Cambridge Core Blog
The thing about canons is that they seem sacred. Challenging them, even revisiting them, can seem heretical. Facing these facts is the first step in addressing the intransigence of the early modern philosophical canon. Step two involves noticing just how much the canon leaves out.
Cambridge University Press is partnering with the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) to publish Renaissance Quarterly, the leading American journal of Renaissance Studies.…
This blog accomapnies Louise Stewart’s Historical Journal article ‘Social Status and Classicism in the Visual and Material Culture of the Sweet Banquet in Early Modern England‘ Today, the term ‘banquet’ is commonly used to refer to any lavish feast. However, in the Tudor and Stuart period the word had a different, and very specific meaning, referring to a separate meal which consisted solely of sweet foods. In September 1591, for example, Queen Elizabeth I visited the Earl of Hertford at his estate at Elvetham. The lavish entertainments provided for the queen during her four day stay included water pageants, fireworks, feasts and a glittering ‘banquet’. A printed account of the entertainment makes it clear that this banquet was no ordinary meal. It was served in the garden after supper, ‘all in glass and silver’ and accompanied by a spectacular fireworks display. The queen was presented with a thousand sweet dishes including sculptural sugar work representing her arms, castles and forts, human figures and mythical and exotic animals as well as preserved fruits and other confections. This elaborate spectacle was typical of the sweet banquet.…
People talk a lot about segregation. Every week it seems that news reports or some new academic finding shows that segregation is related to some salient outcome. The traditional story of how America became segregated is that blacks moved to Northern cities in the early twentieth century and whites, aided by government mortgage programs and the development of the interstate highway, fled to suburban areas, creating cities with black and poor urban cores and wealthier and whiter suburbs. With the flight of wealthier white residents to the suburbs, the resources available to the urban core declined, leaving minorities fewer resources and effectively creating a poverty trap.…
This blog accompanies the Historical Journal article Voting, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Late-Colonial Africa by Justin Willis, Gabrielle Lynch and Nic Cheeseman.…
In public memory, the history of convict labour, penal transportations and colonization is mostly associated with a number of historical stereotypes: The origins of modern Australia as a convict colony, or the notorious history of the Soviet Gulags; the forced labour camps in Nazi Germany, and the harsh, but also somewhat romanticized image of French penal colonies as pictured in the novel and film Papillon.…
This blog accompanies the Forum on Academic Freedom published in History of Education Quarterly. In the past decade or so, there has been an uptick in assaults on academic freedom across the globe. Whether through watch lists, denial of visas to travel to professional conferences, firings, or detentions and jail sentences, professors and teachers are battling for the freedom to regulate their own professional lives against government (and even administrative) officials who invoke national security and patriotism to justify suppression and enforce a particular consensus on contentious issues.…
To mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Historical Society, Cambridge University Press are making a selection of ten volumes from the Camden Series freely available to researchers until the end of the year.…
When the History of Education Quarterly asked me to contribute to a symposium on academic freedom, I could hardly refuse. I had recently written a book about how anti-communist witch hunters in the late 1940s and 1950s attacked teachers and professors, and about the Supreme Court’s eventual (and much-belated) response in 1967–striking down a typical state loyalty law and announcing that academic freedom is a “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” That case was called Keyishian v.…
Supplying food presents a major problem for urban history, for cities, beyond a certain size, cannot feed themselves. Provisioning meat in particular represents a critical juncture, because no other food item was so deeply and, in so many ways, tied to urban modernity.…
UC Irvine history professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom recently concluded his ten-year tenure as editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. One of the new practices that Wasserstrom introduced as editor was a “JAS-at-AAS” panel at the annual conference.…
This blog post is taken from the ‘Introduction by Andrew I. Port’ on a special forum that looks at the lives and legacies of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl.…