Trailblazing paths: iconic women through time [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.

1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli

In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.

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2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green

American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.

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3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History

This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.

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4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey

The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.

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5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh

This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.

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Explore our extended list of titles on Bookshop (UK | US) and Amazon (UK | US).

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The “Freest Writer” in Stalin’s Russia

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing.

In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.”

One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.

The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.

Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.

The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.

In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.

Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.

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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’s fight for affordable housing [timeline] 

Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—featured as a “Wonder Woman of History” in a series produced by DC Comics—was a key figure in America’s settlement house movement. Throughout the early twentieth century, she spearheaded efforts to improve living conditions for immigrants and the disadvantaged in American cities. Her lifelong advocacy for public housing and urban reform remains urgently relevant almost seventy-five years after her death.

Discover Mary K. Simkhovitch’s extraordinary legacy with our interactive timeline below.

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Centuries strong: Black history told through 10 essential Oxford Reads

African American history does not begin with the founding of the United States—its roots stretch centuries deep. Black experiences, intellectual traditions, resistance, and cultural innovation have shaped the story of America. This timeline brings together Oxford works that illuminate pivotal moments across over two hundred transformative years—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet Tubman to long-overlooked accounts from the later Civil Rights era. Explore the essential role of historically Black colleges and universities, and encounter richly drawn portraits of trailblazers like Louis Armstrong and Althea Gibson. Taken together, these books reveal a legacy of resilience, creativity, and influence that has defined American life from the colonial era through the 20th century.

Explore the depth and breadth of African American history with this curated selection of Oxford University Press titles—stories that predate 1776 and continue to shape the nation we know today.

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Reintroducing Justice Robert Jackson

In 1952, Justice Robert Jackson issued a concurring opinion in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which a majority of the Supreme Court held that President Harry Truman could not invoke executive power to seize several of the major U.S. steel manufacturing companies in order to prevent a nation-wide steel strike that the Truman administration claimed would disrupt the participation of the United States in the Korean war.

Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown sketched a framework for executive power under the Constitution, identifying three examples of executive decisions against the backdrop of congressional authority. He set forth a continuum of executive power, ranging from instances in which executive decisions were “conclusive and preclusive” of the authority of other branches, to ones in which Congress and the executive shared powers and the branches operated in a “twilight zone” of concurrent authority, to ones in which an executive decision was in contradiction to a congressional effort to restrain it. When Jackson’s opinion appeared it garnered some appreciative commentary in academic circles but did not otherwise attract much attention.

Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence was revived, however, in two memorable opinions in American constitutional law and politics. The first was United States v. Nixon, in which Chief Justice Burger quoted a statement by Jackson that the dispersion of powers among the branches of government by the Constitution was designed to ensure a “workable government.” Burger concluded that allowing President Nixon to assert executive privilege against a subpoena in a criminal proceeding merely on the basis of a “general interest in confidentiality” would gravely interfere with the function of the courts and render the government “unworkable.” The second was Trump v. United States, in which Jackson’s statement in Youngstown that in some instances the president’s power to make executive decisions was “conclusive and preclusive” was used by Chief Justice Roberts to show that granting presidents absolute immunity for their official acts was necessary to enable them to execute their duties fearlessly and fairly.

More than seventy years after Jackson issued it, his Youngstown concurrence remains the most authoritative statement of the scope of executive power under the Constitution. But what of the justice who issued that opinion? Robert Jackson was arguably one of the most influential persons in the mid twentieth-century legal profession and a unique figure in American legal history. Yet today he is not widely known and has in some respects been misunderstood. Despite his having one of the largest collections of private papers in the Library of Congress, there has been comparatively little scholarship or popular writing devoted to Jackson. It is time to reintroduce him.

Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice to have entered the legal profession by “reading for the law,” a process where people apprenticed themselves to law offices prior to taking a bar examination. He would eventually study law for one year at Albany Law School and receive a degree, but he never attended college. His family were dairy farmers in western Pennsylvania and New York, and he was the first in his family to pursue a legal career. By 1934 he had become one of the more successful lawyers and wealthy residents in Jamestown, New York.

That year Jackson was approached by members of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and recruited to join the Bureau of Internal Revenue, even though his practice had not included tax law. From that position he progressed rapidly through New Deal agencies, becoming Solicitor General of the United States in 1938 and Attorney General in 1940. By that year he was on the short list for Supreme Court appointments, and was nominated to the Court by Roosevelt in 1941.

Jackson seemingly had every quality necessary to be an influential Supreme Court justice, possessing exceptional analytical and forensic skills and being a gifted writer. But he ended up somewhat unfulfilled on the Court, chafing about its isolation from foreign affairs during World War II and having fractious relationships with some of his fellow justices, notably Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. In the spring of 1945, he was offered the position of chief counsel at the forthcoming Nuremberg trials and took leave from the Court, uncertain about whether he would return. Jackson was largely responsible for the format of the trials, and although he had numerous difficulties with representatives of the other allied powers prosecuting Nazi war criminals, especially those from the Soviet Union, he said in his memoirs that he regarded his time at Nuremberg as the high point of his experience.

Jackson’s two years at Nuremberg were also a time in which he began an amorous relationship with his secretary, Elsie Douglas, to whom he would eventually leave his extensive private papers in his will. Douglas continued as his secretary when Jackson returned to the Court after Nuremberg, and when Jackson suddenly died of a heart attack in October 1954, it was in Elsie Douglas’ apartment. After Jackson’s return to the Court in 1946 his relations with colleagues improved, and his last major participation in a Court case came with Brown v. Board of Education in the 1952 and 1953 terms, in which Jackson, through writing successive memos to himself, eventually joined the Court’s unanimous opinion invalidating racial segregation in the public schools. Jackson had a heart attack in March 1954 and only returned to the Court on the day the Brown case was handed down. He then sought to recover over the summer of 1954, only to succumb that October.

All in all, a memorable life and career and a fascinating, complicated personality, whose remarkable talents somehow did not quite suit him for the role of a Supreme Court justice.

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Quatremère de Quincy: the founding father of museophobia?

Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was celebrated during his lifetime as the greatest European writer on the arts. The architect Sir John Soane admired his essay on Egyptian architecture while Hegel considered his research on ancient Greek polychromatic sculpture a masterpiece.

Despite the breadth of Quatremère’s writings, today he is famous for inventing an idea that he never embraced: namely, that art should remain in its original context because displacing it in museums changed its meaning and neutered its power.

While researching my biography of Quatremère, I discovered that his attitude towards museums was surprisingly positive.

The years that he spent in Italy during his twenties shaped his outlook. The sight of antiquities excavated from Herculaneum in the nearby royal palace at Portici led him to propose site museums ‘like those in Italy’ once he returned home. Why not reuse the ancient baths in Paris and the amphitheatre in Nîmes as museums of Gallo-Roman antiquities, he asked?

In Italy, Quatremère also studied in large museums. He found that the papacy’s ‘sumptuous galleries’ in Rome revalorized pagan artefacts as objects of beauty and knowledge. Indeed, the city itself, he later remarked, was a museal microcosm of world geography and history. Far from opposing the displacement of artworks from their original contexts, he remarked how artefacts imported from afar during antiquity had been resurrected in Rome when they took on new meanings and roles. For instance, he found that the Egyptian figures (now believed to be Roman telamons) greeting visitors to the Museo Pio-Clementino had a purpose no less authentic than their original one: ‘by making them support the corniche that decorated the magnificent entrance’, Pius VI had ‘returned them to their first destination’.

Quatremère returned from Italy convinced that it was necessary to centralize artworks in capital museums. He therefore joined the chorus of support for a national museum in the Louvre. Despite his antipathy towards the Revolution, in 1791 he proposed transforming the palace into a ‘temple of knowledge’. After the museum finally opened in August 1793, its administrators relied upon his expertise. For instance, in 1797, he examined thousands of paintings to determine what to share with the Special Museum of the French School in Versailles. Despite previously opposing the spoliation of Italy to enrich the Louvre, in 1807 he applauded Napoleon for amassing ‘treasures of genius from all centuries’.

During the Bourbon Restoration, he defended the Louvre with greater zeal because its fortunes aligned with his royalist politics. He criticized but failed to prevent ‘dishonourable’ demands to return seized artworks to their original countries. He penned a memorandum about rehanging what remained and recommended acquiring replacement antiquities such as a Parthenon metope from Choiseul-Gouffier’s collection. In 1821, he boasted that the newly imported Venus de Milo was ‘the rarest and most valuable item in our Museum’.

Quatremère’s pride in the Louvre did not prevent him supporting capital museums elsewhere. He was delighted, for example, to inspect the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. Lord Elgin saved these antiquities from the ‘barbarian’ Ottomans, he opined, and their ‘handsome arrangement’ in London was ‘even better than on the Parthenon itself’.

During his youthful Italian travels, Quatremère also admired energetic and enlightened private collectors such as Stefano Borgia and Ignazio Biscari. Their example taught him that private collecting benefited everyone, even if some avaricious collectors ‘amassed for the sake of amassing’. In France, he therefore praised Grivaud de la Vincelle, whose ‘patriotic’ efforts helped mitigate the absence of a national museum of antiquities, and Léon Dufourny, whose well-ordered and accessible collection served ‘public utility’. During the second half of Quatremère’s life, he created a sizable collection of his own in his mansion on the Rue de Condé, Paris: at his death, he owned around 3,000 printed volumes, numerous modern artworks, ancient Greek vases, Egyptian figurines, ex-votos seized from the temples of Asclepius and Hygeia, and small figures excavated in Italy.

Far from being a museophobe, then, Quatremère enthused about site museums, capital museums, and private collections alike. His published writings provide direct and indirect explanations for why he considered museums indispensable.

For Quatremère, the future of art depended upon museums because artists must study the ‘corpus of lessons and models’ from antiquity and the modern revival. If ancient Greek artists had perfected art without collections, he theorized that the moderns could never recover the causes of ancient greatness and must therefore turn to museums: ‘In the current state of things, God forbid that artists should be deprived of their assistance!’ Artists could only improve, moreover, if their judges understood beauty, which required a mental ‘ladder of comparison’ that one must calibrate carefully through studying many artworks.

Museums were also integral to the advancement of knowledge. During the eighteenth century, he reflected, the enrichment of museums enabled the ‘spirit of observation’ to triumph over the ‘spirit of system’. Since the consolidation of scattered artefacts into major collections finally enabled objects to ‘illuminate and explain one another’, he predicted that future scholars would discern new connections, decode patterns, improve taxonomies, and identify fakes.

In Quatremère’s mind,good museums therefore facilitated scholarly efforts to preserve and interpret authentic vestiges of the past whereas bad museums undermined this endeavour. He railed at the Museum of French Monuments precisely because he believed that its director, Alexandre Lenoir, presided over a ‘workshop of demolition’ that creatively restored medieval sculptures to illustrate period rooms. Lenoir’s superficial decorative needs and anachronistic assumptions discoloured the past and offended Quatremère’s sense of art and politics. For Quatremère, respect for past mentalities via authentic reminders of the past was the ultimate antidote to presentist dogmatism: ‘only the history of peoples, monuments, and the arts of antiquity’, he observed, ‘can expand the philosopher’s horizon and transform into a complete theory the fleeting observations that the brevity of human life otherwise condemns us to make.’

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How I used the <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> as a student

‘They court the notice of a future age/ Those twinkling tiny lustres of the land’.

Today’s users of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are members of the ‘future age’ that William Cowper talks of in his poem ‘On Observing Some Names Of Little Note Recorded In The Biographia Britannica’. For students, this makes the ODNB a treasure trove. On any given topic, movement or episode of history—be it the Crusades, the first women lawyers, or the Romantic poets—we can find in the ODNB elegant and informative entries about the people behind it. These people might be kings and queens, but they are often ‘tiny lustres’: individuals who lived in quieter ways, but who nonetheless shaped the course of British history.

I started using the ODNB when I was a student of English Literature in 2018-2022. Undergraduate and postgraduate student life is, as many will attest, busy, and this made the ODNB an invaluable resource: a long-form biography might take too much time to read during term, but an ODNB entry is both detailed and short. I used the dictionary to locate in-depth research in an accessible, engaging, concise format, but also as a reading list of sorts: it pointed me towards further material about people I was researching (in my case, these were mostly authors). A given entry might contain both primary sources (diaries, manuscripts, books by the subject, podcasts and film) and further secondary material (full-length biographies, books of criticism) that can form a starting point when researching biographical information about a given person.

But what did this look like in practice? Here’s one example. In my second year, one of our set texts was Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. I didn’t know much about Defoe’s background when I began this module, so I went to the ODNB for a concise overview of his life. I was also able to do a keyword search within the entry to immediately identify specific information about Moll Flanders, which came in handy when writing my tutorial essay. The entry contained quotations from seminal works of criticism (such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel) as well as responses to the work from other authors, both in Defoe’s lifetime and later (like James Joyce, who called Defoe the ‘father of the English novel’). What’s more, the list of sources at the end of the entry provided an accessible and manageable means of navigating criticism around Defoe when I returned to the topic when revising for Finals.

From then on, the ODNB became an essential tool in my undergraduate and postgraduate research. I used it as a starting point to devise my own reading list in preparation for my BA dissertation on Virginia Woolf: indeed, reading the entry on her convinced me to choose this subject for my thesis. The ODNB helped me to discover Woolf’s circle, too: it contains entries about other members of the Bloomsbury group, from her sister Vanessa Bell to the painter and curator Roger Fry.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography allows each user to embark on their own path of discovery. A friend, when writing her history dissertation about Members of Parliament in the eighteenth-century, used the dictionary’s ‘group entries’ to gather sources and discover additional figures related to her project. The ODNB’s coverage stretches all the way back to Roman officers and their wives stationed at the fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall in first century AD, and to the associates of William the Conqueror, who planned the invasion of England in 1066. History is made by ‘tiny lustres’, and this resource equips us to roam across the vast range of individual contributions to national life. Next time you come across a name you don’t recognize in your research, I encourage you to try looking them up in the ODNB: it might just spark a new idea.

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Prague: a playlist from the heart of Europe

Prague is a city steeped in history, where music has long been intertwined with its cultural identity. This playlist captures that spirit, featuring compositions that reflect the grandeur of its imperial courts, the struggles of its people, and the resilience of its artists. From Mozart’s Don Giovanni, composed specifically for Prague, to Smetana’s Má vlast, evoking the flowing Vltava, these works embody the city’s layered character. Jazz and rock music, too, played a key role in its modern history, fueling movements of resistance and unity.

Beyond its stunning architecture and historic squares, Prague’s music tells a deeper story of triumph and tragedy. This collection of ten pieces allows listeners to experience the essence of the city—not just as a visual marvel but as a place where melodies carry the weight of centuries. Whether through medieval chants, romantic symphonies, or revolutionary anthems, Prague’s soundscape is as enchanting as the city itself, ensuring that, as Franz Kafka wrote, “Prague does not let go; this little mother has claws.”

1. “Overture” from Don Giovanni, W. A. Mozart

Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote, “It is not easy to convey…the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart’s] music.” Indeed, Mozart achieved some of his greatest successes in Prague, including the premieres of his Symphony no. 38 in D (Prague Symphony), the Clarinet Concerto in A, and the opera La Clemenza di Tito. The pinnacle of Mozart’s career, though, was the world premiere of Don Giovanni at Nostitz’s National Theater in the Old Town. On October 29, 1787, Mozart conducted the opera in front of a cross section of Prague society. Aristocrats sat sipping lemonade in the lower galleries, while the lower classes stood while downing sausages and beers. The singer Joseph Meissner wrote that when Mozart stepped onto the stage, a hush descended, and “one thousand hands lifted up to greet him.” At the end of the opera, the audience burst into “boundless applause,” and Mozart supposedly uttered the now-famous phrase, “My Praguers understand me.”

2. “Vltava” from Má Vlast,Bedřich Smetana

Bedřich Smetana wrote his magnum opus Má vlast (My Country) between 1874 and 1880. The piece comprised six symphonic poems, each celebrating a historical or natural site in Bohemia. The stirring second movement, “The Vltava” (Der Moldau), conveys the river’s journey through Bohemia. The composer explained that his most famous melody mimicked the region’s geography: “The Vltava swirls into the St. John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe River.” Smetana wrote Má vlast while becoming deaf and ill from the effects of syphilis. He remarked that only his fervent patriotism enabled him to complete the work. The man known as the “Father of Czech Music” died in 1884.

3. “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák’s popular opera Rusalka premiered in 1901 at the Czech National Theater in Prague. In this era of national rivalry, the city’s Czech and German speakers maintained their own theaters. Rusalka’s librettist Jaroslav Kvapil based Rusalka on fairy tales gathered by Czech ethnographers Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová. While Rusalka has similarities to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, this opera has decidedly Czech elements, including Bohemian folk melodies and characters like Vodník (water goblin) and the witch Ježí Baba. In this beloved aria, the water sprite Rusalka asks the moon to reveal her love to a human prince.

4. “Ranní mlha” (Morning Fog), Jaroslav Ježek

During the 1920s, Prague became a center of avant-garde culture. Prague’s Liberated Theater was made famous by the comic duo Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, as well as Jaroslav Ježek, who composed music for the duo and conducted the theater’s orchestra. Ježek combined contemporary genres, including classical, jazz, dada, and incidental film music. He died in 1942, an exile in New York, having escaped the Nazi occupation of Prague. This moody orchestral piece was recorded sometime between 1929 and 1938 at the Liberated Theater.

5. “Motliba pro Marta” (Prayer for Marta), Marta Kubišová

In 1968, the Communist Party secretary Alexander Dubček implemented “Socialism with a Human Face,” restoring the freedoms of expression and movement. In August 1968, Warsaw Pact troops, led by the Soviet Union, crushed the reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Marta Kubišová’s heartfelt balladbecame an anthem during the invasion. The lyrics are by Jan Comenius, the exiled seventeenth-century Protestant theologian: “Let peace still remain with this country! Let hatred, envy, spite, fear, and strife cease!” Kubišová’s music was censored, and in 1977, she became a spokesperson for the Charter 77 movement.

6. “Magické Noci” (Magical Nights), Plastic People of the Universe

Influenced by the Prog Rock movement, this Prague rock band was not overtly political. Yet, artistic director Ivan Jirous and several band members were arrested in 1976 for “hooliganism” and performing illegally. The “Trial of the Plastic People,” inspired dissidents to issue Charter 77, calling for the end of censorship. This song was first recorded at Václav Havel’s country home in the early 1980s. Its lyrics capture the mystical associations many have with Prague:

The time of magic
Night has come…
Delirium
We live in Prague
That’s where the spirit itself will
One day appear
We live in Prague
That is where.

7. “Start Me Up,” The Rolling Stones

In 1990, signs throughout Prague announced: “The tanks are rolling out. The Stones are rolling in.” That August, the Rolling Stones played to an audience of over 100,000 fans in Strahov Stadium, which, only months earlier, had been the site of the largest demonstration against Communist rule. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were so impressed with the enthusiasm of their Czech fans, many of whom had grown up listening to illegal bootleg versions of Stones hits, that they decided to waive their fees and donate all proceedings to a charity for disabled Czechoslovak children. Their choice to open the concert with “Start Me Up” signified to the crowd that a new era had indeed begun.

8. “Paš o Paňori,” Věra Bílá and Kale

The Romani singer from Rokyčany, a town an hour southwest from Prague, became a phenomenon of World Music in the 1990s. Her rich alto voice and charisma led critics to dub her the “Ella Fitzgerald of Romani Music.” Bílá, who performed and recorded with the Roma band Kale, hailed from the Giňa family of Romani musicians. Their songs mixed pop harmonies with traditional Romani instrumentation.

9. “Nad Vltavou,” Lucie Vondráčková

Lucie Vondráčková is a popular stage, television, and film actress and singer. Her aunt Helena was a pop phenomenon who got her start singing with Marta Kubišová in the 1960s. In this wistful song from 2018, Lucie Vondráčková recalls her favorite places in Prague: whispering cathedral arcades, small theaters, and lofty halls. The nostalgic refrain recalls the rhythm of the Vltava River that Smetana captured in his masterpiece: “Over the Vltava River, Prague dances with a swaying gait. No matter where the clouds go, my dreams will remain with her forever.”

10. “Perfect Day,” Lou Reed

 In 1990, Rolling Stone magazine asked President Václav Havel for an interview, and he replied that he would do it only if Lou Reed asked the questions. Havel first heard Reed’s music in 1968, while in New York, and he smuggled the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat into Czechoslovakia. Havel frequently cited Perfect Day as his favorite song. In 2009, in a concert marking the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, Reed performed the hit in an unlikely duet with opera star Renée Fleming accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic.

There are also a number of additional songs after these ten in the playlist for your enjoyment!

_{Featured image by William Zhang via Unsplash.}

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Sabotage of the Normandie? [excerpt]

In the 1940s, the Normandie was the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury. When war loomed over Europe, the ship sought refuge in New York Harbor. In this excerpt from Gotham At War, Mike Wallace shows how its transformation from glamourous ocean liner to utilitarian troopship mirrored the world’s descent into conflict.

On February 9, 1942, the Normandie—the world’s most glamorous ocean liner—had been the site of feverish activity, as 1,750 workers from the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, and 675 other laborers from sixty assorted subcontractors, worked to convert the rakish, Art Deco, red-and-black vessel—whose elegant staterooms had hosted the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Cole Porter, and Ernest Hemingway—into a drabbed-down, bunk-laden troopship.

The Normandie had been tied up at Pier 88 (at the foot of West 48th Street) since arriving from Le Havre on August 28, 1939, four days before Germany invaded Poland. Rather than have its crown jewel brave torpedoes at sea, or bombs back in France, the French Line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), laid up its vessel indefinitely on September 6, leaving on board only a skeleton crew of 113 (out of 1,227) to keep it shipshape. There it stayed, through the fall of France, while other sea queens came and went (at one point, in March 1940, the gray-camouflaged sisters Elizabeth and Mary were berthed in adjacent piers).

On May 15, 1941, the US government took the Normandie into protective custody, leaving French ownership intact but housing a contingent of armed Coast Guardsmen on board to forestall possible sabotage by crew members loyal to the Vichy government. (The Pétain regime was getting increasingly cozy with Germany: Vice Premier Admiral François Darlan had just visited Hitler on May 11.) American thoughts turned to possible uses of the giant ship, in the event of an actual confiscation, and proposals were floated to use it as a dockside super- barracks, or to move it to Brooklyn, where it could serve as a backup power supply for the entire city, capable as it was of generating 150,000 kilowatts. When the Normandie was seized, on December 12, the day after war with Germany broke out, the troopship option won out. The vessel was transferred to the Navy, renamed the USS Lafayette, and turned over to contractors who began carting off the legendary artwork and sumptuous furniture to the Chelsea Warehouse and converting the staterooms, which had housed 1,972 First, Tourist, and Third-Class passengers, into bunkrooms that would carry 14,800 soldiers to war.

With nearly 2,500 workmen (plus Coast Guardsmen and crew) constantly coming and going, the noise, confusion and disorder on the ship attracted the attention of Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM. Security seemed dangerously casual to him, so Ingersoll assigned reporter Edmund Scott to find out how easily a potential saboteur might penetrate the Normandie’s defenses. It proved to be a snap. Scott joined Local 284 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and got a job lugging furniture aboard. Once on deck, it proved easy to wander about as he pleased, and he was struck by how simple it would be to set a fire. On January 3, 1942, he filed his story, which Ingersoll decided not to run—it being, in effect, a blueprint for sabotage—and instead got in touch with the authorities, who seemed uninterested.

When a fire broke out at 2:34 on the afternoon of February 9, crewmen discovered to their horror that the fire hoses could not connect to the standpipes, as the latter had been converted to American fittings, while the former still spoke French. Efforts to sound the fire alarm also failed—it had been disconnected a few days earlier, along with the ship’s link to the city’s fire department, by a subcontractor who had forgotten to tell anyone. In the meantime—it was a blustery winter day—the wind whipped through the corridors, spreading the blaze until it was beyond control, with great sheets of flame leaping skyward. Most of the nearly 3,000 on board dashed down the gangplanks and joined the thirty thousand New Yorkers who choked Twelfth Avenue. Fire trucks now combined forces with fire boats to inundate the upper decks: over the next four hours, they poured on 3,000 tons of water. The ship began to list. The French officers who had rushed to the pier realized the danger; their calls to refill the ballast tanks to ground the ship on the slip bottom were rejected, as were their urgings to close the portholes.

The inundation continued, as La Guardia, who had rushed to the pier, said it was out of the question to let a fire rage unchecked in midtown Manhattan. Even after the inferno seemed contained, around 8:00 p.m., the fireboats—ordered by Commissioner Walsh to stop pumping—didn’t get his radioed message; and having gotten dark, his semaphore signals went similarly unheeded. By the time a cutoff was accomplished, the Normandie had taken on 16,000 tons of water, most trapped on the port side, a burden no ship could have borne. At 12:30 a.m., Admiral Andrews gave the order to evacuate. At 2:32 a.m., it rolled over in the gray Hudson ice and came to rest, its funnels just barely above the waterline, slumped ignominiously in the mud.

Rumors of sabotage flew, starting at the top. FDR asked Navy Secretary Knox the next morning if any enemy aliens had been permitted to work at the site. The truth flew almost as quickly yet had difficulty catching up. The first press reports carried District Attorney Frank Hogan’s statement—“There is no evidence of sabotage”—and Admiral Andrews’s concurrence, along with the facts they had ferreted out. The fire, they said, had been an accident, caused by carelessness. One worker had been using an acetylene torch to cut down a metal stanchion in the Grand Salon, the resulting sparks contained by an asbestos board held up by another laborer. When the second man put down his board for a minute to help a colleague, a spark leapt toward a pile of 1,140 life jackets, each filled with flammable kapok, each wrapped in even more flammable burlap. Up they went, in turn igniting a nearby mass of bunk-bound mattresses. On February 12, the FBI staged a re- creation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; followed up with a full-dress investigation in which they interviewed 760 people, and came to the same conclusion. So did two congressional committees. No sabotage.

Nonetheless, doubts continued. Many refused to buy the verdict, especially after PM published Scott’s original story. The notion that Nazi saboteurs had done the deed was further nurtured by Alfred Hitchcock, then shooting and editing Saboteur (1942). The director inserted a sequence that showed his weaselly Nazi villain (played by Norman Lloyd) being taxied down the West Side past the capsized Normandie (shown in actual newsreel footage). As he surveyed the wreckage, Lloyd gave a perfectly calibrated, wickedly knowing half smile, as if to say: “Ah, our handiwork.” The Navy tried hard to muscle Hitchcock into excising the bit; it failed, and the ranks of doubters grew.

There was one person who did more than doubt—he was utterly certain the Normandie was the victim of foul play, because he himself had ordered the hit. No Nazi, he was the nation’s most celebrated jailbird, languishing up in Dannemora Prison (known as “New York’s Siberia”), doing a thirty-to-fifty-year stretch.

_{Featured image: SS Normandie at sea, colorized by Vick the Viking. Derivative work of Altair78. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A cultural history of the purse [timeline]

In conducting research for The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, Kathleen B. Casey discovered how one everyday object—the purse—could function as a portal to the past. She encountered purses in museum collections, photo albums, advertisements, trial transcripts, and much more.

Here are some highlights she discovered in the cultural history of the purse.

_{Featured image provided by Kathleen B. Casey.}

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Ten American road trips

In the spring of 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, accompanied by Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings, took a road trip. In six weeks, they covered more than 900 miles, travelling through New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before returning across Long Island. Suffering from various physical ailments and exhausted by the political travails of the day, they sought “health, recreation, and curiosity.” Madison said as long as they were together they could “never be out of their way.” Decades later, he recalled that the trip made them “immediate companions.”

Few rites of passage are as venerated in American culture as the road trip, the journey of discovery to places unfamiliar or unknown. Here are ten noteworthy ones in literature and film in chronological order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Mark Twain knew about travel! In his famous novel, we follow Huck and Jim as they stream down the Mississippi in a biracial journey of discovery and escape. The trip gets a bit complicated in the novel’s third act, but, on the journey, they prove their manhood and confess their feelings for one another. Jim discovers he is free and Huck realizes the road is the only place for him. At the end, Huck continues his travels as he lights out for the Territory.

2. It Happened One Night (1934)

In this classic screwball comedy, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert find themselves together on a bus heading to New York from Florida. They hitchhike and encounter all kinds of difficulties as they fall in love, even though Colbert is married to a charlatan. Of course, they end up together. The film swept the key Academy Awards categories̶—and it did something else. In one scene, Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal he is wearing nothing beneath it. As a result, T-shirt sales in America plummeted.

3. The Grapes of Wrath (book 1939; film 1940)

In John Steinbeck’s stirring novel, the Joad family, victims of the dust bowl and ruthless bankers, are forced to flee their Oklahoma home and head to California. They travel along the legendary Route 66, where they experience cruelty and kindness as they make their way to what they think will be the promised land. Unfortunately, it isn’t paradise, and at the end Tom Joad commits himself to forever travelling the country and serving as an agent of justice. “I’ll be everywhere,” he states.

4. On The Road (1957)

Jack Kerouac’s novel is the one everyone thinks of when it comes to road trips. Much of the book focuses on the travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. It is a tale of friendship and discovery, written in a stream of consciousness that matches the improvisational genius of jazz, which is a current that runs through the book. The novel has influenced generations of creative artists. Paradise says it best: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

5. Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

John Steinbeck makes this list twice. In 1960, aging and feeling that he had lost the feel for America, he embarked on a 10,000-mile journey across the nation, accompanied by his French poodle Charley. Part travelogue, part fiction, he wrote about the people he met. He gloried in the gifts of nature at Yellowstone and agonized over scenes of racial violence in New Orleans. In the end, he was uncertain what he found, and he lamented the loss of an older America. “The more I inspected this American image, the less sure I became of what it is.”

6. Easy Rider (1969)

The film follows Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) as they travel by motorcycle from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The pair sold cocaine to finance their trip, and drugs, from marijuana to LSD, are part of their journey. In their travels, they experience life in a commune and befriend a lawyer (Jack Nicholson). But they face hostility (the lawyer is murdered) and, in the end, they are also killed. The movie defined an era where the rebellion of youth came to the forefront and the soundtrack forever linked rock ‘n’ roll to the journey on the road.

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Robert Pirsig’s book became a surprise bestseller, despite being rejected initially by dozens of publishers. It tells the fictionalized autobiographical story of a motorcycle trip he took with his son from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrative contemplates various philosophical and psychological issues. What the travelers found was inward, not outward. “Sometimes,” Pirsig writes, “it’s a little better to travel than arrive.”

8. Rain Man (1988)

Awkward pairings are elemental in road narratives. Few are as different as the brothers Charlie and Ray, portrayed by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. One is an upscale collectibles dealer and the other is an institutionalized autistic savant. On their car journey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, Charlie copes with the regimented habits of his brother and comes to appreciate and understand him. In Las Vegas, Ray uses his mathematical abilities to count cards and win big at blackjack. In the end, Ray returns to the institution where he lives, and Charlie promises to see him again, having come to appreciate his brother and realize he wants him in his life.

9. Thelma and Louise (1991)

What starts as a girls’ weekend away becomes a one-way road trip to eternity. Geena Davis (Thelma) and Susan Sarandon (Louise), looking to escape from a domineering husband and deadening job, plan a weekend at a cabin. But after a stop at a roadhouse where Thelma is nearly raped and Louise kills her attacker, the women go on the lam. Along the way, their friendship and confidence grow, but they reach a point of no return as authorities bear down on them. They gas the engine and head toward a gorge. The film leaves the two of them in still frame, forever suspended in mid-air, pointed upward, out and away.

10. The Road (2006)

In this famous post-apocalyptic work, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a loving father and his young son journeying across a forbidding landscape. There is danger and horror everywhere and the pair struggle to survive. They strive to reach water, and do. But the father dies and the son is left to carry on with another family, who discover him. Father and son had “set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” If each is the other’s world entire, it matters not where you are on the road.

^{Feature image: Photo by Jaro Bielik on Unsplash.}

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The Naval Academy Class of 1940 [slideshow]

As shocking as the Pearl Harbor attack had been for the Naval Academy Class of 1940, the sudden arrival of peace was nearly as disorienting. Most of the Forties, as they were known, were still only 27 years old, and the great adventure of their lives was now behind them. The war had dominated virtually all of their adult lives, from Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 to Japan’s surrender in 1945. For nine years, they had been directed by circumstance, authority, and a shared feeling of responsibility. They had served in different theaters, in different jobs, on different ships—or planes, or battalions. Yet all of them had been forged, tempered, and tested. Every man in the class knew someone who had been killed in the war, and the sacrifice of their classmates was etched into their hearts.

They had learned to live in the moment; now they had to think of the future. For the next two decades and longer, they served in a wide variety of assignments throughout the world. For some of them, there was another war, in Korea. For a few, there was even a third war, in Vietnam. Throughout it all, they stayed in touch with one another, attended class reunions when they could, and caught the occasional Navy football game. Eventually, they retired. Some took up a new profession; several became teachers. But none of them ever forgot their trial by fire in the Second World War, nor did they forget one another. They were always Forties.

_{Feature image credit: Graduation day at Annapolis, Class of 1940. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-12345]. Public domain.}

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10 books to read this Pride Month [reading list]

Dive into ten remarkable books that illuminate the diverse and vibrant experiences of the LGBTQ+ community. From historical explorations that uncover the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ history to biographies of influential musical figures who have shaped the cultural landscape, these books offer invaluable perspectives. Whether you’re looking to educate yourself, find inspiration, or simply enjoy compelling stories, these books are essential reads that honor and uplift LGBTQ+ voices.

Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice

What does the battle between conservative Christians and LGBTQ+ people look like from the vantage point of those who are both? Choosing Love brings together LGBTQ+ conservative Christian experiences with insights from civil rights thinkers, Black feminism, and queer thinkers of color.

Learn more about Choosing Love by Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin

On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide

A lively and imaginative exploration of the career and music of the Rocket Man. Elton John is not only “still standing,” he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry.

Learn more about On EltonJohn by Matthew Restall

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace—the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly emerged as style-conscious men about town during the modern age. Discover the hidden history of the transgender dandy in interwar Paris and Berlin, the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, the New Romantic, and the many colourful dandies from the past that continue to influence us today.

Learn more about The Dandy by Peter K. Andersson

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

In the prize-winning The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. This year marks the 100th anniversary of The New Negro. What better way to celebrate than by learning more about the life of Alain Locke, the man who popularized the term.

Learn more about The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America

The Things She Carried explores how purses have served as more than fashion accessories—they’ve been symbols of privacy, pride, and activism. Kathleen B. Casey examines their role in breaking social barriers, from Black women in the civil rights movement to LGBTQ+ individuals using bags to defend their bodies and as declarations of identity. This powerful history highlights how everyday objects can become tools for resistance and self-expression, making it a compelling read for Pride Month and beyond.

Learn more about The Things She Carried by Kathleen B. Casey

Colette: My Literary Mother

Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes. Michèle Roberts examines how Colette expresses her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love.

Learn more about Colette by Michèle Roberts

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

James Baldwin’s work remains profoundly relevant, offering a lens into the intersections of race, sexuality, and identity. His fiction explores personal dilemmas amid complex social pressures, as seen in Giovanni’s Room, which centers gay and bisexual experiences, and Sonny’s Blues, where music becomes a metaphor for resilience. Tom Jenks’s analysis of Sonny’s Blues highlights Baldwin’s meticulous storytelling, showing how the narrative stays with readers. Baldwin’s exploration of masculinity, race, and class challenged norms and shaped conversations around LGBTQ+ rights, making his work essential reading.

Learn more about James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere in Europe, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys.

Learn more about Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Sir Noel Malcolm

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness is among the most famous banned books in history. A pioneering work of literature, Radclyffe Hall’s novel charts the development of a ‘female sexual invert’, Stephen Gordon, who from childhood feels an innate sense of masculinity and desire for women.

Learn more about The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love.

Learn more about Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Check out these books and more on Bookshop US and Bookshop UK.

_{Feature image by Steve Johnson via Unsplash.}

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Spain 50 years after General Franco

Few countries in the world have changed as dramatically as Spain has since the death of General Franco 50 years ago. Following his victory in a three-year civil war, Franco ruled as dictator for nearly four decades. His successor, King Juan Carlos, whose appointment by Franco in 1969 restored the Bourbon monarchy, abolished in 1931when the Second Republic was declared, used the dictator’s immense powers to transition Spain to democracy, for which there was a crying need among the population.

Today the country is one of only 25 nations out of 167 ranked as a “full democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The economy has moved from being very protectionist to a high level of openness, as measured by foreign trade and direct foreign investment. Spain was a founding member of the eurozone. Socially it is one of the most progressive countries; same-sex marriage was legalized in 2005, euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2021, and paid menstrual leave in 2023.

But in 2025 the country faces a host of challenges, some of them not new but becoming ever more urgent. The unemployment rate has come down from a peak of 27% in 2013, following the 2008 global financial crisis and the bursting of Spain’s immense property bubble, but at 11% it is still double the EU average. The economy is heavily reliant on tourism (94 million international visitors in 2024, the second largest number after France), a seasonal industry; R&D spending, central for technological change and innovation is low (1.2% of GDP), and the state pension system in a country with a fast-ageing population and one of the world’s highest average life expectancies is coming under increasing pressure.

There is also an acute housing crisis, which is deepening the divide between the relatively poor living standards of young adults, unable to get on the property ladder, and the more comfortable life of the elderly. This crisis is aggravated by the influx of immigrants in recent years, who are needed to work in sectors, such as agriculture, construction, and to care for the elderly, and to keep the population growing. Spain’s fertility rate of 1.2 children is far below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Most of the 8 million increase in the population between 2000 and 2024 was due to immigration.

Other problems include the colonization by politicians of state institutions and companies; the government’s overuse of decree laws that obviate the need for parliamentary debate; corruption that is perceived to be relatively high; political pressure on the judiciary, and the closed party system list to elect MPs. Under this system, candidates are elected in the order in which they appear on the voting list. Since that order is decided by the party’s leadership, MPs are then beholden to the leadership–a system that fosters unquestioning obedience and stifles debate. A Pew survey showed close to 70% of respondents in Spain dissatisfied with the functioning of its democracy, the second highest level among the EU countries included in the survey.

As if these problems are not enough, resolving them is in the hands of a highly polarized and fragmented political class that is identified by the state pollster CIS as one of the country’s biggest problems. Tackling the problems and structural challenges for the greater good requires broad consensus across the political divide. More than 80% of Spaniards, according to the private pollster Metroscopia, would like to return to the spirit of compromise of the 1975-1978 transition to democracy.

That spirit saw broad consensus between the Socialists and the conservative Popular Party (PP), the two main parties, to resolve issues for the good of the country as a whole. Since 2015, however, hard-right and hard-left parties have entered parliament, making consensus much more difficult. The combined share of the Socialists’ and the PP’s vote dropped from 73.4% in 2011 to 50.7% in 2015, and recovered to 65% in 2023.

Spain had five general elections between 2015 and 2023, but only 10 in the preceding 36 years.

The unwieldy Socialist-led minority coalition government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez that emerged from the November 2019 and July 2023 elections, with a hard-left alliance as the junior partner, depends for its survival on parliamentary support from Basque nationalist and separatist parties and two Catalan separatist parties.

The movement for an independent Catalonia, which came to a head with an illegal referendum on secession in 2017, has ebbed but not lost its hold over national political life. The maximalist Together for Catalonia’s support for the current government came at the price of a broad and deeply controversial amnesty for some 400 people who faced charges for offences related to the referendum and the secession push.

Meanwhile, Spain’s public administration is still needlessly opaque. Franco’s archaic Official Secrets Law of 1968, which allows classified information to be kept secret forever, remains in force. It is very much out of line with other developed countries. In the 50^th anniversary year of the dictator’s death, now would be a good time to scrap it and agree to a new one. Spain has come a long way but, in some areas, needs to go further.

_{Header image: Photo by Sam Williams on Unsplash.}

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How to read like Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin left many anecdotes about his reading in his autobiography and other writings. Though he presents himself as an example of how reading can enrich a person’s life, he never really codified his personal reading as how-to advice, but that does not mean that I cannot do so. Therefore, in Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin, I discuss many aspects of Franklin’s reading life: what he read, where he read, how he read, and why he read. What follows is a set of practical tips derived from Franklin’s experience to get the most from your reading.

1. Take advantage of spare moments. 

Reading about vegetarianism in Thomas Tryon’s Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness when he was an apprentice in Boston under his brother James, Benjamin Franklin convinced himself that he could prepare cheaper and healthier meals than James and his other employees took at the local tavern. When they went to lunch, Franklin stayed behind in the printshop, enjoyed his solo lunch, and spent the spare hour reading. He used the money he saved on meals to buy more books: the mark of a true bookman. In a life jampacked with activity to benefit the community and the nation, Franklin would apply what he learned as an apprentice: he always took advantage of whatever spare moments he could to enjoy reading.

2. Keep an open mind about unusual ideas. 

One book he read as an apprentice was Philemon Holland’s English translation of Pliny’s Natural History, a landmark in Franklin’s reading life. He laughed at Pliny’s account of a practice among the seamen of his time to still the waves in a storm by pouring oil into the sea, which Franklin considered a silly superstition. When he learned decades later that oil could indeed calm bodies of water, Franklin felt embarrassed by how readily he had rejected this Plinyism without careful consideration. It took a long time to learn, but he eventually realized that readers must not dismiss ideas from different times, lands, or cultures.

3. Talk about books with others. 

Here is something nonreaders never realize: people’s conversation reflects their reading. Franklin learned this lesson after he had run away from Boston. Passing through New Jersey, he encountered a surgeon and poet named John Browne, who could tell by the way the teenaged Franklin talked that he was an avid reader. Their shared love of literature formed the basis for their lifelong friendship. Once Franklin settled in Philadelphia, he befriended other young men who loved to read. Eventually, he and his friends formed a mutual improvement club they called the Junto, and, as in a modern-day book club, book discussions became a prominent feature of their weekly meetings.

4. Assemble your own home library. 

The Junto members each had a personal library, but Franklin got the idea for them to combine their collections to form a library greater than any of them could assemble individually. The communal library did not work, but it would lead to the formation of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in North America. Though the Library Company was a great resource for its subscribers, Franklin still recognized the importance for them to have home libraries of their own, which would provide ready references in the case of practical works and a never-ending source of entertainment, which a good collection of poetry, essays, and plays could provide.

5. Share your books with others. 

Sir Richard Steele’s Dramatic Works was one book of plays Franklin had in his personal library, at least until he loaned it to a friend, who never returned it. More than most possessions, books are notoriously difficult things to return. Franklin told his friend Benjamin Rush “that a man lost ten percent on the value, by lending his books, [and] that he once knew a man who never returned a borrowed book, because no one ever returned books borrowed from him.” Despite the unreturned books, Franklin continued to loan volumes from his library to friends throughout his life. He decided that the opportunity to share the ideas they contained was worth the risk.

_{Featured image by Aida Geraeva on Unsplash.}

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From the new Editor-in-Chief of the <em>Oxford Classical Dictionary</em>

It is a real honour—and more than a little daunting—to take over from Tim Whitmarsh as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The first edition of the Dictionary appeared more than three quarters of a century ago, in 1949, offering “an authoritative one-volume guide to all aspects of the ancient world.” A great deal has changed since, including, of course, how we view “the ancient world.” After four editions of the print dictionaries, the shift to a fully digital OCD5, begun in 2015, offered huge opportunities for improving and extending our coverage and our readers’ experience in using the dictionary. 

In March 2016, this digital OCD included all 6,400 entries of OCD4, and only c. 25 new articles; since then, we have continued to build upon this impressive legacy as we continue to commission both entirely new articles and revisions of previously existing articles. (At the time of writing, in April 2025, the total of new and revised entries has reached nearly 700). The digital format allows for a number of advantages: not only does moving beyond the constraints of the printed page allow for more substantial coverage, it also allows for the embedding of links to both ancient source material and other OCD articles, as well as encouraging the use of digital images. 

The revision process has allowed for substantial expansion of our coverage of such important and well-known classical authors as Sappho and Martial, and subjects such as the epithalamium and Latin metre. Our coverage of ancient history continues to include key issues, such as class and class struggle and Greek colonization, plus updated articles on Greek and Roman enslavement. The ability to include images is of great benefit to readers, in particular when it comes to the area of classical art and archaeology—as with the new article on graffiti, and the newly revised articles on Roman portraiture and Greek painting. 

An increase in our coverage of the ancient Near East reflects the growing understanding of Classicists of the interconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean: readers can learn (for example) from a newly expanded articles on Akkadian and Sumerian and a brand-new article on Mesopotamian ghosts. Jewish studies, too, is well-represented, with revised articles on rabbis and on the Sadducees. The importance of late antique and Byzantine studies to the field is increasingly recognised—note, for instance, the expanded articles on the important scholars and authors Priscian and Michael Psellos. Later reception of the classical world continues to be a growing field and our coverage includes the reception of ancient architecture and other forms of visual and material culture (such as the afterlives of the Pantheon and of triumphal arches), as well as of literature. 

While women were traditionally overlooked in classical scholarship, recent articles include a new entry on Iulia Balbilla, who travelled to Egypt with the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina and commemorated her visit by inscribing four poems on the left leg of the Memnon Colossus, as well as an expanded entry on women in philosophy. The experiences of a much wider range of women are commemorated in the article on the female life-course. Science, technology, and mathematics are indeed well represented, such as by new and revised articles on Egyptian mathematics and knowledge about animals. 

As with previous editions of the OCD, we commission state of the art articles on new and evolving areas of classical scholarship, showing the impact of modern approaches. This can be seen across the different fields covered by OCD5, but includes new articles on cognitive science and on pain. In the broad realm of science and technology, we are increasingly aware of the importance of issues relating to the climate, and you will also find a newly revised article on meteorology; meanwhile, the ways in which the boundaries between the human and non-human were also of concern in classical thought are explored in our new article on robots and cyborgs in antiquity. 

The OCD is the product of longstanding international collaboration, and we continue to expand to include an increasingly diverse range of authors and editors. What we have in common is a commitment to the mission of Oxford Classical Dictionary to continue to provide a truly authoritative home for classical scholarship, even as definitions of the “classical” continue to evolve, and digital advances and other changes alike continue to transform the way both scholars and the wider public encounter the ancient world. Please do feel free to get in touch with your own suggestions for what continues to be an exciting and ongoing collaborative project.

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Excerpts from <em>Electronic Enlightenment</em>’s Spring 2025 update

We have recently published five new blog posts on Electronic Enlightenment. These blogs cover a range of insightful topics and will be linked through our announcement newsletter, offering fresh insights and valuable information to you.

Each blog is crafted to enlighten and engage, providing you with information and discussions on the history of the Barham Family, Charles Bertram, William Stukeley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and the history of slavery through the letters of well-known historical figures. Check out the excerpts below and read the full blog posts and more on Electronic Enlightenment. 

“The Plantation Papers of the Barham Family” by Tessa van Wijk

After the survey of 300 letters and some legal papers, the 16 letters for this mini-edition were chosen to represent seven themes relating to the management of the sugar plantations and, specifically, the enslaved workers. The seven themes present in these letters are the following: (1) providing for enslaved people, (2) efficiency and purchasing of enslaved workers, (3) punishment and reward of enslaved workers, (4) enslaved workers rebelling, revolting and/or running away, (5) pregnancy, birth, and enslaved children, (6) illness & health of enslaved workers, and, lastly, (7) (anti-)slavery debate and sentiment…. 

Several of the 16 letters from the Barham Papers’ Jamaica Correspondence added to Electronic Enlightenment can tell us about the health and well-being of the enslaved people working on the Mesopotamia Estate and Island Estate…. 

These letters also shed light on important political developments at the time. Specifically, when it comes to the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, abolition, and the unstable political situation in European colonies. 

Read the full blog here.

“Colonial Myth-making and Anti-Scottish Sentiment in Charles Bertram’s Letters to William Stukeley” by Sophie Dickson

Charles Bertram urged William Stukeley to forgive his faults. These faults, he admitted, were his undying love for antiquities and his rude intrusion into Stukeley’s acquaintance. However, Bertram’s interruption of Stukeley’s professional and social circle birthed a collection of 32 letters spanning from 1746 to 1764, later collated by Stukeley. Early in their communication, Bertram revealed the spectacular discovery of what he claims were fifteenth-century manuscript fragments written by a “Ricardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis.” The manuscript detailed lost geographical information of Roman Britain, assembled from various contemporary Roman sources such as Beda, Orosius, Pliny, and Ptolemy. Through their correspondence, Bertram gradually shared fragments of the manuscript with Stukeley until its publication in 1757 as De Situ Britanniae(The Description of Britain).

Read about the manuscript here.

“Epistolary Form in the Letters from Charles Bertram to William Stukeley” by Olivia Flynn

Using the collection of 32 letters written by the literary forger Charles Julius Bertram to the Antiquarian William Stukeley between 1747 and 1763 as a case study, Flynn explores the different sub-genres of letters. The purpose and subject matter of letters of the eighteenth century vary greatly, according to the purpose and style of the letter. They included the consolation letter, familial letters, business letters, petitions, political missives, public letters to newspapers and periodicals, and, of course, love letters.

This blog post focuses on the introductory letter and the often overlooked medical diagnosis letter. 

Read the blog post here.

“Slavery in the Electronic Enlightenment Collection” by Tessa van Wijk

According to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert to Voltaire [François Marie Arouet], 14 April 1760, the metaphorical use of terms such as ‘esclavage’ and ‘esclave’ is typical of eighteenth-century French authors. The connotation with the enslavement of African people or the Triangular Slave Trade was a lot less frequently present. Rather, the words ‘esclave’ and ‘esclavage’ are more often defined in opposition to freedom and liberty: “A slave, for the eighteenth century, is someone who was deprived of their freedom, whatever the form or cause of this deprivation”….

The top five letter writers with the most letters in the final list of results are Simon Taylor (57), Edmund Pendleton (42), William Cowper (23), William Fitzhugh (21), and Francis Fauquier (15). Except for William Cowper, these men all had interests in the continuation of the slave trade and slavery, and their letters can mostly be found in categories relating to the owning of and trading in enslaved people….

In Edmund Pendleton’s letters, we can clearly see that enslaved people are considered as personal property. Pendleton was an American plantation-owner and slaveowner, as well as an attorney. Several of his letters in Electronic Enlightenment discuss legal affairs, particularly inheritances. 

Read the full blog post here.

“Phillis Wheatley Peters” by Kate Davies

Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) is one of the most important books to be published anywhere in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It is important because it is a book written by a black woman who was very well aware that her new professional status as an author held the key to her own freedom. It is important because it is a work of creative intellect, whose young writer displayed her imaginative prowess while revealing her adroit mastery of the contemporary literary forms of lyric, elegy, and ode. It is important because it is a work of faith that spoke profoundly to a committed culture of evangelical Christianity, out of which the humanitarian movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery was beginning to emerge…. 

What did this book contain? In her Poems, Wheatley Peters gathered a substantial collection of thirty-nine pieces, including a range of elegies and odes, and hymns. There were poems about the inspiration of breaking dawns, soft evening light and the power of memory; poems which took their cue from Old Testament verses; poems urging religious virtue upon wayward Harvard students; and poems in which Wheatley Peters shared the grief of members of her congregation at Boston‘s Old South Meeting House at the sad loss of friends and family members. One poem was importantly dedicated to Scipio Moorhead, the talented Boston artist, who, like Wheatley Peters, was one of the approximately 5,000 enslaved black people then living in Massachusetts. 

Read the complete blog post here.

These excerpts have been lightly edited to fit the OUPblog’s style guide. No content was changed, and the full blog posts can be found at each of the above hyperlinks and on Electronic Enlightenment.

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Elleke Boehmer’s seminal <em>Colonial and Postcolonial Literature</em> at 30

May 2025 marks the 30^th anniversary of Elleke Boehmer’s seminal text Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, first published by OUP in 1995 with a second edition following a decade later. It remains a landmark publication in the field of colonial and postcolonial literature and beyond, read, studied, and taught the world over. 

To mark this wonderful achievement, Elleke Boehmer reflects on her book and its longevity and shares some of her “must reads.” We are also pleased to offer chapter 4 “Metropolitans and Mimics”—as chosen by the author—free-to-read this May.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors continues to find its way to readers right around the world. In this sense, it is not unlike the migrating metaphors of the title—the images and motifs connecting imperial and postimperial texts that the book explores throughout. 

When I first published the book, I hoped that it would give greater profile to the great wealth and variety of postcolonial writing, alongside investigating its complicated roots in traditions of empire writing. On balance, I daresay that it has achieved those aims. But I had no idea that, 30 years on, the book would still be globally read, cited, prescribed, and discussed, as my academic news feeds tell me it is. I ask myself what its features are that have contributed to its ongoing success. From what I can tell, these include the book’s interest in empire as a system of textual circulation, and also its focus on the exchange of metaphors of land and belonging that interlink Anglophone postcolonial writings worldwide. Essays from across the postcolonial and world literature fields, including in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, have picked up on these aspects. The translation of the book into Mandarin in 1999 seems to have ensured the book’s position also as prominent critical text on university courses in China. About 15 years ago, when first I visited the country, wherever I went people said kind things about the book, and talked about its beautiful cover, based on a painting by the Australian artist Lisa Hill.

The second and expanded edition, published in 2005, offered an updated bibliography and timeline, and two brand-new chapters featuring more postcolonial women writers from the turn of the new century, and more coverage of Indigenous and First Nations authors from countries like Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada. 

Elleke Boehmer, Oxford, 2025

Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition

Robert Young

Fascinating for its treatment of the postcolonial as a mind-set, as expressed in a wide range of cultural forms.

Read more.

Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania

Michelle Keown

A sparkling and wide-ranging discussion of the postcolonial writing of a region that covers half the surface of the earth, oceanically-speaking.

Read more.

Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing

Andrew van der Vlies

A far-reaching account of post-millennial writing from South Africa, through the sometimes-unlikely lens of affect theory.

Read more.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing and Caribbean Thought

William Ghosh

A compelling account of the towering figure of V.S. Naipaul set in relation to the layered Caribbean contexts from which his writing sprang.

Read more.

Editor’s note: Read William Ghosh writing on the OUPblog: Homi K. Bhabha on V.S. Naipaul: in conversation with William Ghosh

Live Artefacts: Literature in a Cognitive Environment

Terence Cave

A provocative study of literary writing, postcolonial or otherwise, as an instrument through which we come to new understanding.

Read more.

All books cited in this blog are available to read via Oxford Academic. Use your institutional access to sign in, or if you don’t have access, recommend Oxford Academic to your library.

_{Featured image by Elleke Boehmer and used with permission.}

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50 years after the fall of Saigon [reading list]

On 30 April 1975, the Vietnam War came to a historic end with the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to North Vietnam forces, marking a significant turning point in world history. This day is remembered for the profound impact it had on the lives of millions, the geopolitical landscape, and the course of modern history. As we commemorate the anniversary of this pivotal event, we reflect on the sacrifices made, the lessons learned, and the enduring hope for peace and reconciliation.

Access the featured books and chapters on this reading list via your institution’s library or recommend to your librarian to gain access.

Fire and Rain by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

This gripping account interweaves Nixon and Kissinger’s pursuit of the war in Southeast Asia and their diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China with on-the-ground military events and US domestic reactions to the war conducted in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration’s relations with the Soviet Union and China vis-à-vis the war in Southeast Asia.

Read more.

Vietnam at War by Mark Philip Bradley

The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of helicopters overhead. But there were in fact several wars in Vietnam, including an anticolonial war with France and a civil war between the North and South. Vietnam at War looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain unresolved to this day.

Read more.

Death of a Generation by Howard Jones

For many historians and political observers, what John F. Kennedy would and would not have done in Vietnam has been a source of enduring controversy. Based on new evidence—including a revelation about the Kennedy administration’s involvement in the assassination of Premier Diem—Howard Jones argues in his book that Kennedy intended to withdraw the great bulk of American soldiers and pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Vietnam.

Read more.

Number One Realist by Nathaniel L. Moir

In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926-67) staked a claim as the “Number One Realist” on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina.

Read more.

“Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy, 1954–1975” by Pierre Asselin

This chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies considers the strategies and tactics used by Vietnamese communist leaders to defeat the United States and its allies in the Vietnam War. It demonstrates that the guerrilla warfare that has come to define the war in the West was in fact only one aspect of a highly sophisticated campaign to “liberate” the Southern half of the country and bring about national reunification under communist aegis.

Read more.

“The Literature of Peace: A War Refugee’s ‘Orphaned Voice’ in The Sympathizer”by Pamela J. Rader

This chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Peace History considers The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese American refugee’s perspective on the war waged on Vietnamese soil. In the tradition of novels as vehicles for social change, the fictional confessional chronicles the lasting devastation of war, cultural imperialism, and nationalism through its eponymous, biracial, double-agent narrator who subscribes to the loyalty of two brothers instead of the two countries he serves.Art, specifically fiction, becomes an act of resistance to assert the loss of individualism and freedom of thought in promoting a culture of peace.

Read more.

The Dragon in the Jungle by Xiaobing Li

Western historians have long speculated about Chinese military intervention in the Vietnam War. It was not until recently, however, that newly available international archival materials, as well as documents from China, have indicated the true extent and level of Chinese participation in the conflict of Vietnam. For the first time in the English language, this book offers an overview of the operations and combat experience of more than 430,000 Chinese troops in Indochina from 1968-73.

Read more.

_{Feature image by USMC Photo by GySgt Russ Thurman. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Subversion: history’s greatest hits

Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—is as old as statecraft itself. But most of what we know about the subject concerns the Cold War and focuses on big powers maliciously manipulating the domestic politics of small ones. To understand how subversion fits into the new epoch of great power rivalry, to know what’s really new and what’s old hat, we need a primer on great power subversive statecraft through the ages. And we need this history to look at all forms of subversive statecraft, not just conventional ones, such as election meddling or propaganda. 

A Measure Short of War provides just that, revealing that most of today’s fears and hopes surrounding subversion would have been familiar to the statesman of earlier ages. Check out highlights from some of the cases detailed in the book:

_{Featured image by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash.}

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What actually happened during the 1970s?

Working-class politics is back in vogue in the West, but for whom does it speak? An AfD candidate in Germany won over 14% of the vote after claiming the SPD was ‘no longer a workers’ party in the classic sense’ and that his organisation was ‘taking on this role’. The US Vice President, JD Vance, emphasises he is a ‘a working-class boy, born far from the halls of power’ and promises to reshore industrial jobs. Marine Le Pen claims to lead the ‘party of French workers’ and Fratelli d’Italia wins a majority of manual workers after asking if ‘the Left is now no longer in the factories and amongst the workers, where can you find it?’ (its answer: a Pride parade). These political visions define themselves against an identity politics of the urbane, the educated, and the socially liberal. They seek to reverse the impacts of deindustrialisation, globalisation, and social liberalisation which began in the mid twentieth century and rapidly accelerated after the 1970s.

Histories of contemporary Europe tend to argue that the defeat of a certain kind of industrial politics associated with the Left was both inevitable, permanent, and an event long in the making. Viewed from the year 2000, the dividends of adaption to broadened social bases, reformulated programmes, and a post-class image seemed self-evident to many. Twenty-five years later, this consensus has been challenged. The British Labour Party’s chief strategist believes winning back working-class voters is the fundamental test of power. Others stress the polarisation of values between graduates, professionals, and ethnic minorities and pensioners, school leavers, and workers. Though many trace the origins of contemporary uncertainty to the 1970s, fewer have concretely analysed what actually happened in that decade.

West Europeans experienced that decade differently to its retrospective representation. The trade unions and social democratic and Communist parties grew and a diverse new generation entered the labour movement. Marginalised young, female, and immigrant workers led strikes to gain rights. White-collar workers unionised and sections of a previously hostile middle class appeared to be switching allegiances. Immigration, women’s entry into the workforce, widening educational access, increasing service employment, and minority movements were believed to have expanded the reach and magnetism of the Left. Many on the other side of politics thought that this trajectory would continue. Successful strikebreaking movements, new automation technologies, and organisational recasting helped to interrupt this momentum. A generation of workers felt bewildered, unable to understand their predicament, and bereft of the means to resist the shift to a new era. Only under specific circumstances at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s did the old Left’s expanded coalition fracture with enduring and sometimes traumatic results. The reliance on ideas of decline has contributed to the flattening of a complex history.   

Asking different questions of the 1970s may require experimentation with methods, incorporation of neglected forms of evidence, and analysis of various cases within unitary frameworks. Archivally-driven accounts rooted in spaces of common deliberation and action can address the absence of a certain kind of working-class voice in existing narratives. Combining transnational and comparative approaches can provide insights on periods where the forces of change traverse states and delimited frameworks, institutions, and cultures channel their energies, manage their impact, and decide on priorities. Looking beyond that decade, it might be worth developing more granular accounts of the relations between technology and society, following the scholarship of David Edgerton and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and establishing a deeper understanding of how machines are used at work. The conditions of possibility of a moment when the Right seeks to occupy the space where classical working-class politics once stood merits further study.

_{Feature image by André Cros. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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How did English literature become a university subject?

Even if you didn’t ‘read English’ at university yourself, you almost certainly know plenty of people who did, and more or less everyone has had to study English literature at school at some point or other. As a subject, ‘English’ (an adjective masquerading as a noun) has been central to educational arrangements in Britain for well over a century, seeming for much of that time to occupy a privileged place in the wider culture as well.

Yet literature may seem the most unlikely candidate for becoming a recognized academic discipline. For the most part, science and scholarship have operated with implicit canons of enquiry that have emphasized objectivity, verified knowledge, causal analysis, and impersonal, replicable forms of argument and presentation. But the reader’s encounter with works of imaginative literature does not easily lend itself to such treatment, involving instead subjectivity, degrees of responsiveness, evaluative judgement, and highly individual forms of imaginative re-creation.

As a result, there was initially scepticism about, even considerable resistance to, the idea that the study of vernacular literature might merit a place alongside the new disciplines being established in the expanding universities of the nineteenth century, and even when it had secured a foothold in the curriculum it continued to be derided in some quarters as ‘a soft option’. Surely the reading of enjoyable works of literature in one’s native language, so the objection went, was an activity to be pursued in one’s leisure hours? A university concerned itself with matters of exact scholarship and rigorous reasoning, as in the established disciplines of Classics and Mathematics: appreciation of the beauties of poetry had no claim to rank alongside these strenuous exercises, and, besides, it was clearly impossible to devise an objective way to examine achievement in such a personal, even emotional, activity.

So how did the improbable marriage of beauty and the footnote came to pass; or in other words, how did English, despite these and other objections, establish itself within British universities so successfully that it could sometimes be spoken of by the beginning of the 1960s as the ‘central’ subject in those institutions—even, in some hard-to-define way, as central to the culture at large? The answer to this question cannot take the form of a seamless narrative. We need, for example, to think about some of the larger enabling contextual conditions—the prior reverence for an established canon of English literature, the authority of Classics as a model and a rival, the formative role of history and philology as exemplars of serious scholarship. We also need to examine the relevant institutional developments between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: how far was the Scottish tradition of teaching ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’ a genuine precursor of ‘Eng Lit’; what were the early civic universities actually like; why were Oxford and, especially, Cambridge comparatively late in establishing courses in English; why was English disproportionately prominent in the institutions founded for the higher education of women; and how did these developments relate to what was going on in schools?

Shifting the focus, we need to think about the roles played by some of those who are regarded as among the ‘founding figures’ of the discipline—some who are well-known, such as Matthew Arnold and A.C. Bradley, but also some who are not, such as John Churton Collins, George Saintsbury, Walter Raleigh, and Arthur Quiller-Couch, as well as thinking about the status of the ‘professorial estate’ more generally, looking at its economic circumstances, its recruitments patterns, and so on. And what about the everyday forms of departments, journals, professional associations and so on? They can’t be left out of the story, can they?

Once we’d done all this, we’d be in a position to challenge the conventional accounts of ‘the rise of English’, showing, for example, that I.A. Richards’s supposedly transformative effect on the discipline was in reality more limited, and that the vogue for ‘criticism’ spread more slowly and more unevenly than has been assumed. In fact, we would eventually discover that most English departments at the beginning of the 1960s still had very traditional-looking syllabuses.

At present, ‘Eng Lit’ is widely seen as a discipline in crisis, with reductions in courses and even closures of whole departments being reported across the country. These problems are systemic and there is no one answer to them, but whatever view we take of the current position and future prospects of the study and teaching of English literature, the essential starting point has to be a more adequate account of the history of the enterprise, one that does not reductively depict it in either sinister or salvationist terms.

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12 key titles to read this Jazz Appreciation Month [reading list]

In honor of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), we celebrate the extraordinary history and heritage of jazz, exploring its music, culture, and people who made it thrive. Jazz, despite its distinctly American roots, resonates globally across cultures, languages, and musical traditions. Often described as a musical conversation between band members, with improvisation, rhythm, and swing, jazz is a powerful unifying force that builds bridges, connecting people from all walks of life. Whether it’s the soulful strains of a saxophone in New York or the lively rhythms of a jazz band in Paris, jazz brings us together and celebrates our shared humanity.

We hope that this reading list of 12 stimulating and inspiring books—like the number of keys in an octave—will spark your interest and encourage your participation in this truly original American art form—to read books about it, to study the music, to play and perform, and ultimately to listen to all things jazz.

1. Stomp Off, Let’s Go by Ricky Riccardi

Two-time GRAMMY award-winning author and Louis Armstrong expert Ricky Riccardi tells the enthralling story of the iconic trumpeter’s meteoric rise to fame. Beginning with Louis Armstrong’s youth in New Orleans, Riccardi transports readers through Armstrong’s musical and personal development, including his initial trip to Chicago to join Joe “King” Oliver’s band, his first trip to New York to meet Fletcher Henderson, and his eventual return to Chicago, where he changed the course of music with the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings.

Read more.

2. SamBop NYC by Marc Gidal

In New York City during the first decades of the new millennium, over two hundred professional musicians play music that combines jazz with Brazilian genres. Blending American and Brazilian music, these musicians continue the legacies of bossa nova, samba jazz, and other styles, while expanding their skills, cultural understandings, and identities.

Read more.

3. The Classroom Guide to Jazz Improvisation by John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen

This book provides what music educators have sought for decades: an easy, step-by-step guide to teaching jazz improvisation in the music classroom. Offering classroom-tested lesson plans, authors John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen draw on their combined 54 years of teaching experience and extensive work as professional jazz musicians to remove the guesswork and mystique from the teaching process.

Read more.

4. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks’s reading of James Baldwin’s short story follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes “Sonny’s Blues” into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the story’s aesthetics and musical progression, with references to Edward P. Jones, Charlie Parker’s music, Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?,” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jenks pays attention to Baldwin’s oratorical gifts, the biblical references in the story, its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and its total effect.

Read more.

5. Chasin’ the Sound by Brian Levy and Keith Waters

Written for all experience levels, Chasin’ the Sound encourages hands-on learning with activities that highlight the intangible yet key aesthetics of sound, groove, and feel. Studying jazz fundamentals alongside well-known examples of those fundamentals in practice, students and instructors will gain a broader and more meaningful understanding of the art of improvisation.

Read more.

6. Rhythm Man by Stephanie Stein Crease

In this first comprehensive biography of Chick Webb, author Stephanie Stein Crease traces his story in full, showing how his skills and innovations as a bandleader helped catalyze the music of the Swing Era and the growing big band industry, allowing Webb to become one of the most influential musicians in jazz history. Crease explores Webb’s personal and professional struggles as he rose to the top of the increasingly competitive world of big band jazz.

Read more.

7. Hearing Double by Brian Kane

When we talk about a jazz “standard” we usually mean one of the many songs that jazz musicians repeatedly play as part of their core repertoire. Unlike classical music, standards are transformed in performance, rearranged, improvised upon, and altered with new chords and melodies. These transformations can be minor or radical revisions. Brian Kane explores what gives a standard its identity by offering a new theory of musical works, addressing the unique challenges presented by standards.

Read more.

8. The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets by Alyn Shipton

Founded in Los Angeles in 1952, The Gerry Mulligan Quartet was the first small jazz ensemble without a chordal instrument like a piano or guitar. Using original scores and detailed transcriptions of Mulligan’s work, Shipton offers an intimate look at Mulligan’s musical development from the initial quartet with Chet Baker to its successors with Bob Brookmeyer, Jon Eardley, and Art Farmer. Featuring original interviews, and presenting a fresh take on Mulligan’s harmonic creativity, this book traces the ups and downs of his heroin addiction, imprisonment, sobriety, and eventual musical triumph.

Read more.

9. Rabbit’s Blues by Con Chapman

Johhny Hodges’ celebrated technique and silky tone marked him then, and still today, as one of the most important and influential saxophone players in the history of jazz. In this first ever biography, Rabbit’s Blues details Hodges’ place as one of the premier artists of the alto sax and his role as co-composer with Duke Ellington.

Read more.

10. Sportin’ Life by Brian Harker

John W. Bubbles was the ultimate song-and-dance man. In this compelling and deeply researched biography, his dramatic story is told for the first time. Coming of age with the great jazz musicians like of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Ella Fitzgerald, he influenced jazz with his rhythmic ideas. A groundbreaking tap dancer, he provided inspiration to Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and the Nicholas Brothers. His vaudeville team “Buck and Bubbles” captivated theater audiences for more than thirty years. Most memorably, in the role of Sportin’ Life, he stole the show in the original production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Read more.

11. Instrument of the State by Benjamin J. Harbert

Interweaving oral history and archival research, Benjamin J. Harbert expands on folkloric definitions of “prison music” to show how incarcerated musicians found small but essential freedoms by performing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion throughout the twentieth century. This book considers the ways in which music manifests among the incarcerated and the prison administration as a lens to better understand state power and the fragments of hope and joy that exist in its wake.

Read more.

12. The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia

Universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time, and acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music.

Read more.

Explore even more great jazz titles over on Bookshop:

• Bookshop US
• Bookshop UK

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We the Men

Amidst the flurry of headlines about the Trump administration’s first weeks in power, who will notice that the federal government’s largest agency no longer celebrates Black History Month or Women’s History Month? The Department of Defense’s January 31 guidance declaring “Identity Months Dead at DoD” may have been lost in the news cycle.

But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the time to make this change because commemorations are important. They shape how Americans understand the past, think about the present, and envision the future. That is why the Trump administration has already launched its plans for marking America’s semiquincentennial in 2026. President Donald Trump himself chairs the task force.

Although the Trump administration is unlikely to acknowledge it, America’s commemorative landscape remains starkly uneven. Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed “that all men are created equal,” only three women made a recent list of the 50 most frequently commemorated people in America’s public monuments. In comparison, the list includes 44 white men, many of them slaveholders. Congress has never designated a legal public holiday—the kind that closes federal offices—to celebrate an important woman in American history.

Reformers have been fighting for generations to expand America’s commemorations. Decades after the creation of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, efforts to include all Americans in the nation’s commemorations have had limited success—largely because these efforts continue to face vehement opposition.

Trump joined that opposition long before his current presidential term, speaking out against placing Harriet Tubman’s image on the $20 bill.

Only two women have ever appeared on America’s paper currency. Martha Washington graced the front of a $1 silver certificate that the United States first issued in 1886. Pocahontas knelt for baptism on the back of a $20 bill first issued in 1863.

Many Americans have noticed women’s absence. After years of activism from women in and out of Congress, the Obama administration announced a plan in 2016 to redesign the $20 bill, with Tubman replacing President Andrew Jackson on the front.

At the time, Trump was pursuing the Republican nomination for President. He immediately denounced the decision to place Tubman on the twenty as “pure political correctness,” as if Tubman did not merit such prominent recognition. In contrast, Trump insisted that Jackson had “a great history.”

To put Trump’s claims in context: Jackson was a slaveholder who removed Native American tribes from their lands. Tubman was an abolitionist and suffragist who freed herself and hundreds of others from bondage before becoming a Union scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War. Each historical figure foregrounds different aspects of America’s past. To my mind, Tubman’s record is far worthier of celebration.

Trump, however, declared in 2016 that “it would be more appropriate” to have Tubman’s image on “another denomination,” suggesting “maybe we do the two dollar bill or we do another bill.” If you have rarely seen a $2 bill, there is a reason for that. The two is the least-used bill.

After Trump became President in 2017, his Treasury Department delayed introduction of the new $20 bill and spent years repeatedly refusing to indicate whether the redesigned twenty would feature Tubman.

One of Trump’s former White House staffers published a tell-all memoir in 2018. She recounted Trump’s reaction when she gave him a memo in 2017 about placing Tubman on the twenty. Trump reportedly looked at a photograph of Tubman and asked: “You want to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?” The question implied that Tubman did not look like someone who belonged in that place of honor, or did not look like someone Trump found physically attractive, or both.

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, the Biden administration reported that it was committed to placing Tubman’s portrait on the front of the twenty. However, Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election has made that commemoration uncertain again.

America’s Constitution purports to speak for “We the People.” But too many of our commemorations include only We the Men. That usually means white men. Amidst the many other struggles that will mark the Trump presidency, it is well worth fighting to include all of us in the stories America tells about itself. The celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States are just one year away.

_{Featured image by Ben Mater via Unsplash.}

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<em>Moby-Dick</em> and the United States of Aggrievement

Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. During the Cold War, commentators debated Ahab’s Stalin-like powers. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the question of vengeance took center stage. Was Ahab Mohammad Attah crashing an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, or was he George W. Bush searching for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged? Trump continues to shatter political norms, but complaining about mistreatment is part of the nation’s DNA. As erratic and self-indulgent as it may be, Trump’s sense of injury stretches back to the series of grievances that the Declaration of Independence itemized about King George III.

The first Trump administration cultivated comparisons to Andrew Jackson, the populist president whose election proclaimed the rise of the self-determined white man. Look behind the myths of Jacksonian democracy, however, and you will find a nation of teeming resentments. A nineteenth-century visitor observed that Americans had an unusual fondness for lawsuits and cheerfully took each other to court. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while Americans were initially difficult to insult, their resentments, once ignited, took a long time to burn out. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously begrudged every dollar he gave to charity as an infringement on his “manhood” and individuality.

Against this backdrop Melville imagined Captain Ahab’s ruinous quest. The feeling of perpetual grievance animates the captain’s violent path through the world. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he tells Starbuck, warning the First Mate that power resides in collecting real and imagined wounds. Ahab seems so difficult to resist because the crew believe that in seeking retribution for his injuries, they will get justice for their own. Historian Timothy Snyder has used the phrase “anticipatory obedience” to describe the way populations capitulated to twentieth-century authoritarians without being asked or forced. Melville depicted this phenomenon a decade before the Civil War. Starbuck openly challenges Ahab’s desire for revenge, but with profound dread, he feels himself already succumbing to the captain’s “lurid woe.”

It is hardly surprising that the authoritarian-loving Trump employs the language of vengeance that Moby-Dick so brilliantly explores: “I am your justice,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Trying to explain Trump’s appeal, pundits have identified multiple resentments among the white working class, but they should look deeper into his supporters’ belief that, long before the assassination attempts, he had been flagrantly wronged. Trump is a convicted felon, an accused sexual predator, a billionaire who ignores bills, accountability, and the most basic laws. For decades, he has ruined people’s lives with relish rather than remorse. And yet, from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to the sycophants of Fox News, our politics seems addicted to the idea that Trump has been persecuted, cheated, and dispossessed.

Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Achilles, whose damaged pride leaves him sulking in his tent and refusing to join the Greek siege of Troy. For all his self-pity, though, Achilles does not convince his fellow warriors to withdraw their armies from the fight. His resentments remain his own. Melville recognized that in the turbulent world of American democracy, aggrievement was a powerful political tool. Seconds before he throws his final harpoon, Ahab exclaims what we might regard as a recipe for the “irresistible dictatorship” he exerts over the crew: “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” 

Let me be clear: Ahab is too elevated, expressive, and philosophically self-aware to be explained by the MAGA movement. And yet, amid all his heroic complexity, the seeds of American aggrievement appear throughout his quest. When he inspires the harpooners, humiliates Starbuck, or tricks his crew, he revels in his own autocratic powers. Think of Trump nursing his bruises as he denies protection to his critics, threatens journalists with lawsuits, and fires the government workers who once held him to account. And think of all those accomplices lining up behind him, shamelessly claiming that he has been victimized by a deep state hoax. 

The recent bans on DEI remind us that the grievances that count for this administration—and for too many administrations before it—primarily concern Christian nationalists and conservative white men. Moving further into the second Trump presidency, we need to interrogate the power the nation gives to their perceived injuries.

Ahab dies when he is strangled by the harpoon line attached to Moby Dick. The whale sinks his ship, and every crew member dies but one. I trust that Trump will come to a more peaceful, gilded end, but what happens to the rest of us? From Canada and Panama to Gaza, Greenland, and Ukraine (the list grows daily), the world seems stuck on an American ship bent on avenging the president’s wounded psyche. 

A wreck seems inevitable. Surviving that wreck does not.

_{Featured image by Matthew Gonzalez on Unsplash.}

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