As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States. Still, the sport spread quickly beyond U.S. borders, and took hold in many other parts of the world. It became the national sport of both Cuba and Japan, and migrated from there to many of the lands where fans pay to watch live games and also follow professional leagues abroad. Here are five sites that illuminate baseball’s complex geography.
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 Housingby 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The purpose of any abstract is to summarise your article’s content in a way that will help potential readers decide if they want to read your work. An abstract usually runs between 150 and 300 words and will likely be your readers’ first interaction with your research article, so you must write it with that in mind. It should be intelligible on its own, without someone needing to have read your whole article or have in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand to follow the abstract’s meaning.
Interdisciplinary abstracts are more complex than abstracts aimed at a single discipline, since they must appeal to a wider range of readers with radically varying knowledge bases. What follows is a list of eight key strategies for writing clear, compelling abstracts for interdisciplinary research. It’s not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive, but I hope it will help if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the amount of ground you’re expected to cover in such a small number of words.
Start with the hook A stand-up comic once told me that the golden rule of comedy is to always start with your best joke. This advice can be applied to writing abstracts: start with the hook. The ‘hook’ is the most exciting and impactful feature of your work. It answers the perennial questions of ‘So what?’ and ‘Why should anyone care?’ If you can convincingly answer these questions in the first sentence of your abstract, readers are much more likely to want to read the full article.
Often, the hook is placed at the end of the abstract as an enticement to read more, but increasingly I think it can be more effective when placed in the very first sentence of an interdisciplinary abstract. When writing up interdisciplinary research, you are appealing to a wider readership that goes beyond the confines of one discipline, so you must capture their attention right from the off with a statement of impact that makes it abundantly clear why researchers in multiple disciplines need to read your work. Then, you can move onto specifics like background and methods.
State your purpose Every abstract should state the central research question or aim of the article, in the clearest possible terms, and justify why it must be answered. It is possible for an article to answer more than one research question, but juggling multiple research questions often leads to an unfocused argument and an overly long article. An article of six-to-ten thousand words gives you enough time to answer one central research question very convincingly, and it is better to do this than to answer multiple research questions less convincingly. Before moving on, you must clarify why it is important to answer that research question. Why is this research necessary and how does the article address that need?
Summarise disciplinary contexts Your interdisciplinary article likely builds upon recent developments in more than one discipline, so you should not assume that readers will be conversant in all the disciplines with which your work engages. Use a couple of sentences to explain key developments in each relevant discipline that directly impact your research. Focus only on what’s essential for understanding your argument. Keep this concise, though, as abstracts should not be overloaded with contextual information.
Explain your methods Interdisciplinary methods are complex but enriching. They usually pull together and combine research techniques from multiple disciplines. Due to this complexity, interdisciplinary abstracts are sometimes overloaded with technical terminology that seem impenetrable to many readers. Take care to explain your methods or theoretical framework and why they help you answer your research question, keeping jargon to a minimum and defining key technical terms with which readers may not be familiar.
Defend your interdisciplinarity Interdisciplinary research is often called upon to justify its existence as interdisciplinary research. There are large numbers of scholars who are sceptical about the very idea of interdisciplinarity. If you are to retain these scholars as readers, you must explain in your abstract why an interdisciplinary approach to your research question is not only possible but essential. Some problems demand interdisciplinary approaches, others do not. You need to convince readers that your work fits into the former category and explain why you have assembled your unique interdisciplinary methodology or theoretical framework to respond to this research question.
Forecast your results Some abstracts won’t do this because the authors prefer to keep the revelation of their findings back for the conclusion of their article. I prefer abstracts to at least forecast the results of the research, simply because this might convince more prospective readers to engage with and cite your article if they know from reading the abstract that its results have direct implications for their own research.
Use an economy of words All your sentences should have a purpose. Meandering trains of thought that take a while to get to the point do not have a place in an abstract, so remove anything that is even slightly tangential. Bear in mind that an abstract is also a discovery aid, since the text of an abstract is often part of the metadata that is pulled across to bibliographic indexes such as SCOPUS and Google Scholar. Consequently, an abstract should include the kind of words you imagine potential readers might type into a library catalogue or online search tool. You will often be asked to provide a list of keywords alongside your abstract, and it is a good idea to work them into the text of the abstract itself to boost your article’s discoverability further.
Write assertively Abstracts are not the place to be modest about your achievements. Use assertive verbs and write in the present tense: say ‘this article does X’ rather than ‘this article aims to do X’ or ‘this article will do X’. Avoid hedging your bets, with words like ‘arguably’ and ‘potentially’ or an overly liberal use of the conditional. And above all: back yourself! It is expected for a research article to contain detailed discussion of other researchers’ work. That is not the case for an abstract, which should foreground your own original interpretation.
Walter Benjamin, the intellectual hero of the 1968 generation and one of the most influential figures in German cultural and media studies, is still regarded as the quintessential melancholic. Yet his work is interwoven with reflections on humour and the political opportunities it offers.
Despite the evident interest in Benjamin today, his views on humour have received little attention so far. One reason for that may be that, unlike his explorations of melancholy, mourning, and allegory, his thoughts on this matter do not exactly leap out at the reader. In Benjamin’s oeuvre, humour plays a role similar to how he described the relationship between comedy and tragedy. He observed that while comedy is ‘the essential inner side of mourning,’ its presence is subtle—much like ‘the lining of a dress’, which may occasionally flash into view at the hem or lapel. In this manner, humour is neither a counterpart to the much-discussed interweaving of melancholy and the allegorical form of perception in Benjamin’s work, nor an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is an integral part of a complex, often ambivalent structure of tension, consistently entangled with elements of melancholy, seriousness, and darkness.
The fashion metaphor of inner linings reveals a theoretical contraband that appears from time to time at significant points in Benjamin’s writings, spanning from his early linguistic-philosophical works to his media-aesthetic theses on cinema and his late materialistic concept of history. But rather than being the subject of a comprehensive study, his insights on humour are scattered across a wide range of texts. Most of these are small forms—critiques, fragments, satirical pieces—that engage with contemporary debates and bear witness to striking intellectual constellations. These include the engagement with authors such as Paul Scheerbart, Salomo Friedlaender, Karl Kraus, Jean Paul, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Sigmund Freud, Charles Fourier, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and others. Moreover, laughter plays a crucial role in Benjamin’s writings on childlike modes of perception and expression, the reception of technology via popular culture, and his experimentation with hashish. Benjamin often expresses his ideas on humour only in passing, making it all the more surprising how much importance he attaches to this phenomenon. In this vein, The Author as Producer claims: ‘It may be noted, incidentally, that there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. In particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul.’ If, however, laughter is the best way to stimulate thinking, where does it lead in Benjamin’s thought?
To begin with, Benjamin is not concerned with fundamental anthropological patterns of a universal human condition (unlike his contemporary Helmuth Plessner, for example). Instead, his focus is on concrete historical constellations, which possess specific expressive forms for capturing the experience of contemporary history. Whether looking at the literature of Gottfried Keller or Disney’s Mickey Mouse, the central question is always how humour, cheerfulness, laughter, and wit provide opportunities for dealing with one’s own time in a productive way—both aesthetically and politically; regardless of whether the time is marked by the massive upheavals of bourgeois society in the canton of Zurich around 1848, or by the overwhelming technological advancements of the period between the world wars. Productivity in this context means, first and foremost, critical thinking.
From very early on, Benjamin believed that humour serves as a mode of genuine criticism. In his letters, he compares it to rays of light that illuminate and dissect whatever they touch. At the same time, since laughter testifies to ‘shattered articulation’, humour has a tension-filled connection to language, pointing to a fundamental conflict between what is or can be expressed and what remains inexpressible. This disruption of human words is vital, as it also means the disruption of one of their fundamental operations: the distinction between good and evil, which is a basic condition of human judgment. In a fragment from around 1917 and 1918, now translated in our Forum Special Issue into English for the first time, Benjamin presents humour as an act that can bypass or even subvert judgment, thereby allowing for a different, higher form of justice beyond conventional moral norms. Benjamin greatly admired Johann Peter Hebel’s calendar stories, as he saw ‘applied justice’ in their humour. Rather than relying on judgment and punishment, he perceived this applied justice in Hebel’s stories as emerging from vivid narration, composition, and a scenic dramaturgy, animated by small rogues and swindlers and enriched by an abundance of details and props. What becomes apparent is a penchant for microscopic humour that avoids grand gestures and operates at the level of concretion.
These early thoughts stayed with Benjamin throughout his career, right up to his later work, where he emphasized the utopian qualities of laughter. Humour emerges in Benjamin’s work as a site of thought where his early writings intersect and resonate with his later materialist reflections. Notably, even in the Arcades Project, he draws inspiration from his initial ideas on humour. Of particular note here is the enormous relevance of early science fiction writer Paul Scheerbart. In his astral novels, Benjamin perceived not a description of reality at work, but the radical attempt to change it. In fact, Scheerbart’s visions of glass and lightweight architecture had a decisive role in shaping modern and even post-war architecture in Germany and elsewhere. Benjamin appreciated this offbeat author for two reasons. First, he valued Scheerbart’s understanding of technology as a medium of interacting with nature rather than dominating it. Second, he admired the humour in Scheerbart’s literature, which he felt could facilitate a profound metamorphosis of both human beings and society. It is precisely this metamorphosis that encapsulates the political potential of humor as higher justice. Ultimately, through the lens of laughter, there is still a great deal to discover in Benjamin’s aesthetic and political thought.
