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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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The Scientific Interpretation of Experimental Results

How do scientists interpret the results of an experiment? How do they draw conclusions from experiments? In January of 1939, the young Alan Hodgkin decided to break in some new lab equipment and he had...

Kenneth Aizawa | 1 Dec 2025

Why Mediation, Why China? How China’s mediation system turns black-letter rules into workable harmony-and what that perspective offers the rest of us.

First, in China, mediation is not the “soft periphery” of law but one of the system’s operating cores. It is embedded across institutions: from people’s mediation at the grassroots, to court-led...

Hao Xiong | 28 Nov 2025

Power, Status, and the Dementia Care Relationship

One afternoon, having just clocked in, I sat down next to a resident of the care home where I worked in the mid-2010s and asked her what she thought about the programme she was watching on TV. Looking...

Matilda Carter | 28 Nov 2025

Back to the Future with István Hont

When the intellectual historian István Hont (1947-2013) defected to the United Kingdom in 1975, he knew that he would likely never see his native country or much of his family ever again. He also knew,...

Lasse S. Andersen | 27 Nov 2025

Why Kant Still Matters in an Age of Nihilism and Reaction

It is a commonplace too often taken for granted that the Enlightenment––in particular Kant’s grounding of morality in reason––was a failure. For some, the Enlightenment’s attempt to clear...

Jaqueline Mariña | 26 Nov 2025

Unveiling the Premodern World through the Lens of Global Travel Writing

What did it mean to travel in the premodern world – long before passports, maps, or reliable roads? Countless surviving yet often overlooked accounts open a window onto a time when people from Asia,...

Sebastian Sobecki | 26 Nov 2025

Why Did Mexico’s Reelection Experiment End So Quickly? My New Book Offers an Answer

On March 4, Mexico took a remarkable step backward: Congress approved a new electoral reform that will, once again, ban consecutive reelection for all elected officials starting in 2030, with the stated...

Lucia Motolinia | 26 Nov 2025

Pious Politics

In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a group with deep roots in religious politics, won a decisive electoral victory in Turkey. The party secured a majority of the national vote, formed a...

Zeynep Ozgen | 25 Nov 2025

Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early American Linguistics: An Introduction

My book, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early American Linguistics, addresses an audience of interested scholars and potential readers with the following concentrations: historians of linguistics with attention...

Emanuel J. Drechsel | 25 Nov 2025

How a post-fascist state model emerged in Cold War Latin America inspired by Francisco Franco’s Spain

During the 1960s and 1970s, most Latin American republics saw their democratic systems ousted by ruthless military dictatorships. Whether in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay, these regimes...

Daniel Gunnar Kressel | 24 Nov 2025

AI Language Technologies are Powerful—But Not Without Limits

Imagine waking up in the morning. You read your emails with the morning coffee and use Gmail’s autocomplete feature to compile the answers. Before leaving the house, you ask Siri for the weather forecast,...

Vered Shwartz | 24 Nov 2025

Flags and Nationalism, Then and Now

Any resident of the United Kingdom will have undoubtedly noticed the proliferation of St George’s Crosses and Union flags of late. Whereas I used to see a few such flags on my drive to work – often...

Patrick J. Doyle | 24 Nov 2025