Memoirs

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


John Marshall Harlan's Political Memoir

JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY, Issue 3 2008
PETER SCOTT CAMPBELL
Near the end of his life, John Marshall Harlan wrote a number of biographical essays, presumably at the request of his children. Most of the essays relate to his experiences in the Civil War. The essay reprinted here instead recounts Harlan's political career before he joined the Supreme Court. Although he rarely won any elections and only held a couple of offices, Harlan's political odyssey is significant in that it shows how his social views were formed. Harlan's transformation from a staunch anti-abolitionist to a civil-rights advocate can be viewed as a series of reactions against various opponents as he struggled to find his political identity after the collapse of the Whig party in the 1850s. [source]


A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia , By Joseph Margoshes

RELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2009
Shaul Stampfer
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Walker Percy's The Gramercy Winner: A Memoir of the American Tuberculosis Experience

THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE, Issue 2 2010
Jean S. Mason
First page of article [source]


Rich Sensitivities: An Analysis of Conflict Among Women in Feminist Memoir,

CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 2 2009
JUDITH TAYLOR
Alors que le mouvement nord-américain des femmes est surtout connu pour ses efforts en vue de transformer les relations sociales entre les femmes et les hommes, ses partisanes ont également mis l'accent sur la reformulation des relations entre les femmes. Utilisant une source de données novatrice, les mémoires du mouvement social, l'auteure souligne la profondeur de la déception que les féministes s'infligent les unes aux autres. Les mémorialistes débattent des notions provenant du mouvement et du courant principal voulant que les femmes soient compétentes socialement. Cet article présente le concept d'«idéation relationnelle» pour décrire la façon dont les mémorialistes féministes analysent d'une manière critique la compréhension de la socialité des femmes tenue pour acquise et aiguisent leurs désirs d'une nouvelle éthique sociale entre elles. While the North American women's movement is most known for its efforts to transform social relations between women and men, its adherents have also focused on remaking relations among women. Using an innovative data source, social movement memoir, this paper indicates the depth of disappointment feminists cause one another. Memoirists dispute notions found in the movement and mainstream that women are socially capable. The paper offers the concept "relational ideation" to describe the way feminist memoirists critically examine taken for granted understandings of women's sociality and amplify their desires for a new social ethic among them. [source]


Memoirs of a Green Centurion

GLOBAL ECOLOGY, Issue 5 2001
David Bowman
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Teaching Foreign Policy with Memoirs

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 2 2002
Terry L. Deibel
Excerpts from the memoirs of high foreign policy officials, if carefully selected and structured, can be a valuable resource in the teaching of diplomatic history, American foreign policy, and international relations. Two decades of teaching a memoirs-only course to mid-career military officers and foreign affairs professionals in a seminar discussion format reveals many of their advantages. Memoirs are interesting reading that rarely fail to engage a reader's attention; they impart detailed knowledge of historical events; they provide a rich understanding of process and the neglected area of policy implementation; like case studies, they let students build vicarious experience in policymaking and execution; and they often provide what Alexander George called "policy-relevant generalizations." While lack of objectivity can be a serious drawback of first-person accounts, it provides its own lessons on the nature of history and can be offset by using multiple accounts of the same events and by combining memoirs with documents and historical works, or countering analytical studies. Although picking the most interesting and worthwhile excerpts, getting them in students' hands, and accommodating their length within the boundaries of a standard college course are additional challenges, professors who take them on should find that memoirs add a new level of excitement and realism to their courses. [source]


Memoirs of a biochemist

IUBMB LIFE, Issue 5-6 2006
Osamu Hayaishi
First page of article [source]


Memoirs of a Peace Historian

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 1 2005
Irwin Abrams
This article will tell the personal story of how I came to write about the peace movement and then something about my work on this subject during my year in Europe 1936,37 as a Harvard Sheldon Traveling Fellow. Due to time and space restrictions, I will concentrate mainly on my time in Geneva at the International Peace Bureau and the Library of the League of Nations. In the journal I started on January 18, 1936, I wrote, "I do not know how long I can keep this up, but if I am able to, how much pleasure I shall have when I, as a bearded and bent octogenarian, can read over this record." I did keep it up through those years, and though I am not bearded and not too bent, but still an octogenarian for another month, I have indeed been reading with much enjoyment my pages about how this rather naive twenty-two-year-old encountered Europe for the first time. [source]


The Odyssey of Senior Public Service: What Memoirs Can Teach Us

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2003
J. Patrick Dobel
This article examines the political, psychological, and moral challenges of senior public service in the executive office. The study uses memoirs published by members of the Clinton administration. The memoirs discuss the consistent background conditions of senior public service as the personality of the chief executive, the vagaries of election cycles, the tension between staff and agency executives, and the role of the media. Senior executives adopt a number of stances to address the tension between the realities of public service and the ideals they bring. The memoirs suggest several stances, such as politics as original sin, seduction, hard work and compromise, and game. The memoirs demonstrate the high cumulative cost that public service exacts on the health and personal lives of senior officials. Finally, the study reveals a number of consistent themes about how senior appointed public officials can navigate the dilemmas and challenges of senior public service at all levels of government. [source]


Memoirs of an indifferent trader: Estimating forecast distributions from prediction markets

QUANTITATIVE ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2010
Joyce E. Berg
C11; C93; D8; G1 Prediction markets for future events are increasingly common and they often trade several contracts for the same event. This paper considers the distribution of a normative risk-neutral trader who, given any portfolio of contracts traded on the event, would choose not to reallocate that portfolio of contracts even if transactions costs were zero. Because common parametric distributions can conflict with observed prediction market prices, the distribution is given a nonparametric representation together with a prior distribution favoring smooth and concentrated distributions. Posterior modal distributions are found for popular vote shares of the U.S. presidential candidates in the 100 days leading up to the elections of 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004, using bid and ask prices on multiple contracts from the Iowa Electronic Markets. On some days, the distributions are multimodal or substantially asymmetric. The derived distributions are more concentrated than the historical distribution of popular vote shares in presidential elections, but do not tend to become more concentrated as time to elections diminishes. [source]


Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Reformer, 1945,1964 , Edited by Sergei Khrushchev

THE HISTORIAN, Issue 1 2009
Paul R. Gregory
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Writing from the Edge of the World: the Memoirs of Darién by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo

THE LATIN AMERICANIST, Issue 2 2008
Lesley Wylie
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Hate speech , a memoir

CRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2001
Anthony Julius
First page of article [source]


An appreciation of Ronnie Mac Keith (1978)

DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE & CHILD NEUROLOGY, Issue 2 2008
Martin Bax DM
It is 100 years since Ronnie Mac Keith's birth and 50 years since he started the Journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology (DMCN; initially called The Cerebral Palsy Bulletin), the first number being a reprint of William Little's original article. Scope, then The Spastics Society, had just begun to raise significant sums of money and Ronnie persuaded them not only to put some money into medical research, which they did, funding the research laboratories at Guy's, but also, uniquely, to spend some money on educating and informing doctors. This led to financial backing, happily still continuing, to the publishers of DMCN, now the Mac Keith Press. Initially, it was published under the title Spastics International Medical Publications but this was a clumsy and difficult title because of the unfortunate use of the word 'spastics'and soon after Ronnie's death, who was then senior editor, the Mac Keith Press Board were delighted that his family agreed that the Press would be named after him. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ronnie was collecting a team around him to develop the Journal and the books, and contacted me because he knew I had literary interests. I didn't really want to edit a medical journal but I was interested in paediatrics so in the end I got involved! I worked very closely with Ronnie, both clinically and at the Mac Keith Press, and also with the Medical Education Information Unit of the Spastics Society on the meetings he ran. When he died, I tried to pull together something of Ronnie's nature in this personal memoir below, which supplemented the more formal statements about his life and career which can be found in the relevant number of the Journal.1 One hopes that Ronnie would be pleased with what we have done and I know that he would be hoping that we would continue for another 50 years developing ideas and approaches which were essentially developed by Ronnie Mac Keith. [source]


The Last Will and Testament in Literature: Rupture, Rivalry, and Sometimes Rapprochement from Middlemarch to Lemony Snicket

FAMILY PROCESS, Issue 4 2008
ELIZABETH STONE
Although the psychological literature on the last will and testament is sparse, authors of fiction and memoir have filled the gap, writing in rich detail about the impact of wills on families. Henry James, George Eliot, J. R. Ackerley, and others reveal that a will is not only a legal document but a microcosm of family life: a coded and nonnegotiable message from the will's writer to its intended readers, the heirs, delivered at a stressful time and driving home the truth that options for discussion between testator and heirs are now gone, all factors which may intensify the ambivalence of grief and stall its resolution. Among the problems the authors chronicle: reinvigorated sibling rivalries, vindictive testators, and the revelation of traumatic family secrets. Writers also demonstrate how contemporary social factors, such as divorce, second families, and geographic distance between family members, may complicate wills and ensuing family relations. Exemplary wills, or will-like documents, appear in fiction by Maria Katzenbach and Marilynne Robinson, allowing the living to make rapprochements with the dead, and pointing to testamentary strategies clinicians might develop to lead to a resolution of grief. The depth of these writers' accounts allows clinicians to imagine points at which they might productively intervene in matters pertaining to a will. RESUMEN Aunque la literatura psicológica sobre la última voluntad y el testamento es escasa, los autores de ficción y de memorias han llenado ese vación, escribiendo en rico detalle sobre el impacto de los testamentos en las familias. Henry James, George Eliot, J.R. Ackerley y otros, revelan que un testamento no es sólo un documento legal, sino un microcosmos de vida familiar: un mensaje codificado y no negociable de la voluntad de quien lo escribe a sus destinatarios, los herederos, enviado en un momento estresante y haciendo obvio el hecho de que las posibilidades de discutir entre el emisor y sus herederos ya no existen. Todos estos factores pueden aumentar la ambivalencia de la pena y demorar su resolución. Entre todos los problemas, los autores relatan: aumento de la rivalidad entre hermanos, testamentos vengativos, y la revelación de secretos de familia traumáticos. Los autores también demuestran cómo los factores sociales contemporáneos, como el divorcio, segundas familias y la distancia geográfica entre miembros de la familia, pueden complicar los testamentos y las relaciones familiares posteriores. Testamentos ejemplarizantes, o documentos con aspecto de testamento, aparecen en los trabajos de ficción de Maria Katzenbach y Marilynne Robinson, permitiendo a los vivos acercarse a los muertos, y señalando estrategias testamentarias que los profesionales de clínica pueden desarrollar con el fin de acabar con la pena. La profundidad de los relatos de estos autores permite a los profesionales de clínica imaginarse puntos en que pueden intervenir de una forma productiva en temas relacionados con testamentos. Palabras clave: última voluntad y testamento, muerte, secretos, Henry James, George Eliot, Marilynne Robinson, J.R. Ackerley, Dorothy Gallagher, Maria Katzenbach [source]


The year-long miners' strike, March 1984,March 1985: a memoir

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL, Issue 4 2009
V. L. Allen
First page of article [source]


Life writing in the shadow of the Shoah: fathers and sons in the memoirs of Elie Wiesel and Leon Weliczker Wells

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES, Issue 1 2010
Bertram J. Cohler
Abstract This paper contrasts the accounts of mourning and the resolution of grief in the aftermath of the Shoah as portrayed in the memoirs of two men Elie Wiesel (1928,) and Leon Weliczker Wells (1925,). Each life writer grew up in an Eastern European shtetl, a traditional community, in which he was immersed in Hasidic culture, and was incarcerated during adolescence in an extermination camp. This paper explores the impact of each life writer's experienced childhood relationship with his father in coping with his losses over the post-war period. Wells' memoir is a factual account of the perfidy of the regime that he witnessed as a member of a Sonderkommando or death brigade in the Janowska extermination camp and kept a journal, later used as evidence for the indictment of the regime at the Eichman trial. Wiesel's acclaimed text Night, and his memoirs, reflect his continuing guilt regarding his father's death while they were together in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Frank Harris: The Berkeley years,A personal memoir

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUANTUM CHEMISTRY, Issue 13 2009
Howard S. Taylor
First page of article [source]


Michael Polanyi and the discovery of co-catalysis: Discussion of an autobiographical letter from Michael Polanyi, FRS to Peter H. Plesch of 17 December 1963

JOURNAL OF POLYMER SCIENCE (IN TWO SECTIONS), Issue 7 2004
P. H. Plesch
Abstract The origin of this memoir was a letter from Michael Polanyi (M. P.) to the present writer (P. H. P.) about their researches in the mid-1940s into the mechanism of what are now called cationic polymerizations, at the University of Manchester (England). M. P. analyzes his tactics and the mistakes made in directing this research. When the Manchester-trained researchers made little progress with what was a very recalcitrant problem, M. P. thinking that scientists from a different background might be more sucessful, got P. H. P., from Cambridge, to work with an Oxford-trained chemist. They recognized that the likely cause of the irreproducibility of these polymerizations was the apparatus used which permitted access of atmospheric moisture to the reaction mixtures containing the moisture-sensitive catalytic metal halides. Because the only method for following the very fast polymerizations was by monitoring the accompanying temperature rise, and the reactions had to be done below ambient temperature, the reaction vessel needed to be adiabatic, that is a Dewar (Thermos) flask; hence the problem of how to cool its contents. The solution was P. H. P.'s invention of the pseudo-Dewar vessel, the Dewar space of which, instead of being evacuated permanently, could be filled with air or evacuated. This device permitted the reaction mixture to be made up and cooled, and the reactions to be started without contact with the atmosphere. Thus it was found that isobutene polymerizations, which had stopped unaccountably, could be restarted by water vapor. P. H. P. termed water a "co-catalyst". The consequent "Manchester" theory recognized the monohydrate of TiCl4 as a protonic acid and saw the initiation as due to the protonation of the monomer, with the formation of a tert -carbenium ion, and these ions, formed repetitively, became the propagating species. The Manchester theory was rapidly accepted because it could also explain observations on other related reactions. The involvement of ions established a link with non-aqueous electrochemistry. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 42: 1537,1546, 2004 [source]


The Vanished Kingdoms of Patrick O'Farrell: Religion, Memory and Migration in Religious History

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 1 2007
HILARY M. CAREY
This article considers the place of religion and memory in the history of religious immigration to Australia. It begins with a discussion of the work of Patrick O'Farrell and his family memoir, Vanished Kingdoms and its evocation of family, place, and religion in New Zealand and Australia. It reviews recent writing on collective memory by the religious sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, theologian Paul Ricoeur, and the Australian historian Peter Read, raising possibilities for the analysis of sources relating to the memory cultures of migrants to Australia in the nineteenth century. This article takes a small sample of testimonies from the letters of Irish migrants, including those edited by Patrick O'Farrell, and the speeches and correspondence of some members of the higher clergy and concludes with some speculation about the way in which migrants to Australia forged the chains of memory that constitute their religious communities. [source]


Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2007
Valerie Sanders
Author's Introduction The Victorian period was one of the great ages for life-writing. Though traditionally renowned for its monumental ,lives and letters', mainly of great men, this was also a time of self-conscious anxiety about the genre. Critics and practitioners alike were unsure who should be writing autobiography, and whether its inherent assertiveness ruled out all but public men as appropriate subjects. It was also a period of experimentation in the different genres of life-writing , whether autobiography, journals, letters, autobiographical novels, and narratives of lives combined with extracts from correspondence and diaries. Victorian life-writing therefore provides rich and complex insights into the relationship between narrative, identity, and the definition of the self. Recent advances in criticism have highlighted the more radical and non-canonical aspects of life-writing. Already a latecomer to the literary-critical tradition (life-writing was for a long time the ,poor relation' of critical theory), auto/biography stresses the hidden and silent as much as the mainstream and vocal. For that reason, study of Victorian life-writing appeals to those with an interest in gender issues, postcolonialism, ethnicity, working-class culture, the history of religion, and family and childhood studies , to name but a few of the fields with which the genre has a natural connection. Author Recommends A good place to start is the two canonical texts for Victorian life-writing: George P. Landow's edited collection, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979) and Avrom Fleishman's Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983). These two re-ignited interest in Victorian life-writing and in effect opened the debate about extending the canon, though both focus on the firmly canonical Ruskin and Newman, among others. By contrast, David Amigoni's recently edited collection of essays, Life-Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) shows how far the canon has exploded and expanded: it begins with a useful overview of the relationship between lives, life-writing, and literary genres, while subsequent chapters by different authors focus on a particular individual or family and their cultural interaction with the tensions of life-writing. As this volume is fairly male-dominated, readers with an interest in women's life-writing might prefer to start with Linda Peterson's chapter, ,Women Writers and Self-Writing' in Women and Literature in Britain 1800,1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209,230. This examines the shift from the eighteenth-century tradition of the chroniques scandaleuses to the professional artist's life, domestic memoir, and spiritual autobiography. Mary Jean Corbett's Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992) begins with material on Wordsworth and Carlyle, but ,aims to contest the boundaries of genre, gender, and the autobiographical tradition by piecing together a partial history of middle-class women's subjectivities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' (3). Corbett is particularly interested in the life-writing of actresses and suffragettes as well as Martineau and Oliphant, the first two women autobiographers to be welcomed into the canon in the 1980s and 90s. Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994) revises and updates the theoretical approaches to the study of life-writing, stressing both the genre's hybrid qualities, and its inherent instability: in her view, it ,comes into being as a category to be questioned' (37). Another of her fruitful suggestions is that autobiography functions as a ,site of struggle' (9), an idea that can be applied to aesthetic or ideological issues. Her book is divided between specific textual examples (such as the debate about autobiography in Victorian periodicals), and an overview of developments in critical approaches to life-writing. Her second chapter includes material on Leslie Stephen, who is also the first subject of Trev Lynn Broughton's Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) , her other being Froude's controversial Life of Carlyle. With the advent of gender studies and masculinities, there is now a return to male forms of life-writing, of which Martin A. Danahay's A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993) is a good example. Danahay argues that nineteenth-century male autobiographers present themselves as ,autonomous individuals' free of the constraints of social and familial contexts, thus emphasizing the autonomy of the self at the expense of family and community. Online Materials My impression is that Victorian life-writing is currently better served by books than by online resources. There seem to be few general Web sites other than University module outlines and reading lists; for specific authors, on the other hand, there are too many to list here. So the only site I'd recommend is The Victorian Web: http://.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html This Web site has a section called ,Autobiography Overview', which begins with an essay, ,Autobiography, Autobiographicality and Self-Representation', by George P. Landow. There are sections on other aspects of Victorian autobiography, including ,Childhood as a Personal Myth', autobiography in Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a list of ,Suggested Readings'. Each section is quite short, but summarizes the core issues succinctly. Sample Syllabus This sample syllabus takes students through the landmarks of Victorian life-writing, and demonstrates the development of a counter-culture away from the mainstream ,classic male life' (if there ever was such a thing) , culminating in the paired diaries of Arthur Munby (civil servant) and Hannah Cullwick (servant). Numerous other examples could have been chosen, but for those new to the genre, this is a fairly classic syllabus. One week only could be spent on the ,classic male texts' if students are more interested in pursuing other areas. Opening Session Open debate about the definition of Victorian ,life-writing' and its many varieties; differences between autobiography, autobiographical fiction, diary, letters, biography, collective biography, and memoir; the class could discuss samples of selected types, such as David Copperfield, Father and Son, Ruskin's Praeterita, and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Alternatively, why not just begin with Stave Two of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the First Spirit takes Scrooge back through his childhood and youth? This is a pretty unique type of life-writing, with Scrooge ,laughing and crying' as his childhood and youth are revealed to him in a series of flashbacks (a Victorian version of ,This is Your Life?'). The dual emotions are important to note at this stage and will prompt subsequent discussions of sentimentality and writing for comic effect later in the course. Week 2 Critical landmarks: discussion of important stages in the evolution of critical approaches to life-writing, including classics such as Georges Gusdorf's ,Conditions and Limits of Autobiography', in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28,47; Philippe Lejeune's ,The Autobiographical Pact', in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (original essay 1973; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3,30; and Paul De Man's ,Autobiography as De-Facement', Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919,30. This will provide a critical framework for the rest of the course. Weeks 3,4 Extracts from the ,male classics' of Victorian life-writing: J. S. Mill's Autobiography (1873), Ruskin's Praeterita (1885,89), and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). What do they think is important and what do they miss out? How open or otherwise are they about their family and personal lives? Are these essentially ,lives of the mind'? How self-aware are they of autobiographical structures? Are there already signs that the ,classic male life' is fissured and unconventional? An option here would be to spend the first week focusing on male childhoods, and the second on career trajectories. Perhaps use Martin Danahay's theory of the ,autonomous individual' (see above) to provide a critical framework here: how is the ,Other' (parents, Harriet Taylor) treated in these texts? Weeks 5,6 Victorian women's autobiography: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877) and Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography (1899): in many ways these are completely unalike, Martineau's being ordered around the idea of steady mental growth and public recognition, while Oliphant's is deeply emotional and disordered. Can we therefore generalize about ,women's autobiography'? What impact did they have on Victorian theories of life-writing? Students might like to reconsider Jane Eyre as an ,autobiography' alongside these and compare scenes of outright rebellion. The way each text handles time and chronology is also fascinating: Martineau's arranged to highlight stages of philosophical development, while Oliphant's switches back and forth in a series of ,flashbacks' to her happier youth as her surviving two sons die ,in the text', interrupting her story. Week 7 Black women's autobiography: how does Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) differ from the Martineau and Oliphant autobiographies? What new issues and genre influences are introduced by a Caribbean/travelogue perspective? Another key text would be Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861). How representative and how individual are these texts? Do these authors see themselves as representing their race as well as their class and sex? Week 8 Working-class autobiography: Possible texts here could be John Burnett's Useful Toil (Allen Lane, 1974, Penguin reprint); Carolyn Steedman's edition of John Pearman's The Radical Soldier's Tale (Routledge, 1988) and the mini oral biographies in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861,62) (e.g., the Water-Cress Seller). There is also a new Broadview edition of Factory Lives (2007) edited by James R. Simmons, with an introduction by Janice Carlisle. This contains four substantial autobiographical texts (three male, one female) from the mid-nineteenth century, with supportive materials. Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839,42; 1844) and Early Days (1847,48) are further options. Students should also read Regenia Gagnier's Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832,1910 (Oxford University Press, 1991). Week 9 Biography: Victorian Scandal: focus on two scandals emerging from Victorian life-writing: Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) (the Branwell Brontë/Lady Scott adultery scandal), and Froude's allegations of impotence in his Life of Carlyle (1884). See Trev Broughton's ,Impotence, Biography, and the Froude-Carlyle Controversy: ,Revelations on Ticklish Topics', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.4 (Apr. 1997): 502,36 (in addition to her Men of Letters cited above). The biographies of the Benson family written about and by each other, especially E. F. Benson's Our Family Affairs 1867,1896 (London: Cassell, 1920) reveal the domestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone's Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extent homosexual or lesbian. Another option would be Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) in which the son's critical stance towards his father is uneasy and complex in its mixture of comedy, pity, shame, and resentment. Week 10 Diaries: Arthur Munby's and Hannah Cullwick's relationship (they were secretly married, but lived as master and servant) and diaries, Munby: Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur Munby, ed. Derek Hudson (John Murray, 1972), and The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984): issues of gender and class identity; the idealization of the working woman; the two diaries compared. Half the class could read one diary and half the other and engage in a debate about the social and sexual fantasies adopted by each diarist. It would also be sensible to leave time for an overview debate about the key issues of Victorian life-writing which have emerged from this module, future directions for research, and current critical developments. Focus Questions 1To what extent does Victorian autobiography tell an individual success story? Discuss with reference to two or three contrasting examples. 2,All life writing is time writing' (Jens Brockmeier). Examine the way in which Victorian life-writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time. 3To what extent do you agree with the view that Victorian life-writing was ,a form of communication that appeared intimate and confessional, but which was in fact distant and controlled' (Donna Loftus)? 4,Bamford was an autobiographer who did not write an autobiography' (Martin Hewitt). If autobiography is unshaped and uninterpreted, what alternative purposes does it have in narrating a life to the reader? 5,Victorian life-writing is essentially experimental, unstable, and unpredictable.' How helpful is this comment in helping you to understand the genre? [source]


The "End Of History" 20 Years Later

NEW PERSPECTIVES QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2010
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumphant celebrations of the West, a new chapter of history has opened featuring the rising powers of Asia, led by China. Though embracing free markets, China has looked to its Confucian traditions instead of liberal democracy as the best route to good governance. Will China manage to achieve high growth and a harmonious society through a strong state and long-range planning that puts messy Western democracy and its short-term mindset to shame? Or, in the end, will the weak rule of law and absence of political accountability in a one-party state undermine its promise? Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean thinker who has become the apostle of non-Western modernity, debate these issues. In this section we also republish a collective memoir by George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, recalling their fears and hopes two decades ago as they brought the Cold War to an end. [source]


An exploration of the handover process of critically ill patients between nursing staff from the emergency department and the intensive care unit

NURSING IN CRITICAL CARE, Issue 6 2007
Brian McFetridge
Abstract The transfer of information between nurses from emergency departments (EDs) and critical care units is essential to achieve a continuity of effective, individualized and safe patient care. There has been much written in the nursing literature pertaining to the function and process of patient handover in general nursing practice; however, no studies were found pertaining to this handover process between nurses in the ED environment and those in the critical care environment. The aim was to explore the process of patient handover between ED and intensive care unit (ICU) nurses when transferring a patient from ED to the ICU. This study used a multi-method design that combined documentation review, semistructured individual interviews and focus group interviews. A multi-method approach combining individual interviews, focus group interviews and documentation review was used in this study. The respondents were selected from the ED and ICU of two acute hospitals within Northern Ireland. A total of 12 respondents were selected for individual interviews, three nurses from ED and ICU, respectively, from each acute hospital. Two focus groups interviews were carried out, each consisting of four ED and four ICU nurses, respectively. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that there was no structured and consistent approach to how handovers actually occurred. Nurses from both ED and ICU lacked clarity as to when the actual handover process began. Nurses from both settings recognized the importance of the information given and received during handover and deemed it to have an important role in influencing quality and continuity of care. Nurses from both departments would benefit from a structured framework or aide memoir to guide the handover process. Collaborative work between the nursing teams in both departments would further enhance understanding of each others' roles and expectations. [source]


Interrogating Security: A Life Story in History

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2000
Geoffrey S. Smith
This essay seeks to synthesize personal memoir and history by focusing on the author's life experiences during his first thirteen years. Interrogating security suggests the ways in which big issues,war, peace, the threatof nuclear annihilation, security and secrecy, and youthful masculinity,hit home close to home as well as in the larger political arena. The essay also indicates important continuities between hot and cold war and,in microcosm,some of the costs of developments during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In sum, it proposes some reasons why a young boynurtured in a patriotic ambience became a ,subversive' adult. [source]


,So that we might have roses in December': The functions of autobiographical memory

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 8 2009
John F. Kihlstrom
Autobiographical memory is not merely declarative and episodic in nature. It also entails explicit self-reference, chronological organization and causal relations. It entails conscious recollection, in terms of remembering, knowing, feeling or believing. Its functions may be agentic or nonagentic, but all are assigned, not intrinsic, and thus are observer-relative features of reality. Questions about function risk committing the adaptationist fallacy. Intrapersonally, autobiographical memory is a critical component in the mental representation of self. Interpersonally, autobiographical memory provides a basis for establishing and maintaining social relationships. Autobiographical memory is an individual right, and it may also be an ethical obligation. The popularity of memoir as a literary genre indicates that it is also a means of making money. In a future world of artificial minds with infinite capacity for data storage, there still will be no substitute for the human capacity to remember what really matters and forget what does not. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


The early history of 32P as a radioactive tracer in biochemical research: A personal memoir

BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION, Issue 3 2005
Howard Gest
The concept of using radioactive isotopes as "tracers" of chemical conversions was conceived and developed by inorganic chemist Georg de Hevesy (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 1943). In 1935, he began to apply the technique to various biological processes using 32P, and his experiments revealed the dynamic character of physiology and metabolism. Following de Hevesy's lead, Samuel Ruben (University of California, Berkeley) exploited 32P in 1937,38 for investigation of phospholipid metabolism. Between 1937 and 1940, Ruben and colleague Martin Kamen spearheaded tracer studies in various biological systems using 32P, short-lived 11C, and other radioactive isotopes. During this period, Kamen was responsible for cyclotron-produced radioactive tracers and was able to sustain de Hevesy's research by supplying him with 32P. In 1940, Ruben and Kamen discovered long-lived 14C, which later proved to be a very powerful tool for analysis of complex biochemical processes, such as the path of carbon in photosynthesis. Between 1946 and 1950, 32P was used in studies of bacteriophage replication and photosynthetic metabolism. This memoir surveys the history of these early investigations. [source]


Rich Sensitivities: An Analysis of Conflict Among Women in Feminist Memoir,

CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 2 2009
JUDITH TAYLOR
Alors que le mouvement nord-américain des femmes est surtout connu pour ses efforts en vue de transformer les relations sociales entre les femmes et les hommes, ses partisanes ont également mis l'accent sur la reformulation des relations entre les femmes. Utilisant une source de données novatrice, les mémoires du mouvement social, l'auteure souligne la profondeur de la déception que les féministes s'infligent les unes aux autres. Les mémorialistes débattent des notions provenant du mouvement et du courant principal voulant que les femmes soient compétentes socialement. Cet article présente le concept d'«idéation relationnelle» pour décrire la façon dont les mémorialistes féministes analysent d'une manière critique la compréhension de la socialité des femmes tenue pour acquise et aiguisent leurs désirs d'une nouvelle éthique sociale entre elles. While the North American women's movement is most known for its efforts to transform social relations between women and men, its adherents have also focused on remaking relations among women. Using an innovative data source, social movement memoir, this paper indicates the depth of disappointment feminists cause one another. Memoirists dispute notions found in the movement and mainstream that women are socially capable. The paper offers the concept "relational ideation" to describe the way feminist memoirists critically examine taken for granted understandings of women's sociality and amplify their desires for a new social ethic among them. [source]


When did Louis Pasteur present his memoir on the discovery of molecular chirality to the Académie des sciences?

CHIRALITY, Issue 10 2008
Analysis of a discrepancy
Abstract Louis Pasteur presented his historic memoir on the discovery of molecular chirality to the Académie des sciences in Paris on May 22nd, 1848. The literature, however, nearly completely ignores this date, widely claiming instead May 15th, 1848, which first surfaced in 1922 in Pasteur's collected works edited by his grandson Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot. On May 21st, 1848, i.e., one day before Pasteur's presentation in Paris, his mother died in Arbois, eastern France. Informed at an unknown point in time that she was "very ill," Pasteur left for Arbois only after his presentation. Biographies of Pasteur by his son-in-law René Vallery-Radot or the grandson, and Pasteur's collected correspondence edited by the grandson are incomprehensibly laconic or silent about the historic presentation. While no definite conclusions are possible, the evidence strongly suggests a deliberate alteration of the record by the biographer relatives, presumably for fear of adverse public judgment of Pasteur for a real or perceived insensitivity to a grave family medical emergency. Such fear would have been in accord with their hagiographic portrayal of Pasteur, and the findings raise questions concerning the extent of their zeal in protecting his "demigod" image. Universal recognition of the true date of Pasteur's announcement of molecular chirality is long overdue. Chirality, 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Between Identification and Documentation, ,Autofiction' and ,Biopic': The Lives of the RAF

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2003
Julian Preece
Since the mid-1970s the RAF has generated a variety of different forms of ,life-writing', ranging from memoirs written by ex-terrorists to autobiographical fiction by contemporaries which explores the interaction between an authorial narrator and a central terrorist character. Film-makers, echoing novelists, have often focussed on the life of an individual terrorist. While the view that an individual's turning to the RAF or one of its related groupings could be explained through biographical experience has been discredited by the evidence now available, RAF memoirs are of limited value in other respects because their authors are unable to reflect critically on their past. In fiction (by writers such as Timm, Chotjewitz, and Demksi) and films (by von Trotta, Schlöndorff, and Conradt) which depict the first RAF generation it becomes clear that what is made of the life is more challenging than the life itself. The same appears true of the largely non-fictional treatment of Ulrike Meinhof. Younger writers and playwrights (Dresen, Kuckart, Scholz, Loher) and film-makers (Veiel), while struggling to make links between the recent past and the present, show much greater distance to the material, sometimes to the point of incorporating the points of view of the RAF 's opponents and victims. In addition to generational affiliation the gender of both author/film-maker and particular terrorist subject also determines in unexpected ways the depiction of RAF lives. [source]


,Memories of the Maimed': The Testimony of Charles I's Former Soldiers, 1660,1730

HISTORY, Issue 290 2003
Mark Stoyle
Historians have paid little attention to the experiences and attitudes of the ordinary men who enlisted in the royalist armies during the English Civil War: chiefly because such individuals , most of them poor and unlettered , left no formal memoirs of their wartime service behind them. The present article suggests that the petitions for financial relief which were submitted by wounded and impoverished Cavalier veterans after the Restoration can help to bridge this evidential gap and to illuminate the mental world of the king's more humble supporters. By putting the language of the ,maimed soldiers' petitions' under the microscope, it shows how the artisans, husbandmen and labourers who had fought for Charles I viewed the conflict in retrospect. The article begins by considering the strengths and limitations of the petitions themselves and the purposes for which they were initially composed. It then goes on to discuss what these documents reveal: not only about the physical suffering which the king's soldiers had undergone in the field, but also about their views of their comrades, their commanders and their enemies. The article concludes by arguing that the personal and political links which had been forged amid the fiery trials of the Civil War continued to bind together former royalists, of all ranks, for decades after the conflict came to an end. [source]