Oxford University Press's Blog, page 232

A guide to the APSA 2018 conference

The 114th American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition will be held in Boston this year from August 30th – September 2nd. This year’s conference theme “Democracy and Its Discontents,” explores the challenges facing democracy in the U.S. and in emerging democracies around the world. Drop by the OUP booth (#315) to visit with our attending staff and to see our newest books including leading work in the field and APSA award-winning titles. There are also several OUP authors on various panels throughout the conference. Here are just a few panels we are looking forward to:

How Democratic is American Foreign Policy? How Democratic Should It Be? 

Thu, August 30, 12:00 to 1:30pm

In this roundtable, presenters Daniel W. Drezner, Alexandra Guisinger, Sarah E. Kreps, John J. Mearsheimer, John Schuessler, and Elizabeth Nathan Saunders (chair) revisit the democratic nature of American Foreign Policy. “How democratic is American foreign policy? How democratic should it be? To be more specific, to what extent does the direction of American foreign policy lie in the hands of an elite establishment versus the public at large? And what difference does it make – for better or for worse?”

Mass Protest in Comparative Perspective: New Directions in Methods & Empirics

Thu, August 30, 12:00 to 1:30pm

David S. Meyer chairs the panel of new scholarly work on mass protests across the globe. “This panel will present four papers, all of which seek new methodological tools, data and theoretical approaches in order to facilitate the analysis of mass protest. All of the papers are exploring cutting-edge methods and research design in studying mass protest.”

Political Economy of Migration 

Thu, August 30, 2:00 to 3:30pm

Sarah Bermeo  and David Leblang analyze the impact of environmental and individual natural disasters in “Climate Shocks, Natural Disasters, and Global Migration.”

Historical Perspectives on Public Policy 

Fri, August 31, 12:00 to 1:30pm

Deondra Rose presents “Politics and the Hist. of Lawmakers’ Reluctance to Regulate For-Profit Colleges” in this panel. “Using primary and secondary sources, including the Congressional Record, transcripts from House and Senate committee proceedings, government reports, and historical newspapers, this paper examines the history of government activities related to for-profit higher education, paying particular attention to the question of why the government has failed to effectively crack down on an industry that targets vulnerable populations like military veterans, low-income citizens, and racial minorities.”

Social Media and the 2016 Presidential Election 

Fri, August 31, 12:00 to 1:30pmrising powers

Ben Epstein chairs the panel on social media’s impact on the 2016 election. “A variety of social media platforms are explored as they relate to the 2016 Presidential Election. Spoiler alert: social media played a role in the election being more contentious (and Russian) than most.”

Public Administration in Developing Countries 

Fri, August 31, 2:00 to 3:30pm

“This roundtable brings together a disciplinarily and methodologically diverse group of scholars to discuss the challenges and opportunities of bringing the study of developing country bureaucracies into the mainstream of public administration, and synthesize lessons from their own research for public management research and practice.” Presenters include Yanilda Maria Gonzalez, Mai Omer Hassan, Dan Honig, Ken Ochieng’ Opalo, Daniel Rogger, Johannes Werner Christian Schuster, Martin J. Williams, and Anthony Michael Bertelli (Chair).

Rising Powers and Emerging Great Power Competition? 

Fri, August 31, 4:00 to 5:30pm

William Wohlforth  chairs the panel which sheds lights on the strategies dominate and emerging powers implement to gain and exercise power.

Oligarchic Tendencies in US Politics 

Sat, September 1, 12:00 to 1:30pm

Scholars Lawrence R. Jacobs ,Theda Skocpol , Benjamin I. Page, Martin Gilens, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Desmond King (chair) examine the dominance of special interest groups and economic elites on American politics.

While these are only a few of many events taking place at the APSA, the conference program is fully searchable online.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Featured image credit: Boston Skyline by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay. 

The post A guide to the APSA 2018 conference appeared first on OUPblog.

Reciprocal loyalty in consumer transactions

Conventional wisdom holds that the interplay of demand and supply of goods in a free market economy, as if through an invisible hand, provides us with material wealth. This vantage point is based on Adam Smith’s reference to an economy where most of mankind lived in small communities, where self-interest was restrained by a desire to be esteemed by others, and personal relationships bound overweening opportunism. In this economy, buyers had little trouble acquiring information to ascertain the quality of the goods they purchased and producers had no incentive to bamboozle customers into selling inferior merchandise. The butcher, the brewer, or the baker would have brought themselves into disrepute had they tried to fool, fleece, or in any other way ensnare their fellow citizens.

But conditions have changed. In an anonymous global marketplace, dominated by online services, credit card transactions, and complex products such as mortgage-backed securities, people struggle with very different psychological predicaments. The ties that previously held back unbounded self-interest and social distress have been lessened by unnamed corporate entities doing business with indistinctive faces in the crowd. While the personal nature of Smith’s small-scale economy made people care sufficiently about the consequences of their behavior on others, today’s marketplaces are mostly coined by asymmetric information that renders business transactions far more risky and uncertain. In this environment, it is much easier for sellers to exploit consumers’ ignorance than it was during Smith’s time.

The rapid proliferation of Internet shopping, Big Data, computer algorithms, and the like only amplifies this trend. Where the transparency of the online world has made it possible for consumers to compare the price and quality of almost any good at any time in any place, the ability to track, collect, and analyze consumers’ behavior has brought about a market dynamic in which manufacturers and vendors frequently know more about what they sell than their customers know about what they buy, and regularly know more about consumers than consumers know about themselves.

From the product manufacturer’s perspective, advertising and brand loyalty are key in this economy—goods and services, human relationships, and access to content are repackaged as cultural products and entertainment that engages consumers in a complete production of sights, sounds, tastes, aromas, textures, and smells in an effort to connect with them personally and memorably. Once a supplier-user relationship is established, a product manufacturer or seller holds an exclusive good that commands customer loyalty, protects goodwill, and carries a tremendous amount of advertising value.

The ties that previously held back unbounded self-interest and social distress have been lessened by unnamed corporate entities doing business with indistinctive faces in the crowd.

The point is that in this new economy, it becomes increasingly more difficult for consumers to steer commerce into a broader range of choices and back to the production of effective price reductions. If firms are able to amass personal data to an extent that they can ascertain without doubt which bias at what time will prompt consumers to purchase an item at the highest price they are willing to pay, the switch for consumers from one segment to another is going to become progressively more difficult to make. The stronger the consumer’s preference for a particular segment becomes, the weaker the check provided by the competitive system will be.

How, then, can we preserve the free choice of consumers to cast a vote with their wallets about which goods are “superior or inferior”—at the same time affording sellers the discretion to spend money to market their goods as they see fit?

A fresh look at Smith’s village economy may provide an answer. Consumers who are most loyal to a particular segment are most likely to have their voices heard by having some direct role in the producer’s decision-making process as to the conditions on which the producer sells, resells, distributes, or services its goods. This type of influence is inextricably linked to the account of the consumer who embeds their choices into a real governance decision by altering the terms of agreement in relation to their preferred segment. Put differently, enhanced participation in the organization of an economy might occur through a new mode of contracting in which norms of reciprocity and trust are reestablished by allowing consumers to participate in the creation of the firm’s own terms, or at least by encouraging them to do so in a manner that affords them an opportunity to get involved in shaping, reshaping, or altering the firm’s values.

A fascinating recent set of studies demonstrates that in the new economy, digital platforms such as Kickstarter, Tumblr, or Etsy are beginning to do just that. Their contracts are no longer simply accomplishing the common objectives of communicating information and establishing rules designed to produce incentives for performance and breach due to court-inflicted damages. Instead, they incorporate in their end-user contracting frameworks communication with and management of users. Such contracts complement the market’s discovery function in an important—probably in the most crucial—way: they facilitate agenda setting by loyal customers. They give consumers who are loyal to a segment the opportunity to shift the producer’s burden of inertia to constantly adjust the terms and conditions of sale and compel firms to engage in a real exchange with their clients.

Spurring incentives to encourage participation in contract formation does not thereby just create space for consumers’ opposition. Such incentives also give consumers a chance to affirm their loyalty to producers who in turn demand the consumers’ loyalty by selling particular worldviews, leaving an indelible imprint on the attitudes and beliefs of consumers. Most obviously, enhanced participation in setting the terms of agreement will bestow agency upon consumers, and along with it the dignity associated with choosing their own fate, which is why “choice” has long been an essential quality of free market economies.

Featured image credit: Business by rawpixel. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post Reciprocal loyalty in consumer transactions appeared first on OUPblog.

The cost of the American dream

In its simplest form, the American Dream asserts that success should be determined by effort, not one’s starting point. This is the promise on which most Americans base their hopes and the calculus that is supposed to govern our institutions. Specifically, in the modern US economy, the path to prosperity is understood to pass through the education system. Americans believe—and children are told—that individuals should have an equitable chance to climb the economic ladder, through exertion of their innate talents. However, while there are few ways for children to exit poverty without educational attainment, there is mounting evidence that education is far from a guaranteed ticket to opportunity.

There is a more than 30% gap in college graduation rates by family income. Even more discouraging, these gaps persist even among students with strong academic preparation; 74% of such students from high socioeconomic status graduate college, compared to only 41% of students with similar academic prowess but more economic disadvantage. Further, high school students from low-income families who manage to enroll in college often find themselves in the lower tiers of the stratified higher education system, where they realize outcomes that lag wealthier peers’.

Even when low-income students push through layers of disadvantage to graduate from elite universities, they usually do so saddled with debt. For these students, higher education comes at a high price—one that may take them years to pay off. As their incomes are diverted from asset building to debt management, they lag behind their peers, even with comparable levels of educational attainment. These gaps are often dramatic and—multiplied throughout this generation—they directly undermine the idea that educational attainment is an equalizer in American society. Quite shockingly, low-income students do not get the same benefit from their college degrees as those who start out at an advantage. Instead, college graduates from poor families earn 91% more over their careers than high school graduates from the same income group; but, college graduates from wealthy families earn 162% more than those with just a high school diploma. Race, another dividing line in the distribution of American wealth, also influences return on degree. Black families whose head earned a college degree have 33% less wealth than white families headed by a high school dropout. Particularly alarmingly, the nation appears to be moving in the wrong direction on these fronts, even as media headlines, student activists, and indebted parents increasingly decry the uncertainty of the education path to prosperity. Indeed, as college grows increasingly expensive and costs shift to students and parents, wealth matters more than ever for determining who can leverage education for future payoff.

While salvaging the American Dream may not require closing the wealth gap entirely, ensuring that education can be a ladder of equitable opportunity requires reducing wealth disparities that start at birth. This is perhaps the most critical conclusion policymakers are forced to grapple with, if the United States is to restore education as a meaningful and viable path to prosperity. While reforms—those that innovate new instructional delivery, tinker with credentialing, or soften the blow of student indebtedness—may speak to some angst about college costs and value, only by striking at wealth inequality directly can policy restore education as a viable path to the nation’s promised prosperity. In today’s economic context, reducing inequality will require a wealth transfer, large enough in size to equip disadvantaged children with a real stake in their own futures, and specifically formulated—by targeting children and focusing on postsecondary education—to be politically palatable.

While salvaging the American Dream may not require closing the wealth gap entirely, ensuring that education can be a ladder of equitable opportunity requires reducing wealth disparities that start at birth.

Children’s Savings Accounts (CSAs) are innovative solutions that engage government, philanthropy, and communities to help families accumulate educational assets. In their ideal form, CSAs seed accounts with initial deposits, automatically enroll children, and progressively match families’ contributions. Due in large part to their demonstrated potential to improve children’s outcomes on the way to higher education—along what can be referred to as the “opportunity pipeline”—there is growing interest in and momentum for CSAs. At the end of 2016, there were nearly 313,000 children in 29 states with a CSA. Specifically, research has revealed ways that holding assets dedicated for postsecondary education, from early in life, can affect how children and parents view the future, including in ways that influence preparation for college, not just its financing. Among the positive effects of early asset accumulation:

Young children are equipped with the social and emotional competencies that support improved academic achievement.Poverty is less disruptive to children’s development—even without changing families’ current income.Largely by encouraging and sustaining higher expectations of postsecondary education, children chart a clearer trajectory through school, with greater academic achievement and better prospects for college enrollment and graduation.Stronger return on degree, via reduced dependence on student debt and cultivation of healthy financial practices.

CSAs have demonstrated tremendous potential to improve children’s lives, equip them for achievement, and close gaps. Though CSAs cannot change all the underlying conditions that challenge children and families, they may disrupt the processes by which these factors affect how well-positioned children are to move successfully through the opportunity pipeline. Assets alter how people see themselves and their futures. However, making the opportunity pipeline equitable requires that all children have the propulsion of wealth, and CSAs, as currently designed, may not be enough to place the American Dream within reach. With wealth playing the determinant role in children’s futures evident in the widening gap between the college prospects of privileged and disadvantaged students, leveling the playing field will require policy that builds on CSA evidence to construct a universal, substantial, and progressive investment in early educational asset holding, as a sort of “down payment” on every child’s American Dream.

There can be little doubt that endowing families with assets from which to finance children’s educational attainment makes a difference. Interrupting the distorting effects of wealth inequality on our nation’s primary engine of opportunity—education—is technically an easy fix. It requires only the political will to make our education system’s actual performance match our aspirations for it – as an equalizer in society, a path out of poverty, and a truly fair chance at the American Dream.

Featured image credit: Cute piggy by Fabian Blank. CCo via Unsplash.

The post The cost of the American dream appeared first on OUPblog.

Exploring Indigenous modernity in North America

I work at a history museum with vast Native American collections, and I see every day how stubborn narratives of Native “disappearance” in modern America persist in institutions and among the public. Recent activism and art have begun to present a “reappearance,” but non-specialists have been offered few stories of the paths Native people actually took between, to use iconic incidents, the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Recognized or not, this was a period of creative rebuilding across many Indigenous communities, landscapes, and cultural forms.

What were the varied contours of Native American history across the twentieth century? Scholars have written many excellent studies of Native life between the end of military resistance and highly visible activism in the last couple of generations—from the Red Power activists of the 1970s to the water protectors at Standing Rock. But these works are still outnumbered in the library stacks by histories of “Indian Wars” and ethnographic studies. More and more scholars are adding to the conversation about Indigenous modernity, considering Native gamers, radio hosts, musicians, artists, models, students, and commuters. These, among other works, offer up a set of challenges to views of Indigenous life as either static or disconnected from modernity. They continue to multiply the rhetorical and cultural power of what the scholar Philip J. Deloria has called “unexpected Indians.”

My own research follows Native engagements with sound technology from the first phonographic recordings (recorded around 1890) to pioneering American Indian–operated radio shows and record labels in the mid-twentieth century. By focusing on the cultural politics of technology, this study traces a history of Native modernity, still too often seen as a contradiction. Many Indigenous media pioneers remain unheard and unsung. Activist and singer Jesse Lyon (Onondaga) recorded what were probably the first commercial Native records at the Victor Records studios in 1904. Manuel Archuleta (Ohkay Owingeh) and Alyce Archuleta (Laguna) founded one early record label and Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) another, both in the 1940s. And Don Whistler (Sac and Fox) founded what appears to be the first sustained Native-operated radio show in 1941 on WNAD radio in Norman, Oklahoma.

Whistler’s creation, the Indians for Indians Hour, was an innovative model of non-commercial community radio. In fact, the credit belongs collectively to Whistler and the hundreds of guests who performed on the show and the thousands of listeners who made it an interactive institution, with telegrams, postcards, and broadcasts forming a conversation of community announcements, music, and political action. This program, still in operation every Sunday on KACO in Anadarko, Oklahoma, now employs live streaming and social media to strengthen local communities and cultures. While histories have documented new technologies (e.g., railroads, photography) as destructive intruders in Indigenous communities, Indians for Indians demonstrates a case where Native American people deployed modern media in innovative social ways—“ahead of the white man as usual,” Whistler once joked on air.

Image credit: Indians for Indians hosts Carla Whiteman (Cheyenne/Arapaho/Osage) and Edmond Mahseet (Comanche), with the author (left), broadcast from the Comanche Nation visitor center in Lawton, Oklahoma. Photo used with permission.

Histories cannot be written without archives, and sound archives present particular challenges of preservation and access. Many rich sound archives have been neglected as generations of technology continually shift. It is encouraging to note that in the past few months, two major Native radio archives received grants to preserve and catalogue hidden histories. In June, the Grammy Foundation awarded a reservation assistance grant to the Native Media Resource Center to preserve 400 hours of radio from the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. The Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma recently received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to preserve recordings of Indians for Indians itself. More research and analysis remains to be done on the show and the windows it opens into the broader topic of Native history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Digitization of such archives also places institutions in closer dialogue with Native communities. In a recent example, Lina Ortega (Sac and Fox), the Head of Operations at OU’s Western History Collections, posted on social media an unlabeled archival photograph (shown below) of two singers performing on Indians for Indians. Family members were able to identify the singers as the Comanche singers Ida Attocknie Asah and Joe Attocknie.

Image credit: Ida Attocknie Asah and Joe Attocknie perform on Indians for Indians, Norman, Oklahoma. Courtesy of the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

In addition to changing academic and popular conceptions of Native modernity and twentieth-century history, scholarship must continue to grow more responsive and responsible toward those whose stories have too long been excluded from dominant narratives. Any full account of the neglected history of Indigenous modernity will be produced in collaboration with Indigenous communities themselves. And we can hope that this conversation happens publicly enough to transform the misconceptions that haunt Native people, and to honor the real lives people have lived and continue to live.

Featured image credit: “A view of Oklahoma Memorial Union on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK” by Soonerliberal. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Exploring Indigenous modernity in North America appeared first on OUPblog.

Who is Leonard Bernstein?

Best known as the composer of Candide and West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein had an immensely versatile career. Born on August 25, 1918, Bernstein’s career spanned decades, leaving a lasting impression through his work as a conductor, composer, and music educator.

https://youtu.be/fdkeyjgOpS4

Here are some facts you may not know about this legendary conductor.

His parents, Samuel Bernstein and Jennie Resnick, were Russian Jewish immigrants. His father worked in the barber and beauty supply business.He was born Louis, after a deceased grandfather, although his family always called him Leonard. He legally changed his name at 16.Although hired as only an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he substituted at the last moment for a concert that was broadcast nationally and became famous within 18 months of being hired.Bernstein led a tour with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra during the Israeli War for Independence, making him very popular in Israel.Bernstein was the youngest music director ever of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra when he was named to the position in 1958.While mostly too busy for academia, Bernstein did teach briefly at Brandeis University from 1951-1954, inspired by his mentor Serge Koussevitzky.As a composer, Bernstein is perhaps most known for his theatrical works, which include five Broadway scores, three ballets, two operas, incidental music for two plays, the “theater piece” Mass, and a film score.Bernstein worked on the scores of Candide and West Side Story—two of his crowning achievements—simultaneously, with the shows opening about nine months apart.Mass (1971) was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the dedication of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. A young lyricist Stephen Schwartz, a client of Bernstein’s sister, helped write the English texts and devise the work’s plot.Bernstein was interested in politics, lending his name to many left-wing groups early in his career, causing the FBI to amass a huge file on him over the decades.

Featured image credit: Leonard Bernstein and Maximilian Schell by Unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Who is Leonard Bernstein? appeared first on OUPblog.

How well do you know Saint Thomas Aquinas? [quiz]

This August, the OUP Philosophy team honours Saint Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274) as their Philosopher of the Month. Aquinas is a well-known figure in theology and his ideas are becoming increasingly studied within the discipline of philosophy. His work on Aristotle and his two major texts Summa contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae have gained him the reputation of being one of the greatest philosopher-theologians of his time.

How much do you know about the life and work of Thomas Aquinas? Test your knowledge with our quiz below.

 

Quiz image credit: St. Thomas Aquinas, between Plato and Aristotle, triumphs over Averroes by Benozzo Gozzoli. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Featured image credit: Capitole of Toulouse by Benh Lieu Song. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .

The post How well do you know Saint Thomas Aquinas? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

Race and political division during American Reconstruction [excerpt]

Despite succeeding in reuniting the nation after the Civil War, American Reconstruction saw little social and political cohesion. Division—between North and South, black and white, Democrat and Republican—remained unmistakable across the nation.

In the following excerpt from Reconstruction: A Concise History,  Allen C. Guelzo delves into the complicated nature of race and politics during this divisive time in American history.

It was not Republican factionalism alone that crippled the Reconstruction regimes. The freedpeople themselves were any­thing but a political monolith, and they wasted political energy on internecine quarrels as vigorously as white Republicans had. The first fault line was the reluctance of Southern blacks to accept white Republican leadership as unquestioningly as whites had expected. Northern white schoolteachers found that Southern blacks did not want whites to run either their politics or their schools.

The teachers from the American Missionary Association who descended on the occupied Port Royal Sound to educate and uplift the freedpeople discovered, as Austa Malinda French noted, that “nothing is more evident to those who actually know the Colored, than that while they respect, value, and revere, the good, they want little companionship with the whites.” Lawrence S. Berry, a freed slave turned journalist, urged his readers to “forget our sable complexion” and close ranks with progressive whites. But, as one Freedmen’s Bureau agent dis­covered, “their long experience of slavery has made them so distrust­ful of all whites, that on many plantations they persist still in giving credit only to the rumors set afloat by people of their own color, and believe that the officers who have addressed them are rebels in dis­guise.” Moreover, the freedpeople resented the paternalistic tenden­cies of well-intentioned whites, especially when assistance calcified into orders and sympathy into control. When Georgia’s short-lived Republican legislature tried to ban the admission of black state legislators, black Methodist leader Henry McNeal Turner frankly said, “My colored friends, the white men are not to be trusted. They will betray you.” And Hiram Revels, the first black US senator to be elected from Mississippi, denounced white Adelbert Ames and white Mississippi Republicans as “notoriously corrupt and dishon­est,” and actually applauded the downfall of Adelbert Ames as a tri­umph over “corruption, theft, and embezzlement.”

But just as divisive were the fault lines that separated blacks from blacks. A racial hierarchy that bestowed privilege along a carefully graded spectrum of color had long existed in the black South. “There is in the Southern States a great amount of prejudice in regards to color,” the African American abolitionist and novelist William Wells Brown admitted in 1867, “even among the negroes themselves. The nearer the negro or mulatto approaches to the white, the more he seems to feel his superiority over those of a darker hue.”

The freedpeople resented the paternalistic tenden­cies of well-intentioned whites.

Louisiana’s politics were more than sufficiently twisted by white factionalism, and made even worse by rivalries among factions led by Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (one-quarter black, and married to a white woman), Oscar James Dunn (born a slave, to a slave mother and a free black carpenter), and Caesar Carpentier Antoine (a one-time business partner of Pinchback’s, his father was a free gens du couleur and his mother was West Indian). In postwar Savannah, Aaron Bradley mounted a political smear campaign against his rival for a seat in Congress, Richard White, a mixed-race Union army vet­eran from Ohio. White, sneered Bradley, was a “hybrid” who did not deserve the support of true African Americans. “What color will he represent himself?” asked Bradley, who then answered his own question: “The greasy color.”

Even Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany sparred, with Douglass (himself biracial) bitterly criticiz­ing Delany’s black racial purism for “going about the same length in favor of blacks, as the whites have done in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.” Delany was right to assert African Americans’ “need for dignity and self-respect,” but not, Douglass warned, to point where “he stands up so straight that he leans back a little” and ends up in a version of black racial triumphalism little different from white supremacy. Douglass also parted company with John Mercer Langston, despite Langston’s agreement that “this is no more a white man’s country and government than it is the country and govern­ment of the black man. . . . It is the country and government of the American people.” Nevertheless, Douglass accused Langston of “mad political ambition.”

A racial hierarchy that bestowed privilege along a carefully graded spectrum of color had long existed in the black South.

These interracial feuds were a key factor in the most singular absence in black Reconstruction in the South: namely, the lack of a single commanding leader who could bind together the disparate threads of African American identity into a single movement. Slavery was certainly no useful training- ground for the game of politics, and the marginalized experience of free Northern blacks did not pres­ent much more in the ways of practical opportunities for honing political savvy. Given that only Louisiana and South Carolina had developed any substantial prewar populations of blacks who were property owners, business proprietors, and skilled craftsmen, the likeliest quarter from which such leadership could have developed was the Northern black community— but even then, few Northern blacks made the attempt. And no wonder; it was doubtful if Southern blacks would feel obliged to follow Northern leadership, a reluc­tance the National Conference of Colored Men demonstrated when it debated a resolution “That we pay no heed to such men as Fred. Douglass and his accomplices, for the simple reason that they are well-to-do Northern men who will not travel out of their way to ben­efit the suffering Southern Negro.”

And it was certain that Southern whites would make aggressive Northern blacks a target of choice. “Write as you please, but never go south, or killed you most assur­edly will be,” warned Julia Griffiths Crofts, Douglass’s British friend and supporter. “You are, in many respects, a marked man.” So, when Douglass was invited to set up a newspaper in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1866, he politely declined: “It is not my duty to court violence or martyrdom or to act in any manner which can be construed into a spirit of bravado. . . . I think it wise to remain where I am, at least until the public mind of the South shall attain a more healthy tone than at present.”

Featured image credit: American Flag Usa by DWilliams. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post Race and political division during American Reconstruction [excerpt] appeared first on OUPblog.

Improving patient outcomes in weight loss surgery

“Globesity” (the global pervasiveness of obesity) is an epidemic issue across both developed and developing countries. For many nations obesity is a major health issue, but especially the United States. Across the US, the overall obesity prevalence for adults in 2011-2012 was 34.9%, meaning that more than one-third of adults in the country were obese. Bariatric surgery has been proven to be the most effective treatment for obese patients, with longer-lasting results; however despite this, currently only 1% of the obese population is treated surgically.

Bariatric surgery itself has made remarkable progress over the last two decades. In the mid-1990s, mortality rates of 1- 2% and major morbidity rates of 10-15% were commonplace. Due to advances in laparoscopic surgery, enhanced training, and the creation of bariatric centre standards, these statistics have dropped significantly. Today, mortality rates have decreased to 0.1- 0.3% and major morbidity rates to 3%-7%.

Nevertheless, despite such significant progress in safety, much opportunity for improvement remains. More high-risk, patients with co-morbidities are seeking bariatric surgery. Fear of mortality or complications is now the most common reason eligible patients choose not to undergo bariatric surgery, and it is important that surgeons are able to able to alleviate these fears to encourage patients to undergo surgery when necessary, to improve their quality of life.

In this video series, Dr Tomasz Rogula provides a comprehensive overview of the types of complications a bariatric surgeon might face, and the steps necessary to overcome them—from venous thromboembolism, to increased awareness of psychological factors in weight regain.

 

What are the most common complications of bariatric surgery?

 

Perioperative assessment in bariatric surgery

 

What is the future of bariatric surgery?

 

Post-operative complications : anatomical and psychological

 

Advice for quality improvement in bariatric surgery

 

Featured image credit: “Medical team performing operation. Group of surgeon at work in operating theatre toned in blue” by Idutko. Used under license from Shutterstock.com.

The post Improving patient outcomes in weight loss surgery appeared first on OUPblog.

Animal of the month: the pride [interactive guide]

Pride is one of the most widely-recognised animal collectives in the world. We often picture lions among their family unit, whether they be standing proudly together or hunting down a doomed antelope. These famous social groups are usually formed of between three and ten adult females, two or three males, and the pride’s latest litters of cubs, and they live together (most of the time) across Africa and in the Gir Forest Sanctuary. We say most of the time because lions do in fact spend a fair amount of their time apart from the rest of the pride, as pride members have a variety of different roles.

Hover over the lions in our interactive pride to learn about the different roles of pride-members, from raising cubs to hunting for food.

Featured image credit: ‘Masai Mara Lion Pride’ by Justin Jensen. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Animal of the month: the pride [interactive guide] appeared first on OUPblog.

Do you have what it takes to be a copper?

Are you studying to become a police officer? Perhaps you have considered volunteering as a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO)? Whether you are a student of policing, or simply interested in police theory, you can test your knowledge with our short policing quiz.

 

 

Featured image credit: “Officers are patrolling across the force to reduce both crime and anti-social behaviour throughout the summer months” by West Midlands Police. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Do you have what it takes to be a copper? appeared first on OUPblog.