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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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What makes us human?

What makes us human? What (if anything) sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed us back to our own animal nature....

Julia Kindt | 19 Jan 2024

A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918

Between 1780 and 1918 over 1 million petitions were sent to the UK House of Commons. These petitions, which addressed over 33,000 issues, were signed by 165 million people. The colossal scale of petitioning...

Henry J. Miller | 18 Jan 2024

Why is Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions so important?

Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, over 60 years ago.  The book is principally remembered for the role it attributes to paradigm change in the development of science. ...

K. Brad Wray | 18 Jan 2024

Kant’s First Critique and the Method of Metaphysics

The main claim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press 2023) is that the Critique of Pure Reason should be read as the doctrine of method...

Gabriele Gava | 18 Jan 2024

David Stefan Doddington, Old Age and American Slavery

Dorothea Lange, photographer. Ex-slave and wife on steps of plantation house now in decay. Greene County, Georgia (loc.gov) In my book, Old Age and American Slavery, I explore perceptions of old...

David Stefan Doddington | 12 Jan 2024

Can a fallible text be liberating, in relating to other faiths?

St Andrew’s Anglican church, Tangier Can religions change? Historically, the evidence is overwhelming that they do. But for believers standing against this has long been the notion of revelation...

David Brown | 11 Jan 2024

Invoking Counsel in the United States: A Game Facilitated by the Law

My work as a forensic linguist provided a window into the interrogation room. One of the cases in which I consulted was a criminal appellate case in which the defendant’s invocation for counsel was...

Marianne Mason | 9 Jan 2024

The Tea Party Insurgency and the Great Recession:

It Was the Economy, Again, Stupid! The Great Recession, a global economic crisis that began in 2007, generated extensive protest of varying intensity and form in nations around the world. The typical...

John D. McCarthy, Patrick Rafail | 9 Jan 2024

On Bilinguals and Bilingualism: Fifty Years in the Field

Academics first become interested in a research field in different ways – some by following a course at university, others through listening and talking to motivating speakers, others by events they...

François Grosjean | 3 Jan 2024

Can the Aristotelian-Thomistic School of Thought Embrace the Evolutionary View of Reality?

The question of whether the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic school of thought may correspond with the evolutionary worldview continues to inspire research and (sometimes heated) debates. A number...

Mariusz Tabaczek | 29 Dec 2023

Ableism: An Ancient Prejudice?

In 2017 a new musical about the life of Louis Braille, The Braille Legacy, opened in London. The show was widely criticised for its flagrant inaccessibility: of the 90 performances, only two were Audio...

Marchella Ward | 21 Dec 2023

The United States Army after the Cold War

‘American soldiers in Cap Haitien, Haiti, during Operation Uphold Democracy in October 1994.’ Image credit: US National Archives (NARA). In late 1999, the United States Army found itself confronted...

David Fitzgerald | 14 Dec 2023