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Oxford University History Soci

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The podcast of the Oxford University History Society, bringing you interviews and insights from some of the world's leading historians. Directed and produced by Maggie Wang. Music performed by Felipe Sarro.
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These oral history interviews, conducted by Georgina Ferry, capture the stories of pioneering women at the forefront of research, teaching and service provision for computing in Oxford, 1950s-1990s. Themes throughout the interviews include career opportunities, gender splits in computing, the origins and development of computing teaching and research in Oxford, as well as development of the University of Oxford's Computing Service and the commercial software house the Numerical Algorithms Gr ...
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The Faculty is one of the leading centres for the study of European language, literature, and culture world-wide, offering expertise in the entire chronological range from the earliest times to the present day, and with specialists in film studies, cultural studies, and cultural history as well as languages and literatures.
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Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geographic Society — and the one responsible for the idea to plant Japanese cherry trees in Washington DC. Her fascinating life is expertly told by Diana Parsell in Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journali…
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Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.…
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Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fi…
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Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s (Stanford UP, 2016) is a genealogy of Hebrew poetry written in pre-state Israel between the beginning of World War II and the War of Independence in 1948. In it, renowned literary scholar Hannan Hever sheds light on how the views and poetic practices of poets changed…
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In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warships and aircraft. Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War (Osprey, 2024) by Steven K. Bailey tells the story of what those air raids were like for the men who lived through them. Targ…
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Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction…
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Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction…
  continue reading
 
Throughout the 1920s Mexico was rocked by attempted coups, assassinations, and popular revolts. Yet by the mid-1930s, the country boasted one of the most stable and durable political systems in Latin America. In the first book on party formation conducted at the regional level after the Mexican Revolution, Sarah Osten examines processes of politica…
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Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction…
  continue reading
 
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.…
  continue reading
 
In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing belief th…
  continue reading
 
In this elegantly written study Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedde…
  continue reading
 
In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warships and aircraft. Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War (Osprey, 2024) by Steven K. Bailey tells the story of what those air raids were like for the men who lived through them. Targ…
  continue reading
 
Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction…
  continue reading
 
Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book: A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arab…
  continue reading
 
In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warships and aircraft. Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War (Osprey, 2024) by Steven K. Bailey tells the story of what those air raids were like for the men who lived through them. Targ…
  continue reading
 
"Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead". So writes Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Double Day Books, 2024). Applebaum's new b…
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Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.…
  continue reading
 
In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing belief th…
  continue reading
 
In this elegantly written study Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedde…
  continue reading
 
Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book: A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arab…
  continue reading
 
Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nati…
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There are some topics that historians know not to touch. They are just too hot (or too cold). The assassination of JFK is one of them. Most scholars would say either: (a) the topic has been done to death so nothing new can be said or (b) it’s been so thoroughly co-opted by nutty theorists that no sane discussion is possible. Thank goodness David Ka…
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“Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles.” So begins The Graduate (1967), which everyone loves but which many of us loved for one reason when we were younger and one when we became a little more seasoned. “Plastics” is a great joke when you’re 20; how does it sound decades later? The movie hasn’t changed, but we hav…
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In his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a…
  continue reading
 
By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes—Histories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s (Routledge, 2024) and Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s (Routledge, 2024)—study the histories of Colombia over the last two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy ac…
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A new book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban-American history that’s been all but forgotten until now. Lisandro Perez‘s Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018) tells the story of a vibrant Cuban émigré community in 19th-century New York that ranged from wealthy sugar plantation owners investing their fortunes…
  continue reading
 
Has fascism arrived in America? In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascis…
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The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of kno…
  continue reading
 
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles.” So begins The Graduate (1967), which everyone loves but which many of us loved for one reason when we were younger and one when we became a little more seasoned. “Plastics” is a great joke when you’re 20; how does it sound decades later? The movie hasn’t changed, but we hav…
  continue reading
 
The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of kno…
  continue reading
 
Has fascism arrived in America? In Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascis…
  continue reading
 
In his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a…
  continue reading
 
In an unusual episode, we listen back to field recordings that co-host cris cheek made in 1987 and 1993 on the island of Madagascar. It’s a rich sonic travelogue, with incredible musicians appearing at seemingly every stop along the way. Mack interviews cris, who discusses the strangeness and surprises of listening back to the sounds of that other …
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A new book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban-American history that’s been all but forgotten until now. Lisandro Perez‘s Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018) tells the story of a vibrant Cuban émigré community in 19th-century New York that ranged from wealthy sugar plantation owners investing their fortunes…
  continue reading
 
In his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a…
  continue reading
 
In Christian Collier's debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a famil…
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On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives. Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your chi…
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The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades – to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-d…
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In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by…
  continue reading
 
Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditional Sinitic poetry—works written in literary Sinitic, or classical Chinese, a language of enduring importance far beyond China’s borders. Together, they led itinerant lives, traveling around Japan teach…
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In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success …
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In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success …
  continue reading
 
In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by…
  continue reading
 
You could fill a large library with books about JFK’s assassination. We’ve even touched on the subject here. The topic of the transfer of power from JFK to LBJ, however, has been neglected. I was under the impression that after JFK was pronounced dead, LBJ took an oath and that was that. As Steve Gillon points out in his terrific new The Kennedy As…
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Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditional Sinitic poetry—works written in literary Sinitic, or classical Chinese, a language of enduring importance far beyond China’s borders. Together, they led itinerant lives, traveling around Japan teach…
  continue reading
 
Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (U Illinois Press…
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Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (Verso, 2020), Breanne Fahs has curated a comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos from the nineteenth century to today. Fahs collected over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, calling on feminists to act, be defiant and show their rage. This thought-provoking and timely collect…
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Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Francine Banner is a fascinating cultural diagnosis that identifies our obsession with complicity as a symptom of a deeply divided society. The questions surrounding what it means to be legally complicit are the same ones we may ask ourselves…
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