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The Cuban Missile Crisis was a six-day public confrontation in October 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union over the presence of Soviet strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. It ended when the Soviets agreed to remove the weapons in return for a US agreement not to invade Cuba and a secret assurance that American missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn. The confrontation stemmed from the ideological rivalries of the Cold War.

The post The Cuban missile crisis appeared first on OUPblog.

Ang Lee, the two-time Academy Award-winning director, has noted that we should never underestimate the power of storytelling. Indeed, as a storyteller, Lee has shown through his films the potential of stories to connect people, to heal wounds, to drive change, and to reveal more about ourselves and the world. In particular, Lee has harnessed new technology for storytelling in movies such as Life of Pi (2012) and his upcoming feature film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (to be released on 11 November, 2016).

The post The earnest faith of a storyteller appeared first on OUPblog.

American-born, British citizen by an ill-fated marriage, the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) was wary of nationalism, which she viewed as leading inevitably to either war or imperialism. Admittedly, she felt—as she wrote of one of her characters—“torn between anglo-philia and anglo-phobia,” and like all prominent modernists of her day, her views were probably not as enlightened as ours.

The post Remembering H.D. on her 130th birth anniversary appeared first on OUPblog.

On 7 September 1940, German bombers raided the east London docks area in two waves of devastating attacks. The date has always been taken as the start of the so-called ‘Blitz’ (from the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ or lightning war) when for nine months German bombers raided Britain’s major cities. But the 7 September attack also came at the height of the Battle of Britain.

The post The Battle of Britain and the Blitz appeared first on OUPblog.

If you were accused of a crime that you did not commit, how confident are you that you would be found innocent? And what injuries and injustices could you endure before your innocence was finally proven?

The post Revisiting the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial appeared first on OUPblog.

His words still shape our consciousness, even if we fail to read him. This is not due to some hackneyed idealism (“tilting at windmills”), but rather to his pervasive impact on the genre that taught us to think like moderns: the novel. He pioneered the representation of individual subjectivity and aspiration, which today undergirds the construction of agency in any narrative, whether in novels, films, television, or the daily self-fashioning by millions of users of social media.

The post Cervantes’s pen silenced today appeared first on OUPblog.

In the 21st century, “show-me-the-bodies” seems a cruel and outdated foundation for public policy. Yet history is littered with examples—like tobacco and asbestos—where only after the death toll mounts is the price of inaction finally understood to exceed that of action.

The post Show me the bodies: A monumental public policy failure appeared first on OUPblog.

These are the images I carry in memory that form my understanding of passion and compassion in science: Rachel Carson waking at midnight to return to the sea the microscopic marine organisms she has been studying, when the tidal cycle is favorable to their survival; John Muir clinging to the upper branches of a tall pine during a violent storm, reveling in the power of natural forces.

The post Passion and compassion: The people who created the words and numbers of environmental science appeared first on OUPblog.

What do Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Brazil, and India have in common? They have banned the use of Roundup—the most heavily applied herbicide in the United States. Why have these nations acted against what is the most heavily used herbicide in the world today? This is because of growing reports of serious illness to farmworkers and their families.

The post Potential dangers of glyphosate weed killers appeared first on OUPblog.

A tired old elephant hunched in the room as President Obama announced the launch of a new moonshot against cancer during his State of the Union address a month ago. We've heard that promise before. On 23 December 1971, when President Nixon first declared a national war on cancer, he also based his conviction on the successfully completed moonwalk.

The post Cancer is no moonshot appeared first on OUPblog.

With the most widely-celebrated winter holidays quickly approaching, test your knowledge of the cultural history and traditions that started these festivities. For example, what does Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer have to do with Father Christmas? What are the key principles honored by lighting Kwanzaa candles?

The post Ready for the winter holidays? [Quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

This year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, the 21st annual session of the Conference of the Parties since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 11th session of the Meeting of the Parties since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, will be held in Paris from 30 November to 11 December.

The post Entering an uncharted realm of climate change appeared first on OUPblog.

The 2014 Men’s World Cup finals pitted Germany against Argentina. Bets were made and various observations were cited about the teams. Who had the better defense? Would Germany and Argentina’s star players step up to meet the challenge? And, surprisingly, why did Argentina lack black players? Across the globe blogs and articles found it ironic that Germany fielded a more diverse team while Argentina with a history of slavery did not have a solitary black player.

The post An African tree produces white flowers: The disappearance of the black population in Argentina 110 years later appeared first on OUPblog.

Health care reform in the United States has promoted policies and practices that are evidence-based. Prevention, diagnoses, and treatment decisions are to be guided by the best available empirical evidence. Decisions about what treatments are to be provided are to be informed by findings of randomized, controlled, research studies when such evidence is available.

The post Should social work be evidence-based? appeared first on OUPblog.

On a blustery St. Martin’s Eve in 1619, a twenty-three year old French gentleman soldier in the service of Maximilian of Bavaria was billeted near Ulm, Germany. Having recently quit his military service under Maurice of Nassau, he was new to the Bavarian army and a stranger to the area.

The post The phosphene dreams of a young Christian soldier appeared first on OUPblog.

The librarians at Bates College became interested in Oxford Bibliographies a little over five years ago. We believed there was great promise for a new resource OUP was developing, in which scholars around the world would be contributing their expertise by selecting citations, commenting on them, and placing them in context for end users.

The post Celebrating five years of Oxford Bibliographies appeared first on OUPblog.

In a recent Huffington Post piece entitled “Police Shootings Are About Class as Well as Race,” Jesse Jackson argued that the issue of police violence specifically, and an unjust and excessive criminal justice system in general, are disproportionately experienced by the poor, irrespective of race.

The post Police shootings and the black community appeared first on OUPblog.

A common perception is that the problem with Africa is its leaders. In 2007, Sudanese billionaire Mo Ibrahim even created a major cash prize through his charitable foundation as an incentive to African heads of state to treat their people fairly and equitably and not use their countries’ coffers for their personal enrichment.

The post There are many excellent African leaders appeared first on OUPblog.

The fifteenth of August commemorates Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, and the birth of independent India, a historical landmark where he played a significant role. Aurobindo, the founder of Purna, or Integral Yoga, is a renowned and controversial poet, educationist, and literary critic, a politician, sociologist, and mystic whose evolutionary worldview represents a breakthrough in history. Nevertheless, what is the relevance of Aurobindo nowadays?

The post Commemorating Sri Aurobindo’s anniversary, the birth of a nation, and a new world appeared first on OUPblog.

Effective wildlife conservation is a challenge worldwide. Only a small percentage of the earth’s surface is park, reserve, or related areas designated for the protection of wild animals, marine life, and plants. Virtually all protected areas are smaller than what conservationists believe is needed to ensure species’ survival, and many of these areas suffer from a shortage of

The post Cecil the lion’s death is part of a much larger problem appeared first on OUPblog.

Pierre Bourdieu would have turned 85 on 1 August 2015. Thirteen years after his death, the French sociologist remains one of the leading social scientists in the world. His work has been translated into dozens of languages (Sapiro & Bustamante 2009), and he is one of the most cited social theorists worldwide, ahead of major thinkers like Jurgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, or Irving Goffman (Santoro 2008).

The post Death is not the end: The rise and rise of Pierre Bourdieu in US sociology appeared first on OUPblog.

It is difficult to imagine a more disempowering place than a solitary confinement cell in a maximum security prison. When opportunities for meaningful human engagement are removed, mental health difficulties arise with disturbing regularity. In the United States, where prisoners can be held in administrative segregation for years on end, stories of psychological disintegration are common.

The post Psychological deterioration in solitary confinement appeared first on OUPblog.

No time to plant a garden or ride your bike to work this Earth Day? Don't worry--you can still do your part to honor Mother Nature today by staying informed about our global environment. Test your knowledge of water, weather, air, sea, and soil with the Earth Day quiz below, featuring content from Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental Science.

The post Are you an “earth ranger”? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

Today is Armistice Day, which commemorates the ceasefire between the Allies and Germany on the Western Front during the First World War. Though battle continued on other fronts after the armistice was signed “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, we remember 11 November as the official end of “the war to end all wars.”

In honor of the Great War, the Oxford Bibliographies team has created this interactive map, a visual bibliography of critical moments, battles, people, technology, and other elements that defined the spirit of the times across continents. Explore the trenches, navigate the front-lines, and track troop movements while gaining scholarly insights into this crucial period, from the outbreak of the War to its conclusion and lasting effects.

Note: This map may not be a completely accurate geographical portrayal, but it is intended to depict historical facts pertaining to the “Great War” and the countries and regions involved.

Featured image credit: Battle of Broodseynde [sic] Ridge. Troops moving up at eventide. Men of a Yorkshire regiment on the march. Ernest Brooks. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Armistice Day: an interactive bibliography appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Andrew Rabin

On a shelf by my desk rests a pale, cloth-bound octavo volume entitled Leges Anglo-Saxonum, 601-925, published in 1958 by the German philologist Karl August Eckhardt. Inside, the volume’s dedication reads, “Dem andenken Felix Liebermanns” (“In memory of Felix Liebermann”). On its face, this seems perfectly innocuous: what could be more natural than one scholar paying tribute to another, especially someone generally considered among Germany’s greatest medievalists? Yet the dedication conceals a disturbing history, for Liebermann had been a member of one of Berlin’s foremost Jewish families, one nearly wiped out in the Holocaust, and Eckhardt was a dedicated Nazi, a Sturbannführer in the SS, and a close friend to Heinrich Himmler, the leading architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Felix Liebermann by Max Liebermann. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Liebermann was born in 1851 to a family of wealthy German-Jewish textile merchants. Against his father’s wishes, he pursued a degree in philology at the University of Göttingen and subsequently joined the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a project editing the major records of early Germanic culture. In 1883, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Munich invited him to produce a new edition of Anglo-Saxon law. The result, published in three volumes between 1903 and 1916, was the Gesetze der Angelsachsen, a monumental accomplishment numbered among the greatest achievements in the history of scholarly editing. Its reception was summed up by the historian Frederic William Maitland, who described Liebermann as “a Sherlock Holmes of today” and the Gesetze as “the best work that has hitherto been done on historical materials of a similar kind.”

Jewish themes surface only occasionally in Liebermann’s writings, yet their appearance suggests that he saw his religious and professional identities as complementary. For instance, in a lecture to the Jewish Historical Society of England, he suggested that Jews should take pride in the fact that “the gem so honored by [England's] greatest king, the founder of the English constitution, as Alfred was called in the twelfth century, was the Mosaic law.” More pointedly, he did not hesitate to harshly and publicly criticize those who concealed anti-Jewish sentiments behind a facade of disinterested scholarship, such as the historian J. M. Rigg, who suggested a factual basis for the medieval “blood libel” legend. Though Liebermann took pride in his Jewishness, it nonetheless had significant consequences for his career. In Germany, he never received a full university appointment, while in England he was mocked as “Stubbs’s Jew” (a reference to his friendship with Bishop William Stubbs) and denied a Cambridge professorship, ostensibly because of an otherwise-unattested stutter. Though Liebermann himself died in 1925, well before Hitler came to power, others in his family felt the full brunt of Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1938, the Liebermann family, including Felix’s widow Cäcilie, saw their home and possessions confiscated. Five years later, Cäcilie would die just weeks before she was to be deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Shortly afterwards, Martha Liebermann, widow of Felix’s brother, the modernist painter Max Liebermann, committed suicide to avoid the same fate.

The history of Liebermann and his family furnishes part of the backdrop against which to read the dedication in the Leges Anglo-Saxonum; the rest must be filled in from the life of Eckhardt himself. Eckhardt was born in 1901 into a family of lawyers and judges. He completed a doctorate in law at Marburg in 1922 and then went on to study Germanic history at Göttingen. His editions of medieval lawbooks earned him a reputation for both brilliance and productivity that led to faculty positions at Keil, Bonn, and Berlin. At the same time, however, he was also growing more engaged with right-wing politics. He joined the SA in 1931, the Nazi Party in 1932, and the SS in 1933. By 1934, he had become a member of Himmler’s personal staff. In this capacity, Eckhardt oversaw the expulsion of Jewish academics from German universities, developed policies penalizing students who spoke out against the regime, and ghost-wrote speeches on Himmler’s behalf, most notably his 1936 address calling for the extermination of homosexuals. Eckhardt also composed a number of pseudo-scholarly pamphlets on topics of interest to Himmler, including ancient Germanic mysticism and the question of whether Jesus was actually Jewish (Eckhardt concluded that he wasn’t). When war came, he was drafted into the army and posted to Paris, where he spent his time carrying out research in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Though briefly imprisoned in 1944-5, he was deemed too insignificant for prosecution. Eckhardt returned to scholarly life and, over the next twenty-five years, published a series of influential editions — most notably of the Lex Salica and the Schwabenspiegel — that confirmed the promise of his early career. He died in 1979.

Eckhardt has often been spoken of as two people, the scholar and the Nazi, but it can be difficult to separate the two. He frequently twisted his scholarship to support his political views, as when he argued (in an essay titled “Unnatural Sex Deserves Death”) that ancient Germanic law offered legal precedent for the execution of homosexuals. Likewise, even in his serious scholarship, he often sought to emphasize the purity of Germanic law and its freedom from the taint of Jewish influence (a notable contrast to the pride Liebermann took in the Mosaic influence on Alfred’s laws).

In this light, it is difficult to escape the impression that Eckhardt was using Liebermann’s memory to innoculate himself against his own history. Association with Liebermann allowed him to claim a scholarly pedigree while dismissing the implication that his political record reflected anything more than dedicated (if misguided) patriotism. Yet how should Eckhardt’s history — along with his attempts to erase that history — affect our perception of his scholarship? We cannot simply avoid Eckhardt: like it or not, his serious historical work is too important to dismiss out of hand. But Eckhardt’s history still raises uncomfortable questions: how might our research — and indeed, the shape of early medieval legal history as a discipline — have been influenced, albeit unconsciously, by Eckhardt’s noxious ideology? And is our use of his work, however necessary it may be, complicit in his attempt to erase his involvement in one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities?

If Borges was right and every library is a labyrinth, then inside every library lurks a monster. In my library, the monster is Karl August Eckhardt.

Andrew Rabin is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. He has published extensively on early medieval law and literature. His next book, The Political Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, will be published this fall by Manchester University Press. He is a forthcoming contributor to Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature.

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The post Monsters in the library: Karl August Eckhardt and Felix Liebermann appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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