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The missing scholarship of American tap dance

Tap dance, our first American vernacular dance form, and the most-cutting edge on the national and international stage, has suffered a paucity of critical, analytical, historical documentation. While there have been star-centered biographies of such tap dancers as Bill Robinson, Fred Astaire, and Savion Glover, there remains but a handful of histories exploring all aspects of the intricate musical exchange of Afro-Irish percussive step dances that produced the rhythmic complexities of jazz tap dancing: Marshall and Jean Stearns’ Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968), Jerry Ames Book of Tap: Recovering America’s Long Lost Dance (1977), and my book, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (2010), are but three.

Why has tap dance as an art form suffered a mere flickering of scholarly attention?

One bluntly sobering answer is that tap dance, which evolved from the rhythmic and social exchange of transplanted Irish indentured servants and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean in the 1500s, has a long and contested legacy of racism and classism. Tap dance developed through plantation jigging competitions staged by white masters for their slaves, challenge dances in the walk-around finale of minstrel shows, and juried buck-and-wing contests on the vaudeville stage. Tap’s artistic tradition was never, and never will be, separated from its long history of hardship–from slavery to blackface. European traditions continue to be favored over the improvisatory African-American forms. Considered mostly a popular entertainment on the vaudeville and variety stage and in the movies, tap, until very recently, has been placed in the category of “low” art, unworthy of the concert stage, and of scholarly attention.

Moreover, the absence of women in early accounts of jigging competitions forces a consideration of gender in the evolution of tap which, for most of the twentieth century, was dominated by men. As Gene Kelly stated in a 1958 CBS television special, “Dancing is a man’s game… and if he does it well, he does it better than a woman. I don’t want this to sound as if I’m against women dancing, we must have to remember that each sex is capable of doing things the other can’t.” Men’s claim to (tap) dancing as their exclusive province, which has been perpetuated by critics who foreground the masters, points to an “aristocracy of sex.” Thus male authority in tap dancing has discriminated against and been critical of women, particular women soloists.

Tap dance, moreover, has been invisible in the scholarly canon because it continues to be characterized as a constantly dying art form. Tap enjoyed nearly four decades of popularity on the American stage, from the turn of the twentieth century to its heyday in Swing-era of the 1940s. Then it “died out” in the 1950s, in a period that was commonly referred to as “tap dance’s decline,” or what Honi Coles called “the lull,” when tap waned in popularity as the sheer number of live performances diminished, tap dancers found themselves out of jobs, and venues for tap performances shifted from the live stage to the television screen. Tap was then “revived” in the 1970s during the so-called tap resurgence or tap renaissance. By 1989, and with the award-winning Broadway musical Black and Blue, tap dance was again “resurrected,” and its masters–most all in their sixties and seventies–inspired a young generation of dance artists who would “vivify” the form with yet unrealized rhythmic inventions. That tap was finally regarded as a national treasure was confirmed by the passage of the US Joint Resolution, on 7 November 1989, declaring May 25th “National Tap Dance Day.”

With the 1971 revival of the 1925 musical No, No Nanette, directed by Busby Berkeley (who had been the musical director for the 1933 tap musical film Forty-second Street), and the casting of sixty-two-year-old Ruby Keeler (who had starred in that film) as Nanette’s star, tap’s rising in popularity came on the wings of nostalgia. “What we love about the show, and what we have been missing so long is its playfulness,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Times. “It’s like a puppy without a purpose. It’s free, and off and skipping… No, No Nanette is irresponsible. Like all musicals it grew up with, it just wants to be happy and to make you happy too.”

If this infantalizing of tap could be dismissed as 70s nostalgia, check out the selection of vintage clips New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay “discovered” and comprised as a “tap history,” which goes no farther than the 1930s.

More troubling is Joan Acocella’s speculation, writing about tap dance in The New Yorker, that “It could die…. The classic dance forms of India… have almost no audience outside the festivals. The same could happen to tap. In that case, it will go down in the history books as a marvelous thing that grew and died under certain historical conditions, mostly in the twentieth century.” Acocella is cynical and dismissive of the legacy of tap that continues to inspire yongblood tap dancers. She points to one reason why tap has received little scholarly attention: “Dance itself, because it mostly went unrecorded, was little studied in a serious way, and there was no reason that tap should have been an exception.”

A new chronology of tap dance for the Library of Congress sets the record straight and dismisses critical commentary that has rendered tap dance history virtually invisible. It will, hopefully, quell uninformed commentary by dance critics who now have the opportunity to acquaint themselves of tap’s long and brilliant history.

Featured image: “tapped out” by Pabak Sarkar. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Who owns culture?

The quiet corridors of great public museums have witnessed revolutionary breakthroughs in the understanding of the past, such as when scholars at the British Museum cracked the Rosetta Stone, deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and no longer had to rely on classical writers to find out about ancient Egyptian civilisation.

But museums’ quest for knowledge is today under strain, amid angry debates over who owns culture. When it comes to requests from once colonised peoples, cultural institutions are timid. This is not a question of shipping back artefacts in museums to tribal groups in Australia, America, Canada, or New Zealand. Still, claims made by these groups are restricting what audiences can see – and what they can know.

In America, Canada, Australasia, and even parts of Europe, since the 1990s, indigenous people have been granted extensive control over art and artefacts in museums. Museum policies mandate the active involvement of ‘source communities’– sincere laypeople from the relevant cultural group – in decisions about exhibitions, research and the care of objects. An unfortunate elision is made between someone’s ethnicity and their authority to speak definitively about cultural artefacts, which excludes those who do not share that ethnicity, despite their expertise.

It has meant the disappearance from public display of important material. Artefacts are segregated and access to them limited if they are sacred or have ceremonial status. In British Columbia, rattles and masks made by the Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest have been moved to restricted areas of museum storerooms. Female museum staff have been asked to stop handling certain medicinal objects originating among Northern Plains Indians, as they originally were for men. The National Museum of Australia in Canberra keeps ‘secret sacred’ Aboriginal objects segregated from the rest of the collection; only certain tribal members may see them, via strictly controlled levels of security — even the director may not be permitted to know the contents of the storage. And in museums across Britain, you will rarely find on show tjurunga from Australia, objects given to young men as they reach adulthood, because they are deemed sacred and are held instead in storage. Female researchers are discouraged from even examining them.

‘Ancient Indian Art’, by Norm Bosworth. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

‘Indigenous Australia: enduring civilization’, an exhibition held at the British Museum last year was informed by the same principles. British Museum staff visited Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders, and indigenous art and cultural centers across Australia to discuss objects from the museum’s collections and how to exhibit them. Museum professionals assure me that this sort of consultation tells us more about the objects. And it’s true that people who may be close to the original manufacture and use of an artefact will reveal a significant amount about its creation, use and meanings. But that is different to granting a measure of control to people on the basis of their apparent cultural roots, which is what appears to have happened.

The consultations for ‘Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation’ resulted in the identification of the central messages for the exhibition content; objects for display; an initially selected artefact not being shown; and another displayed in a particular way, in line with community wishes.

Removing artefacts that were once on display is an increasingly common practice in museums with indigenous collections, one celebrated by the anthropologist Ruth Phillips, as rendering objects “invisible” and as a “grand refusal of key Western traditions for the production and disposition of knowledge.”

But if museums no longer offer universal access to their collections, and if the right to interpret material culture is granted only to those with what is deemed the approved ethnicity then the museum is no longer an institution in the service of open inquiry. Scholarship cannot thrive if limits are placed on who can investigate the past, or if lines of investigation are shut down. The Western traditions for the production and disposition of knowledge, so disparaged by Ms Phillips, are the best way to research history and culture. Indeed, surrendering the authority to curate an exhibition to communities on the basis of their identity hinders the understanding of the very people it claims to help, because the effect is to make if impossible to research historical—and current—indigenous life. And it is an approach that does nothing to address the political and economic problems faced by indigenous populations.

The encroachment of liberal guilt into curatorial decisions is undermining the traditional purpose of the museum; a secular institution in the service of historical inquiry. It risks transforming our great institutions into places where understanding the past is conditioned by present-day political and therapeutic criteria. And yet it should be the role of a museum to open up the past to everyone.

Featured image credit: ‘Museum’ by Unsplash. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

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Etymology gleanings for February 2016

By jingo, brooms, and kick the bucket

It is the origin of idioms that holds out the greatest attraction to those who care about etymology. I have read with interest the comments on all the phrases but cannot add anything of substance to what I wrote in the posts. My purpose was to inspire an exchange of opinions rather than offer a solution. While researching by Jingo, I thought of the word jinn/ jinnee but left the evil spirit in the bottle. I also ran into Thomas Shanley’s intelligent Jynges and once again receded in embarrassment. It is curious that so many similar-sounding words surfaced in print at approximately the same time (the second half of the seventeenth century). The conjurers’ gibberish, mentioned in the OED, belongs here too. Given the multitude of look-alikes, it is no wonder that numerous outlandish etymologies of Jingo have been offered. As usual, the least convoluted one may perhaps be the best, but, if Jingo is of Oriental origin, it would be good to know how it reached England when it did. The same requirement holds for all borrowed elements, phonemes, grammatical forms, syntactic constructions, and lexis. Besides, it is not inconceivable that a mysterious foreign word (or name) met a similar native one. Such things happen. Jingo and by jingo may have more than one source.

In my file on hang out a broom, I find multiple references to the custom of marrying under the broomstick, to witches flying on broomsticks, to the phrase to cry mopstics (I wrote a special post on the latter one), and to the idiom good wine needs no bush. Many people sought a connection here, but the links seemed weak to me, and I did not mention them.

In kick the bucket, both elements may be less transparent than they seem. Even so, the whole remains a mystery. The tragic event connected with the coal merchant Kick & Sons happened too early to be the source of our idiom. For the sake of entertainment I would like to recall part of an essay that has often been quoted, though I suspect that the episode is a hoax. I’ll be quoting from the original, published in The London Magazine, vol. 7, 1823, pp. 442-43 (“Anglo-German Dictionaries”). The essay, as was the rule in those periodicals, bears no signature, but the author referred to Mr. Coleridge, and I assume that he meant Samuel T. Coleridge, who was still alive in 1823 and could have refuted the report of his friend; apparently, he did not.

It is told that around the year 1794 a certain German came to Bristol and heard of a widow to whom he decided to propose. With the help of a dictionary he tried to put together the sentence I have heard that your husband died. He first explained to the bewildered lady that, according to his information, the late lamented had kicked the bucket. Since the woman failed to understand that statement, next to the first gloss he found hopped the twig but met with the same blank look, and, only when he explained that the worthy gentleman had gone to Davy’s locker (sic), he made himself understood, to the delight of his hostess, who enjoyed the language rather than the mode of wooing (the phrase was known in the streets of Bristol).

Allegedly, the hapless German found all those idioms at sterben “to die.” According to the OED, the idiom kick the bucket turned up in a slang dictionary only in 1785. In 1792 most English speakers did not know it. What was the dictionary published between 1785 and 1792 that instead of glossing sterben as “die” listed several examples of the very latest newfangled slang? German-English dictionaries printed around that time exist, but I had no access to them and, as noted, told the story “for fun.” On the other hand, Coleridge’s dedication to German is famous. So perhaps his tale was not a hoax? Perhaps. But by every intelligent Jingo, die must have stood in the dictionary before kick the bucket!

Hulagu Khan: a cruel man, but not the first hooligan.

Some troublesome words
Hooligan

I’ll quote the letter:

“Resulting from a heated discussion on the purported Irish origin of the word hooligan, I offer the alternative. After reading an article on the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongol Hulagu Khan in 1257, it occurred to me that the term hooligan may have for its origins the name Hulagu. Just as a criminal can be called a vandal, after the 5th-century Germanic tribe, it makes sense to me that calling someone a hooligan… after Hulagu Khan is more plausible than a rowdy Irish family.”

The analogy is excellent, but hooligan appeared in English at the very end of the 19th century from a comic strip, and one wonders what happened to this word between 1257 and the late 1890’s. There is not a trace of it in any book. And how many English speakers have heard about the 1257 event? True, the Vandals are also separated from the 17th century (when the word resurfaced in its present meaning) by more than a millennium, but the story of its new life is known. In principle, heated arguments about etymology should be avoided. Many easily available good books give convincing answers to such questions or say that no one knows for sure where the word came from. To our correspondent I offer a puzzle: What can, in his view, be the derivation of hoodlum and larrikin? Both are hard nuts to crack.

OK.

“I’d guess this is to be one of the class of common pesky words, but might okay and the Hindi acha be related?” Alas, no. Great efforts have been expended on the origin of OK, and the answer is known. OK goes back to Old Kinderhook, though it too resembles several foreign words.

Inexpressible love

Chichikov, the Hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, enjoyed short fame in the town in which he tried to strike a lucrative bargain. One day he received a letter that began “most decisively: ‘No, I must write to you’.” I experienced a feeling akin to that which filled Chichikov when I received a letter beginning so (no capital letters and with few punctuation marks): “love is not enough.” I thought a declaration of love would follow but was mistaken. “another valentine’s day has passed and I was unable to express the depth of my love. ‘love’ is overused, the superlative ‘worship’ and ‘adore’ have religious overtones, ‘mad’ and crazy’ about you suggests mental instability. Can you please find a word for me that intensifies ‘love’ without those allusions? Many thanks” This was followed by a real signature. What about I am so fond of you, I dote upon, yearn, long for you, hold you so dear, care for you more than for anyone else? I wish I could think of something less trite. Just in case, reread the beginning of King Lear, where the king’s daughters profess their love for their father in truly Shakespearean terms. Pay special attention to Goneril’s words.

“…And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay / O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.”
A few tidbits from newspapers and ads

“Of everything I have read about ‘gun violence/gun control’, [X]’s commentary was the most unique attempt making sense of the Second Amendment dilemma.”


There are more unique things in heaven and earth, Horatio….
“To even contemplate this kind of aggressive roundup…”; “To sometimes meet such a man…”


Right: to be or to not be is no longer a question.
An ad: “Decadent, Delicious, Practical.”


Complete works of Baudelaire in one charming volume on rice paper? No. A restaurant.
Decadent. Delicious. Practical.
News Service: “A Maine man who travels the country to document the final resting places of poets reached a milestone in Birmingham. Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society of America, said his visit to the grave of Sun Ra marked the 500th site.”


And I, though still alive, some time ago had the audacity to advertise my 500th post… What a shame!

Image credits: (1) Hulagu Khan. Rashid-al-Din Hamadani, “History of the world”, 14th century. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Pygmalion and Galatea. Jean-Leon Gerome, c1890. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City . Public domain via WikiArt. (3) Old man without appetite. (c) KatarzynaBialasiewicz via iStock.

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Concentrate! The challenges of reading onscreen

Our lives are full of distractions: overheard conversations, the neighbor’s lawnmower, a baby crying in the row behind us, pop-up ads on our computers. Much of the time we can mentally dismiss their presence. But what about when we are reading?

I have been studying how people read with printed text versus on digital devices. Both media have virtues and drawbacks. But one standout issue concerns our ability to concentrate on the words in front of us. Do we focus as well while reading on a screen as when those same words are on a printed page?

The data suggest we don’t. My surveys of university students in five countries—the United States, Japan, Germany, Slovakia, and India—asked about the medium on which these young adults concentrated the best: print, a computer, an eReader, a tablet, or a mobile phone. Of the more than 400 respondents, 92% said print. In reporting what they like most about reading hard copy, respondents said things such as “You can concentrate better” and “feels like the content sticks in your head more easily.” When it came to complaints about reading digitally, replies included “danger of distraction” and “no concentration.” Other researchers have reported similar results.

Some of the reasons people get distracted when they read online are obvious. With computers, it’s easy to multitask, toggling between a Wikipedia article on the Zika virus and a live cam of Carnival in Rio. We hear a ping on our mobile phones and rush to find out who’s texting us, abandoning that article we were reading from the digital New York Times. On our tablets, we keep a game of Angry Birds going at the same time that we are working through Go Set a Watchman.

Yet there’s another challenge to our concentration when we read on a digital screen with internet connection, and that is extraneous images and messages. Those ads that clutter our every web search. Those dancing images that snatch away our attention. Those banners plastered over the text we’re trying to read until we figure out how to extinguish them.

“Tablet Reading” by Unsplash. Public Domain via Pixabay.

Such distractions aren’t limited to the likes of commercial weather sites or discount travel pages. They show up on mainstream publications like Fortune. Do you want to read breaking news about the death of Antonin Scalia? While you’re at it, how about a Celebrity cruise or an Amex sale on select hotels? Return to the site 30 seconds later, and you’ll find the same article, but perhaps a whole new set of offers, beckoning.

More troubling is that distractions show up when we are trying to do serious reading online. Recently I came upon an eloquent essay called “The Future of the Humanities” by Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda. You can find the article from the magazine Humanities on the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, that’s not where I originally encountered it. Instead, I stumbled upon the piece reposted on the website of the Pacific Standard, where I was barraged with sidebar ads for Amazon’s Audible and TripAdvisor’s recommendations for hotels in Anchorage, along with in-text temptations from Saks Fifth Avenue. Even though I was deeply interested in what Dirda had to say, the siren call of Alaska kept pulling my eyes away, along with my mind.

The problem most squarely hit home when I came across a piece on BuzzFeed that described my own research. A central finding of those studies—though not specifically referenced in the article—was problems of concentrating while reading onscreen. The BuzzFeed story was visually delightful but a model of distraction: an animated GIF of an old-fashioned young woman with a book, a colorful still tableau of a hand removing a volume from a library shelf, and then another animated GIF, this time of a cartoon maiden (courtesy of Disney) gliding along a classic library ladder. All fun to watch, but the result was to reduce the text into a side dish for the main entertainment course.

Reading onscreen is not going away, nor are those ads and waltzing GIFs. If the content of what we are trying to read matters to us, we need to develop coping strategies. The task is not a simple one. Given the commercial model for funding the majority of websites, it’s hard to imagine a wholesale return to the once pristine, ad-free pages of Google. And recognizing our human desire to be amused, after the public tires of GIFs, something equally distracting will surely take their place.

I don’t have a solution in my hip pocket. Rather, for now, I challenge those who care about the written word—teachers, parents, students, researchers, and readers of all ilk—to take the problem seriously. Acknowledging distractions when reading onscreen is a necessary first step.

Image Credit: “Man Reading Touchscreen Blog Digital Tablet” by kaboompics. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Business and society: new words for new worlds

Neologisms (from Greek néo-, meaning ‘new’ and logos, meaning ‘speech, utterance’) – can do all sorts of jobs. But most straightforwardly new words describe new things. As such they indicate areas of change, perhaps of innovation. They present us with a map, one that can redefine what we know as well as revealing newly explored areas; new words for new worlds. What do recently coined words and phrases tell us about how the world of business is developing?

One large area of newly broken lexical ground is where business meets social and ethical values. There’s been a greater emphasis on this in recent years, driven by an interest in using market-oriented methods to achieve fairness and sustainability, as well as concerns over how private advantage can result in public disadvantage.

In some ways, this is quite an old theme. For instance, the Quaker-owned chocolate businesses of Cadbury and Rowntree were founded to wean people off alcohol by offering up reliably delicious hot chocolate. However, the religious element and the overtly moralistic approach to lifestyle no longer hit the right tone—‘temperance’ is not urged upon us any more—meaning new words are required.

So where have we gone to find these words? Civic values are one source: we now talk of corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility (or CSR). The implication is that the business, like a citizen, is a member of a body politic with responsibilities as well as rights. It’s an ancient political idea—as old as the Greek city-states—that has found a new, contemporary application. Linguistically the ploy is very straightforward: ‘corporate’ precedes the political term, yoking the entity to the idea.

Businesses can now measure and report on their contribution as socially responsible citizens. The CSR industry has come up with its own reporting tool: triple bottom-line accounting (each line measuring respectively traditional profit and loss, social contribution, and environmental impact).

For a big oil company, this might mean helping to conserve the nesting sites of rare gulls, for a food multinational it might be funding community sports facilities: both undoubtedly worthwhile activities. But how much of this is done for the intrinsic good involved, how much for PR purposes? Are these activities usefully distracting window dressing? The importance of PR in this area can certainly be discerned through new language: there is now a specialized set of words describing public responses to social or environmental transgressions on the part of business: accommodating response, obstructive response, defensive response, and proactive response. These represent different strategies for maintaining a business’s reputation in the wake of a reputational issue.

Image credit: light interior design tv by cdu445. Public domain via Pixabay.

Another linkage between business and the wider community is achieved by introducing the idea of the social into existing business terms. Hence, we have social entrepreneurship, social enterprise and, inspired by the financial world, social capital. ‘Social’ is used here as a modifier: taking the business activity or entity and replacing its focus on profit with something broader. This might involve the reduction of poverty, the emancipation of the disadvantaged, the protection of the environment, or the improvement of people’s health—so broad indeed.

However, it would not be right to describe the social enterprise as a non-profit organization. Profit remains a goal; just not the overriding one. Such profit as is made may be reinvested to further the business’s social or ethical goals. In this way, the model follows the traditional capitalistic one: an entrepreneur combines the factors of production and does so within the enterprise, a legal construct that may well also be a limited company. The ledger, however, will show that any surplus created is added to our social capital, either directly or through reinvestment of profit, to create a less unequal, more just society or a more sustainable, healthier world. This is a step beyond the business that engages in CSR on the way to making a profit – rather, the social enterprise makes a profit on the way to achieving its ethical goals.

As business pursues broader objectives, we are likely to see more innovation in form and therefore language. We now think of charities and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) as occupying a third sector—with state-owned and private organizations comprising the first and second respectively. Businesses that pursue profit but within an overarching idea of citizenship are certainly in the second (private) sector. But how about businesses whose goals don’t prioritize financial profit at all? Are they second or third sector?

The interstices between sectors can only become more crowded, the dividing lines more blurred. Why? On the one hand, the traditional state faces huge problems. Government spending is set to continue on its austere path whilst an ageing population clamours for more and better social services and the impact of climate change necessitates bigger and smarter investment. This mismatch of uses and resources will require new, more efficient and responsive approaches to problem-solving, to achieving equitable and sustainable goals. We will need new organizations and a new language to describe what they do and why.

Where might these come from?

Entrepreneurship is growing like never before as the huge increase in company formation over recent years suggests. Indeed, amongst graduates it is becoming a career path in its own right, joining law, accountancy, advertising, the civil service, and so on. Digital technologies have reduced the costs of starting a business and people increasingly appreciate the meaning, autonomy, and rewards that it can bring. So this will be a good place to look for ways that do more with less to address our social and environmental needs. Increasingly, where there is a knotty problem that requires a radical solution the answer will come through some form of enterprise, whether it is social, nonprofit, or simply responsible.

It will be fascinating to see what new institutions—and words—come to populate this emerging landscape.

Featured image credit: ‘New York City Skyline Sunrise’ by Anthony Quintano. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Ancient Rome vs. North Korea: spectacular ‘executions’ then and now

Reports over recent months from South Korea’s Yonhap news agency have suggested that two prominent North Korean politicians have been executed this year on the orders of  Kim Jong-un: North Korea’s vice-premier Choe Yong-gon was said to have been shot after he “expressed discomfort against the young leader’s forestation policy,” while the North Korean Defence Minister, Hyon Yong-chol, was said to have been executed by anti-aircraft weapons in front of an audience of hundreds, reportedly charged with treason for disobeying orders, falling asleep at a military event, and being disloyal to the supreme leader.

These reports evoke some interesting parallels from the darker side of the history of ancient Rome, or at least from the more colourful stories told about it by Roman historians. The similarities are striking; in both cases we rely on a small number of reports from potentially biased origins in order to gain a view of a distant and inaccessible society. Arguably, our sources for ancient Rome some two thousand years ago are at least as extensive as those for modern North Korea, and perhaps even more reliable.

The main ancient sources in Latin on the early Roman empire are the imperial biographies of Suetonius and the historical works of Tacitus. The two men were friends and office-holders in the Roman state, and share an essentially pessimistic view of the system of emperors. In particular, both had lived through and endured the reign of the emperor Domitian, whose erratic and tyrannical behaviour plainly coloured their views of emperors in general. For Suetonius this comes out in his Lives of the Caesars, gossipy and occasionally muck-making biographies which show the emperors as weak human beings; for Tacitus, his Annals and Histories show how the imperial system put too much power into the hands of one individual or dynasty, with catastrophic effects on the state such as familial infighting, civil war, and unsuitable leaders.

‘Portrait of Kim Jong-un’, by En-cas-de-soleil (Own work). CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The reported fates of North Korean ministers evoke these pessimistic and sometimes melodramatic accounts of some of the more colourful emperors. One of the key issues for Roman emperors was their tendency to be dependent on particular individuals as advisers: as with similar modern autocrats, one problem for the suspicious and capricious supreme rulers of Rome was how long such advisers could be trusted, and how to get rid of them once the emperor’s trust was lost, or once he became tired of them. A spectacular public end made it clear who was really in charge, and encouraged obedience and servility through vivid intimidation (it could be the spectator next).

One example is the emperor Tiberius, successor of Augustus and the emperor under whom Jesus was executed, who for some years depended on the services of his commander of the guard Sejanus. Sejanus was so trusted by Tiberius that the ageing emperor felt able to retire to a life of pleasure on the Italian island of Capri, leaving Sejanus to run things for him in Rome. But eventually (we are told)  the emperor’s suspicions won out, and Sejanus was cunningly brought down by being lured to the Roman Senate to hear a letter from Tiberius read aloud before the assembly. The letter was supposed to bring him promotion and marriage into the imperial family, but in fact contained a complete denunciation and a death sentence. He was taken to prison, strangled and his body hacked to pieces in the streets by the Roman mob.

Tiberius’ successor Gaius, better known as Caligula, was more overtly sadistic. His executions were often public events: he is said to have burned a comic playwright alive in the middle of the amphitheatre, because of a humorous line of double meaning in a show, and when a Roman aristocrat who was being thrown to the wild beasts in the public arena loudly protested his innocence, Caligula had him taken out, had his tongue cut out, and then sent him back to be finished off.

Nero a generation later was little better. Again, getting rid of ministers was an issue: all the four advisers who helped him most on his route to the throne died on his orders within eight years. One of them, Burrus, was sent a poison which Nero pretended was a throat medicine, while another, the philosopher Seneca, was forced to suicide by opening his veins in a hot bath. But his most famous public executions were those of the early Christians, who, as the historian Tacitus tells it, were blamed by Nero as convenient scapegoats for the great fire of Rome, which destroyed the city in 64 CE. A mass of them were dispatched by being covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs in the arena, or by being fastened on crosses in his public gardens and set alight to serve as novelty lamps by night.

As noted above, these stories all come (like the South Korean reports) from hostile sources; modern historians are skeptical about many of them, and in some ways they show how some Romans felt about the potential dangers of hereditary autocracy rather than reliably retailing the details of history. Just like North Korea, Rome could be presented by interested parties as presided over by a youthful ruler who had been brought up without normal moral boundaries, who felt acute suspicions of those close to him, and who could exercise absolute power of life and death, backed by the might of a highly militarised state. In both cases, there are clear motivations for bias: Suetonius and Tacitus were in some ways in conflict with the imperial system, just as South Korea and North Korea are still in some sense at war with each other. In such an environment, traditional stereotypes about tyrannical rule are likely to emerge, especially where one side maintains rigorous restrictions on information, creating a vacuum which the other is keen to fill for the benefit of a more ‘liberal’ global audience. As with ancient Rome, we need to be aware of the potential unreliability of biased reporting, and the natural tendency to demonise political opponents; melodramatic colouring of events is just as manipulative as controlling and limiting what is disseminated to the world.

Originally posted on the BBC News website in  December, 2015. Reprinted courtesy of the BBC.

Featured image credit: Colosseum, by AlexVan. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

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Should primary schools be responsible for childhood obesity prevention?

In most developed (and many developing) countries, childhood obesity has become much more common over the last few decades, and it is now regarded as one of the most serious global public health challenges of the 21st century. In England, one in five 4-5-year-olds are now overweight or obese, rising to one in three 10-11-year-olds. This sharp increase in obesity rates over the primary school years, alongside the long-term contact that schools have with the majority of children and their parents, are two factors that have led to primary schools being seen as a potential key setting for obesity prevention. Schools can provide an environment for children to eat healthily and engage in regular physical activity, and the curriculum presents opportunities for learning about healthy lifestyles. But should schools have a responsibility for obesity prevention?

We interviewed 22 headteachers from socio-economically and ethnically diverse primary schools across the West Midlands, UK, to ascertain their views on the role of schools in preventing obesity. By understanding headteacher opinions, we hoped to contribute towards shaping future approaches to children’s health in schools.

All headteachers identified that schools have an important role to play in the health and wellbeing of their pupils and that part of this was the promotion of healthy eating and physical activity. They discussed ways in which their schools contributed towards preventing childhood obesity, for example through the provision of healthy school meals and extra-curricular activities, or the implementation of health policies aimed at promoting consistent messages throughout the school. Headteachers saw benefits in promoting healthier lifestyles, and the link between children’s health and academic success was a key driver for schools.

“I think healthier children are more switched on to their learning and they seem more enthusiastic and more willing to work hard and be independent and engage with the learning.”

Photo by Tania Griffin. Used with permission.

Many headteachers discussed how they would like to dedicate more time to promoting healthier lifestyles, as they believed that this would benefit children both in terms of their health and their education. However, academic pressure and the ‘prescriptive curriculum’ were found to be the principal barriers for schools in doing more (alongside a lack of space and facilities). One headteacher was convinced that by committing more curriculum time to physical activity and healthy eating, test results would improve. However, she was too scared to take the risk because of pressure from the government agenda.

“If this was my school and I was able to run it in any way I wanted to… a bigger part of their education would be healthy eating and active lifestyles. I can only do it minimally because of the government agenda… which has to be the ultimate priority otherwise I get into trouble.”

Despite unanimous support for the school role in promoting healthier lifestyles, headteachers were keen to point out that this was only a supporting role, with parents having the main responsibility.

“We will play a role, we will support… we will educate, but I firmly believe that it’s got to be parents who take the ultimate responsibility.”

Issues arose when it was considered that parents were not fulfilling their responsibilities adequately, for example in not providing children with breakfast or PE kits, or where parents appeared to be lacking in the knowledge and skills required to lead healthier lifestyles. Headteachers recognised that some families face barriers to adopting healthy lifestyles and require support, particularly the case in schools serving deprived communities. In these situations, many headteachers perceived the school role as a ‘backstop’, taking on responsibilities which in other schools would be seen as more in the parental domain.

“We have a big gap in parenting knowledge and so we almost step into the shoes and have to do an awful lot of that that would ordinarily be done by parents elsewhere.”

A number of schools involved parents in health promotion activities, although this was often thought to be too late.

“Often by the time they’ve come to us and they’re four and five years old, those habits have been set and it’s about unbreaking the habits, you know, we do need to start much, much earlier.”

Although many headteachers agreed that schools were ideally placed to support families, some felt that they lacked the necessary capacity and expertise to tackle the complex issues surrounding childhood obesity.

Our study suggests that headteachers are happy for their schools to play a part in contributing towards obesity prevention, and that schools would reap the benefits in terms of academic success, if they were able to do more. However, support is required, through resources and government policy, to enable them to expand on their current contribution. Targeting of such resources to those schools serving deprived communities may help to reduce health inequalities.

Featured image credit: During playtime by JackHoang. CC0 public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Disparity in the restaurant industry [infographic]

If someone were to tell you that the restaurant industry is one of the lowest paying sectors in the US economy, the types of jobs that might come to mind include those in the fast food segment. Not surprisingly, workers from all parts of the restaurant industry—tipped and non-tipped—live in poverty. Many employers fail to pay their workers fair wages and provide paid sick days (thus increasing the risk of spreading illnesses). The infographic below illustrates just some of the restaurant industry’s shortcomings, with data from Saru Jayaraman’s new book, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining.

Download the infographic as a jpg.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by ranjatm. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Can re-wilding the uplands help to prevent flooding in the lowlands?

The recent flooding in the north of England has prompted calls for better flood defences and river dredging. But these measures are unlikely to work by themselves, especially with the increased likelihood of extreme weather events in the coming years. A new approach is needed that considers whole catchment management – starting with the source of rivers in upland areas. Upland landscapes have been drastically transformed from their original forest state, and this has affected river flow in lowland areas. The reduced water-holding capacity of uplands makes for fast release of water, contributing to flooding downstream. Therefore, restoring upland landscapes is an essential part of good flood management, and could also help to revitalise upland communities.

To make an effective management plan for upland areas, we need to understand the history of these evocative landscapes. The uplands are dynamic cultural landscapes that have responded to human management for millennia; choosing restoration targets therefore needs to blend social as well as ecological considerations. Fossil pollen and charcoal, found in peat bogs and other wetlands, shows that tree cover has declined over time, driven by increased grazing and burning. Extensive forest clearance began in the Iron Age and intensified in mediaeval times as monasteries expanded grazing and wool production. Grazing and fires were used to keep pastures free of encroaching trees, and over the centuries, deep layers of peat developed, creating unique moorland soils. Over time, a system of transhumant pastoralism developed, in which cattle and sheep were moved between winter and summer grazing areas, allowing lowland pastures to rest in the summer months. The annual migration was an important part of pastoral society and ecology; townships grew up around the summer grazing areas, and mosaic landscapes developed with forest fragments, woodpastures, and moorlands. Veteran pine and oak trees can still be found on abandoned woodpastures, themselves now highly valued as the enduring sentinels of a lost way of life (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Abandoned woodpasture from Holl, K., and M. Smith. 2007. Scottish upland forests: History lessons for the future. Forest Ecology and Management 249:45-53. Used with permission.

Cultivation, overgrazing, burning, the harvesting of wood for construction, and bark stripping for use in the leather industry also contributed to ongoing woodland clearance (Dodgshon and Olsson 2006). From the late 1700s, many hill farms were abandoned or forcibly cleared to make way for more extensive forms of sheep farming, and traditional transhumant systems began to erode (Holden et al. 2007, Davies 2008); (Dodgshon and Olsson 2006). By the mid-19th century, enclosed sheep farms were dominant, due to high prices for wool, mutton, and lamb, and the introduction of new, hardier breeds of sheep that could spend more of the year in the hills. Continued grazing, managed burning to rejuvenate heather plants, as well as soil erosion and acidification prevented tree regeneration (Dogshon 2006).

Overgrazing continued in the twentieth century, encouraged by guaranteed prices for livestock. Subsidies for upland drainage and afforestation projects further degraded upland landscapes and contributed to soil acidification Holden et al. 2007). Since industrialisation, changes in nitrogen, and sulphur deposition have altered soil properties, affecting ecological processes like peat-building and heather maturation. By 2003, 86% of moorland SSSI’s (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) were in poor conditions due to overgrazing and inappropriate burning (RSPB 2007).

A consequence of overgrazing and woodland clearance in the uplands has been soil erosion and reduced water holding capacity, leading to faster release of water from upland areas and increased flood risk in the lowlands. At the same time, channelization of rivers in the lowlands and urban developments on floodplains has reduced the capacity of lowland areas to absorb water and buffer waterflow. As well as woodland restoration, other measures, such as blocking gullies and drains, help to restore peatland and wetland habitats, reducing erosion and contributing to water and carbon storage (Reed et al. 2009). In valleys the restoration of fluvial meanders and riparian corridors can enhance biodiversity and connectivity, and increase the buffering capacity of rivers. Abandoned farms in the most remote upland areas provide opportunities for re-wilding with large mammals.

The socioeconomic landscape of the uplands is now in flux and there are new opportunities for changing upland management. New Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies are decoupled from stock production and instead reward compliance with good farming practices and a range of environmental standards. This has led to a decline in stock numbers, and a move away from hill farming to more productive areas in valley bottoms. At the same time, afforestation schemes have declined and there is a move towards planting native woodlands, which supply a range of products and ecosystem services (Reed et al. 2009). A new ‘Environmental Stewardship Scheme’ subsidises farmers for developing and maintaining agro-environmental plans that conserve biodiversity and provide ecosystem services like ground water recharge, flood prevention, carbon storage and recreation. In addition, the Environmentally Sensitive Areas schemes (ESA) supplements upland farmers’ incomes and helps to safeguard landscapes through good farming practices, such as limiting stocking rates and reinstating traditional husbandry that reduces upland stocking levels over the winter (Reed et al. 2009).

The future of the uplands is therefore open and involves a negotiation between what is environmentally and culturally desirable, ecologically feasible, and economically realistic. The overall aim for uplands today is not to reconstruct an arbitrary point in the past but to provide flexible, resilient, and richly diverse upland landscapes with woodland and moorland elements that sustain a wide variety of livelihoods, ecosystem services, and heritage values (Peterken 1996, Tipping et al. 1999, Brown 2010). Such systems could help to ameliorate problems of extreme flooding in the lowlands, by restoring water-holding capacity and evening out river flow.

Featured image credit: nature Bach lake river by re1kojote. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Getting to know Lauralee, Eden, and Andrew in music editorial

Publishing music books would be much harder without our stellar editorial team. We sat down with three editorial assistants from the New York office – Lauralee, Eden, and Andrew – to talk about Oxford University Press, their music lives inside and out of the office, and current literary addictions.

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Lauralee Yeary

What is the strangest thing currently on or in your desk?

1) Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Pants printed on a postcard. I didn’t know until recently that it stems from a movement during which European artists perpetuated and fetishized the myth of voluntarily hypersexual servants in Far East harems (from what I understand). Really nice colors, though.

2) a bottle of pepto-bismol

What is your favorite word?

eavesdrop (v.) or gossamer (n.); eavesdrop because it comes from the term ‘eavesdrip’ referring to the water dripping from a house’s eaves or the ground space on which water could fall. So within that context, you can imagine an eavesdropper acting as a sort of human rain barrel for vocal precipitation and language / gossip as liquid refuse. Gossamer’s always good.

Do you play any musical instruments? Which ones?

Trumpet and some piano; slowly learning to program.

Do you specialize in any particular area or genre of music?

I focused on jazz studies and performance during school, later merged with computer music and music/gender studies.

What artist do you have on repeat at the moment?

Arvo Pärt; Max Roach/Clifford Brown; Ghost Town DJs/Inoj.

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Eden Piacitelli

When did you start working at OUP?

I started in August, and it’s been a whirlwind since.

What are you reading right now?

I’m rereading A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. It’s mystifying, magical, and so beautifully written.

Open the book you’re currently reading and turn to page 75. Tell us the third sentence on that page.

“The fish shuddered in the curve of my rib cage.”

What drew you to work for OUP in the first place? What do you think about that now?

I’ve always admired the music scholarship published by OUP. OUP’s books have followed me through my academic career (e.g. Freedom Sounds by Ingrid Monson, Shostakovich: A Life by Laurel E. Fay, the Global Music Series from higher ed.), and it’s a dream to interact in some way with the vetting, contracting, development, and production of these fascinating, often groundbreaking, books.

What is in your desk drawer?

I guess you could say I have an ‘emergency’ drawer. It houses a plaid parka in case of rain, a sweater in case I’m cold (which is often), and snacks. It’s usually candy or cookies, and right now it’s a bag of Oreos and some banana chips.

Do you play any musical instruments? Which ones?

Yes, I play the cello.

Do you specialize in any particular area or genre of music?

I handle titles related to ethnomusicology, practitioner books, and certain series, including Oxford Theory in Ethnomusicology, Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music, AMS Studies in Music, and Master Musicians.

What was the last concert you went to?

I have a friend who has season tickets to Carnegie Hall, and I volunteered to accompany him to as many concerts I could fit in my schedule. On my latest excursion, I saw the Orchestre National de France perform Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 with Julian Rachlin, and Tchaikovksy’s 5th. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert where both the soloist and orchestra play encores, so this concert was doubly exciting!

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Andrew Maillet

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found about working at OUP?

They give you free croissants and access to the OED!

What’s the least surprising?

Everyone here is chronically addicted to reading.

What’s the most enjoyable part of your day?

Seeing final cover designs and proofs come in! It’s a moment when you realize the book is actually going to exist in the world beyond your computer screen.

What are you reading right now?

As always, I’m dipping in and out of many things. One of them is a book by Brian Kane, published last year by OUP, called Sound Unseen. It’s a fascinating work on how sound comes to be thought of as independent from its source, and how this peculiar principle has influenced the way people listen to music throughout history. Another is a history of physics by Bruce Gregory called Inventing Reality.  I’m also looking at Oxford’s Very Short Introductions on Wittgenstein, Critical Theory and Jung.

Open the book you’re currently reading and turn to page 75. Tell us the title of the book, and the third sentence on that page.

It is a book of aphorisms by Franz Kafka.  “Lurking, fretful, hoping, the answer creeps around the question, peers despairingly in its averted face, follows it on its most abstruse journeys—that is, those that have least to do with the answer.”

If you could trade places with any one person for a week, who would it be and why?

The J-POP star Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.  I can’t imagine a more exciting and unpredictable week.

What is your favorite word?

Spoonerism.

Most obscure talent or hobby?

I make my own bread and sauerkraut.

Favorite animal?

The octopus, obviously.

All photos by Celine Aenlle-Rocha.

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