muir of Tarradale, a village at the opposite end of the peninsula from Cromarty; they were at any rate unable to identify any other surviving speakers from their district. These were brother and sister Roderick and Martha MacKay, who were living in the brother’s household in Muir of Ord. I also recorded, later archiving the tape with Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (the Gaelic college in Skye) and the School of Scottish Studies, the remarkable local Gaelic of John Cameron, who came home to Brae of Kinkell after an adult working life spent in Canada, still speaking utterly fluent Black Isle Gaelic. The MacKays and John Cameron are long gone, and unfortunately it is perfectly safe to assume that no one has spoken their varieties of Black Isle Gaelic in many years.

Without wishing in any way to minimize the loss of Cromarty’s fisherfolk dialect, I would wish to set beside it the equally painful and significant losses of Muir of Tarradale and Brae of Kinkell Gaelic in the Black Isle, of Hilton, Shandwick, Balintore, and Inver fisherfolk Gaelic, likewise in Easter Ross, and of the fisherfolk Gaelic dialects of eastern coastal Sutherland to their north. Their like will never be heard again as everyday mother-tongue speech forms.

Nancy C. Dorian is the author of Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting. She is Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College (retired). She is the 2012 holder of the Kenneth L. Hale Award of the Linguistic Society of America in recognition of her work on East Sutherland Gaelic.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to language, word, lexicography, and etymology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to only anthropology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

View more about this book on the