Commissioning Official History versus Paying for Official History

Reviewed by: No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1939-1943 Desmond Morton No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1939-1943, Volume 2, Part 1. W.A.B. Douglas, Roger Sarty, and Michael Whitby. St Catharines: Vanwell Publishing, 2003. Pp. 640. $60.00 Canada's Navy has had to wait a long time for an official operational history of its service in its only major war. Sixty years later, a majority of those who served in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War have passed on. Other survivors may lack the strength to lift so massive a volume of their wartime exploits. Purists insist that RCN veterans have benefited from Professor Gilbert Norman Tucker's two-volume The Naval Service of Canada published in 1952 - as accurate and boring an administrative record as any bureaucrat could wish for. So dull was Tucker's work that his minister of national defence, Brooke Claxton, cancelled his third volume on RCN operations and tried to wind up all official histories. Instead, naval veterans and their families were probably satisfied in 1950 by Joseph Schull's Far Distant Ships, a chatty account of the RCN at war, based on interviews collected by Tucker's staff. Certainly Schull's matelots performed as heroically as any posterity could have wished. Unfortunately, there was a large, potentially embarrassing hole in this version of RCN history of which most Canadians and even many RCN veterans were unaware. In the spring of 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic [End Page 566] entered its darkest moment. Ultra was stymied when the Germans added a wheel to their coding machines, wolf packs shared British codes, and sinkings soared. At this moment, the exasperated British opened their training facilities and virtually ordered Canada's corvette navy out of battle to get the training and equipment it needed to do its job. The British might have included this episode in their official history but, instead, discretion prevailed. Canadian reviewers noted the lack of grateful references to the RCN and blamed the British for being snotty. In 1977, Alec Douglas, senior author of this volume, and Ben Greenhous published Out of the Shadows, a popular history of Canada in the Second World War. Suddenly some embarrassing truths began to emerge. Canada's corvette navy, with its yacht-club officers and prairie-bred sailors, had been valiant and long-suffering and too untrained and badly equipped to find or kill U-boats except almost by accident. In 1985, a young academic historian, Marc Milner, published North Atlantic Run, full of the operational failings hinted at by Douglas and Greenhous and severely questioning the competence of both the uniformed and civilian leadership of Canada's wartime navy. Three years later, David Zimmermann published The Great Naval Battle of Ottawa, criticizing the failure of admirals and politicians to provide ships at sea with the scientific and technological resources to do their job. As official historians, Douglas and Greenhous might have saved their revelations for No Higher Purpose, since it covers much the same history as Milner's first volume. Still, there are advantages in being late. In the 1950s, Professor Tucker could not have anticipated the American or British histories, nor could he have known what we now know about the German submarines and their management by B-Dienst. Admirals who might have tried to shape Tucker's work, like the generals who tried to influence Colonel Charles Stacey's army volumes, are now barely ghosts. The failings and inadequacies depicted by Milner and Zimmerman are neither hidden nor polished, but they are set in a fairer context. Except for specialists, the main contribution of this phenomenally detailed account is to enlarge understanding of Canada's complicated role in the North Atlantic alliance against the Nazis. Starting as a tiny colonial clone of the Royal Navy, the RCN grew to be a junior ally of both the British and the Americans. Excluded from major decisions, unwisely eager to shoulder heavier burdens than were compatible with its lack of up-to-date equipment and trained...

ACTION HISTORY,________ DECLARATORY HISTORY, AND THE REAGAN YEARS Richard A. Melanson From the beginning, our administration has insisted that this country base its relations with the Soviet Union upon realism, not illusion. This may sound obvious. But when we took office, the historical record needed restatement. So restate it we did. -Ronald Reagan, October 28, 1987 M, .ore than thirty years ago Paul H. Nitze published an influential essay, "Atoms, Strategy, and Policy," in Foreign Affairs, which offered a penetrating critique of the Eisenhower-Dulles nuclear strategy ofmassive retaliation.1 Most significant, however, was the conceptual distinction he drew between declaratory policy and action policy. Nitze defined declaratory policy as "policy statements which have as their aim political and psychological effects." Action policy was described as the "general guidelines which we believe should and will in fact govern our actions in various contingencies."2 Nitze argued that whereas the Eisenhower administration 's declaratory policy rested on massive retaliation, its action policy actually set in motion the doctrine of gradual deterrence. This sharp disjunction troubled Nitze because he believed that the psychological and political effectiveness of declaratory policy would be vitiated if it departed too greatly from action policy.3 1.Paul H. Nitze, "Atoms, Strategy, and Policy," Foreign Affairs, vol. 34, no. 3 (January 1956): 187-198. 2.Ibid., 187. 3.Ibid., 188. Richard A. Melanson is director of international studies at Kenyon College and a faculty associate at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University. 225 226 SAIS REVIEW Nitze's suggestive distinction can be adapted by introducing the concepts of declaratory and action history. Declaratory history refers to those public statements made by presidents and their advisors that use historical analogies, lessons, interpretations, parallels, anecdotes, and other historical material to defend or criticize current U.S. foreign policy, though the notion of declaratory history could be used to include other types of policy as well. These public utterances comprise an administration 's "official" history of important past events and policies, or, in this case, an "official history" ofU.S. foreign relations. In the service ofmodern "personal/rhetorical" presidents, this official history invokes unifying, emotive symbols designed to facilitate public support for their foreign policies. Action history refers to those historical analogies, lessons, trends, parallels, and so forth that policymakers invoke in their private policy deliberations. The political appointees of new administrations may initially articulate action histories that conform closely to their declaratory histories. But external, unanticipated events may challenge or upset these historical images and create significant gaps between an administration's declaratory, or official history and hard, new realities.4 Officials may minimize the discrepancies between their action and declaratory histories, find new historical materials to employ in policy discussions while continuing to publicize the same declaratory history, or simply muddle through, retaining their old historical views while coming to grips with a new environment and not worrying much about cognitive inconsistencies .5 This essay will argue that the Reagan administration's declaratory history of U.S. foreign policy emphasized two themes: (1) the cold war years as a golden age of U.S. strength, wisdom, steadiness, generosity, and restraint in which a stable and just international order was constructed ; and (2) the period between the mid-1960s and 1980 as an age of U.S. foreign policy weakness, timidity, confusion, and despair. But while these declaratory themes were not absent from policy discussions, the more salient action history of the Reagan administration consisted of lessons drawn from the Vietnam experience. 4.The literature examining the ways in which U.S. foreign policy officials employ historical analogies, lessons, parallels and the like in their private deliberations is notably scant. Best known are two works by Ernest R. May: "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse ofHistory in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and, with Richard E. Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986). 5.On the ability of President Truman and his senior advisers to accommodate large amounts of inconsistencies in their thinking about U.S. -Soviet relations between 1945 and 1948 see Deborah Welch Larson, Origins ofContainment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton...

On April 30, 1871, an unlikely group of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono Oodham Indians massacred more than a hundred Apache men, women, and children who had surrendered to the U.S. Army at Camp Grant, near Tucson, Arizona. Thirty or more Apache children were stolen and either kept in Tucson homes or sold into slavery in Mexico. Planned and perpetrated by some of the most prominent men in Arizona's territorial era, this organized slaughter has become a kind of phantom history lurking beneath the Southwest's official history, strangely present and absent at the same time. Seeking to uncover the mislaid past, this powerful book begins by listening to those voices in the historical record that have long been silenced and disregarded. Massacre at Camp Grant fashions a multivocal narrative, interweaving the documentary record, Apache narratives, historical texts, and ethnographic research to provide new insights into the atrocity. Thus drawing from a range of sources, it demonstrates the ways in which painful histories continue to live on in the collective memories of the communities in which they occurred. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh begins with the premise that every account of the past is suffused with cultural, historical, and political characteristics. By paying attention to all of these aspects of a contested event, he provides a nuanced interpretation of the cultural forces behind the massacre, illuminates how history becomes an instrument of politics, and contemplates why we must study events we might prefer to forget.

A place of incarceration and liberation, political debate and historical denial, the H Block cell units of Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland housed members of both Republican and Loyalist military groups during ‘The Troubles’ and are now considered ‘icons’ of that conflict. The H Block’s dual status as an articulation of and resistance against power mean that the area is still one of the most contested sites of conflict in Europe. Based on a long-standing site-specific investigation, and drawing on a range of sources from architectural plans to photographs of street protests, H Blocks explores the material relationship between the prison as a built articulation of power and its inhabitants, highlighting the ethical and political roles that architecture can play in situations of conflict. It also addresses the afterlife of such sites after the end of conflict and how they can adapt to the changing cultural meanings of their space. The book demonstrates how the conflicted histories of the prison are configured in its design and destruction, and the inhabitation and attempted preservation of the site itself, revealing how its architecture is bound up with questions of power and resistance, embodiment and attachment, witnessing and remembering, the materiality of history and its commodification. H Blocks is about the power of architecture and image. It examines the spaces of the H shaped cell units of Long Kesh/Maze prison and how they were inhabited. It is an exploration of the material relationships of political imprisonment in a British jail in Ireland. In its various phases, from architectural plan to post-ceasefire ruin, the H Blocks are a material form of conflict in and about Northern Ireland that carried a highly significant symbolic load. Representations of the H Blocks are integral to the struggle over their meaning, part of their history and historical record. But H Blocks is not an official history. Its sources are the site itself, the voices of prisoners and prison visitors and an array of images and objects that comprise the material culture of Long Kesh/Maze. Each chapter explores a fragment of its material record: the design of the H Blocks, the resistance from its cells, the global witnesses to the oppression of imprisonment, the female visitors and war of waiting, the murals of a liberated zone and the sale of material culture of Long Kesh/Maze. Each chapter also offers a different theoretical lens through which to understand these fragments: panopticism and its critique, dwelling perspectives, necropolitics and the rights-bearing body, a feminist spatial theory and the practice of writing, performativity, the appropriations of commodity culture and agency of objects.

This study attempts to analyze the portrayal of the Mumbai attacks and the contradiction points in the Hotel Mumbai film. This film is made based on the true events of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. Related to these huge events, there are a lot of historical books that have covered the Mumbai terrorist attacks. The study aims to find the contradictive representation of the film based on the official history. This research was conducted by using a descriptive method and qualitative approach. In this research, the researcher took data from conversations of characters and the framing of mise-en-scene in the film. This study is conducted by applying a new historicism approach and intrinsic elements of literature, the researcher compares the official history and the film. Through the new historicism approach, the researcher discovers that the Hotel Mumbai film places a lot of differences. First, there is a difference regarding the characters positioning, Arjun’s character in the film is the amalgam of the real story of Karambir Kang and Amit Pashave. Second, there is a difference in the narrative structure of Zahra – Seyfi & Meltem in which Zahra’s character was not killed because she said two sentences of creed. While, as what is told in the historical record, there was a Turkish couple named Seyfi and Maltem Muezzinoglu who were held as hostages and witnessed the murder of another hostage but they were not killed by the terrorist because they prayed in Arabic loudly. Third, there is a very clear difference between the setting of place and time. The report Mumbai terrorist attacks in history happened in six places and lasted for four days, meanwhile, the portrayal in the film happened in three places and lasted for a day. Lastly, this film has picked up the narrative elements to show what has not been known by the public only by reading the official version of history. The goal is to show that a historical-based film can be aimed to gain equal representation of historical narratives from a different point of view.

Over the last 20 years British witches have reconsidered historical orthodoxies handed down from earlier generations. Over this time most practitioners have followed the lead of contemporary historians who offer revised empirical accounts that suggest received claims about continuity have no basis in the historical record. In doing so, they contributed to strategic perspectives on the history of a modern movement. Simultaneously, revisionist histories have provided new spaces to trace alternative connections to the past through less rational and more analogic ways. This chapter explores how the “traditional wise-woman”—made tangible through the tale of the Wayside Witch” at Cornwall’s Museum of Witchcraft—provides a sensory and emotional means to consider the past in the present. It traces how empirical sources are one thread in a complex and dynamic sense of historicity where official histories are continually combined with multiple sources and polyvocal accounts towards creative ways of making meaningful histories.

As an ancient physician, the name of Qibo was firstly found in Hung Di Nei Jing (Huangdi's internal canon). In official history, his name was firstly recorded in Shi Ji (Historical Records) by Si Maqian. According to the records in Tong Zhi and Lu Shi, Qibo might be a tribe headman being aware of medicine and health preservation in the period of three emperors. Ancient Qibo tribe located at the foot of Qishan in Shanxi Province. Qibo and his tribes lived in Zhouyuan at the foot of Qishan. During Huangdi's travel to the west, he guided Qibo and his tribe to Xinmi, Henan Province. According to Suwen and Lushi, Qibo studied medicine from an ancient famous physician, Jiudaiji. According to the forward of Dian Huang Di Ba Shi Yi Nan Jing by Wang Bo, it can be known that Nan Jing was handed down by Qibo to the latter generations. Except Nan Jing, the Huang Di Nei Jing, Huang Di Wai Jing, Huang Di Tai Su, Huang Di Qi Bo An Mo Jing, Qi Bo Zhen Jing, Qi Bo Jing Zang Lun, Huang Di Zong Nan Jing were also medical treatises written by Qibo.

In 1783 Margaret and Sophia Ross were transportedby their father John Ross from the short-lived colony of British East Florida to live with relatives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Born into slavery like their mother Bella, the girls were manumitted before being sent to live with their grandfather, the Laird of Arnage. Their experiences, and their relationships with their Aberdonian relatives have until now remained conspicuously concealed in the archives in the Special Collections Library at the University of Aberdeen. Personal letters, journals, and testaments – in addition to records found in other archives in the United Kingdom, United States and the Caribbean – reveal the worlds of two among the many hundreds of marginalised ‘natural or reputed’ children lost to both memory and the historical record. Does their absence from official published history suggest an intentional and calculated deletion of their presence from the family story? 

The arrival of the first female Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers disrupted the highly masculinized image of a police force that was closely connected to ideal Canadian manhood and the formation of the nation. The absence of women from the historical record allowed the figure of the manly and heroic male Mountie to continue its dominance in official, academic, and popular histories of the police force. Both the print and broadcast media were complicit in disseminating these representations. When the first female Mounties were hired in 1974, editorial cartoonists and journalists frequently portrayed them in highly gendered terms that reflected understandings of femininity in operation in broader Canadian society at the time. The RCMP also articulated the arrival of the first female RCMP officers in gendered terms, reinforcing beliefs about manliness and masculinity as essential attributes for police officers. In contrast to these depictions, the oral histories of female RCMP officers present an alternative perspective that challenged and contested these gendered assumptions, establishing female Mounties as equal participants in the policing activities, and the history, of the RCMP on their own terms.

Dixie's Daughters The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Culture By Karen L. Cox University Press of Florida, 2003 218 pp. Cloth, $55.00 Many young southerners today may have heard of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). If they have, they probably did so when Congress refused to renew a patent on its insignia or when the Daughters defended the flying of the flag. A century ago, however, most southerners knew of the UDC and its activities; it was the largest independent organization of women in the region. Despite the UDC's historical importance, however, Dixie's Daughters is the first (other than official histories) book-length study of the group. Author Karen L. Cox traces the origins of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the Civil War relief efforts of southern women and, more directly, to the numerous Ladies Memorial Associations that formed right after the war. These local organizations cared for graves and established Memorial Day, thereby shaping the South's initial memory of the Civil War. In 1894 the UDC organized and soon established chapters across the South, indeed across the nation. By the end of World War I, it boasted a membership of 100,000, made up primarily of upper-class women, both those women who had lived through the war and those descended from veterans. The group undertook various progressive benevolent projects, including college scholarships and homes for veterans and women, but the UDC's major goal always remained vindicating the Confederacy. They erected monuments across the South and in various other ways helped establish a historical record of the war. Most important, the UDC tried to indoctrinate the young with what Cox calls Confederate culture. They created an organization for them--the Children of the Confederacy--sponsored essay contests, ensured state adoption of school textbooks with a southern view of the war, and placed flags and pictures of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in southern schools. Through its efforts, the UDC sought not just to ensure that future generations of white southerners agreed with them but also to secure vindication from the Yankees. The group had always promoted an American patriotism, conditioned on the North's respect for the South, and in World War I southern support for the war effort evoked a northern response that the Daughters felt constituted that vindication. After the war, Cox argues, the group never again exerted the public influence it had. Dixie's Daughters provides a much-needed institutional history of the UDC at the height of its influence; that alone would be a major contribution. …

Reviewed by: Practicing Memory in Central American Literature by Nicole Caso Greg C. Severyn Caso, Nicole . Practicing Memory in Central American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 288 pp. In Practicing Memory, Nicole Caso selects a variety of "mainstream" contemporary texts from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Honduras that employ historical fiction to cover what poet Humberto Ak'abal describes as "the mouth of silence" (2), that is, to speak out against pervasive silences and forced acceptances imposed by official history in the isthmus. Although the chosen works assume markedly different approaches as they each seek to interject their historical perspectives, their "regenerative effect" (3) becomes [End Page 107] clear in the four sections of this study as memory is accessed from distinct physical and ideological spaces. The influence of East-West politics and North-South economics is treated in each chapter, uniting Caso's critical analyses into a cohesive argument that reveals recurring imperial and colonial legacies. As a result, Central America becomes more than just a small strip of earth bridging two land masses; it becomes a spatial metaphor "intentionally left open [to] ambiguity" (4), allowing both marginal and popular, literal and figurative issues to be explored. The first two chapters comprise part one, "The Isthmus", where East-West relations converge in Central America, making clear the links between the Cold War rhetoric of the twentieth century and the isthmus's role as "elusive object of desire" (20) for foreign powers. In chapter one, Caso argues that Ernesto Cardenal's epic poem El estrecho dudoso (1966) challenges complacent univocal representation of the past by filling in the omissions in the hegemonic historical record in an effort to escape its construct. In chapter two, Caso focuses on U.S. involvement in the region by analyzing the ideological use of language in two works that deal with the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état: Miguel Ángel Asturias's Week-end en Guatemala (1956) and Arturo Arias's novel Después de las bombas (1979). She indicates that Asturias forcefully brandishes language in his short stories in order to expose anticommunist campaigns through the manipulation of words and propaganda to legitimize U.S. intervention. Arias, on the other hand, makes language a "site of struggle" (76) by restoring some words onto the silenced, blank pages of history. Caso points to the novel's carnivalesque and satirical style as a means to "orchestrate the many self-conscious voices of resistance" (75) elaborated within a single, literary space. Caso then begins section two, "The City," which concentrates on urban spaces as entities representing the impact of modernity in Central America. Chapter three initiates this section with a study of Asturias's El señor presidente (1946). By examining the cost of "progress" in the isthmus, Caso makes the case that this novel "captures what gets left out of historiographical discourse... through sounds, spaces, and images that fall at the margins of normative language" (107). Then, the fragmented novels Diario de una multitud (1974) by Carmen Naranjo and Manlio Argueta's Caperucita en la zona roja (1977) are contrasted in chapter four to reveal how "community" can be represented either as isolated and broken-down by external market forces, or an interrelated unit able to resist in times of need. In both novels, the push towards social awareness and sociopolitical solidarity is evident. She concludes this chapter by suggesting that these works use "fragmentary narrative styles from within the discourses that they are critiquing to interrupt their homogenizing tendencies" (142). Part three of the study, "The Nation", takes a step back, spatially speaking, to consider the totalizing narrative of Julio Escoto's Rey del Albor, Madrugada (1993) in chapter five. Caso argues that Escoto opts to use the typically hegemonic [End Page 108] style of totality to give voice to his project from the margin, able to point out "top-down manipulations from abroad" (147) when conceiving ideas that pertain to mestizaje and nationalism in Honduras. Additionally, although the novel attempts to fight homogenizing tendencies imposed on the country from the outside, the risks involved in an inward "rallying around the Honduran nation" (183) and the consequent homogenizing from within are also taken...

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South Susan V. Donaldson (bio) Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them. —J. W. C. Pennington Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history—and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history. . . . Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126). These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the [End Page 267] antebellum white South's systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history—in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). Toni Morrison, for one, has seen it as her specific charge to search out those silences "for the unspeakable things unspoken" and finally to retrieve them from the realm of the forgotten and give them voice ("Unspeakable" 210). But there are also issues that have generated furious arguments since the publication of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner: that is, what is it that stories and histories of slavery should say, what narrative forms should they take, who should write them—and for what audiences? These are questions that have provided much of the impetus for new categories of writing about slavery, the most notable of which are novels like Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Morrison's Beloved, often referred to as "neo-slave narratives." Two 2003 novels, Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Known World and Valerie Martin's Orange Prize-winning Property, suggest yet another category: that of post- or anti-plantation tradition novels drawing inspiration in part from the tradition of slave narratives, especially those by Solomon Northup, Henry Box Brown, and William and Ellen Craft, but also from the necessity of responding to and writing against the long shadow cast by Gone with the Wind on popular memories of slavery, the antebellum South, and the Civil War era. Indeed these two novels cast their sights farther afield by interrogating mastery itself, and by implication master narratives of history, by exposing the daily operations and limits of power and domination, excavating the counternarratives blocked by those operations, and ultimately revising both the content and the form of the historical record. The Known World and Property, then, are not just historical novels. They are postmodern novels written for a postmodern South and a postmodern age—with all the connotations of a loss of mastery that term "postmodern" carries. For if all of our current debates on slavery reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible...

The investigation of Structure 10L-26 has revealed a series of sequent monumental constructions underlying the elaborate final phase temple/pyramid made famous by the Maya area's largest hieroglyphic stairway. The meticulous recording and analysis of the archaeological, architectural, hieroglyphic, and iconographic materials from this sequence of sculpture-adorned buildings provides the opportunity for a diachronic view of the nature of the historical record and political symbolism. Investigations conducted to date provide hieroglyphic and archaeological evidence in support of the sequence of rulers documented in the official histories of the last four rulers of Copan, and evidence of a dramatic shift in the use of this space, and of political symbolism in general, by the fifteenth king, Smoke Shell. While the lack of evidence for “re-writing of history” will be encouraging to many, the evidence also shows the need for a careful assessment of official histories by archaeological excavations. Just as important, the Copan Acropolis research demonstrates the usefulness of incorporating ideas and data derived from the careful scrutiny of the public monuments in ongoing archaeological investigations and model building.

The 5000 km long Queen Charlotte‐Alaska‐Aleutian seismic zone is subdivided into 17 unequally sized segments. Their boundaries are delineated based on the prior distribution of large and great earthquakes. The 17 segments are chosen to represent areas likely to be ruptured by “characteristic” earthquakes. This term usually implies repeated breakage of a plate boundary segment by either a large or great earthquake, whose source dimensions remain consistent from cycle to cycle. This definition does not exclude the possibility that occasionally adjacent characteristic earthquake segments may break together in a single “giant” event that is larger than the characteristic size outlined. Conversely, a segment can also sometimes break in a series of smaller ruptures. Formal computations of the conditional probabilities for future large and great earthquakes in the 17 segments of the Queen Charlotte‐Alaska‐Aleutian seismic zone are based on the following data sets and findings: (1) recurrence intervals from historic and geologic data; (2) direct recurrence time estimates based on rates of relative plate motion and the size or displacement of the most recent characteristic event in each segment; and (3) the application of a lognormal distribution of recurrence times for large and great earthquakes. Results of these computations indicate seven areas that have high (i.e., ≥60%) conditional probabilities for the recurrence of either large or great earthquakes within the next 20 years (1988–2008). These areas include Cape St. James, Yakataga, the Shumagin Islands, Unimak Island, and the Fox, Delarof, and Near Islands segments of the Aleutian arc. When a shorter time interval is considered (1988–1998), those segments more likely to rupture in large (MS 7–7.7) rather than great earthquakes have a high conditional probability. These areas include the Unimak, Fox, and Delarof Islands segments. The largest uncertainties in these forecasts stem from the short historic record (providing a single recurrence time estimate for some segments, or widely varying estimates for others); from the unknown importance of aseismic slip; and from a vague definition of “characteristic” earthquake size. In fact, characteristic earthquake size may not be a time‐invariant quantity.

In light of recent developments, the historical record of the German Democratic Republic will be closely reexamined as the two Germanies merge into one country. Christoph Hein's novel Horns Ende undoubtedly will play a role in the debate about the GDR past, because it is a clear repudiation of official historical mythmaking. The novel examines in detail the political and social fiber of a small town in the GDR during the fifties. Horn returns to the town some thirty years after his death, and entices the townspeople to recount their lives during the early years of the socialist republic. These recollections initiate a dialogue between author, reader and the townspeople. The outcome of these exchanges is a skillful dissection of the effects of Stalinism on ordinary citizens, and it revises perceptions of a period in GDR history that officially had been touted as politically and socially harmonious. Hein challenges the reader to reconstruct a historical record that more closely reflects the experiences of ordinary people, and in doing so he exposes past official historical mythmaking. He is convinced that a society's survival is dependent upon the accuracy of its history; historical revision therefore must not be left to those in power. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol15/iss2/4 Christoph HeM's Horns Ende: Historical Revisionism-A Process of Renewal Heinz Bulmahn The University of Toledo Historians as well as writers in the German Democratic Republic have long recognized that the history of the GDR has yet to be written, because much of the official history remains a composite of ideological mythmaking. Recent developments in the German Democratic Republic will accelerate the process of historical revisionism, and the term Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to grips with the past) will take on a more complex meaning now that the Berlin Wall has come down. The historical record, which had already been scrutinized in recent years by both historians and writers in the GDR will now be examined and re-examined as people who were previously excluded from participation join the discussion. Literary works in the German Democratic Republic will undoubtedly play a significant role in setting both the tone of the debate about the past and in providing a broad spectrum of viewpoints about past political, social and economic developments in the GDR. Helga Konigsdorf commented recently about the role of literature in defining the past: Wenn man spater wissen will, wie es gewesen ist, in dieser DDR, wird man es vor allem aus der Literatur erfahren. Oder besser, man wird erfahren wie es auch gewesen ist(14). 1 She acknowledges the primary role that GDR poets and writers have played in providing a significant, even if not entirely adequate, repository of information about life in the German Democratic Republic. Despite its shortcomings, the literary record will be more reliable in assessing the past than either media or official historical accounts. In varying degrees writers and historians in the GDR have challenged the official concept of history of the German Democratic Republic. In much of his fiction, Christoph Hein, one of the prominent GDR writers, has engaged his readers in a dialogue about the necessity for an accurate historical account. In his latest novel, Horns