x

Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

Menu

Higher Education Admissions Practices

The new year brings with it wishes for health and happiness. But for many secondary school students, the beginning of the year also brings anxiety about completing college applications, apprehension waiting...

Cathy Wendler | 7 Feb 2020

Long Live Beatlemania

The following text is excerpted from chapter 8 of The Beatles in Context (ed. by Kenneth Womack), ‘Beatlemania,’ by Melissa Davis. Beatlemania: biːt (ə) lˈmeɪnɪə/ From Gr (noun) mania...

6 Feb 2020

Who Benefits?

What can musical benefits tell us about the ecology of performance in eighteenth-century Britain? Why did musical benefits become such an integral part of a performer’s work in the eighteenth century?...

Alison DeSimone, Matthew Gardner | 5 Feb 2020

Poetry and Language

People who love poetry are not likely to love these sorts of thing:  ˌɪntərˈnæʃənəl fəˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəbɪt VP   ->   t (M) (have + prf) (be + prg) V *h2ner-seerg ...

Michael Ferber | 3 Feb 2020

Tiny Things and Why We Love Them (and what they do to us…)

Why do people adore tiny things? From souvenir keychains to dollhouses, Christmas ornaments to refrigerator magnets, the act of shrinking a life-size thing to a smaller scale has an influential effect....

Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper | 3 Feb 2020

THE AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH: A HISTORY

As an awe-struck adolescent in attendance at the 1962 Pittsburgh Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, I saw Bishop Richard R. Wright, Jr., a scholarly protégé of W. E. B. Du Bois....

Dennis C Dickerson | 31 Jan 2020

Moneyball for the Huddled Masses

In a thought-provoking piece in Politico Magazine , Professor Justin Gest proposes a “Moneyball Fix” for America’s immigration system.  Taking a page out of sports analytics, he suggests that...

Matthew Wright, Morris Levy | 30 Jan 2020

Sing to Me Muse…

Where do the Iliad and Odyssey come from? The story of these ancient epic poems is a “complicated” one (to borrow Emily Wilson’s inspired translation of the Homeric epithet polytropos, a word that...

Corinne Ondine Pache, Casey Due, Susan Lupack, Robert Lamberton | 30 Jan 2020

Trump and Iran Go Back Years

We do not yet know whether President Trump’s killing of Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most powerful leader, will prove to be a masterstroke or a disaster. The president’s antipathy toward the Islamic...

Timothy J Lynch | 27 Jan 2020

An Introduction to How Party Activism Survives

Party activism, understood as individuals voluntarily and regularly participating in party-related activities (i.e. not simply for electoral campaigns), seems to be a thing of the past. In the best-case...

Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Rafael Piñeiro Rodríguez, Fernando Rosenblatt | 24 Jan 2020

Associating with Dickinson: What the Manuscripts Can Tell Us About the Poet’s Conversation with her Culture

I hate movies about Emily Dickinson, and novels. I hate even the idea of the play. I hate impudent rapey poems addressed to Dickinson by entitled male poets. I hate the mugs, pot holders, T-shirts, and...

Melanie Hubbard | 24 Jan 2020

Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature

When I was writing Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, a book primarily about two writers, the Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, back in the 1990s, the opening sentence of the jacket blurb read:...

Warren Chernaik | 24 Jan 2020