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Cassini was the NASA-developed Saturn orbiter, and Huygens was the European-built probe that sat on-board, which would eventually descend on to the surface of Saturn's biggest moon, Titan. Cassini will come to an end on 15th September 2017, when it makes its final approach to Saturn, diving in to the atmosphere (sending data as it goes), and finally burning up and disintegrating like a meteor.
Posted on September 14, 2017
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Jane Austen wrote six novels and thousands of letters in her lifetime, creating a formula of social realism, comedic satire, and romance that is still loved today. Her works were originally published anonymously, bringing this now celebrated author little personal renown ' with nineteenth century audiences preferring the Romantic and Victorian tropes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Since then, literary tastes and opinions have changed dramatically, and many people have written about, interpreted, and adapted Austen's writings. But why do we like her stories so much? What can they tell us about her world, and ours?
Posted on July 18, 2017
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Republican Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have called for the mass deportation of undocumented workers, the majority of whom hail from Mexico. To many liberals, the anti-immigrant rhetoric of these Republican candidates seems oddly anachronistic'a terrible throwback to an earlier America when we were less in touch with our melting pot roots.
Posted on April 8, 2016
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The recent tragedy involving toxic, lead-laced tap water in Flint, Michigan highlights the growing gulf between rich and poor, and majority and minority communities. In an ill-fated measure to save costs for the struggling city of Flint, officials stopped using Detroit's water supply system and switched to the Flint River.
Posted on April 6, 2016
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Americans, black and white, love to commemorate the civil rights struggle. School programs, public events, popular culture, and historic markers all recount the heroic battle black Americans waged for their full humanity. Yet, racial inequality continues to plague the United States, and most popular civil rights history mythologizes it in ways that hinder the full realization of the movement's goals.
Posted on April 4, 2016
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Where did we come from? How did we become human? What's the origin of our species? It is hard to imagine our understanding of humanity without, of course, Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Our own family tree testifies to this age-old pattern of extinction, adaption, and evolution.
Posted on February 11, 2016
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The US taxpayers fund the overwhelming majority of addiction research in the world. Every year, Congress channels about $1 billion to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). An additional almost $0.5 billion is separately given to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), my own workplace for the past decade.
Posted on February 10, 2016
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When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominees for the 2015 Academy Awards, the James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy The Interview wasn't on the list. That Oscar spurned this 'bromance' surprised nobody. Most critics hated the film and even Rogen's fans found it one of his lesser works. Those audiences almost didn't have a chance to see the film.
Posted on January 12, 2016
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Today's carceral state has its roots in the 'war on crime' that took hold in America in the 1980s. That 'war' was led by the political forces that I associate with Reaganism, a conservative political formation that generally favored a rollback of state power. A notable exception to this rule was policing and imprisonment. Both Reaganism and the 'war on crime' had a racial politics embedded in them, so that these three phenomena'Reaganism as a movement, the 'war on crime,' and the resulting carceral state, and the racial politics of the 1980s'strengthened and reinforced the others.
Posted on December 14, 2015
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What value does the story of Henry George, a self-taught economist from the late nineteenth century, hold for Americans living in the early 21st century? Quite a lot, if we stop to consider the ways in which contemporary American society has come to resemble America in the late-nineteenth century, a period popularly known as the Gilded Age.
Posted on November 22, 2015
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What can the history of medicine tell us about food allergy and other medical conditions? An awful lot. History is essentially about why things change over time. None of our ideas about health or medicine simply spring out of the ground. They evolve over time, adapting to various social, political, economic, technological, and cultural factors. If we want to know anything about the health issues that face us today and will face us in future, the very first thing we should do is turn to the history of such issues.
Posted on November 20, 2015
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Too often, we in Europe and the English-speaking world presume that we have a monopoly on both modernity and its cultural expression as modernism. But this has never been the case. Take, for instance, the case of sixteenth and seventeenth century urbanism in Europe and Asia. One can focus on the different ways in which classical precedent was deployed in Europe, teasing out the distinctions between the early and late Renaissance, not to mention Mannerism and Baroque.
Posted on September 6, 2015
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On 27 October 2005, two French youths of Tunisian and Malian descent died of electrocution in a local power station in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Police had been patrolling their neighborhood, responding to a reported break-in, and scared that they might be subject to an arbitrary interrogation, the youngsters decided to hide in the nearest available building. Riots immediately broke out in the high-rise suburbs of Paris and in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country.
Posted on August 24, 2015
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In 1682, the French court moved from Paris to the former royal hunting lodge of Versailles, which had been transformed under the supervision of Louis XIV into Europe's most splendid palace, one which moreover was set in a stunning park that stretched all the way to the horizon. Versailles established a fashion for palaces surrounded by ample gardens that most major European courts would soon imitate.
Posted on September 10, 2015
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The new Greek government that took office in January 2015 made a commitment during the election campaign that Greece would stay in the Eurozone. At the same time, it also declared that Greece's relations with its European partners would be put on a new footing. This did not materialize. The Greek government accepted the continuation of the existing agreement with its lenders, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. This was the only way of ensuring Greece would not run out of funding.
Posted on April 15, 2015
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As I approached retirement, it seemed appropriate that I should tackle one of the most controversial aspects of Liverpool history: race relations. Since there is outstanding scholarship on the operation, legacy, and memorialisation of the heinous slave trade, I chose to concentrate on later developments, particularly the growth of a large 'black' population from the late 19th century, primarily composed of 'seamen' who dropped anchor in 'sailortown' Liverpool.
Posted on April 10, 2015
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Like much historical research, my chapter in the Britain's Soldiers collection came about more or less by accident. It relates to an incident that I discovered in the War Office papers at in 2007. I was taking a group of History students from Northampton University to The National Archives in Kew, to help them with their undergraduate dissertations.
Posted on December 8, 2014
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On 9 November 1989, at midnight, the East German government opened its borders to West Germany for the first time in almost thirty years: a city divided, families and friends separated for a generation, reunited again. For much of its existence, attempting to cross the wall meant almost certain death, and around 80 East Germans were killed in the attempt, shot down by the border guards as they tried to make their escape. With this announcement, however, the gates were thrown open.
Posted on November 9, 2014
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The Bastille once stood in the heart of Paris — a hulking, heavily-fortified medieval fortress, which was used as a state prison. During the 18th century, it played a key role in enforcing the government censorship, and had become increasingly unpopular, symbolizing the oppressiveness and the costly inefficiency of the reigning monarchy and the ruling classes.
Posted on July 14, 2014
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By Margarita Lugo Hubp From a librarian's perspective, there has been a huge change in the types of electronic publications that academics, students, and researchers use. In Mexico, as in other developing countries, journals, e-books, and other electronic works make it possible to offer greater access to scholarship in increasingly large university populations.
Posted on July 16, 2014
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By Nicola Wilson When I was invited to develop two lists for Oxford Scholarship Online, I jumped at the chance. From the perspective of a commissioning editor, digital publishing has extended the 'life' of our copyrights indefinitely, and we no longer need to hold a book in physical print for it to continue to be available to our readers.
Posted on April 23, 2014
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By Adrastos Omissi As someone who has lived out his entire academic career in a research environment augmented by digital resources, it can be easy to allow familiarity to breed contempt where the Internet is concerned. When I began my undergraduate degree in the autumn of 2005, Oxford's Bodleian Library, as well as every faculty and college library, had already digitised their search functions...
Posted on March 11, 2014
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By Hannah Skoda When I started in my current post, one of my students, off to a nightclub, very cheekily asked me whether when I was young, they were still called discos. The same sorts of feelings are coming to characterize attitudes towards books ' our students find it hard to imagine a time when nothing was available electronically.
Posted on February 11, 2014
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By John Louth One of the questions we are asked most frequently as university press editors is whether and how our work has changed to accommodate digital publishing. That can be taken to refer to a wide range of changes, but if we mean the digital publication of scholarly monographs, the answer, thankfully, is 'not much'.
Posted on January 10, 2014
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By Luke Swindler At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Libraries, it took well over a century, from the university's founding in 1789, to reach a collection of one million volumes. In the last five years alone, the campus has added nearly one million 'volume-equivalents', mainly due to massive e-book acquisitions.
Posted on December 11, 2013
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By Sophie Goldsworthy Back in 2001, there was a whole host of reference products online, and journals were well down that digital road. But books? Who on earth would want to read a whole book online? When the idea that grew into Oxford Scholarship Online was first mooted, it faced a lot of scepticism, in-house as well as out.
Posted on November 19, 2013
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The nights darken, the wind howls, and branches (or ghostly fingers?) tap against your windowpane. This can only mean one thing ' Halloween approaches! To celebrate the day of ghouls, ghosts and other creatures which go bump in the night, we've compiled a list of University Press Scholarship Online's most spine-chilling chapters (available free for a limited time).
Posted on October 30, 2013
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How well do you know Liverpool University Press and Stanford University Press, the newest members of the UPSO family? Why not take our quiz to test your knowledge?
Posted on July 5, 2013
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