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The Holy Cross

By Philip H. Pfatteicher

Throughout much of the Christian Church, 14 September is celebrated as a feast of the Holy Cross. By focusing on the visible cross, the Christian church is making a rich and manifold proclamation. Venantius Fortunatus (530-609) in his hymn “Sing my tongue, the glorious battle” reflects one aspect of devotion to the cross. Its wood and the nails, transformed by the One who hung on them, are addressed as “sweet.” In John Mason Neale’s translation,

Faithful cross, above all other,


One and only noble tree!


None in foliage, none in blossom,


None in fruit thy peer may be;


Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,


Sweetest weight is hung on thee.


Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory!


Thy relaxing sinews bend;


For a while the ancient rigor


That thy birth bestowed, suspend;


And the King of heavenly beauty


On thy bosom gently tend.


[The English Hymnal no. 96]

The tree of the cross is asked to become, for the hours of crucifixion, a tender and sustaining mother.

In St. John’s Gospel, the moment of Christ’s death is in fact the moment of his glorification. Jesus dies with a cry of victory, “It is finished”; his work of redemption had been completed. The Roman instrument of death has been transformed and becomes a sign of victory. Such an understanding is clear in the proper Preface of the Cross in the Roman and Lutheran liturgy: “. . . O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty and Everlasting God, who on the tree of the cross gave salvation to humanity, that whence death arose, thence life also might rise again, and that he who by tree once overcame, might likewise by a tree be overcome, through Christ our Lord.” In a wonderfully concise way, two trees are brought together: the tree in the Garden of Eden by which Satan tempted humanity’s first parents to disobey the clear command of the Lord God, and the tree of the cross on which the Second Adam, the progenitor of a new race of humanity, by his obedience, overcame the temptation of the destroyer.

Medieval legends preserved the profound insight by making the two trees in fact one. One version imagines that when Adam was expelled from paradise, he took with him some seeds of the forbidden tree and planted them in his place of exile. They grew into a tree that when it was cut down became a pillar in Solomon’s temple. When the temple was destroyed the wooden shaft was buried, and then later unearthed by the Roman soldiers who were charged with the execution of Jesus and became the cross on which he was crucified. Moreover, the cross was planted on the very spot of the first Adam’s death, and so a crucifix is often shown with Adam’s skull at its base. The whole sweep of salvation history, from creation to crucifixion, was brought together on Golgotha.

Book of Kells, Folio 114r, Arrest of Christ. Scanned from Treasures of Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 a.D. : From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, & Trinity College, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum of Art & Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the Latin Gospel Book known as the Book of Kells, one of the only two surviving full-page narrative scenes, folio 114r, shows Christ, looking directly at the reader, flanked by two figures holding his arms. The scene is usually understood as a portrayal the arrest of Jesus, but closer examination, with the whole of the Bible echoing in our minds, suggests a more complex scene. Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane has been struggling with his vocation and has prayed to his Father to take away the cup of suffering (Matt. 26:39). He did not want to die and sought some other way of delivering his people. The two figures holding his arms seem to be pulling Jesus’s resistant arms outward as indeed they will soon be extended on the cross. Those extended arms will be seen as signifying an embrace reaching out to the whole world. Moreover, in Exodus 17:11-12, Moses watches the battle between Israel and Amalek. When his hands are extended as if in blessing, his people have the advantage in their battle; when he tires and lowers his hands, the battle turns against them. Aaron and Hur, one on each side, therefore hold up Moses’ hands to steady them “until the sun was set,” and so Israel was victorious that day. The scene in the Book of Kells brings together the support rendered to Moses and the extension of Jesus’ hands not only as an appealing embrace but also as a sign of blessing of his people as they engage in their battle against the forces of evil.

The Book of Common Prayer collect for Monday in Holy Week asks, “Grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.” The divinely appointed way of the cross may be unwelcome, but there is no other way into the heart of God.  William Penn put it succinctly: no cross, no crown.

Philip H. Pfatteicher is Professor of English and Religious Studies Emeritus at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania and sometime adjunct professor of sacred music at Duquesne University. He is the author of Journey Into the Heart of God: Living the Liturgical Year.

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CSI: Oral History

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

In our first podcast of the season, managing editor Troy Reeves speaks with the newest addition to the Oral History Review (OHR) editorial staff, David J. Caruso. As you will learn, David wears a number of hats in the oral history community. In addition to taking John Wolford’s place as OHR book review editor, he is director of the Center for Oral History at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and acting board-president of the non-profit organization Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR). He is not yet , but we’re sure it is only a matter of time.

Welcome to the team, David!

Or listen to the podcast on the Oral History Review Soundcloud page.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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Image credit: David Caruso. Courtesy of David Caruso

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I love APSA in Chicago in the summer

By Cherie Hackelberg

Without a doubt, attending society conferences is one of my favorite job responsibilities as a Marketing Manager for the Academic and Trade books division at Oxford. I typically spend the majority of my days marketing our books from my desk: emailing and phoning authors, creating spreadsheets, analyzing spreadsheets, scouring news sites and social media looking for new ways to reach our audience, and making numerous, numerous trips to the mailroom to send books out for review. But working an exhibit allows me to step away from my computer screen for a few days and engage on a much more personal level with our authors, our readers, and our books.

Setup is always pretty hectic: the morning dash from the airport straight to the booth, the pallet breakdown, the many hikes to the FedEx office to pick up our newest books hot off the press, the organizing, the re-organizing. But once the boxes are unpacked, the OUP banner hung, the monitor display set up, I can step back and see the scope of our publishing program as a whole — from our award-winning books painstakingly categorized, to our suite of online products rotating on the screen, to our abundant collection of journals. The breadth of our list, the level of scholarship, and the achievements of our authors astounds me and, though my job is gratifying on a daily basis, I know that my career path is chosen well as I feel so rewarded to be a part of this process.

Once those exhibit hall doors open, it’s still, well, hectic. But in between the order taking, straightening, and restocking, I get to reconnect with authors whom I’ve met at previous conferences, and meet many others for the first time. Here are just a few of our authors who visited us:




Lars Tønder
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Author of Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics

Daniel Naujoks
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Author of Migration, Citizenship, and Development: Diasporic Membership Policies and Overseas Indians in the United States

David Karpf
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Author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy

Farida Jalalzai
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Author of Shattered, Cracked, or Firmly Intact?: Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide

Christina Greer
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Author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream

Andrew Chadwick
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Author of The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, and Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series

Maxwell A. Cameron
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Author of Strong Constitutions: Social-Cognitive Origins of the Separation of Powers

Rebecca Neaera Abers and Margaret E. Keck
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Authors of Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics

In between those author meets, order taking, and more restocking and straightening, I also get to engage with our readers: what are they browsing, what are they excited about? Well, attendees were very excited about our list, overall, and these meeting best-sellers, in particular: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth; Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics by Rebecca Neaera Abers and Margaret E. Keck; The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power by Andrew Chadwick; More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislatures by Susan J. Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu.

I must admit that I’m partial toward to our award-winning authors and products—it is, after all, my job as a marketer and a representative of Oxford representative to be so. But our authors make my job pretty easy. Here’s a list of this year’s APSA award-winners:

2013 Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award—APSA International History and Politics Organized Section


Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958 by Ted Hopf
2013 Best Book Award—APSA Information Technology and Politics Section


The Move On Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy by David Karpf
2013 Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award—APSA Political Organizations and Parties Section


Political Parties, Business Groups, and Corruption in Developing Countries by Vineeta Yadav
2013 Alan Rosenthal Prize—APSA Legislative Studies Organized Section


The Diversity Paradox: Political Parties, Legislatures, and the Organizational Foundations of Representation in America by Kristin Kanthak and George A. Krause
2013 Best Book Award—APSA Human Rights Section


The Political Economy of Violence against Women by Jacqui True

Another reason why I love working conferences? I am bitten by the travel bug. I’ve been to Chicago a couple of times before during wintertime for other meetings and, admittedly, the windy city was not on my top five favorites in the US…until this summer at APSA. Strolling around at the end of each day, I was able to soak in the Chicago sunshine and incredible architecture. Prior to the conference, we asked some of our Chicago-native authors for some recommended things to do and see in Chicago. Alas, I did not get to see and do all of those things because I was rather busy selling books (and, recalling the lines of eager book-buyers at our booth, it did feel like every one of APSA’s 6,000 attendees came by to take advantage of our last-day 50% off sale!), but I did get to hear some great tunes at the Jazz Festival in Millennium Park (thanks for the tip, Cathy Cohen!), and strolled by some incredible art installations along the way. I hope other attendees got to see some Chicago sights in between sessions and buying books! APSA-goers, I look forward to seeing you next year in D.C.

Cherie Hackelberg is a Marketing Manager for social sciences books at Oxford University Press in New York.

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Why send a woman to Washington when you can get a man?

By Richard A. Baker

In a 1948 election contest to fill a US Senate seat, the wife of one of the candidates took a dim view of her husband’s opponent, Representative Margaret Chase Smith. Why, she wondered publicly, would the voters of Maine want to send “a woman to Washington when you can get a man?”

Margaret Chase Smith. From the US Senate Historical Office. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, indeed, the voters of one of Maine’s three congressional districts had already taken a chance on a woman, electing Margaret Smith on five occasions since the death in 1940 of her husband, Representative Clyde Smith, whose dutiful secretary she had once been. During her more than eight years in the House, Mrs. Smith—who never missed an opportunity to associate herself with the 1939 film classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—initially built a record as an independent outsider, mirroring the Hollywood image of Jimmy Stewart’s “Senator Jefferson Smith.”

In 1948 the women of Maine, who constituted nearly two-thirds of that state’s registered voters, appreciated Smith’s efforts during World War II to bring equal status to women in the armed services. Some among them were particularly offended by her opponents’ questioning of women’s ability to hold public office.

With the campaign slogan, “Don’t trade a record for a promise,” Smith overwhelmingly won both the June Republican primary and the general election–at that time held in September. In that latter election, she benefitted from the cluelessness of her opponent, a dermatologist who argued that in a sick world, what the nation most needed were more physicians in government.

The first woman elected to both houses of Congress and the first woman to reach the Senate without previously having been appointed to an unexpired term, Mrs. Smith was the most nationally prominent Republican in her Senate freshmen class. Among her classmates were high-profile Democrats Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota.

It was customary for new senators of her day to remain quietly in the shadows. Not Senator Smith! In office less than a year-and-a-half, she delivered a blistering 15-minute floor speech against the anti-Communist demagoguery of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. McCarthy responded predictably with a sneering reference to Smith and the co-signers of her “Declaration of Conscience” as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.”

Margaret Smith’s power in the Senate grew out of her independence—no party leader could take her vote for granted; her diligence—she made every roll-call vote for nearly twenty years until hip surgery broke that remarkable streak; her boundless energy; and her eventual seniority on the chamber’s influential committees on Appropriations and Armed Services. She dismissed efforts to brand her as a pioneering feminist. “I was treated fairly in the Senate not because of equal rights but because of seniority.”

From her Armed Services Committee perch, Smith adopted a hawkish approach to US military policy, supporting the war in Vietnam and criticizing the United States for not keeping ahead of the Soviet Union in stockpiling nuclear weapons. That stance provoked Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to denounce her as “the devil in disguise of a woman.”

“Maggie” (a commonly used reference that she disliked) Smith’s path-breaking Senate career ended in 1972 with her defeat by Democrat William Hathaway. His campaign played on her apparent physical frailty, noting that she used a motor scooter to shuttle between her Senate office building suite and the Capitol (she would live for another 23 years), and charges of her remoteness from her constituents. Her retirement left the Senate an all-male bastion for the next five years.

Twenty years after Smith’s departure, the 1992 Senate elections witnessed a major national backlash against the traditionally male Senate. The result was the so-called Year of the Woman. This came in no small degree because of the shabby treatment the men of the Senate Judiciary Committee accorded to Anita Hill, who testified at its hearings in opposition to the US Supreme Court appointment of Clarence Thomas. As a result of that pivotal election, by mid-1993 seven women sat in the Senate. Today, that number stands at 20, including 16 Democrats and 4 Republicans. Currently, in California, New Hampshire, and Washington State, both senators are women, a status held by Smith’s Maine from 1997 until 2013.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of Margaret Chase Smith’s 1948 Senate election is that these 20 women are no longer viewed with the condescending curiosity that greeted the Mrs. Smith who went to Washington 65 years ago. Today, they are not primarily “women” senators; they are just senators.

The Margaret Chase Library in her hometown of Skowhegan, Maine, now serves as a robust research facility for those who wish learn more about her life, her times, and a US Senate largely unrecognizable to her modern successors.

Richard A. Baker, Historian Emeritus of the US Senate, is coauthor of The American Senate: An Insider’s History.

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On the Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist

By Robert Eaglestone

So here’s the first thing about the books on the Booker Prize lists, both short and long: until the end of August, it was hard-to-impossible to get hold of most of them. Only one was in paperback in July (well done, Canongate). And while some were in very pricey hardback, several hadn’t even been published. This begs the question: who is the Booker Prize for? If it’s supposed to encourage wider reading, debate and book sales, that’s hard for us and for bookshops if the books just aren’t available. If people outside the world of media reviewers and publishers can’t read the books – I couldn’t and I teach and write about contemporary fiction – then isn’t this all just a little bit strange? It makes the whole thing seem like a game played by an enclosed elite or (hardback prices being what there are) a publishers trick.

Still, eventually I was able to buy some, including four on the outstanding shortlist. I was sorry Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart didn’t make the cut. A multi-voiced, pitch-perfect account of post-Crash Irish life, I thought this was a wonderful novel, deep things carved small and accurate.

The author Jim Crace, who has been shortlisted for ‘Harvest’

The press is very keen to see Jim Crace win: he is a much underrated novelist and Harvest has a trick the Booker likes – a sinister and unreliable first person narrator. I teach his excellent novel Being Dead, although when I discovered that all the lovely ecological and scientific details in that book were simply made up, somehow the book lost its sheen. Of course, novelists are supposed to invent stuff, but, well, details are details and they make you trust a book. Harvest has the same flaw. It’s a historical novel set… when? Somewhere between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth century? You can’t tell from the language or plot. There’s a threat of witch burning and people in big hats (sixteenth century) but there are also things that are clearly late eighteenth century. The thing is, people do live in a time and their time colours and shapes them. Historical details wouldn’t escape the book’s sharp-eyed narrator. But this blurriness of focus makes one worry about small things: is that how you make vellum, as the narrator does? (no, it’s not, according to Wikipedia); do horses sleep kneeling down (I don’t know, but it’s a crucial clue)? Was it ever actually illegal just to walk across parish boundaries? And then one worries about larger ones: if you can’t trust the book with minor things, can you believe in the motivations, characters, plot? The book somehow floats free of the world and of history, just the things it wants to be about.

In contrast to Crace’s unreliable storyteller, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the narrator of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, is trying to separate what actually happened from what she wished happened and from what other people – rather sinister Evangelists – want to say happened. It’s an odd accompaniment to J. M. Coetzees’s The Childhood of Jesus, also published this year, which focusses on a Joseph-like figure, transposed to an unnamed country. This very short novel – also a historical novel of sorts – is incredibly intense and really rather beautiful, and less controversial than the press presents it, I think.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names is also narrated in the first person: a child growing up in Zimbabwe. Children’s voices are hard to do, but this novel gets the tone and level of detail just right. In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a savage satirical piece called ‘How to Write about Africa’, attacking stereotypical representations in fiction and the first half of this novel does rather fall foul of this: however, as the book goes on and especially after the narrator emigrates, it turns into something more challenging, reminding me of work by the great Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta.

At the core of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for Time Being is another first person narrator: Nao, a Tokyo teenager, dealing with a range of problems. Her sections are brilliantly written (and when the novel turns to the other narrator, the authorial Ruth, it sags a little). The core of this very contemporary novel is the interconnectedness of things, and in it, stories uncover stories, trauma uncovers trauma, discussions of zen lead to discussions of physics, of philosophy and of the heart. It could have done with more Ruth-less editing – it’s too long, as if the author was desperate to cram in more and more – but apart from that it really grows on one.

I’ve not read the much praised and just published The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (832 pages long…) but the start – again, a historical novel – looks promising. Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, again, just published, seems to be getting good reviews.

Overall, then, three historical novels (even if one is a bit unfixed in time), three and a half (Nao is the half!) first person narrators, and, as everyone has said, a very culturally and geographically diverse field. Interestingly, religion features significantly in the four of them I’ve read (Mary, obviously; Crace’s narrator makes much of the village’s unbuilt church; Bulawayo’s narrator is involved with Christian fundamentalists and a lot of Ozeki’s book concerns Zen Buddhism). Perhaps there’s something in the water.

Robert Macfarlane is an outstanding literary critic (and writer) and his committee has produced one of the most interesting lists for years, one which brilliantly shows off the aesthetic and intellectual vibrancy of contemporary Anglophone writing. Still having two to read, I’m not going to predict anything, but any of the novels I’ve mentioned above would be great winners. They, and most of the long list (especially Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, Richard House’s The Kill, and Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English), would spark fascinating reading group conversations and are well worth picking up.

It would have been even better (for the general reader, for the bookshops) if we could have read them all first, though.

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (and formerly Director) of the Holocaust Research Centre. His research interests are in contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy, and on Holocaust and genocide studies. He is the author of Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013) and Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (third revised edition) (Routledge, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter: @BobEaglestone.

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

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Image credit: Jim Crace at the 2009 Texas Book Festival, 2009. Larry D. Moore [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Back to (art) school

By Kandice Rawlings

Summer is over and it’s back-to-school season. Art students are heading back to their classrooms and studios, receiving a course of training that will help them become professional artists. Much of the general public today likely has an image of the working artist as a glamorous intellectual, a socially-conscious provocateur, or a tradition-busting bohemian who has received a course of formal training, resulting in a fine arts degree. But these stereotypes and the reality they approximate—and the institutions that have contributed to it in one way or another—are relatively recent phenomena.

For most of history, the artist in the West (Europe and its colonies) was a craftsman who was trained as an apprentice in the workshop of a senior artist (‘master’). By working under the master and paying him a fee, an apprentice would learn the technical aspects of his craft—how to mix pigments, prepare wood panels for painting, or handle a chisel and hammer—as well as standard motifs and compositions that would suit his patrons. (I use the male pronoun here deliberately—professional women artists were unknown until the Renaissance period and were still extremely scarce until the 19th century.) After several years of training (usually in adolescence), an apprentice could apply for guild membership and open his own workshop.

Students painting ‘from life’ at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Late 1800s. Photograph in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This model persisted in most of Europe until the 17th and 18th centuries, when state-sponsored art academies became widely established. The institution of the academy has its roots in Renaissance Italy, where humanist scholars, famous artists, and their patrons set out to reshape the visual arts as intellectual endeavors. While the medieval artist was a craftsman, the same as a cobbler or a weaver, the Renaissance artist—a good one, anyway—was a genius and a scholar. He (and, increasingly, she) therefore required a new kind of education, to learn about classical culture, literature, philosophy, theology, science, and mathematics, all of which were deemed essential to the production of good art. The first academy (named after Plato’s school in ancient Athens) was established in Florence in 1563, soon followed by one in Rome. By the end of the 18th century, every major European state boasted at least one academy of art. The National Academy of Design was founded in New York in 1825, based on the British model of independence from government involvement. The course of study at the academies was highly standardized and was based largely on classical forms and subjects, and the study of live models and plaster casts. Artists not trained at academies might instead learn similar skills in a successful artist’s studio, similar to the medieval master/apprentice relationship, with an updated curriculum.

By the late 19th century, after decades of political upheaval throughout Europe and the United States, the academy came to be seen by many artists as a sclerotic arm of the state. Academic artists turned out technically astute but formulaic work, some of it openly propagandistic. The emergence of the avant-garde prompted many artists to break institutional ties, forgoing academy-sponsored exhibitions (in France, these were the famous Salons) and trying to make their way without the help or influence of the establishment. (Thus the image of the artist as a struggling outsider was born.) In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, groups of artists established schools that were alternatives to the academy, such as the Art Students League in New York and the Bauhaus design school in Germany. A break from academic norms also opened doors for so-called self-taught artists with no formal training at all.

Exterior of the Bauhaus workshops, Dessau. Photo by PeterDrews (Own work). CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Today artistic training happens in the contemporary academy, in post-secondary art schools or fine arts departments of colleges and universities, and in some cities and countries, beginning in specialized high schools. Programs awarding bachelor’s and graduate degrees require a variety of studio courses, as well as exposure to art theory through seminars, and sometimes professional internships or additional coursework in art history. Typically, graduating students participate in a capstone exhibition of their work (‘thesis show’).

How do artists fare after their formal education has finished? Statistics and studies from different countries provide a mixed picture, but a recent survey revealed that Americans holding fine arts degrees have a rate of unemployment (4%) well below the national average and report a high level of satisfaction in their jobs.

Kandice Rawlings is Associate Editor of Oxford Art Online at Oxford University Press. Before joining OUP, she studied Italian Renaissance art and taught art history at Rutgers University. Her students included many talented artists and performers studying at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

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Are the differences in acceptance of LGBT individuals across Europe a public health concern?

By Richard Bränström

Although there has been much progress in many European countries regarding social acceptance of LGBT individuals in recent decades, much discrimination, social injustice, and intolerance still exists with adverse consequences for both physical and mental health in these populations.

Awareness of health disparities in specific populations, in particular based on ethnical background, gender, age, socioeconomic status, geography, and disability has increased during the past decades. And lately, public health policy and research have begun to address the issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations, and many official public health agencies call for programs addressing the specific needs of LGBT individuals.

An increasing number of studies, although still limited, points to a higher prevalence of certain conditions among LGBT people that call for the attention of public health researchers and professionals. The most significant area of concern is the increased prevalence of mental health disorders. Recent studies show that LGBT youth are at greater risk for suicide attempts than non-LGBT youths and have higher prevalence of depression and anxiety diagnoses. Studies also show that transgender individuals are regularly stigmatized and discriminated against both in the health care sector and in the society as a whole.

Traditionally LGBT public health research has almost exclusively focused on sexually transmitted diseases. In particular, the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s brought visibility to the LGBT population as a group with specific health needs. However, the public health consequences of discrimination of LGBT individuals have only recently been focus of greater attention.

The level of acceptance for minority sexual orientations differs greatly between countries. In the European Social Survey 2010, a question was used to assess level of acceptance of gay men and lesbians. The proportion of respondents that agreed to a statement that ‘Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish’ varied greatly between countries, from around 90% in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway to about one third of the respondents in Russia and Ukraine.

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These results indicate that in many countries LGBT people still live in communities where a majority of the population supports discrimination and inequality for sexual minorities. In many countries, LGBT people are also subject to legal discrimination concerning basic civil rights, e.g. regarding recognition of same-sex unions.

But are these large differences in acceptance and legal discrimination influencing the health of LGBT individuals, and what needs to be done to overcome inequality in Europe’s health based on sexual orientation and gender identities? These questions are difficult to answer in the absence of sufficient data.

In a recent commentary in the European Journal of Public Health, we argue for greater awareness of these issues, and the need for more knowledge about the public health situation of LGBT populations through improved data quality and well-designed studies. Systematic data collection regarding sexual orientation and gender identity is required to better understand factors that can help us reduce and better understand disparities, as well as increase quality of health care provision for LGBT individuals. In addition to working towards greater acceptance to end discrimination and social injustice, greater efforts from public health researchers and policy makers are needed to reduce health disparities among LGBT populations.

Richard Bränström is a health psychologist and researcher. He is currently associate professor at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and he works with public health analyses at the Swedish National Institute of Public Health. His main research interest concern health inequalities, predictors of physical and mental health, and health related behaviors. He is the author of the commentary ‘All inclusive Public Health—what about LGBT populations?’, which is published in the European Journal of Public Health.

The European Journal of Public Health is a multidisciplinary journal in the field of public health, publishing contributions from social medicine, epidemiology, health services research, management, ethics and law, health economics, social sciences and environmental health.

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Image credit: Gay Pride. By chatursnil, via iStockphoto.

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No simplistic etymology of “simpleton”

By Anatoly Liberman

Simpleton is an irritating word. At first sight, its origin contains no secrets: simple + ton. And that may be all there is to it despite the obscurity of -ton. We find this explanation in the OED and in the dictionaries dependent on it. The word surfaced in the middle of the seventeenth century and must have been a facetious coinage, but we are not sure in what milieu it turned up, and quite often the etymologists’ biggest trouble is their ignorance of the initial environment of a new term. The earliest attestation sometimes misleads the researcher, because a popular word need not have been first recorded in its “cradle.” If we knew more about the center of dissemination of hobo, kibosh, and their likes, we might be able to offer truly persuasive hypotheses of their origin and discard others as untenable. Those who have read my posts on chestnut, masher, and dude will easily recognize the problem. Who were the wits responsible for launching simpleton, and why did it catch on? Samuel Johnson (1775) offered a piece of relevant information in that he called simpleton a low word. He often used this label and apparently knew what he was saying. We can assume that in his days simpleton was slang, cant (which is much worse than slang despite the horror stories told about slang at that time), or a dialectal word not fit for polite use.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, while expanding the entry in the original edition of the OED, states that -ton in simpleton is the same -ton we have in family names derived from place names and cites a few parallels. The names present no trouble. Newton, Hilton, Dayton, Clinton, and many others immediately spring to mind. Some of them are transparent (for instance, Newton = new + town), and Hilton needs only another t to clarify it (the family name Hillton, from hill + town, also exists). The oldest sense of town was “enclosure,” as in German Zaun, and “the space enclosed,” as in Icelandic tún. By contrast, Clinton is opaque, for Clin- requires an explanation.  The little-known word idleton “idle person” and the obsolete sillyton, along with words ending in by (idleby, sneaksby, and so forth; by, from Scandinavian, also signifies “town”), are supposed to bolster the explanation in the OED. However, idleton and sillyton arose later than simpleton and could have been modeled on it.

Of special interest is the word skimmington, which predates simpleton in the OED by forty-one years. Its best-known meaning refers to a frontispiece of 1639: “A burlesque procession formerly held in ridicule of a henpecked husband; a cavalcade headed by a person on horseback representing the wife, with another representing the husband seated behind her, facing the horse’s tail and holding a distaff, while the woman belabored him with a ladle” (The Century Dictionary; “supposed to have originated in the name of some forgotten scold” [!]). The OED, with reference to the ladle in the picture, tentatively derived the word from skimmer + ton. Ernest Weekley also cited lushington “drunkard,” but this word was a jocular nineteenth-century creation, this time indeed from a family name, containing an allusion to lush. It sheds no light on simpleton.

In 1882 the first edition of Skeat’s English etymological dictionary was published. His opinion on simpleton, as it appeared there, never changed. According to Skeat, simpleton is simple-t-on, with a double French suffix, from Old French simplet “a simple person” (-on, without the preceding diminutive suffix t, can be seen in Spanish simplón “simpleton,” and another word with a double suffix is musketoon, that is, musk-et-oon; -oon, as in spittoon, saloon, etc.). Our “thick” dictionaries are divided in their judgment: most follow the OED, while a few side with Skeat. Other derivations of simpleton do not explain -ton and are not worth mentioning—except perhaps one.

Abram Smythe Palmer, the author of a popular book on folk etymology, quoted the following lines from a satirical 1772 poem: “This fashion, who does e’er pursue,/ I think a simple-tony;/ For he’s a fool, say what you will,/ Who is  a macaroni.” Tony, it appears, was not a rare name for “any person.” Simpleton, Smythe Palmer suggested, was short for Simple-tony, as babe is short for baby. It did not occur to him that simple-tony could have been a witty alternation of simpleton. Skeat did not comment on this idea, but he disliked complex etymologies when an easy one solved the riddle (though his etymology is not particularly easy).

Smythe Palmer’s conjecture is ingenious. Yet it can hardly be upheld despite phrases like any tony and to be pointed at any tony that he unearthed. Any tony probably belongs with Tom, Dick and Harry (incidentally, also a seventeenth-century creation), and, even if simpleton could go back to some such collocation, it would still be desirable to find a common origin for all the -ton words, especially for skimmington, and assuming (just assuming) that skimmington predates simpleton, the tony idea falls to the ground. As far as we can judge, in the seventeenth century, which was a great age for slang, words ending in -ton spread among “the lower orders,” and this pseudo-suffix attached itself to a small number of nouns, of which today most speakers of English still remember only simpleton. When that happened, the -ton words merged with place and family names ending in -ton, and the origin of the “first formation” was lost.

This returns us to the question of the milieu. If the -ton words sprang up in the streets, the French etymology that Skeat favored has little to recommend it. But it could be a word coined in a dialect with a strong admixture of the Romance element. Frank Chance discussed French singleton in 1883, a year after the publication of Skeat’s dictionary. He pointed out that, according to the best authorities, singleton “a single card in a suit” or at least its root, had come to French from English, and ended his article thus: “If the word singleton arose in French, it is odd that the French should have added a French termination to an English word; but if the word was originally English, it is equally odd that the English should have added on the French termination (e)ton. They seem, however, to have done this in simpleton; at least, no record is before us of the word’s ever having existed in French.” Whatever the peregrinations of singleton may have been, the French provenance of -ton in simpleton cannot be considered proven.

Also in 1883 F. C. Birkbeck Terry, another active contributor to Notes and Queries, expressed his hope that “[t]he compilers to the great English dictionary, of which we shall soon have the first instalment [sic], will no doubt be able to supply examples of the use of the word antecedent to 1720.” He was right. The first installment appeared in 1884, and a citation with an earlier date was supplied. But the word’s origin proved to be less simple than one could expect or wish for.

The first picture will remind you of Simple Simon, that proto-simpleton of English folklore and a close relative of Simple Tony, though the poem about him and the pieman again goes back to the seventeenth century. The second will reintroduce you to Simpicissimus, the superlative of simpleton (as it were) and the hero of a famous eighteenth-century German book by Hans Jakob Chr. Von Grimmelshausen.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: (1) Simple Simon met a pieman.From Ring O’Roses : a nursery rhyme picture book with numerous drawings in colour and black-and-white by L. Leslie Brooke. (London Warne n.d.). NYPL Digital Gallery. (2) Frontispiece of Grimmelshausen’s book Simplicissimus. Issue 1669. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Booksellers in revolution

By Trevor Naylor

The written word has always played its part in the spreading of revolutionary ideas and in the recording of historical events. Until the Internet, this was done principally by the bookshops of the world, nowhere more so than across the countries of Asia and the Middle East, where the humble corner bookshop sells not just books, but newspapers, magazines, stationery, and all manner of things to keep its daily customers up to date.

Often such stores have been places for the local intelligentsia to hang out, gossip, and ruminate on the events of the day, be they local or international. No wonder then that such places also attract the unwanted attention of government intrusion and censorship.

All the great centres of bookselling I have enjoyed working with have their stories and family histories to tell. Recounted during long pleasurable evenings over dinner, booksellers eager to record their own role in history and the ups and downs of their businesses.

Delhi, in particular Ansari Road and Connaught Place, teems with books and book people, the Hindu family bookshops that settled there after the terrible events of Partition, when the most exciting book capital in the world, Lahore, was ripped apart.

To go from one to the other was a joy, one day selling to the Indians and the next to the Pakistani families whose forebears used to have stores beside those now in Delhi.

In Lebanon, booksellers found a way to sell books as the city around them literally fell in pieces; Antranik Helvadjian somehow came to London and Frankfurt, with cash in hand, to pay his bills and ship new titles. Many publishers still have a sentimental side and such people continue to be honoured and supported.

One country’s book trade which has not fully recovered from a Revolution is Iran, where the complete reversal by those events of everything it had known and its ongoing sense of isolation from the world has prevented the import of books and news from returning and thriving — a huge pity for its people, whose history with books is one of the world’s oldest.

During the Gulf War the booksellers in Kuwait kept their heads down and survived, while in Turkey the ups and downs of both the military and the Turkish currency have seen stores thrive, then barely survive, but they continue because it’s all they know.

I come then to Egypt, centre of Arabic publishing, the home of AUC Press for over fifty years, and a haven for readers and bookshops for hundreds of years. From the backstreets of Islamic Cairo to the glorious riverside in Luxor, intelligent and brilliant family booksellers have greeted the millions who live in or travel to the country.

Today they sit mostly waiting, surviving and finding ways to keep the sales ticking over and to pay their faithful staff. They watch the turmoil that surrounds them, hoping it will settle soon, for they know that the draw of Egypt is indeed eternal and things will come back. They know that because they, or their father, or indeed their father’s father (ask Fahdy Greiss at the Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop) saw it all before. Revolutions, wars, and terrorism mean it’s never certain what is round the corner here, but this is one trade that won’t be beaten by them.

The AUC Press has several stores, the biggest and most famous on the corner of Tahrir Square itself. Some days we are busy, some days we are closed, some days no one visits, but we know they will again. The thirst for knowledge is undiminished here. Most people are not directly involved in the events you see and read of. They just want a normal life; they wish to study and move forward. When that time returns the bookshops of Egypt will still be waiting.

Trevor Naylor is the Sales, Marketing, and Distribution Director at The American University in Cairo Press, Egypt. Oxford University Press is proud to distribute AUC Press titles in North and South America.

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Image credit: Alexandria, Egypt – November 21, 2010: Young Egyptians relax and work on a book themed bench, outside the famous Library of Alexandria. (c) 1001nights via iStockphoto.

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Five important facts about the Irish economy

By Donal Donovan

After many years of extraordinary success the dramatic collapse of the Irish economy in 2008 was unprecedented in the history of post-war industrial countries. Who and what was responsible for the demise of the poster boy “Celtic Tiger?” What lessons can be learned form the Irish debacle and can the Tiger come roaring back?

(1) Until around five years ago, the Irish economy was the envy of the world.

During the nineties, the rise of the Celtic Tiger was one of the most remarkable post-war industrial country phenomena. A relatively poor country on the periphery succeeded in transforming itself into one of the richest countries in Europe. The key was the massive inflow of foreign direct investment, as US and other multinationals sought to take advantage of Ireland’s location and young, well-educated labour force – the only English-speaking country in the common currency euro area. To be sure, sound financial and macroeconomic policies also helped inspire confidence. Ireland experienced annual growth rates of almost 10% at times, living standards soared, and emigration — the hallmark of the Irish – turned into net immigration. Foreigners, especially from Eastern Europe, flocked to take advantage of the booming economy.

Awaiting an upturn in the Irish economy. This section of City Quay between Moss Street and Prince’s Street, surrounded by steel and glass buildings of the Celtic Tiger Era, has been saved from demolition by the severe downturn in the Irish economy. Photo by Eric Jones of geograph.co.uk. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons.

(2) Things then started to go horribly wrong, although it was not recognized at the time.

Starting around 2002, the technology based export led growth began to turn into a property bubble. Fuelled by special tax incentives and unlimited funding at low euro area interest rates, the Irish banks went on a splurge of reckless lending to property purchasers and developers. Government budget expenditures soared, financed by revenues from the artificially booming property sector. House and land prices soared to levels among the highest in the world and the population engaged in a frenzy of borrowing to acquire property before it was too late…

(3) The economy started to collapse around 2008.

In 2008, following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the United States, the property bubble burst in a spectacular fashion. Almost overnight, prices began to plummet, eventually losing between 60-80% of their value. All the Irish banks became hopelessly insolvent, the budget deficit soared to almost unimaginable heights as the earlier surge in expenditures could not be reversed, and unemployment tripled. The fall in output was probably the largest ever experienced by an industrial country since the Second World War. Ireland quickly found itself unable to borrow on international markets and in November 2010, had to follow Greece and seek ignominious recourse to an emergency bail out from the IMF and the EU.

(4) Much progress has since been made but there is still a tough road ahead. 

Under the strict insistence of the IMF/EU, much — albeit painful — progress has been achieved in righting the financial ship of state in the last four years. The enormous budget deficit has been slowly but steadily reduced, and the massive financial problems of the banks have been addressed. But Ireland’s debt has unavoidably continued to soar, and while the economic decline appears to have bottomed out, unemployment remains stubbornly high at around 14% and large scale emigration has resumed. Moreover, it is not clear that steps are being taken to tackle decisively the major failings in political and economic governance that caused the debacle  in the first place

(5) Can the Celtic Tiger rise again?

It is very difficult to imagine a return to anything near the heady heights of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland’s economy is very heavily dependent on exports and the EU growth outlook remains very clouded. Increasingly, there are questions as to whether Ireland’s preferential corporate tax regime – key to attracting foreign investment over the years — can be sustained in the face of pressures from other countries. Still, even if real incomes in Ireland return to around their 2000 levels, this would still be an enormous improvement compared to the seventies when Ireland joined the EU as its then poorest member.

Dr. Donal Donovan is a Member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, and Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. He is a former deputy director at the International Monetary Fund with considerable experience in the area of financial crises. He is co-author, with Antoin E. Murphy, of The Fall of the Celtic Tiger: Ireland and the Euro Debt Crisis.

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