Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Today is Library Workers Day! How are you showing your appreciation for the library workers in your life?
Image created by Eleanor Robson for Oxford University Press
Happy National Poetry Month!
Since 1996, the Academy of American Poets has designated April as National Poetry Month, a period to celebrate the importance of poetry within our culture. American National Biography has created an animated graphic, linking to the biographies of America’s most famous poets. From Auden to Whitman, learn more about the American poets who helped influence poetry today.
7 April 2019 marks 25 years since the start of the Rwandan Genocide, when approximately 800,000 Rwandans were killed in a period of 100 days. To mark this anniversary, African Affairs journal has created a free virtual issue of their best scholarly articles on Rwanda. Don’t miss this opportunity to read about the legacy of genocide and Rwandan politics under the RPF.
Image provided by Wikimedia Commons
Happy National Beer Day!
7 April celebrates the day in 1933 when the Cullen-Harrison Act was officially enacted into law, legalizing the sales of beer after prohibition. For millennium, beer has been one of the most popular drinks across cultures. Learn more in Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World.
On average, 100 million people per year are driven into severe poverty as a result of their healthcare spending. As the global spend on healthcare continues to increase, it is more important than ever that people aren’t required to pay for essential services out of their own pockets. This principle is known as universal health coverage and describes the situation in which everyone receives the health services they need without suffering financial hardship. The big push towards achieving universal health coverage relies on health systems delivering a high standard of primary health care.
It is important to recognize that although labelled as universal health coverage, this is not a one size fits all solution, and approaches should be adapted depending on countries’ current climates. As part of the Sustainable Development Goals outlined by the United Nations, all member states have an objective in place to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. In addition to reaping immediate benefits to populations, these goals also help to deliver long-term, sustainable socio-economic changes for the future.
Read the latest universal health care research from Oxford Journals: https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/pages/universal_health_coverage.
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From rags to a giant grand piano? The Chronicle of Jazz follows the most imaginative and enduring music of the last 120 years. Included here are a few of the hundreds of rare images that are featured in the book, from record cover artwork to pictures of live performances.
- Harlem Rag. Private collection.
- Jelly Roll Blues. The Frank Driggs Collection.
- Fate Marable’s band. The Frank Driggs Collection.
- Sydney Bechet. © Redferns-William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress.
- Mamie Smith. The Frank Driggs Collection.
- Louis Armstrong. The Frank Driggs Collection.
- Fats Waller. Redferns/Michael Ochs Archives.
- Dorothy Dandridge. BFI Stills, Posters and Designs, London.
Image source: The Chronicle of Jazz
Happy Jazz Appreciation Month from OUP!
The Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory identifies 11 key criteria defining “masculinity”: the desire to win, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuals, and pursuit of status. Often overlooked in the discussion of “toxic masculinity” are the very real and specific negative consequences it has for men who adhere to these norms.
Image by Sarah Butcher for Oxford University Press
They want to be beautiful.
A blind head goes where a beak can’t.
On the mountain, larks flit into nothingness,
A brightness in water for a god rushing through.
A blessing haunts a soldier’s lips,
A man drags his shadow upstream.
A prisoner swirls on a water board
Blotches of snot, shards of cartilage,
Under blackened wings, the body’s broken grove.
Trees shift their vernacular into a swollen script.
Once in the Valley of Swat
A child herded goats, raced his golden kite.
Now walls crumble with light.
[“Jihad” by Meena Alexander. Literary Imagination, Volume 12, Issue 2, July 2010.]
National Poetry Month is celebrated nationally in April each year. This celebration was introduced in 1996 as a way to increase the awareness and recognition of poetry in the United States. Oxford University Press and the Literary Imagination journal have curated a special collection of recently published poems as well as the top read poems from 2018.
Graphic designed by Sarah Trostle for Oxford University Press. Background image provided by pexels.
"O thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro’ the clear windows of the morning; turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!"
Thro’ the clear windows of the morning; turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!"
— ‘To Spring’ by William Blake
A Very Short Fact: On this day, the 1974 Super Outbreak occurs, the second biggest tornado outbreak in recorded history. From April 3 to April 4, 1974, there were 148 tornadoes confirmed in 13 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario.
“Tornadoes are produced by supercell systems, which, as just described, are particularly prevalent over the central states of the USA (the High Plains). Tornadoes tend to form from supercells along the dryline between the warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and the drier air from the desert states to the south-west. Although details are still obscure, the method of tornado formation differs from other rotating vortices, which may be grouped under the general term of ‘whirls’, and which will be described shortly. Although the media tend to describe all rotating vortices as ‘tornadoes’ or ‘twisters’, there are two distinct mechanisms at work. Tornadoes appear to originate within a supercell system as a horizontal, rotating cylinder of air. The strong updraughts lift the centre of the cylinder into an arch, and the ‘descending’ limb with clockwise rotation decays, leaving the ‘ascending’ branch as the incipient tornado. (The most common direction of rotation in a tornado is thus anticlockwise at the ground, but clockwise rotation is occasionally observed. Such vortices appear in a slightly different location, relative to the parent supercell.) The separation between the up- and downdraughts in a supercell helps to strengthen the vortex, which descends toward the ground as a funnel cloud (or ‘tuba’), becoming classified as a tornado when it touches down and raises a debris cloud.” — From ‘Weather: A Very Short Introduction’ by Storm Dunlop.
[Pg 106 - ‘Weather: A Very Short Introduction’ by Storm Dunlop.]
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