Today (October 24) is World Polio Day, focusing on a communicable disease which the World Health Assembly committed to eradicate in 1988. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Today (October 24) is World Polio Day, focusing on a communicable disease which the World Health Assembly committed to eradicate in 1988. Polio is transmitted faecal-orally (often through contaminated water) and can cause highly variable extents of paralysis in the limbs or, in severe cases, the respiratory muscles, which can lead to death by suffocation.
Action for the Crippled Child’s Charity Collection Box, showing a young boy with a walking stick and calliper. Image Credit: Action Medical Research
In 2026, there were only 11 wild poliovirus cases recorded in Afghanistan and 3 in Pakistan. However, circulating vaccine derived strains (caused by mutations in the live attenuated (meaning weakened) oral vaccine) continue to be an issue in many African and Middle Eastern countries, and recent wastewater detections (including in sewers in London) remind us that this global health battle is far from over. Additionally, an estimated 20 million people globally are living with disabilities caused by polio, around 50,000 of them in Britain. In narratives around polio, their enduring experiences and realities often go overlooked.
This was not always the case. During the epidemic years of polio in Britain, between 1947 and 1960, it had a cultural resonance and power to terrify which far outweighed statistical realities. This was due to its often-lifelong disabling impacts, propensity to impact children and seemingly random or unpredictable nature. However, representations of polio were generally produced without the input of polio disabled individuals and often presented them as objects of fear (to encourage vaccination) and pity (to encourage continued fundraising, particularly as the public health threat waned). This can be seen, for example, in the iconic Action for the Crippled Child Charity Collection boxes.
The Bulletin was an exception to this. The bimonthly newsletter of the British Polio Fellowship (a polio support charity founded in 1939), it was produced by and for polio disabled individuals and provides insight into many aspects of life and experiences of polio disability, from the 1940s to the present day.
During the 1960s, The Bulletin affirmed and celebrated difference, focusing on experiences of ‘life going on’, including travel, sports (especially swimming, table tennis, and bowling), work, driving, and romance. This was especially powerful in the visual culture, with many images submitted by polio disabled readers themselves, which showed visibly polio disabled people as a fact of life and embodied reality. Representations of ‘feel-good’ experiences which aimed to inspire others dominated The Bulletin, all driving home the central message of ‘overcoming’. These ranged from modest to more extreme, including ‘He Can’t Walk, but He’s Cycled 184,000 Miles’, ‘He Cuts Steak with his Feet’ and an article about severely polio disabled Frank Baillie, who used special apparatus to paint pictures by moving his head.
Polio disabled Frank Baillie Painting with his Head, The Bulletin, May 1965, p. 3. Image Credit: The British Polio Fellowship
Of course, not everyone was capable of what literary scholar Thomas Couser terms ‘supercrip overcoming’, those with disabilities who were able to reach extraordinary and seemingly unattainable goals. Indeed, The Bulletin presented a somewhat sanitised account of living with polio disability, one which did not adequately consider bodily difficulties and experiences of pain. It also continued to tacitly reproduce contemporary gender expectations, and ethnic minorities were conspicuously absent, demonstrating that the agency of disabled people in constructing their own representations does not necessarily make them unproblematic.
Whilst disabled identity was not often positively recognised in mainstream culture until the 1990s, The Bulletin constructed and projected a positive polio disabled identity long before this. It fostered a sense of pride, often around notions of uniqueness and exceptionalism, placing emphasis upon the internal characteristics of polio disabled people, including hard work, determination, and tenacity, idealising those who could and did ‘get on with things’. For example, Dennis Atkins, who relied on an Iron Lung respirator for survival (irreverently termed a ‘Responaut’), was portrayed as having led an enjoyable life because he was determined to do so, using ‘sheer grit to inject tenacious spirit into a confined existence’. This polio disabled identity was constructed as unique and exceptional, something which is especially interesting because positive self-identification is usually associated with congenital rather than acquired disability, seen for example in the Deaf community.
The Bulletin was a key mechanism in asserting presence, significance, and identity, as polio became increasingly relegated to the past and to other places through the 1960s and 1970s. It provided a space for polio disabled individuals to represent themselves and construct a cohesive and positive social identity, though one which was not without its limitations.
As World Polio Day encourages us to focus on vaccination and the achievement of a ‘world free from polio’, it is important to remember the histories and enduring lived realities of those disabled by polio, for whom the impacts will linger long after biomedical ‘eradication’.
When official history falls silent, who remembers the war?
This question lies at the heart of Lebanon’s troubled relationship with the memory of its Civil War (1975–90). More than three decades after the conflict ended, the war remains a deeply contested part of Lebanon’s past. Lebanon has had no comprehensive state-led truth commission or national reconciliation process, and the Civil War remains largely absent from the official history curriculum. Memories of the conflict therefore remain fragmented across communities, families, political affiliations, and generations.
But silence does not mean that the past has disappeared. When official history falls silent, other forms of remembering emerge. Novels, poems, paintings, films, photographs, and testimonies become archives of experiences that institutions have failed—or refused—to preserve.
Arab women, including the Syrian novelist Ghada al-Samman, the Lebanese-born poet, novelist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, and the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, have created some of the most powerful alternative archives of the Lebanese Civil War. They refuse to let the conflict disappear into historical silence. Their works expand what it means to remember war. Sometimes, remembering means recording a nightmare, preserving a fragment, painting a ruined landscape, or making people laugh in the face of sectarian violence.
When everyday life becomes an archive
Ghada al-Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, written during the Civil War, takes us away from the conventional battlefield and into the intimate space of a woman’s home. The protagonist is trapped in Beirut during the siege. Snipers, shelling, hunger and fear transform the apartment from a place of safety into a prison. Yet the novel does something more than document the violence surrounding the protagonist. It records what war feels like in the body: insomnia, terror, hunger, exhaustion, and the constant anticipation of death. Conventional histories of war tend to privilege battlefields, political negotiations, military leaders, and armed combatants. Yet Al-Samman asks us to look elsewhere. The protagonist’s manuscript, written under siege, becomes an alternative archive, preserving experiences that might otherwise disappear. The home becomes a site of resistance, while the female body becomes a record of a war that official narratives cannot fully capture.
When a broken story tells the truth
Etel Adnan approaches the problem of remembering differently. Her Sitt Marie Rose, The Arab Apocalypse, Of Cities and Women, and her visual art refuse to offer a single, coherent version of the Lebanese Civil War. Instead, Adnan gives us fragments, contradictions, symbols, and ruined, blood-red landscapes. Her work captures the experiences of living through violence when the familiar structures that make life intelligible—home, city, community, language, and identity—are themselves fractured.
In Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan recounts the story of Marie Rose Boulos, a Christian educator who worked with Palestinian refugees. Marie Rose’s commitment to crossing sectarian boundaries places her in direct conflict with the patriarchal and sectarian logic of the war. Her murder exposes how women’s bodies and choices become battlegrounds for competing ideas of community, loyalty, and nation.
In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan takes fragmentation even further. Language itself seems to break apart. Words, images and symbols collide, while recurring suns and ruined landscapes replace the orderly historical timeline we might expect.
In Of Cities and Women, Adnan reimagines Beirut through personal memory and encounters with the city, challenging the idea that its history fits into a single narrative. Her attention to women, displacement, and place offers a gendered reimagining of the city and its histories.
Adnan’s visual art performs a similar archival function without relying on documentary representation. Landscapes and abstract forms become traces through which loss, destruction, and memory remain visible.
These works create another way of remembering. Adnan’s fragments resist the demand to make war appear coherent, reconciled, or safely contained in the past. Her art keeps the wounds visible. The result is an archive without the appearance of an archive: no official monument, no single narrative, no authorised voice. Memory survives instead through images, fragments, landscapes and voices that refuse to settle into one version of history.
Can humour remember war?
Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? takes yet another approach. The film is set in an unnamed Lebanese village divided by sectarian tensions. Its women are determined to prevent the men from turning those divisions into violence. But they do not confront the men through conventional political power. Instead, they destroy radios, manipulate religious symbols, hire Ukrainian dancers to distract the men, and even drug their meals to keep weapons out of their hands. The scenes are absurd and often genuinely funny. But the humour conceals a serious question: who carries the responsibility for remembering what war does to a community?
Labaki’s women know what another cycle of violence will cost. While their interventions are acts of care, they are also acts of historical resistance. They try to prevent the past from becoming the future. The film therefore turns women’s everyday labour—mourning, caring, organising, persuading, protecting—into political action. Its unnamed village also transforms the story into a wider reflection on communities divided by violence: what happens when neighbours become enemies, and when the wounds of one generation become the inheritance of the next?
Beyond preserving the past
What connects Al-Samman, Adnan, and Labaki is not simply that they write about the Lebanese Civil War, but how they remember it.
Al-Samman records the war through the female body and the domestic space. Adnan fragments its history through literature, symbols and visual art. Labaki transforms remembrance into tragicomedy, showing women attempting to interrupt the repetition of violence. Together, their different forms create what I call “alternative archives”: cultural memory that exists outside official institutions and challenges the silences surrounding the conflict. They challenge official institutions’ authority over what counts as history and reshape our understanding of feminist resistance; for these women are not simply adding women’s experiences to an established history of the Lebanese Civil War. They question how history is produced, showing that women’s fear, grief, survival, creativity, care and resistance are not secondary to the “real” history of war; rather, they are history itself. A monument can preserve a name; a textbook can preserve a date; an archive can preserve a document. But a novel can preserve a feeling; a painting can preserve a wound; a film can preserve a gesture; and a woman’s testimony can preserve what an official history leaves behind.
When official history falls silent, remembering becomes more than looking backwards. It becomes a struggle over who has the right to tell the story and, ultimately, who has the right to imagine what comes next.
The presidential election of 1860 was, in the words of eminent Civil War scholar James McPherson, “undeniably the most important – and pivotal – in all of American History.” But the election, which culminated with the election of Abraham Lincoln after a chaotic campaign which saw parties disintegrate, dark horses flourish, and secessionists plot the undoing of the republic itself,
Explore the timeline below to follow along on some of the key moments in the nation’s most momentous campaign.
In his most recent work, historian and OUP author Alexander Mikaberidze turns his expansive, globally minded lens to one of the most familiar episodes in American history—the Louisiana Purchase—and reveals just how far its story reaches beyond a simple land deal. Best known for his work on the Napoleonic Wars, Mikaberidze brings the same cross-border, deeply archival approach to this project, tracing the Purchase through the tangled currents of empire, revolution, and political ambition that connected Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Here, he reflects on the enduring pull of Napoleonic history, the serendipity of research, and why the Louisiana Purchase still has urgent meaning today.
1. You’ve spent much of your career immersed in the world of the Napoleonic Wars. What was the moment when this period first caught your imagination—and what keeps pulling you back to it?
As a kid, I was very susceptible to the romance of the past. The decisive moment came at the start of middle school when I stumbled across a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. I was, quite simply, swept away. Here was this improbable figure—a provincial outsider from a small island—who seemed to bend an entire continent to his will. It read like a romantic saga, the kind that makes you forget about your own problems (and in the turbulent 1990s, there were many problems in the former Soviet republics!). The Napoleonic legend has a way of doing that, as it doesn’t just inform; it recruits. And I responded.
What keeps me returning is the complexity of the past. The closer you get, the more it fractures into competing perspectives, new narratives, and additional layers. It’s an inexhaustible subject, and after over two decades studying the Napoleonic Era, I am only just starting to get a good grasp of it.
2. Your work often crosses borders, languages, and archives. When you’re deep in research, what does a good working day actually look like for you—and where do you most often get pleasantly stuck?
A good research day begins, as all respectable obsessions do, with a cup of coffee and a false sense of control. When I’m in the archives, I arrive with a plan—a list of dossiers to order, documents to peruse, and old leads to follow up—and within an hour that plan is usually in ruins. Some obscure document opens onto a new set of questions, which leads to a detour into entirely unfamiliar territory. At home, my working day is really a working night. Once lectures are finished, papers graded, and family attended to, I turn to reading and writing, usually well after ten o’clock. So, I tend to work past midnight, when everything has gone quiet and the world, for a few hours at least, stops making demands. I surround myself with piles of books and documents and slowly read through them all, taking notes and creating outlines. I’ve always had a particular fondness for tracing details, especially those included in footnotes. More often than not, those are the threads that unravel something larger. I recall one such instance when an innocent inquiry into a single footnote sent me chasing leads across European archives and auction houses. The trail eventually led me to the Lilly Library, where I found a rare Georgian illuminated manuscript long thought lost.
3. How different did it feel to write about the Louisiana Purchase compared with Napoleon’s Europe? Were there habits you had to unlearn—or new ones you picked up along the way?
In some ways, it felt less like a departure than a continuation under a different name. The story of the Louisiana Purchase is so closely intertwined with subjects I had already spent years studying—European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution, and, of course, Napoleon—that the transition was more seamless than I initially expected. If anything, the shift was one of emphasis rather than method. My earlier focus of tracing connections across borders—which led to the writing of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History—proved just as essential here. The Purchase only really makes sense when placed within those overlapping imperial and revolutionary contexts; taken in isolation, it risks losing a lot of important details.
4. After years of writing big, interconnected histories, what part of the process do you enjoy most now—and what part still gives you pause every time you start a new book?
What I enjoy most is the moment when the material begins to “talk back.” After years of research, there comes a point when the documents stop feeling like scattered fragments and begin to form a kind of chorus. Shaping that into a cohesive story feels less like construction and more like listening closely enough to catch the underlying rhythm. What still gives me pause is the beginning… There’s a particular sense of terror of realizing the depth of the subject that you will have to explore and then staring at the blank page knowing how many lives and complexities you’re bound to compress into prose. It’s a useful anxiety, though—it keeps you honest about the challenge, and more importantly, keeps you striving for a deeper understanding of what actually transpired.
5. If readers take away one big idea from The Louisiana Purchase that reframes how they think about global history, what do you hope it will be?
If there’s one idea, I’d hope readers carry away, it’s that the Louisiana Purchase was not a neat bilateral transaction—the familiar “greatest real estate deal,” measured out in a few cents per acre. It was (and in many ways, remains) a hinge in a much larger story of imperial rivalry and global entanglement, stretching across both space and time. It is a story that continues to ask something of us—serving as a striking historical precedent, for instance, when the United States recently revisited the idea of acquiring Greenland. I hope the Louisiana Purchase would compel readers to confront the past with candor and to reckon with the tangled complexities of our national story.
I think all historians, whether they admit it or not, are engaged in an ongoing conversation, sometimes amicable, sometimes argumentative. In approaching the Louisiana Purchase as a longue durée history, I found myself naturally echoing Fernand Braudel, with his expansive sense of time and structure. He has a way of reminding you that events are only ever the visible surface of much deeper currents. At the same time, scholars like William Dalrymple, Simon Schama, Gordon Wood, and Alan Taylor bring a narrative vitality that makes you want to match their energy, if not quite their eloquence. This book also owes a great deal to recent Louisiana Purchase studies, too many to mention all, but I will highlight a few: to Robert Lee on long-term consequences; to Mark Edward Hay and Larry Neal, whose economic histories of the Purchase have helped shape my own thinking; and to Peter J. Kastor, whose scholarship on the Purchase’s impact on the American identity has influenced many of my conclusions.
These are the words that have guided the Very Short Introduction series for over thirty years. With over ten million copies sold worldwide, it’s become a universally accessible way to gain new knowledge (ChatGPT, eat your heart out).
To celebrate the publication of our 800thVery Short Introduction, we’ve put together a timeline featuring our series milestones, from our first Introduction co-authored by famed classicist Mary Beard, all the way to our upcoming introduction to rock ‘n’ roll.
