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Intentional or unintentional falsification of data, understatement of information, distortion of statistics, manipulation or invention of new facts are periodically encountered in official document...

To say that the COVID19 pandemic has imposed a prolonged sense of uncertainty across the globe is an understatement. Individuals and families everywhere were thrust into an uninvited period of isolation that dismantled the predictability and familiarity of our daily lives.

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

Here’s my candidate for perhaps the biggest understatement of the year: the pandemic has been disorienting. I don’t think my experience has been exceptional but, even if it has just been me, the la...

To refer to Laura Millar’s A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age as timely is both an understatement and inaccurate. It is an understatement because, as of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as not only the most disruptive event across the globe in generations, but has also been subject to the worst excesses of the epistemic crisis that Millar details throughout the book. Perhaps now more than ever, facts, evidence, and the truths they support are urgently needed—they are a matter of life and death—but yet they are constantly subjugated to selective incredulity, confirmation bias, and political expediency. The reference to A Matter of Facts as timely is also inaccurate, not through the fault of the author’s straightforward approach or concise handling of the subject matter, but because any single work cannot possibly account for the depth of the problem of misinformation or anticipate the rate at which it has evolved and embedded itself into our social fabric in such short order. Certainly, Millar is aware of the intractable yet fluid nature of the current situation, and the developments in just the year or so since the book was published could very well provide a tremendous amount of cautionary fodder for an expanded edition at a later date.

To say this book was enjoyable is both an understatement and a misstatement. To read about the extensive environmental damage wrought in the nineteenth-century Victorian goldfields is sobering. The...

Using the term “legacy” for a career as productive, insightful, and pathbreaking as Chris Bayly's is doubtless an understatement. The movement in his publications from the transitional world in the Indian subcontinent leading to British imperialism, through aspects of high empire in India, to world history through both case studies and broader context for grasping the implications of a changing world, provides valuable analyses for all of us, if not a pattern many could replicate. Perhaps what ought to be noted here is the experience, common to many of us working across a very broad range of problematics and focal points, to have found Bayly there, before us.

Previous estimates of the impact of foreign official demand for U.S. Treasuries (USTs) on U.S. Treasury yields control for domestic conditions only. Yet global cyclical factors jointly shape U.S. yields and foreign demand for USTs. This paper recovers global factors from the cross-section of advanced economy sovereign bond yields, and shows that the impact of foreign official UST demand on U.S. 10-year yields is understated -- often by 50% -- when global factors are omitted. This understatement arises from the cyclical nature of UST accumulation by foreign officials, who buy (sell) USTs when safe asset yields are rising (falling) globally. Structural VAR evidence suggests that U.S. yields are particularly sensitive to official demand linked to China.

To say that the moral stain of racism pervades American history would be an understatement. One does not have to look hard to find examples where people of color were treated disparagingly or disparately. Thus, it should come as no surprise that throughout much of American history there are examples where race played a role in lawmakers deciding who may and may not acquire, own, and use firearms for lawful purposes, or where race was the principal factor in orchestrating state and non-state sponsored armed violence against people of color. The painful and often tragic historical intersection between race and firearms is indeed a complex and multi-faceted narrative worthy of examination and reflection, including in the area of history-in-law —that is the study of how the law has evolved in a particular area, what events and factors caused the law to evolve, and how, if at all, this history is important when adjudicating legal questions. Yet in the ongoing discourse over the purpose, meaning, and protective scope of the Second Amendment, the historical narrative of race and firearms is becoming increasingly misappropriated and hyperbolized. There are indeed numerous examples, but two are particularly concerning and exist at the extreme opposites of the Second Amendment political spectrum. The first—often stated by gun rights proponents—is history shows that gun control is inherently racist. The second—sometimes stated by gun control proponents—is that the Second Amendment itself is inherently racist, with some going so far to claim the right to “keep and bear arms” is on historically on par with the Constitution’s morally “indefensible” three-fifths clause—the clause that provided slaves would account for three-fifths a person for the purpose of congressional apportionment. This article seeks to examine and unpack these extreme historical opposites and explain why their ‘racist’ claims ultimately do more societal harm than good. This article is broken into three parts. Part I critically examines how and why the ‘gun control is racist’ narrative came to be. Part II then critically examines how (and the elusive why) the ‘Second Amendment is racist’ narrative came to be. Lastly, Part III outlines why accepting either of these ‘racist’ narratives do more harm than good, particularly in the confines of history-in-law.

The article deals with the syntactic means used in the speech of modern Englishmen to express understatement. The author defines the special role of syntactic means in the speech of the characters of modern fiction, which serve to show restraint of negative and positive emotions and reflect the cultural and national features of the British character.

The subject of women has been among the issues discussed in almost all societies and civilizations for centuries. These debates were initiated while the story of creation was being constructed, and the lack of creation created in this process was reflected in every phase of life. These debates have found their place in all the fields of overdoing and understatement, but although the woman himself was often debated, his views were not taken and his opinion was not asked. In this article, the view of the Holy Quran and as a “role model” of the Qur'anic practitioner Prophet Muhammad will be examined from the moment of creation and tried to determine the phenomenon of women described in the verses and hadiths.

Euphemism is a discursive strategy that politicians use to approach unsettling, embarrassing, or distasteful, i.e. taboo, topics without appearing inconsiderate to people’s concerns. Following a critical discourse-analytic approach to political language, this paper discusses the communicative functions that euphemism performs in the discourse of local and state politicians from New Jersey (USA) in a sample of language data excerpted from The Star-Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper. The analysis reveals that (metaphorical and non-metaphorical) euphemism constitutes a major strategy of self-protection and positive self-presentation for legislators which allows them – mostly by understatement, periphrasis, and metaphor – first, to refer to socially disadvantaged groups or address delicate subjects without sounding insensitive; second, to criticize their political opponents in a socially acceptable way; and third, to purposely conceal from the public unsettling or controversial topics.

This paper discusses Old Frisian swear words used in the Medieval society to insult another member. These include 8 simplexes and compound words attested in the Old Frisian sources. The Old Frisian corpus can be characterized as a minor one, limited not only in terms of its volume, but also in terms of the genre spectrum. To be more precise, all Old Frisian texts, be that codices, charters or private letters, are related to the legal domain. As blood vengeance was widely practiced in the Middle Age Frisia, the continuous sequence of vendetta was limited through a compensation system covering a vast variety of illegal cases. The concept of honour was of great importance for the Frisians, and any offence was to be compensated in the court. At this, a persons honour could be offended not only through causing bodily harm or property damage, but through verbal insults as well. The paper analyses four semantic groups of insults: insults related to or addressed to females; social status understatement; intellectual abilities understatement; comparison with animals. Each of the eight cases considered in the paper are discussed within a wider cultural-historical context. First of all, the female-related swear words are connected with, on the one hand, the pan-Germanic idea of female night spirits choking the sleeping person, or, on the other hand, emphasize the bastardly status of the addressee, which would negatively predetermine their position in the Frisian society. Secondly, the addressee could have been insulted by a direct statement of their limited or completely absent property, which would assert their low social status as well. Thirdly, and this case is still relevant for the contemporary world, an insult could have been based on a statement of the addressees limited intellectual capabilities. Finally, the fourth group includes designations of animals associated with aggression or indecency. An analysis of Old Frisian swear words and their functions as insults in a wider context allows to touch upon and reflect basic linguo-historical features of the Old Germanic data despite the minimal volume of the lexical selection.

This study aims to identify the differences types of euphemism as an expression in deriving meaning used by the composer of male and female Minangkabau in their song lyrics. The subjects of this research are male and female Minangkabau composers. Data taken from this study were downloaded from youtube and transcribed. The procedure of collecting the data was taken from two of song lyrics by the composers Ipank and Ria Amelia “Rantau Den Pajauh” and “Harok di Rantau urang”. The procedure of analyzing the data was descriptive qualitative method, by having the lyrics identified and underlined to get the types of euphemism that used in their lyrics. The result of analyzing the data indicated that there were three types of euphemism used by male and female composers. The female composer used euphemism more than the male composer. The female composer used three types of euphemism such as ; Circumlocution, Metaphor, understatement and Hyperbole while the male composer only used Hyperbole in the Lyrics.

To describe Hilary Hinds’ wonderful cultural history of twin beds as timely is undoubtedly an understatement. Whilst it is a truism that all histories reflect their moments of production, far fewer...

The annual Basic Cardiovascular Sciences (BCVS) Scientific Sessions remains a premier conference destination for those in the basic and translational cardiovascular research community. This year’s BCVS meeting was held at the downtown waterfront in Boston, MA from July 29 to August 1, 2019. To say that BCVS 2019 was well-attended is truly an understatement, as this year’s meeting broke all BCVS conference records with over 1000 registered attendees, over 600 posters, and a plethora of new offerings, such as expanded early career sessions and the first Asian Cardiovascular Symposium. Here, we highlight some of the emerging science and exciting programming that was featured at the 2019 BCVS Scientific Sessions.

The Ebola outbreak in the troubled north east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has passed 2000 confirmed and probable cases, the World Health Organization has announced. The epidemic is now spreading faster than ever, as local suspicion and attacks from armed groups disable the medical response. The 2000th case was a “sad and frustrating milestone,” said Tariq Riebl, emergency response director of the International Rescue Committee. At least 1346 people have died in the outbreak. This is the second worst Ebola outbreak ever, though still far behind the 2014 west African epidemic that killed over 11 000 people. No other outbreak has killed over 300. “To say that things are not going well is an understatement,” said Riebl. “It’s time the international community wakes up to the severity of this crisis. “We are now seeing eight to …

Można zastanowić się nad różnymi sposobami budowania wieloznaczności. Jednym sposobem będzie użycie homonimów, skojarzeń, sugestii, nawet cytatów. Drugim zaś odwrotnie – „nie mówienie”, czyli „przemilczenie”. Pierwszy wydaje się bardziej konkretny, wręcz słownikowy, drugi jedynie intuicyjny, wymykający się próbom naukowego opisu. Zarówno homonimiczna gra słów, czy przywoływanie dalekich skojarzeń i inne ars poetica wykorzystywane, jako ozdobnik w japońskiej literaturze pięknej, jak i przemilczenie pozwalają odbiorcy na wielorakie rozumienie skąpego obrazu. Fascynujące jest to, że Cyprian Kamil Norwid tworzył według podobnego klucza, nie tylko w aspekcie estetycznym, ale podnosił wartość milczenia, jako postawę etyczną. Podobny w tym był do japońskich twórców okresu średniowiecza (w. XII-XVI) i nowożytności (w. XVII-XIX). Poetyka milczenia uważanego za część mowy, przemilczenia, niedomówienia, paraboli, elipsy, znaku, dalekiej aluzji, tak charakterystycznych dla sztuki Norwida – jak pisze Krzysztof Andrzej Jeżewski – w zadziwiający sposób, bez modyfikacji opisuje także sztukę słowa w kontekstach japońskiej literatury. Wieloznaczność rodzi się z milczenia – może brzmi to paradoksalnie, okazuje się jednak możliwe.

This paper examines one of Nusantara commentary books entitled Tafsîr al-Azhâr that is written by Hamka. By analyzing the contents of the commentary and tracing the historical roots of the birth of the work, this study shows that Hamka contextualises his interpretation as a criticism against the Sukarno regime. Among the critiques that he poses in his commentary suggest that Sukarno aligns to Communism and the political policies of his administration resonate to the interest of Communist while at the same time are detrimental to that of Muslims. From the historical perspective, there was, in fact, a conflict between Hamka and Sukarno concerning the issue of Communism. In other words, there is a close relationship between Sukarno’s affinity to Communism and Muslim’s conflict with Communists in Indonesia. In the development of tafsîr studies so far, tracing the interpretation material in the context of social criticism is considerably understatement. This is the reason why this study takes this approach. This study suggests that tafsîr (Quranic exegesis) is not just a task of understanding the divine message, but can also be a social critic.

Mockery is one of the most aesthetic literary arts produced by human thought, since it monitors the pulse of life with its pains and hopes through its fusion into the crucible of the reality where the artist finds his way. Therefore, mockery is a difficult technique as it depends on the manipulation of objects: exaggeration and magnification or understatement and degradation, and this manipulation is within a technical standard called the vindictive critical criticism in an atmosphere of humor and pleasure. Thus, this study is concerned with instances of mockery in the literature of Al-Rusafi and Peykes who are both Kurdish. While Al-Rusafi organized his poems in Arabic, Peykes organized his poetry in Kurdish. The significance of this study is that it deals with a subject that has not yet received due academic and scientific research, namely mockery in Peykes’ poetry. The researcher adopted the analytical descriptive method. The study falls into an introduction and two sections. The introduction part explores the concept of mockery in Arabic poetry, while the first section deals with the biography of the two poets, with a description of the similarities and differences between them. The second section tackles the types of mockery manipulated by the two poets. Three types are distinguished: social, religious, and political.

To say that Media Studies changed drastically on 9/11 is an understatement. Change came in three areas. First, the media provided the means by which most people experienced the event. Second, media offered a narrative that made 9/11 more personal by telling stories of the victims and those involved in the attacks. Third, media contributed to the strengthening of an American sense of patriotism, opening the way for and justifying the “war on terror.” This chapter argues that the field of Media Studies was turned on its head on September 11, 2001.

desmet010420.f1 The eminent paediatric and neonatal surgeon Irene Marion Desmet (nee Irving) wrote with classic understatement: “I feel that my real claim to fame is that of having managed to combine the careers of motherhood and surgery.” This was much harder for her generation than for today’s. A former senior consultant surgeon at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, and a prolific author, Desmet was among the first women to go to medical school immediately after the second world war—at the age of just 17. As a surgeon, mother of three children, and a hotelier wife who often cooked for guests, she was pulled in many different directions. The challenge may have overwhelmed lesser women, but Desmet was—to use a word not then fashionable—“feisty.” She qualified as a pilot at the age of 20 and, rare for a woman then, had a passion for cars. As a woman she was viewed with …

On its release in 2004, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was called “the greatest book ever” and “a more enthralling read than all the novels ever entered for the Booker Prize put together.” The tabloid The Daily Mail, where these giddy pronouncements appeared, is not known for understatement, but more cautious academic researchers have long held the ODNB in similarly high esteem. Stefan Collini, writing in the London Review of Books, found himself “experiencing a rare, and wholly unironic, feeling that mixes pride and humility with a dash of wonder” when he considered “generations to come making use of this vast consolidation of scholarly accuracy for purposes of their own which may be barely imaginable to us now.” Taking into account both the hardbound version and what most assume is its digital doppelgänger at oxforddnb.com, Noel Malcolm in The Sunday Telegraph called the ODNB “an astonishing piece of work: a colossal, beautiful, fully functional and utterly user-friendly engine of enlightenment.” Reviewers’ initial responses—awe and astonishment—have, until recently, arguably been the responses most appropriate to the ODNB considered in its entirety. The enormous scope of ODNB, which is the work of roughly 10,000 scholars, runs to 60 volumes in print, and is made up of more than 62 million words, quickly defeats the capacities of even those most eager to praise it.

Opening with dry understatement that ‘it was hard to be a tsar’ and that ‘Russia is not an easy country to rule,’ Simon Sebag Montefiore grasps the fundamental existential dilemma of Russia’s autoc...

Since the Middle Ages learned men used the parable of the dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants to honour ‘the ancients’ and (in the main) to play down their own role in all (false) modesty. This specific understatement surely was also Newton’s intention. We should ask anyway: on whose shoulders did Leibniz and Newton actually stand? Which preliminary works were already there for the two men to build upon?

This study deals with euphemism in political speech of David Cameron about ISIS attacks. The objectives of the study were to find out the types of euphemsim used in DavidCameron’s speech on ISIS attacks and the reason why the most dominant types was choosen. The study was conducted by applying descriptive qualitative method.The data for this study were David Cameron political speech transcript in 20 July 2015, 14 November 2015, 2 December 2015, 5 february 2016. The source of the data was from United Kingdom govermentwebsite .The data were analyzedusing the theory of Allan and Burridge (1991). The findings of the study showed that the types of euphemism used in David Camerons political speech about ISIS attacks were: figurative expression(28,8%) ,circomlocution (15,5%), ommision (13,3%), ommision (13,3%) , hyperbole (11,1%), understatement (8,8%) ,flippancy(8,8%), abbreviation (8,8%), borrowing (2,2%) and clipping (2,2%) . Figurative expression as the most dominant type used by David Cameron because it make words in speech more organized as a nice thing to be spoken in public in order to convince people.Keywords: euphemism, euphemism types, speech, politic

TO SAY Bessie Coleman was born into deprivation would be an understatement. Her parents were sharecroppers in late 19th-century Texas, picking cotton and taking in laundry to get by, and she was the 12th of 13 children. Bessie's father was Native American Cherokee while her mother was African American, so almost every door to improvement was closed to them. Not that this put her off.

The article focuses on the concept of Understatement as a lingua-cultural category and analyses the main linguistic means of realization of this phenomenon. Besides, some stylistic and pragmalinguistic aspects of Understatement are analyzed from the perspective of a distancing strategy. The researcher is primarily interested in Understatement as a lingua-cultural category relying on historically stipulated cultural traditions of Anglo-Saxon society which gave rise to the forming of the British national character, and which reflect age, gender and social differences of the English. The author does not use the Russian variants of the translation of Understatement in the article, as they do not fully convey all the aspects of denotative and connotative meaning of this concept. Further on it is emphasized that the structure of Understatement is complex, diverse and can be expressed by a variety of lexical as well as grammatical means, among which double negation, modal verbs, the adverbs of degree and particles can often be encountered which are in most cases dependent on the context. From the pragmatic angle Understatement can be used to conceal embarrassment, anxiety or offence. Moreover, Understatement is used while singling out the positive aspects of the communicative situation. The understatement of the positive characteristics of the speaker is reflected in the so called «effect of modesty », which finally boils down to such a strategy as «fishing for compliments», that is an intentional understatement of one’s positive qualities in order to «fish for compliments». Understatement used to and continues to play a special role in the English speech behavior. Its aim is to minimize the impact of the negative factors on the message addressee, to lower the categoricity of the utterance and to take the interlocutor’s interests into account.

“[Annie] Ernaux describes the scene of her father's death objectively, with a measured, studied neutrality,” writes Warren Motte in “Annie Ernaux's Understatement” (56). Like many critics, and like...

Unplanned development: Tracking change in South-East Asia By JONATHAN RIGG London and New York: Zed Books, 2012. Pp. xvi + 240. Tables, Figures, Illustrations, Glossary, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi:10.1017/S0022463414000678 To suggest that Jonathan Rigg's Unplanned development takes issue with the legacy of development in Southeast Asia since the Second World War would be a dramatic understatement. Concise yet incisive in its commentary, Rigg's work mines a territory similar to that of other major works devoted to theories of planning, such as Jim Scott's Seeing like a state, offering a synthesis on the current state of the field. In its seven chapters, and clearly reflecting the author's more than three decades of work in the field as a development geographer in mainland Southeast Asia (Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam), Rigg's assessment encourages a deep and corrosive scepticism in anything taking the form of the abstract, the planned. If the work consists of less than an original argument per se, and more of a series of brief episodes compiled in the direction of a commentary, it nonetheless holds enormous value in its close and careful examination of the empirical, the grounded, and the contingent. Placing its sceptical perspective front and centre, Rigg addresses his stance in the Preface, observing that he will take up 'the inadequacies of models, the deficiencies of grand theories, the ineffectiveness of planning, and the limits of government and statecraft' (p. xiv). With this revealing statement, he goes on to contextualise the chapters that will come by invoking a consistent call for disruption and contingency, whether natural or man-made, citing a sequence of recent events, including the political upheaval in the Middle East, an earthquake in New Zealand, and the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant) at Fukushima, linking these events in their defiance of easy anticipation, thereby leaving planners and policymakers looking for answers. At such moments, Rigg implies, there is precisely a temptation to invest in another set of plans and even more theories, schemes promising to handle such a scenario with their revisions to existing designs. However, such dramatic occurrences are few and far between, he notes; instead, his real interest lies in the everyday moments that determine and shape lives--a car accident, a difficult choice, a family or personal crisis. Here, for Rigg, is the representative core of human experience, and as such, it defies a facile effort to summarise or extract generalisations from the surrounding richness. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Rigg moves from this opening to a wide-ranging take in the following chapters, offering six mini-case studies to emphasise his major themes. If these cases and the accompanying critique --the development plan, the rise of Asian economies, teleology and modernisation theory--feel a bit familiar in some respects, Rigg nonetheless brings to bear a refreshing enthusiasm and an energy that is engaging. …

A FEW YEARS AGO, OUT of scholarly as well as pedagogical interest, I happened to be looking through two recent anthologies on the nebulous-sounding subject of “transatlantic literature.” I was teaching a new course on transatlanticism and was particularly curious to discover how these texts represented the period that is the focus of this journal and the one to which at least a few of its readers are attached. In both cases, I was struck by the degree to which “the Victorian” – the era, people, frame of mind, even the word itself – was either subsumed within Romanticism or absent. In Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767–1867, edited by Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, the subtitle alone incorporated half of the Victorian era, even while the contents omitted virtually all of the Victorians we would expect to represent that half. That anthology as well as the other, Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor’s Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, included glossaries of salient terms for transatlantic inquiry, and while “Enlightenment,” “Peterloo,” “Romantics,” and “sublime” appeared there, “Victorian,” not to mention “Great Exhibition,” “natural selection,” and “utilitarianism,” did not. This experience left me wondering, on the one hand, why so minimal a presence for Victorianism, the answers to which question would be partly speculative and constitute the subject of another article altogether, and on the other, what forms a Victorian transatlanticism would take. This brings me to the four books under review in this essay. While only one of them identifies, via its title, as wholly and solely a Victorian study, all four contribute to a greater understanding of what the directions and concerns of transatlantic Victorianist studies might be. To say that I came away from these books newly informed about relations among Britain, North America, and the Caribbean, principally in the nineteenth century but earlier and later as well, would be an understatement. For all of their differences in focus and approach, it is notable that each book examines to greater and lesser extents Victorian conceptions of race and ethnicity. Indeed, they make clear, to those for whom it was not already, the absolute centrality of racial ideology as a shaping force in the Victorian world. I will discuss these books in approximate order of temporal reach, though I will focus on the sections in each that are most relevant to Victorianists. To begin, then, Vanessa D. Dickerson’s Dark Victorians concerns itself with “how African Americans and British

To say that the story of Louise Erdrich's The Painted Drum (2005) is subtly told would be an understatement; I argue that the transformation of the protagonist, the process central to this novel, is not described at all. Rather, the narrative structure, with its unexplained breaks and juxtaposi tions, conveys the means of the protagonist's change. The novel sets the fol lowing puzzle for readers: Part One is narrated by Faye Travers, a woman whose tenacious attachment to her dead sister prevents her from engag ing fully with the events of her own life; Part Four presents a transformed Faye, with a new attitude that enables her to connect creatively with the outside world. Something has changed her—and we have only Parts Two and Three to look to for explanation. The stories in Part Two are told by Bernard, a man on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota; his tales are succeeded in Part Three by the story of a young girl named Shawnee and her siblings on the same reservation. But we know nothing—or almost nothing—about Faye in these intervening sections. We know from the first chapter of Part Two that Faye and her mother have come to the reservation to return the Ojibwe ceremonial drum Faye discovered in a New England attic; we know they form part of the group listening to Bernard's stories— listening, that is, to the stories we are reading. But Faye's consciousness is not open to us during the storytelling, nor when the narrative returns to her focalization in Part Four does she mention any response to the sto ries. What we know from Part Four is only that Faye has changed: her perception of reality has shifted toward an Ojibwe worldview, she has a new vision of her relationship with the dead, and she is more open to the unfolding experiences of her life. What brings Faye out of her melancholic state? The cure is built directly into the narrative structure; the mechanism of change is dramatized, not described. Because the plot of The Painted Drum is undertold, because the process of Faye's transformation is not narrated, the reader has to do work ordinarily accomplished by plot; to understand the change that takes place in Faye, a reader has to imagine the effect of

Archival science, information science, records management, and information management are allied sciences. Recently, there are tendencies to merge them into information science, recognising, that despite some differences, every field copes with information. It is a big simplification of the problem, and searching for direct roots of information science in works of archives is another understatement, because this approach does not see archival science as grown from practical works of archives and having explicitly separate research object, which are archives and archival materials. Not contesting fair arguments for seeing archival science as one of information sciences, it must be stressed, that only one of its divisions – archival information resulted from arrangement and description of archival materials – is a research object shared with information science. The situation is similar with records management, that was born on the ground of studying works of offices and records circulation, from creation until their destruction or archiving permanently. Regardless of modern information and communication technologies, that substantially influenced methods of creating and passing on records, and other office works, as well as the way archives perform their functions, the specific nature of archival science and records management, that previously determined their autonomy, still remains. The cooperation with specialists of information science, with information architects is possible in accordance to practice – which is records management and archival information on the Web.

This essay renews a discussion of how historians do, and should, represent atrocity. It argues that the problems of representing extreme violence remain under-conceptualized; in this context it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of minimalism, a style prevalent both in historiography and in an intellectual culture that values understatement in approaches to violence. The essay traces the general cultural preference for minimalist narratives of suffering, which, it claims, is driven by the widespread conviction that experimental and exuberant narratives convert victims' suffering into kitsch. It then focuses on two works, by Saul Friedlander and by Jan Gross, on the history of Jewish victims during and after the Second World War in order to assess how each uses sophisticated minimalist understatement to represent suffering, but with radically different effects. Finally, it asks historians to reflect upon the representation of extreme events by focusing on narrative style, on questions of ethics, and on the cultural narratives within which their own work on suffering and violence is inevitably embedded-especially given that historians are paying increasing attention to violent events that generate tremendous difficulties in relation to the representation both of victims and perpetrators.

Lawrence Fisher’s vita lists 18 ‘‘Refereed Journal Articles’’ over the period from 1959 to 1992. It also lists five books, eight chapters in books, and, in a rather dramatic understatement, three ‘‘Large Data Bases.’’ But what data bases there are. The CRSP Treasury Securities files and the CRSP monthly Master and Returns files are far more than simple compilations of some security prices. They are the foundation upon which almost 50 years of empirical research in financial economics has been built. Simply put, without Larry Fisher, there may well be no modern finance. This survey discusses the early CRSP papers published in the period from, roughly, 1964–1970. I then turn look at three other papers Larry oeuvre. This is not, and is not meant to be, a comprehensive overview of Larry’s lifetime of work. Rather, it focuses on one, fairly short though important, time in his life as an academic researcher. The dialog at the start of this paper is how Compton told Conant, who was in Washington, the news of Fermi’s success in running a controlled nuclear chain reaction at

The ending of The Mountain and the Valley is notoriously difficult to interpret: Is David Canaan’s death on the mountaintop meant to be tragic or ironic? Since its publication in 1952, these somewhat irreconcilable possibilities, along with Ernest Buckler’s challenging prose style, have inspired uneasiness—often verging on outright exasperation—even in readers who regard it as, on the whole, a great novel. How we read the ending will ultimately affect how we make sense of Buckler’s narrative strategies throughout this novel; in fact, the ending demands a return to the beginning. Rereading the novel turns out to be crucial, for a close scrutiny of both epilogue and prologue uncovers a strong basis for read ing David’s entire story as functioning on one of its levels as a metaphor for shifting states of consciousness. Buckler’s low-key remark that David’s death “was to be the crowning point of the whole dramatic irony (and, of course, the most overt piece of symbolism in the book)” (quoted in Young 36), appears then to be something of an understatement. The Jungian notion of a limited self confronting his own shadow worked out in the penultimate chapter gives way in the epilogue to David’s encounter with what Jung would call the transpersonal self. The clearly delineated stages of David’s ascent up the mountain also closely mirror the

There are major problems in the history of the American and Soviet hydrogen bombs. They are associated with the Teller-Ulam and Teller-Oppenheimer controversies, and the question of whether the design of the Soviet H-bomb was an independent conception. Because of the scarcity of documentary evidence, these problems have little chance of being settled if the histories of the two are considered separately within their national frameworks. Considered comparatively, however, they can help clarify these problems separately and convert them into different facets of this most important segment in the history of the thermonuclear age.The recently disclosed evidence on the history of the Soviet H-bomb, in particular, on Klaus Fuchs’s key idea of radiation implosion, validates Edward Teller’s view on the invention of the H-bomb, including his understatement of his own accomplishment and his concern about the benefits and head start that the Soviet H-bomb program could have gotten from Fuchs’s espionage. In addition, the Russian perspective on the realities of illusory worlds during the Cold War helps us see these illusory worldviews as largely responsible for the intensity of the H-bomb debate in the United States.

With roots in the Old World and fertile ground in the New World, the tall tale ourished in America, especially within the boasting, expansive atmosphere of the American frontier (Burrison 1991: 6–7). Hunting, fishing, weather, domestic life, and agriculture were popular topics, and opportunities for artful exaggeration were numerous. This paper examines the tall tale as artistic folk humor in which the narrative is carefully constructed and performed for best effect. Field recordings, printed texts, and folklore-archive texts will provide examples for analysis. Finally, examples of tall-tale postcards add a visual dimension to the genre.

Okamoto Taro is one the most prominent intellectuals and artists of postwar Japan. His “On Jomon Ceramics” marks the beginning of his engagement with prehistoric Japanese culture. Published in 1952 in the Japanese journal Mizue, the article was highly controversial as it challenged the common view that traced Japanese culture to the achievements and the refined ceramic tradition of the prehistoric Yayoi people and ascribed elegance and understatement to Japanese aesthetics. Okamoto, however, argued that the earlier Jomon culture, a hunting-gathering economy with a dynamically different ceramic tradition, was an equally important influence. Okamoto's vision of Japanese culture as rough, explosive and even “surreal” anticipates an alternative understanding of what modernist artists, architects and the general public would subsequently consider as authentically “Japanese.”

THINK IT SAFE To SAY that most well-read people in the English speaking world have not read The Making of Americans" (Two Lives in). This rather droll observation by Janet Malcolm might well be an understatement. It's probably safe to say that most English professors, perhaps even the majority of American literature professors, have not read The Making of Americans. But does that mean, as Malcolm concludes, that despite its status as a Modernist masterpiece, The Making of Americans is "more a monument than a text, a heroic achievement of writing, a near-impossible feat of reading" (111)? That very much depends on what you mean by reading. To pass the time when my wife Glenys was pregnant with our son Euan we decided to read books out loud. We only ever read the one book, but it was a doozy. We chose The Making of Americans. Here was a text that on the page cannot but seem preposterous to most readers--a 925-page "novel" with no conventional plot or characterization--that comes effortlessly to life as sound and song in performance The Making of Americans proved so accessible as sound that this "near-impossible feat of reading" turned into a happy family ritual that we sustained for several months and continued after Euan was born, a few pages almost every day, bigger chunks on the weekend. We used a fancy silver bookmark with a bright red tassel to mark our place Now, either we are an unusually obstinate family or one of the most formidable texts in the American literary canon is also one of the most accessible I have better proof for the latter claim, so that's the one I will pursue. It would seem that the case with The Making of Americans is as Eric Sevareid puts it: "In written form her words seem bizarre and difficult to follow, but when she herself reads them aloud it is all perfectly lucid, natural, and exact" (quoted in Malcolm 103). But how can something that on the page seems ludicrous suddenly become lucid when experienced as sound rather than as text? How can the same words play host to such different effects? Perhaps, as suggested in the work of Paul Zumthor, the words on the page and the sounded words of a speaking voice are not really the same words at all. "Half a century after the death of Dante," Zumthor writes, "The Divine Comedy, which was intended to be read, was on the lips of the ordinary people of Florence, who sang its terzine as they walked along the streets. Was it the same work? Of course not" For Zumthor, voice and text are two sides of an ontological schism. The materiality and the duration and social resonance of sounded words create an entirely different context for language. He continues, Written works have their own values, on which European and American critics have concentrated.... But the voice brings to the fore other values, which in the course of a performance become part of the meaning of the text that is being transmitted. They enrich it and transform it, sometimes making it mean what it does not say. For the voice is more than speech. Its function is greater than that of conveying language ... and the physical existence of the voice hits us with a force of a material object. The voice is a thing. (7-8) What would it mean, then, to bring an oral perspective into the critical conversation about literature, to presuppose voice rather than just text as a backdrop against which meaning emerges? As counterintuitive as it seems, that is precisely the method a text like The Making of Americans warrants and rewards. But it involves returning to a discussion long thought of as closed and runs the risk of seeming to fall into the critical vice Derrida named phonocentrism. In what would become a well-known pillar of the poststructuralist creed, Derrida collapses the distinction between speech and writing by showing how both modalities are always already prey to the difference and deference (difference) that infuses signification. …

Elizabeth Bishop built her much-beloved late poem "In the Waiting Room" on a childhood memory of reading National Geographic. Her memory, however, was pointedly inaccurate: the "grown-up" poet who speaks "In the Waiting Room" invented the riveting photographs that the child Elizabeth sees in "National Geographic, / February, 1918" (Complete Poems 160). Bishop's photofiction is not news. Already 15 years ago, Brett Millier observed that many of Bishop's contemporary critics "fairly cackled with glee at catching her in an inconsistency" (445). (Such relish was misguided. Bishop readily admitted the fictionality of her recollected National Geographic both publicly and privately.(1)) Although in the intervening years. Bishop's invented photographs--especially one of topless African women--have been read as coded deposits of the poet's homosexuality or political worldview, (2) the literary referentiality of Bishop's citation of the magazine remains largely unexamined. For what other text might National Geographic stand? Or: what does Bishop read under "the cover / of National Geographic, / February, 1918"? This essay argues that "In the Waiting Room" activates two kinds of allusion. Wrapping an iconic pop-cultural reference around a high literary allusion, Bishop's treatment of the ubiquitous National Geographic echoes and alters the "Geographic picture" lyric that William Carlos Williams plants early in Paterson I. I contend that the occasional text of "In the Waiting Room," National Geographic, participates in the collapse of chronology on which the poem relies throughout. (3) As the speaker's adult perspective frames the telling of her childhood experience, so the speaker's adult reading inflects the child's reading. As the speaker reads "grown-up" matter over her child self's shoulder, Bishop superimposes Williams's reading of National Geographic in Paterson I onto her own recollection of reading National Geographic. I am less concerned with proving the intentionality of Bishop's allusion to Williams than with exploring the viability, and the consequences for interpretation, of the intertextual claim. Nothing in Bishop's letters, drafts, or extrapoetic commentary will confirm that she had Williams in mind as she wrote "In the Waiting Room." In place of such "hard" evidence, I juxtapose Paterson I and "In the Waiting Room" and link the two poems by way of close readings and telling contingencies of Bishop's and Williams's intertwined publication histories. I contend that lack of such conventional evidence ought not preclude examination of an audible echo--certainly not when the examination underwrites a new reading of one of Bishop's most important poems and unsettles acquired accounts of her poetic persona. Bishop's reputation for modesty and deference has recently undergone vital critical revision, especially around the question of her political engagement. Those early overworn points of reference, though, continue to limit readings of Bishop's poetic engagement, of how this "poets poet" also responded critically to poetic models and precedents.(4) This essay, then, moves toward redressing that limitation by taking the hint of Paterson I in "In the Waiting Room." A final introductory point: if accustomed modes of reading Bishop or her work have forestalled consideration of her allusion to Williams in "In the Waiting Room," then the difficulty of classifying her citation only compounds the problem. Parody, refutation, revision, critique: these pointed terms do not quite capture the simultaneous blatancy and understatement of Bishop's allusive mode in "In the Waiting Room." Her response to Williams is most helpfully approached as a methodological problem, as strategic misdirection. Responding to Williams, Bishop's poem capitalizes on the conspicuousness of both the National Geographic and its pictures of half-naked women; the ubiquity of the magazine and the notoriety of that particular genre of photograph hide her reference to Paterson I in plain sight. …

In Flare Path Rattigan focuses on the generation that fought World War II, as exemplified by RAF flyers who live at a residential hotel near the airfield, particularly one pilot who, while he appears jaunty and carefree about his dangerous bombing missions, secretly becomes sick with fear in every mission. He conceals his fear from his men because he feels a responsibility to give them confidence, and he conceals it from his wife who is planning to leave him for a fading movie star. When he finally confesses to her and she thereby feels needed by him, she rejects her movie star and commits to staying with her husband. In this drama of held-back words, Rattigan continues to develop his art of understatement, communicating the thoughts and feelings of his characters by having them not articulate those feelings until the articulation will have maximum impact. Rattigan sews the play with examples of written language that allegorize both the way playwriting as an art depends on subtext and needs to be translated to communicate and the way in life we often do not manage to say what we mean to say. As in After the Dance, the males are weak or wounded and the women are either afraid to be humiliated in their sexual love or sacrifice themselves in some way for the sake of the males.

With regard to Rattigan’s use of understatement and implication, I offer the reader six examples of Rattigan’s dramatic artistry (from five plays) to persuade the reader that Rattigan’s plays compel and repay attention through their elegance, that is, they achieve a maximum of affect from an apparent minimum of effort. The effort, rightly, does not showcase itself, but it produces the emotional effect nonetheless. At the same time, each episode examined reveals essential pieces of Rattigan’s view of life, for example, how Rattigan subtly shows that empathy can transform people who seem to be the least likely candidates into rebelling against cruelty or that visionary attempts at establishing world peace and order end in surrender, with the uncomprehending trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

BUELL, LAWRENCE. The Dream of the Great American Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 584 pp. $39.95. The Dream of the Great American Novel. It's a big concept--and Lawrence Buell has written a big book. Weighing in at over five hundred pages, this is twice the size of most scholarly monographs. Buell's astonishing range and trademark versatility are immediately evident. His account of the great American novel (or GAN as he calls it, breathing new life into Henry James's acronym) offers sustained discussion of The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hucklebeny Finn, The Great Gatsby, An American Tragedy, U.S.A., Absalom, Absalom!, Invisible Man, Gravity's Rainbow, and Beloved, as well as briefer treatment of dozens of additional novels including The Grandissimes, The Marrow of Tradition, Gone with the Wind, and Grapes of Wrath. To say that very few scholars could treat this range of texts is an understatement indeed. Buell advances four interrelated points. First, the dream of the GAN began shortly after the Civil War and has proven remarkably resilient, a case for which this book offers rock solid evidence. Second, GAN contenders tend to be acutely aware of their predecessors and often comment on them intertextually (for instance, Buell looks at Invisible Man as a response to Hucklebeny Finn). Third, GANs are tied up with nation-building but critical of American exceptionalism arguably Buell's most important point, though one set aside for long stretches as he pursues other ideas. Finally, Buell anatomizes GANs as following four distinct templates. Three of those templates derive from plot and thematics. There is the "up-from" story of self-making such as The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy, the "romance of the divide" focusing on conflict among races, ethnicities, or regions such as Beloved and Absalom, Absalom!; the "meganovel" that uses a fictional microcosm to comment on the failed promise of American democracy, such as U.S.A. and Gravity's Rainbow. The fourth template reflects forces more external to the literary work: when a novel is referenced and imitated repeatedly (often by multiple media), it can, as in the case of The Scarlet Letter, attain GAN status retrospectively. While Buell organizes the book around these four templates, providing examples over a large swath of time, it proceeds less as an anatomy than as a very readable, if recursive, account of a large chunk of literary history. The historical depth is extended by Buell's adopting a constellation approach, surrounding a detailed reading of a central text with briefer mention of many related works. …

Writing about Percival Everett's fiction, the achievement of just over two decades, is both necessary and daunting, necessary because it is so good it demands attention, daunting because Everett has parodied so many modes of recent criticism that it is scary to adopt one, knowing that he has already demolished it—or soon will. One wants, nevertheless, to write about him, for his fictions are not only immensely engaging but also deeply provocative—altogether, an accomplished body of impor- tant work. Many of the most significant character types and recurrent motifs in Everett's extensive canon appear in his very first novel, the zany, disturbing, and finally uplifting Suder. There we find the slightly out-of-whack narrator, in this case the slumping baseball player Craig Suder, an anticipation of such later skewed characters as the racially off-base Curt Marder of God's Country, the confused Robert Hawks of Watershed, the metamorphosing Alice Achitophel of Zulus, the shape-shifting Velepo of Frenzy, and the conflicted Thelonious "Monk" Ellison of Erasure, to cite just a few. There we find the innocent female in need of rescue, in this instance, the teenaged Jincy; later versions run from the very young, Jake in God's Country, for instance, to the elderly, Butch in Walk Me to the Distance. And there, we find the ever-present complication of race, a key aspect in most, though by no means all, of Everett's novels. The appearance of such recurrent elements at the very beginning of his career marks some of his personal obsessions and culturally important concerns, but the astonish- ing thing is how varied their subsequent realizations are. Surely no other contempo- rary writer has created, as Everett has, a parody of a Western, a realistic novel (several in fact), a futuristic dystopian fantasy, a moving Greek myth, and a kunstlerroman, not to mention a novel (I'm at a loss for genre description) narrated by a baby. When Everett said casually in a recent interview, "I don't care much to write the same thing," he was surely engaged in understatement (Interview 4). His originality is as stunning as his versatility. Running through all his works, however, are the hallmarks of his style: sparse and pellucid prose, sharp dialogue, humor—both outrageous and subtle—a pervading edginess, sudden drama, deep feeling, and always a firmly controlling, sly and ironic intelligence. The exuberant end of Suder foreshadows some of his future fictions. It creates a paradigmatic situation that loomed so strongly in Everett's imagination that he returned to its tensions in two later novels. The foreshadowing drama assumes this oddball shape: having taken a forced break from baseball (he is put on the Disabled List), developed an obsession with the rendition of "Ornithology" by The Bird

It would seem an understatement to remark, as Freud once did, that "incest is not a rare occurrence even in our society" (Totem and Taboo, 901). Incest is, in fact, the event that therapists expect to hear about perhaps more than any other; it is a crucial plot point in their master-narratives of human life. For example, Freud's own early Studies on Hysteria, written with Josef Breuer, features five case histories in which the eponymous pathology arises out of forbidden father-daughter contact: Fraulein Anna

The Native American ethnic group has always been used and abused, not to say manipulated, by the medium of cinema. Such an exploitation of the image of the Indian responded to the demands of a new form of artistic expression which was extremely graphic and violent, as were graphic and visually violent the first western movies. As an artistic genre, cinema really manipulated the classical stereotypes related to the Indian in order to use him as a « character » detached from any historical reality. It is not surprising though to see that the evolution over time of this widely exploited « character » can be equated to a long wandering from exaggeration to understatement, to eventually reach the political expression of the Indians themselves. All this turmoil and agitation did correspond to the modus operandi of the Hollywoodian « system ».

This book's title is an understatement. The study is a wide‐ranging work that chronicles a “world war” encompassing India, Europe, and the Americas. It could have been titled “The Downfall of Franc...