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The impact of On the Origin of Species

What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Today, we are exploring the impact of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which was recently voted as the most influential academic book in history.

Charles Darwin was widely known as a travel writer and natural historian in the twenty years before On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. The Voyage of the Beagle was a great popular success in the 1830s. But the radical theories developed in the Origin had been developed more or less in secret during those intervening twenty years. An extraordinary range of investigation and hard thinking lay behind the new book though it was written in a rush of just thirteen months. And it was written for any intelligent educated person to read, in an open non-mathematical language. So from the start it challenged wider society to re-think the history of the world and all species. It required human beings to understand that we are one among many in the ‘great family’ of living and once-living things: plants, insects, animals, birds, fishes, and behind them all, minerals and rocks with their traces of past life. The book presented all this while barely mentioning humankind.

‘On the Origin of Species’ at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Photo by Dan Parker.

Darwin thought he was being ‘diplomatic’ but leaving out any discussion of ‘mankind’ undermined all the assumptions that we are separate and chosen. Instead we become just one among an array of life-forms all of which interconnect and depend on each other. His is not a theory only of competition, though the struggle to survive often involves a struggle for scarce resources or mates. He saw also how intricately all the elements in an environment function together and he was at the source of our present ecological investigations.

Darwin wrote for his scientific peers but he wrote for a general public too. The Origin was never solely an ‘academic’ work. And his readers have taken away from it quite different, and often contradictory, stories about the rise or the fall of mankind, about the ‘survival of the fittest’ or the need for collaboration, about diversity and selection. That ability to generate broad understandings of life underpins the work’s revolutionary success. Over time it has been read by different political groups as authenticating their theories: socialists, anarchists, fascists, have all claimed its support. Darwin himself eschewed any political readings and saw his work as purely natural history.

Over time, too, scientists in quite different domains have worked with and tested his ideas to their utmost. Even though Darwin worked before genetics, geneticists have found in the Origin a founding text for their work. How Darwin would have delighted in the human genome project! And how essential his evolutionary theory with its emphasis on natural selection has proved to be to later researchers! His careful, enthusiastic, rich account of a lifetime’s accumulated evidence resolved into ‘one long argument’ and has given abundant materials for later generations to think with. It has placed human history in among the longer and more diversified histories of all other species and it has offered a compelling means of understanding how, as Darwin put it, ‘We are all netted together’. The Origin’s arguments still provoke and refresh and look set to travel long into the future.

Featured image credit: Turtle reading On the Origin of Species. Photo by Dan Parker for Oxford University Press.

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Change in publishing: A Q&A with Michael Dwyer

What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Today, we have a Q&A with Michael Dwyer, Publisher at Hurst Publishers.

Academic publishing is not as simple as it may appear. University presses such as Oxford and Fordham range from large to small; for-profit publishers such as Wiley and Elsevier must appeal to both academics and shareholders; start-ups such as Academia.edu and WriteLatex are fulfilling smaller services; and niche publishers, such as Hurst, offer tremendous depth and breadth of specific subject areas. We sat down with Michael Dwyer, Publisher at Hurst Publishers, to discuss the industry — past, present, and future.

How did you get started in publishing?

By taking a job in Heffers Booksellers in Cambridge and answering an advert in The Bookseller magazine seeking a trainee editor interested in African affairs. I studied African history at university and was brought up in Nigeria, so that part was easy. Publishing is not.

What does your typical day look like?

My typical day usually consists of far too much email correspondence, several author and would-be author meetings, discussions with colleagues about editorial and marketing matters, paying bills, editing manuscripts and assessing them prior to acquisition, wrangling about cover design options, discussing book ideas with our editors, planning publicity with our publicist, and trying to ensure that as many people in the business as possible know what’s going on, what editorial and production standards mean to us at Hurst, and that they are enjoying their careers in publishing.

From old-fashioned paper-and-ink, to e-readers, to mobile phones, how has readership and access changed?

Far more options to read via several different platforms are now available yet most people I meet claim to prefer long-form reading via the traditional book format rather than on a screen. I don’t think the way in which we read has altered much in the last decade, though that is hard to quantify. Nor do I think readers necessarily prefer shorter books, despite much received wisdom to the contrary.

How has the transition from print to digital impacted your press?

The transition continues so gauging the real rather than the imagined impact is difficult. For the time being we are delighted by publishing our books in a medium that allows people to access them wherever Internet access is available, including those who would usually be unable to acquire our publications because of government or social censorship.

How has your list changed over the last ten years?

Our focus remains publishing books on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, principally on the last two hundred years or so, but we have expanded in new areas, especially since 9/11, namely terrorism, intelligence and espionage, human rights, humanitarianism, and more on history and the history of religions, principally Islam.

How have authors changed in the last ten years?

They are far more aware of their own worth as producers of cultural capital, yet they also seem more willing to help publishers publicise their books via literary festivals and social media. It is less of an ‘us and them’ relationship than it used to be and is generally a more collaborative, more cordial relationship, principally because both parties are better informed — through the Internet — about the pressures the other faces.

What new collaborations and opportunities are available to publishers?

We should invest more time than we do at present in deepening and broadening our relationships with our authors, seeking their advice and treating them as career-long partners in a shared enterprise rather than a commodity ripe for exploitation, which some publishers still do, sadly. We should also conduct far more detailed and stringent market research into the products — book manuscripts — we acquire before deciding whether to publish them at all and then later how best to publish them.

What do you wish you’d seen coming in the last ten years? What innovation caught you by surprise?

That mobile phones and text messaging and social media mean that we write to each other far more often than in the past, albeit in a weirdly truncated format.

What happens behind-the-scenes that people often miss?

The very great effort expended in properly editing a manuscript.

What is one of the greatest misconceptions about publishing?

That we chose to publish books as slowly as possible, rather than seeking to improve efficiency of production and editorial processes, which is the reality.

What do you predict for the next ten years of academic publishing?

An inexorable decline in the monograph and a rise in universities ‘publishing’ their own research and circulating it amongst themselves, and a corresponding desire on the part of many scholars to avoid that option by working with traditional publishers, especially those writers who wish to reach a readership beyond the academy.

How does your press fit into the academic publishing ecosystem?

While we may be known for publishing in certain niche areas, any interesting, well-written manuscript in the humanities and social sciences is likely to hold our attention, and we believe we can publish and promote the book that results as well as any competitor in our field.

How has your partnership with OUP impacted your press?

It has raised our profile, especially among the academics who write and consume most of our publications; it has given us greater leverage in commissioning and acquiring new titles; and it has opened up an entirely new means of reaching readers via the Oxford Scholarship Online initiative, in which Hurst is a partner press for books bearing the OUP imprint.

Photo by Sara Levine for Oxford University Press.

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Hurst Publishers: 5 academic books that changed the world

What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Today, we present selections from our partner Hurst Publishers.

Which books have changed the world? Given our news today, one might expect that books no longer have as great an impact on it. ISIS has Syria in turmoil and refugees are making their way to Europe; the United States is gearing up for an election that may determine the future for many others around the globe; China is changing in rapid and unexpected ways, with political and economic consequences rippling around the world. Books, however, play a key role in exploring these contemporary issues, leading to new theories, new investigations, new revelations, and new predictions. Here are five titles from Hurst Publishers that offer such academic analysis on pressing issues.

Photos by Sara Levine for Oxford University Press.

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University Press Week blog tour round-up (Tuesday)

What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Here’s a quick round-up of topics discussed on the University Press Week blog tour, which kicked off on Monday.

For the last few years, the AAUP has organized a University Press blog tour to allow readers to discover the best of university press publishing. On Tuesday, their theme was “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” featuring commentary on trends in the industry, the case for financial support, and the meaning of gatekeeping in a digital era.

How do we advance without losing our heart? Indiana University Press director Gary Dunham discusses the emotional work of editing and the rewards of collaboration.

“Publishing, famously, is always in crisis.” Our own editorial director Sophie Goldsworthy examines the shifts within the market, often pulling in two different directions.

Take a survey on scholarly communication. John Warren of George Mason University invites academics to participate in research on the use of digital tools in the research workflow.

University Press of Colorado turns 50. Darrin Pratt is pulled between history and the future.

“better now than ever.” Charles Myers, Director of the University Press of Kansas, reflects on a passion to publish exciting writing and ideas for scholars and the general public.

Operating in a market-driven environment. John Sherer, Spangler Family Director of UNC Press, makes the case for financial support of university presses.

We are what we acquire. Derek Krissoff, Director of West Virginia University Press, reminds us that acquisition editors will shape the future of presses far more than publishing innovation.

Back to the Future, of the book. Greg Britton, editorial director in the books division at Johns Hopkins University Press, calls for more collaboration between publishers, librarians, technologists, scholarly societies, and scholars themselves.

Filling the gap. Jason Bennett, Direct Mail Manager of the University of Georgia Press, argues that university press publishing is not as isolated as one might think.

Be sure to look out for blog posts from Northwestern University Press, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Georgetown University Press, Syracuse University Press, Stanford University Press, Harvard University Press, AU Press, and Yale University Press later today.

Featured image: Tromso, Norway. Photo by Marcelo Quinan. CC0 via Unsplash.

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How the South was made

Why study the South? What makes this peculiar region important from the point of views of Americans, or people abroad wanting to know more about the American experience? The South experienced changes and phenomena central to how the United States evolved over time. What defines it—and the extent to which it really was and is different from the American nation—lies at the intersection of the widespread interest in southern history, literature, and culture. Southern particularity in its economy, system of racial hierarchy, cooking, climate, and speech all seem to mean a sort of country-within-a-country, at odds, perhaps, with the rest of the nation.

Today, southerners speak differently, eat differently, live in a different climate, and regard themselves as apart from the rest of the United States. Still, what constitutes “the South” remains a contested concept that has evolved over time. Some parts of the South were dominated by slavery; others were largely isolated from it. Most scholars agree that the eleven former states of the Confederate nation are southern, but so probably are the border states that did not secede, including Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Parts of Delaware historically are southern; much of the state in 1861 remained wedded to slaveholding and plantation agriculture.

Rather than a single “South,” there were in fact many Souths, and the region exhibits remarkable geographical, economic, and demographic diversity. Within the South, there remains a physical diversity that includes mountains and highlands, coastal plains, towns and cities, piney woods, and river bottoms, swamps, and wetlands. The South spread west, extending from Arkansas into Texas, while, to the North, it also included border regions in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

The South’s diversity was both geographical and historical. The particularity of the region is rooted in the physical differences extending across the South, from the marshy coastal areas on the Atlantic seaboard, to the red-clay interior of the Piedmont, to the hill country and mountainous regions, and to the Delta region that extends down the spine of the Mississippi River. Along the Gulf of Mexico, a Gulf South emerged whose original European influences were Spanish and French, not English. The unification of these diverse regions was historical, occurring over centuries between the colonial era and the Civil War. Ultimately, these Souths converged in the nineteenth century, with the spread of plantation agriculture and spectacular expansion of cotton culture across the Gulf region and Mississippi Valley.

Perhaps more useful is to regard the South as a highly diverse region, often at odds with itself, which shared a regional identity based on unique historical forces. Despite its diversity, the South, as an identifiable region, came into existence by the middle of the nineteenth century. Its identity lies in what W. J. Cash described as a “peculiar history” of the South, a history distinguishing it so much from national norms. And this “peculiar history” is tied to the rise and fall of racial slavery, its destruction during the Civil War, and the troubled aftermath of emancipation. Although “not quite a nation within a nation,” Cash reminded us that the South was the “next thing to it.” But the story of the South charts, and helped to define, the history of the United States.

“African American cotton pickers at work in a Southern field.” Public domain via Library of Congress.

But the most important thing that made the South “the South” was race—the establishment of a coerced labor system based on racial slavery; the expansion of that system to include, at its peak in 1860, four million enslaved people; the demise of this system during the Civil War; the reimposition of white supremacy after Reconstruction; and the slow and ambiguous effort to achieve a racially just society. The mind of the South, concluded Cash, arose from the institution of slavery and the social, economic, and political conditions surrounding it. A “proto-Dorian” bond of racial unity among white males transcended class differences. Southerners’ military prowess blended with patriarchy, male dominance, social class, exalted values of personal honor, and above all, race. This “savage ideal” characterized the South historically as a region bound to defend its traditions of individualism, localism, and racial hierarchy against all outside intrusion.

Cash’s proto-Dorian bond and savage ideal made the South different, but these considerations also made the region crucial to the very meaning of American politics, culture, and economic development. Slavery fueled much of the urgency and political participation of the Jacksonian political system, and race has dominated American politics since then. Slavery sustained American economic growth; the Cotton Kingdom became the most significant generator of capital fueling capitalism around the Atlantic World. White supremacy may have appeared confined to the region below the Mason-Dixon line, but racism infused American society after the 1870s. The most important diaspora of the twentieth century was southern—the Great Migration of millions of African Americans to the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. This southern diaspora had manifest cultural consequences in the rise of an African culture that found audiences around the world.

The American South was constructed with roots in the plantation system and the particular world that grew up around slavery. The region—and its sense of self—came into existence as a result of a shared past in which experiences of slavery, geography, and ethnicity created a set of common interests and values. There was no such nothing as “the South” until after the American Revolution. Before then, the region south of the Potomac River remained a collection of disparate colonies with differing cultures and political traditions, united mainly by the dominant influence of slavery and slaveholding. The birth of the American Republic paradoxically fanned feelings of state particularity and sectional difference, and, in the new federal constitutional system of 1787, the interests of slaveholding states diverged from those of non-slaveholding states. The South’s regional consciousness accentuated a continuing debate about what the Republic meant.

Image Credit: “George Street, Charleston, South Carolina” by Henry de Saussure Copeland. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr. 

 

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How conservative are married priests?

Following the Episcopal Church’s 1976 decision to ordain women, Catholic leaders in America and Rome were approached by Episcopal clergy who opposed the decision and sought conversion as a result. The Catholics responded by establishing rules that would allow the Church to receive married convert priests as exceptions to the rule of celibacy-a decree known as the Pastoral Provision. In his fascinating new book, D. Paul Sullins brings to light the untold stories of these curious creatures: married Catholic priests. Sullins explores their day-to-day lives, their journey to Catholicism, and their views on issues important to the Church. Surprisingly, he reveals, married Catholic priests are more conservative than their celibate colleagues on nearly every issue, including celibacy: they think that priests should, in general, not be allowed to marry.

Check out the infographic below to see how the opinions of married priests on premarital sex, homsexuality, and cloning in medical research compare with the opinions held by their unmarried peers.

 

 

Featured image: St. Joseph Catholic Church, San Antonio, Texas by Ralph Arvesen. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Analyzing causal effects of multiple treatments in political methodology

Recent years have seen amazing growth in the development of new tools that can be used to make causal claims about complex social phenomenon. Social scientists have been at the forefront of developing many of these new tools, in particular ones that can give analysts the ability to make causal inferences in survey research.

An example of an important contribution in this area is the paper “Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments,” published in Political Analysis in 2014. This paper, co-authored by Jens Hainmueller, Daniel J. Hopkins, and Teppei Yamamoto, was recently given the Miller Prize, recognizing it as the best paper appearing in Political Analysis in the previous year. In recognition of receipt of this award, this paper is available for free online access.

I recently had an opportunity to ask Jens, Daniel, and Teppei a series of questions about their paper, their research project, scientific collaborations, and about their strategies for publishing technical papers.

Your paper uses a survey experiment design, called conjoint analysis, to analyze causal effects of multiple treatments. What is conjoint analysis, and how does your paper develop a new way to use this technique in survey research?

Conjoint analysis is a survey method to measure preferences about objects that are characterized by many different attributes of interest, such as products, policy packages, and candidates in elections. The method is commonly used in marketing research to assess consumers’ demand for particular types of products and services, but until recently, political scientists had rarely taken advantage of this powerful method despite the recent boom in survey experiments. In our paper, we analyze statistical underpinnings of this method from a causal inference perspective. The framework is helpful in identifying what quantities conjoint designs can actually allow us to estimate. In a nutshell, we show that conjoint analysis can be used to estimate valid causal effects of multiple attributes and compare them to one another, and that estimation can be done with methods that are both simple and familiar to political scientists such as linear regression. We also provide statistical tools to implement what we propose: a GUI-based application that allows users to generate PHP scripts for web-based conjoint experiments and an R package that implements all of the proposed estimation methods and beyond.

In the conclusion of your paper, you note that the methodology you develop can be used for public policy research. What types of policy design problems do you think your methodology would be well-suited for?

When designing a public policy, one critical question is what the public prefers. In modern society any policy involves multiple dimensions and trade-offs to consider, meaning that it is crucial to assess how people would react to the proposed policy as a bundle. For example, consider a proposal to build a national stadium for hosting the next summer Olympic games (an ongoing, thorny issue in Japan). An ideal stadium would accommodate audiences of tens of thousands, have a fully retractable roof for multi-purpose use, cutting-edge design, and so forth. But such a stadium would also cost billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and potentially have negative impacts on the environment. How should the government balance those multiple considerations and come up with a proposal that is going to be backed by the public? If some corners have to be cut because of the budget constraint, where should that be made, and what other aspects should be prioritized? Conjoint analysis is a natural and effective means to answer such questions. Similar issues arise when designing many other types of multidimensional policies such as: what should a health care reform look like, what should a welfare reform look like, what should a bailout package look like, and many more.

How are you and your colleagues working to apply or extend the results in your Political Analysis paper?

We recently published a study that examines the external validity of vignette and conjoint survey experiments against real-world choice behavior. We found that the paired conjoint design, in contrast to single profile and vignette designs, is remarkably effective at replicating this real-world benchmark. But there are are still many open questions about how to optimize conjoint experiments for causal inference. How many attributes should you include in the conjoint table–and how many profiles? How many choice tasks? Is it better to use a forced-choice or a rating design? We are currently working on several projects that examine these key questions to better understand how one get the most out of conjoint experiments. We are also updating our software package and survey design tool to make it easier for researchers to implement and analyze conjoints.

Your Political Analysis paper is the product of a collaboration that across different time zones, and involves methodologists at different universities. How do collaborations like this work? How did you and your co-authors come together to work on this problem? Do you have any advice for other scholars who are considering collaborations like these?

There is no secret sauce for success in collaborations we know of, and if anybody has figured one out we would love to hear about it. What helps for us is that we share a preference for working on methodological problems that we deem important for applied research. In fact, many of the methods problems we get excited about are the ones we encounter in our substantive work when we or one of our colleagues hits a roadblock. In terms of workflow, we do regular conference calls and work jointly on our drafts and analysis and we also benefit from our great colleagues who give us feedback on our work. But at least for us progress in research is far from a linear or even a monotonic process. We generate ideas for new methods but often toss them out once we figure that they only work under too stringent assumptions or produce bogus results. Fortunately, every once in a while something turns out to work and then we write it up and submit.

Publishing technical papers like yours is often difficult; it’s common to hear that authors spend months, even years, trying to get papers like yours published in a good journal. What advice to you have for other authors about finding the right journal, crafting your paper for submission, and dealing with the criticisms of anonymous reviewers and journal editors?

It’s very true that in political science, there are not a ton of outlets for technically oriented work. In addition to Political Analysis, one might target the American Journal of Political Science‘s Workshop section or sometimes the American Political Science Review or Political Science Research and Methods, but the options can be limited. Given that, it does seem especially useful to put some effort into tailoring a manuscript for the specific journal and audience in question. By the time we submit a piece, we have probably written and discarded more text than is in the manuscript itself. A related challenge we’ve encountered is how to get the most out of reviewer feedback without being overwhelmed by it; pay particular attention to any comments that come up multiple times during the review process.

Featured image: Olympic stadium in Japan. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Seeking the elusive dead

It is a well-known fact of British prehistory that burial monuments, sometimes on a monumental scale, are well-documented in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, but largely absent in the Iron Age, outside certain distinctive regional groups at particular periods. In central southern England, for example, where hillforts and settlements abound, until recently burials were mainly limited to occasional inhumations in pits within settlements or fragmentary human remains, found scattered, apparently arbitrarily, in pits and ditches, but seldom constituting a formal cemetery. Despite abundant settlement evidence, the dead were strangely elusive.

So what has changed? In recent years the cost of excavation, especially technical analyses and post-excavation processing, has far exceeded the resources of most research groups, professional or amateur, so that research excavation is virtually non-existent, except on a very small scale. The great majority of fieldwork is now development-driven, in advance of road building, quarrying or the like, in other words, triggered by no academic rationale whatsoever. In consequence it eliminates the preconceived prejudice of academic strategies. Furthermore, it is undertaken on a scale that far exceeds the areas that could ever have been excavated by older conventional means. These two factors plainly increase the chances of detection of any archaeological feature that leaves minimal surface evidence, unlike hillforts, enclosed settlements or barrow mounds that are visible on the ground or through air-photography and thereby invite investigation. Simple burials without barrow mounds fall into this category, and are now being detected by large-scale area stripping. Unenclosed settlements, previously unrecognized from surface traces, are likewise being uncovered more frequently, significantly shifting the balance of the known database. The fact that archaeological sites exposed by mechanical stripping for development may have been severely damaged in the process, of course, is another issue.

Image credit: The Wandsworth Shield, Iron Age shield boss in La Tène style, British Museum, Room 50 by Johnbod. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Equally important, however, our expectations of the evidence are changing. In the case of burials, Western Christianity and norms of state-level society had conditioned us to expect that the dead would be buried in cemeteries, or at least following regular conventions. Isolated burials were regarded as those of criminals or outcasts, and fragments of human bone found on settlements were described as ‘casual’ disposals, as if discarding odd fragments of human bodies was the ultimate demonstration of nonchalance. Now we are beginning to appreciate that these fragmentary deposits were deliberate attempts to integrate the dead into the community of the living, rather than segregating them into separate cemeteries or communities of the dead. Plainly for Iron Age societies this world and the other world were not rigidly divided, and there is accumulating evidence that bodies or bones of ancestors were curated against the future need to invoke their potency against some impending disaster. Our recognition of settlement remains is equally being changed by the diversity of evidence, for example, of structural remains, not just circles of post-holes or stone foundations but including a much wider range of construction techniques that may leave only ephemeral traces.

So what about the downside of developer-led archaeology? Isn’t it better to discover all these new sites and have a broader picture as a result, even if sites are damaged in the process? In the case of settlement evidence, in lowland contexts centuries of agriculture had often already destroyed the uppermost levels of secondary occupation, leaving only the truncated foundations in subsoil. And developer-led archaeology is not new; as ‘rescue’ or ‘salvage’ archaeology, E. T. Leeds had organized Oxford students to help retrieve evidence from the Thames gravel pits in the 1930s. The difference is that the scale of development is so much greater today, and the response is more professional. But after a century of modern investigation we still have not a single late Iron Age burial of the Welwyn series recovered intact. The problem is that the questions now being asked need careful and reliable excavation to resolve. Questions like:

Were bodies exposed until clean and dry before re-assembly in graves, and were some bones retained for other purposes?


Were bodies re-assembled as composites of different individuals?


Were individuals preserved for prolonged periods before final disposal?


Were graves re-opened and bones or other items retrieved as talismans after burial?


As well as whole objects, were selected fragments of broken objects placed in graves, or are incomplete fragmentary finds the result of subsequent re-opening of the grave or simply of damage in discovery?


Why was only a small proportion of the cremated remains interred in cremation burials, and was the residue deposited elsewhere?


Were inhumations treated in the same way?

Not all of these questions will ever be resolved by excavation, but to stand any chance of resolution they require optimum conditions of investigation.

If fragmented and integrated burial was a normal means of disposal in the Iron Age, could it have been commonplace in earlier periods too? In fact, have we been beguiled in the past by the tombs of the Neolithic and Bronze Age into believing that they represented the burial norm, when perhaps burial was really only incidental to their true purpose? It has long been evident that not more than a minority of the population could have been buried in tombs as monumental as New Grange or Maes Howe, even allowing for satellite tombs. These sites were plainly special, and involved burial in their ceremonial. But regular disposal of the dead in the Neolithic and Bronze Age almost certainly involved other practices that archaeologically have been as elusive as were those of the Iron Age. Modern excavation provides the opportunity to resolve these issues, but not always the conditions to realize that outcome.

 Featured headline image: Moss on the earthworks at Galley Hill Fort, Sandy by Jason Ballard. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Shoehorn; or a new Grove spoof article

The editors of Grove Music Online were pleased to learn recently that one of their favorite bookstores, the Seminary Coop on the campus of the University of Chicago was running a contest to write the best Grove spoof article. The prize? A set of the 1980 paperback New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The winner, Brad Spiers, a graduate student in History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago, has done an excellent job at both reflecting Grove’s writing style and at cracking up the Grove editors. We hope you enjoy this excellent addition to the pantheon of Grove spoof articles.

Shoehorn
(Eng. Schoying horne [Old English]. Fr. chausse-pied, Corne de chaussures. Ger. Schuhanzieher, Horn von Schuhen, Ventilschuhlöffel [valve shoe horn], Gleitschuh Horn [slide shoe horn]. It. Calzascarpe, Corno di Scarpa).

 


Sturdy idiophone ubiquitous among dress shoe-wearing cultures. Rising to prominence during 15th century England, the shoehorn has today become one of the most widely used instruments in the world. This notoriety had lead many scholars to suggest that the shoehorn stands as Britain’s crowning contribution to contemporary music culture. While Medieval and Renaissance shoehorns incorporated animal horns, hooves, and ivory, today’s instruments have adopted contemporary materials, including cheap plastic, glass, metal or wood.

See also: SHOEHORNING, GLOBAL POLITICS OF

1. Construction.

The modern shoehorn is comprised of three parts: (1) the horn, a curved piece of wood fitted to the performer’s heel, (2) the handle, which allows for the instrument to be gripped, and (3) the leading, a connective attachment holding together the horn and handle. This design allows the performer to more effectively leverage the heel of their shoe to maximize the surface area of both the sole and foot. While standard shoehorns typically measure from 15cm – 50cm (handle to horn), this design has been expanded indefinitely to meet the individual needs of the performers and their shoes.

2. Repertory.

Although writings about the shoehorn are extensive, the instrument’s surviving repertory is severely limited. Descriptions from the 19th century suggest that shoehorns were one an important part of many large-scale symphonic works, including Mahler’s eighth Symphony (“Symphony of a Thousand”), Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, but many of these parts have been now lost. Perhaps the greatest remaining shoehorn compositions were written in the Austro-German lieder tradition, including seminal works by Franz Shoe-bert (1809-1847), Robert Shoe-mann (1810-1856), and Ludwig van Boot-hoven (1770-1816). The shoehorn also experienced a passionate revival during the early 20th century, prominently featured in post-tonal compositions by Arnold Shoe-nberg (1874-1951) and Dmitri Shoe-stakovich (1906-1975). Today, with much of these pieces lost, shoehorn performances persist mostly in improvisatory and vernacular traditions.

Bibliography

C. Dahlhaus: Das Zeitalter der Shoebert und Shoemann (Wiesbaden, 1980)


R. Heel-inger: Die Geschichte der Schuhanzieher anzieher (Berlin, 1988)


W. Pumps: The Inner Game of Shoehorning (Toronto, 1989)


B. Straps: Sole with a Capital S: A Cultural History of the Shoehorn (Chicago, 2004)

Bradley Spiers

Our congratulations to Mr. Spiers! You can read more about the history of spoof articles in Grove. You can read winners of Grove Music Online’s spoof article contests from 2013 (“Del Marinar, Stella.”) and from 2014 (“Fogger-Houndsmilk, George”). Look for the announcement of Grove Music Online’s next spoof article contest on the OUPblog in early 2016. Winners will be announced on – when else? – April Fool’s Day.

Featured image: Oberhausmuseum (Passau). Nativity (15th century) – detail: Shoe of Saint Joseph. Photo by Wolfgang Sauber. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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The right to a fair trial: part two

This post explores the issue of human rights in the UK and the right to a fair trial. The first part of this article was posted 3 November, 2015.

Human rights law has had a long and tortuous history in the UK, defined by some of the most fascinating cases in legal memory.

The case of John Wilkes was a milestone in establishing the right of free speech. Today a statue of him watches over the Rolls Building of the Royal Courts of Justice in Fetter Lane. There he is described as “A champion of English Freedom”, although he was in fact something of a popular rascal!

In 1763, Wilkes wrote a scathing attack on a speech delivered by King George III when he opened Parliament. It was published in a weekly paper which Wilkes himself had founded, called The North Briton. First the printers of the paper were arrested on the orders of the King, and then Wilkes himself. A writ of habeas corpus was immediately issued by the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir Charles Pratt, to have Wilkes brought before the court.

The judge ordered Wilkes to be released. He said that it could not be right that anyone should be arrested on a general warrant issued by the King, which did not specify the crime he was said to have committed, and that the publication of a critical article about George’s speech was not a crime. This was by no means Wilkes’ only appearance before the courts, but matters were settled by another Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, who confirmed the importance of the right to free speech.

James Somerset was an African who was transported as a slave to Virginia in America. There he was sold to a man called Charles Stewart. In 1769 Stewart brought his slave with him on a journey to England. Once in England Somerset looked after his master for two years, but when Stewart decided to return to Virginia, he escaped his master’s control. Stewart employed men to recapture him, and he was taken to a ship called the Ann and Mary, which was bound for Jamaica. There, Somerset was kept in irons. Word of Somerset’s plight leaked out before the ship set sail, and a writ of habeas corpus was issued to bring him before a court.

The case was heard by Lord Mansfield. It was argued that there were over 10,000 slaves in England at this time, and if he let Somerset free the result would be to abolish slavery altogether. This would cause great economic loss to many people. Lord Mansfield ended slavery in England with these words: “The state of slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law [meaning an Act of Parliament]. […] The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe. Let the black go free.”

Image credit: William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield by Jean Baptiste van Loo. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Human beings have unfortunately proved to be at their most imaginative and inventive when it has come to inflicting punishment upon their fellow men and women. Our own history of punishments has been as savage and inhumane as that of many other nations. Although the last executions in the UK took place in 1964, the death penalty is still in place in a number of Commonwealth countries, including Barbados.

Our Supreme Court Judges, sitting as members of a Committee of the Privy Council, are the final court of appeal from a number of other countries. In the case of Bradshaw v Attorney-General of Barbados (1995) two men who had been convicted of murder in Barbados had been sentenced to death. They each lost a number of appeals, and in 1993 the Court of Appeal in Barbados dismissed their final appeals. By this time they had been ‘on death row’ awaiting execution for over seven years.

Section 15 of the Constitution of Barbados adopts the same words as the European Convention on Human Rights, and provides that ‘No person shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading punishment. It was argued before the Privy Council that to execute men who had been under sentence of death for so long would amount to ‘inhuman or degrading punishment’ in violation of this constitution. The Privy Council agreed with this argument, and held that where it was proposed to execute a defendant five years or more after sentence the delay would be so great as to make the punishment inhuman or degrading. Accordingly, sentences of life imprisonment were substituted for the death sentences.

This judgment had a profound impact upon the fate of other prisoners in Barbados who had also been awaiting execution for many years. It has also been used to save the lives of prisoners in other Commonwealth countries.

There are many who are dissatisfied with the Human Rights Act, and the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France. Their main criticisms are that laws are often interpreted by the courts in a manner unduly favourable to those who arrive or stay in this country illegally, commit crime, or in some other way work against the interests of British citizens. In 2011 the Home Secretary, Teresa May, announced that a Commission would be established to investigate the creation of a British Bill of Rights. She said that it was time to assert that our Parliament makes the laws, rather than the courts, and that ‘the rights of the public come before the rights of criminals’. This announcement followed a ruling by the Supreme Court, which she described as ‘appalling’, that not granting sex offenders the opportunity to seek a review of their sentences amounts to a breach of their human rights.

On the other hand, Kenneth Clarke, (then Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice), did not agree with this analysis, and does not share this view of the Human Rights Act. In October 2011 he used strong language in criticising the arguments of a fellow cabinet member, accusing the Home Secretary of using ‘laughable, child-like examples’ to denigrate the Human Rights Act and making a ‘parody’ of court judgments. Here he was referring to her inaccurate complaint that a court had agreed to permit an illegal immigrant to remain in the UK because he had become attached to his cat!  Lord Woolf, who has served as Lord Chief Justice, added to this a view of the wider picture. He suggests that if an influential and respected Member State such as the UK pulls out of the European Convention, then other countries whose standards of treatment of their citizens already fall a long way below ours will take this as a signal that they need not comply either.

Feature image credit: John Wilkes Esq. before the Court of King’s Bench engraving from The Gentleman’s Magazine. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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