“In the New World, these fried dough balls were served year-round for breakfast lunch, and dinner. Writers reminisce about eating the fried treats during the Revolutionary ear; soldiers were feted with doughnuts before being sent to war. Even New England whalers, far from home, fried doughnuts in rendered whale blubber.”
GIF by Nicole Piendel for Oxford University Press.
50 years on, the revolt of May ‘68 in France continues to
reverberate in art as well as politics. While the events in Paris are often
remembered for the student barricades and the now famous slogans - 'under the
cobblestones, the beach’ or 'kill the cop in your head’ - the upheaval produced
the largest general strike in history. Paris provided an inspiration for a
political and cultural transformation, but it would be wrong to isolate the
French upheaval from wider international currents. The Prague Spring and
disgust at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia fuelled a rejection of
Stalinism; the Vietnam War produced international opposition; and the
inspiration of anti-colonial movements around the globe from China to Cuba and
Africa served to radicalise students and young workers. The rise of
dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere and the Neoliberal backlash
against progressive ideas and practices were a response to this rising tide.
This cycle of unrest gave rise to the New Left, whether Maoist or Trotskyist in
inspiration, and a wave of theoretical initiatives linked to unorthodox Marxisms.
Alongside this growth of leftwing parties, new political projects developed:
the Black Panther movement in the USA; the Women’s Liberation Movement; the Gay
Liberation Front; and movements of indigenous people. In many ways, the 'event’
of '68 initiated a political cycle that
we are still living through.
Artists
who were not intent on ‘sleeping through the deluge that threatens them’, as
Adorno put it, could not help but be touched by this wave of unrest. Those that
were awake often participated in the struggles of the time as political
subjects and as artists. Of course, artists did not just respond to this new
mood, they were also some of its progenitors. The Situationist International
and the films of Goddard fed into the radical upswing and the posters appearing
on the streets of Paris represent a significant feature of the period.
Nevertheless, '68 opened a criticism of prevalent conservative attitudes in art
as elsewhere. The American artist Dan Graham put it like this: ‘[t]he art world
stinks; it is made up of people who collectively dig the shit; now seems to be
the time to get the collective shit out of the system.’ As artists and critics
broke with formalism, a gamut of radical initiatives developed too extensive to
catalogue here, but we might mention Supports/Surfaces group in France; the Art
Workers’ Coalition in the US; Tucuman Arde and Cildo Meireles in South America;
the new cinema cultures of France, Germany, Brazil and Senegal; and the
politicisation of Conceptual Art in San Diego and London, which had such
significant implications for photography and gender. New ways of thinking from
Tel Quel to the Social History of Art are rooted in this moment; as is the
impetus to recover the many significant artists who had been marginalised by the
dominant story, whether as women, artists of colour and those working under
colonialism, politicos or those who simply didn’t fit.
A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1806, American politician Andrew Jackson killed Charles Dickinson in a duel over a horse race. Jackson would later go on to become the 7th President of the United States in 1829.
“In 1822 William Duane, the editor of Philadelphia’s Aurora and a fierce critic of banks, floated Jackson’s name as a potential presidential candidate, and two years later, as James Monroe prepared to step down as president (and the last representative in the White House of the generation of 1776), Jackson began acquiring a wave of endorsements from those state legislatures hit hardest by the 1819 economic panic. The front-runners, Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, represented the new edge of pro-banking, pro-improvement thinking within Jefferson’s old party; they did not welcome in Jackson an interloper who looked determined to undo everything in a new American economy. The election of 1824 proved that Clay and Adams were much less convincing to the American public. Clay, Adams, and Jackson ended their race for the presidency in a three-way split that forced the decision into the hands of Congress—was Adams finally elected. But Adams’s presidency was handicapped by the rumor that Adams and Henry Clay had struck a
“corrupt bargain” to throw Clay’s support behind Adams in return for appointment as Adams’s secretary of state. Jackson never doubted for a moment that he ought to have been the winner, and in 1828, when Adams and Jackson faced off again for the presidency, Jackson won a resounding victory.”
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Image credit: Portrait of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl (1785/88–1838). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
There are very few dishes which are eaten during Ramadan across all Muslim communities. The foods that make up the evening meal vary across every region of the Muslim world. One prevalent tradition is to break the fast by eating dates, which has its roots in the time of the Prophet
Muhammad. This tradition is widely observed in the Arab peninsula where date cultivation is ubiquitous.
Every year World Digestive Health Day
focuses on particular digestive disorder or disease in order to increase
awareness of issues, treatments, and prevention. In support of 2018 World Digestive Health Day’s theme, “Viral Hepatitis, B and C: Lift the Global Burden,” we have put together a list of articles on health, hepatitis, and digestive issues.
Thanks to modern taxonomy we can identify and classify species of plants, animals, and other organisms with relative ease. But rewind to the early modern period and things were a lot more difficult.
At that time, every cabinet was likely filled with a great diversity of material, and when collectors did begin to favour one category of material over another, such as plants, amphibians, or even specific types of insects, they were faced with a dilemma: how does one develop specific
strategies for the structuring and arrangement of specimens in an era when understanding of animal and plant anatomy was basic?
Images used with permission. Click on image for full credit.
Romance
fraud: ‘Where a person is defrauded by an offender(s) through what the
victim perceives to be a genuine relationship.’
While romance fraud can happen online or
offline, one
third of cases reported were initiated using social media, and a case of
dating fraud is reported every
three hours. But how do offenders convince their victims to send them
money?
New research in The British
Journal of Criminologyshows
that romance fraudsters often use similar techniques as domestic violence
abusers, including extensive psychological abuse such as isolation, verbal
abuse, and emotional withdrawal, which causes severe trauma for victims and
often results in victims sending large amounts of money to the offender.
Image credit: “Selfie Mobile Phone Portrait Hood Hoodie” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay.
Congratulations to the class of 2018! Many recent grads
struggle with transitioning from being a student to working full-time, but
there are steps
new workers can take to make this major life change successful.
Image by Stephanie King for Oxford University Press.
