Official Story Research Articles

Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (review)

Reviewed by: Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks Craig A. Condella Charles Bambach . Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xxvi + 350. Paper, $24.95. In the last twenty years, Martin Heidegger's encounter with National Socialism has been an ongoing subject of debate. While some scholars believe that Heidegger's politics discredit his overall philosophical project, others argue that we can save Heidegger's philosophy by bracketing out his personal politics, effectively separating the man from the thinker. Splitting the difference between these two extreme positions, Charles Bambach focuses his study on the Heideggerian themes of rootedness (Bodenständigkeit) and self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) in maintaining the close connection between Heidegger's politics and ontology, particularly during the period from 1933 to 1945. What results is a carefully researched book that vilifies more than it vindicates, though without ever denying Heidegger's place as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth-century. Turning the tables on Heidegger and his philosophical obsession with the rootedness of the German people, Bambach explores Heidegger's own roots, insisting that we read Heidegger within his proper historical context and not within some imagined "hermeneutic vacuum" (15). This proves to be no easy task, however, as the post-1945 Heidegger took great pains in presenting his previous thought as more of a renunciation than an affirmation of National Socialist ideology. Heidegger's concerns were ontological, not political—or so he would have us think. Contesting what he calls the "The Official Story" of Heideggerian apologetics, Bambach does well in situating Heidegger's writings from that period—from the Rectorial Address of 1933, to the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, to the Nietzsche lectures of 1936–37 and 1944–45—in dialogue with some of the foremost Nazi sympathizers of the day. As Bambach has it, Heidegger's interlocutors were not only Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, but contemporary figures like Hans Heyse, Ernst Krieck, Alfred Baeumler, and Kurt Hildebrandt, all of whom argued in favor of National Socialism and the self-assertion of the German people. The theme of Selbstbehauptung was by no means original to Heidegger, nor was it apolitical. The self-assertion of the Volk was not an abstract idea but a very real and pressing concern, particularly at a time when Germany found itself caught between the rootlessness and nihilism of Russia to the East and America to the West. In drawing our attention to Heidegger's co-opting of National Socialist terminology, Bambach nevertheless remains open to the ever-widening gulf that existed between them [End Page 675] Ultimately, Bambach reads Heidegger's writings from 1933 to 1945 as "a philosophical attempt at geo-politics, a grand metaphysical vision of German destiny that develops both within and against the vision of political hegemony forged by the National Socialist movement" (10). While it cannot be doubted that Heidegger's talk of struggle and rootedness, sacrifice and homeland, heroic valor and native soil mimics the language of National Socialism, it is similarly hard to deny that he used these terms in a private way. Heidegger's pastorale militans did not employ a positivist metaphysics founded upon biological racism and bent on worldly domination. Instead, what Heidegger hoped for was an "ontological revolution" (99) wherein the German university would lead the way, with Heidegger himself playing the role of "philosophical Führer" (21). For Heidegger, German autochthony demanded a new beginning that would require a certain return to the Greek understanding of truth and being—Germany, after all, being the "sole nation capable of retrieving the Greek arche" (171). Needless to say, Hitler's brand of National Socialism would never lead to such a revolution—a fact that would become all too clear to Heidegger after his brief stint as rector at Freiburg. And yet, even while acknowledging "the terrible failure of a particular version of [National Socialism] in its organizational, technocratic, administrative, and military-political form" (184), Heidegger refused to relinquish the language of 'rootedness,' holding to what Bambach deems a private, "purer" (180), "Messkirchian" (10) form of National Socialism from the mid-1930s until 1945, and...

Forget Baghdad: Roundtrip to the Promised Land

Memory is an empty plate, scarred by scratches from the knife on its skin. —Ronny Someck, "Baghdad," in The Milk Underground1 In his film Forget Baghdad (2003), Samir aims to compensate for the historical "abyss of abandonment" (Hess 1993:7) that looms between the Zionist official story of Israel and its Iraqi chapter through the intimate and poignant reminiscences of five individuals of Baghdadi origin.2 He does this in part by closing in on the faces of the five "actors"—Shimon Ballas, Moshe Moussa Houri, Sami Michael, Samir Naqqash and Ella Shohat –for whom the film offers permission and a vehicle to travel to their ancestral homeland and, to a certain extent, to the self. What have been, in the Israeli rhetorical climate, spurned fragments in a linear journey—a one-way-ticket to the Promised Land—is transformed into a roundtrip journey, characterized by endless loops and coils. Significantly, the film opens with a top-down view of a man's suited legs walking through an airport; in the background is heard an announcement of the imminent departure of an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Airport sounds merge and then give way to Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil's multicultural jazz instrumental, "Got to Go Home," which is somewhat reminiscent [End Page 133] of the "Pink Panther" theme song. Both the music and the audible display of the film's title and credits, by way of typewritten font, clinch the detective story-like documentary nature of Samir's nearly two-hour film.3 This essay attempts to contribute to increasing the visibility of Baghdad as an originary site of Israeli and US Jewish minorities. In "Forget Baghdad," the hybrid, hyphenated identity of Iraqi-Jews or Arab-Jews is presented within the context of European colonialism and modernity, and situated on the extended cultural map of the Jewish diaspora in the "East" from Baghdad to Teheran and Mumbai. I aim to expand the visual archive of ethnography and its representation beyond "writing culture" or "reading culture" to include viewing as an important aspect of the discursive practices of cultures. Ever since Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the media representation of Iraq and Baghdad has been ideologically veneered by US foreign policy, contributing to an essentialized, Orientalist portrait of what is in reality a finely textured "culturescape." As a visual ethnography that takes memory as its subject, "Forget Baghdad" redresses the tendency to represent Iraq and its Jewish minority culture as abstractions, as a chapter in Jewish history that lacks historical context and legitimacy. It is one thing to return to a place that is associated with violence, collective or personal, and another to return to the place that was forsaken for the hope of a better one. The viewer quickly discovers that Baghdad is a place that invokes both trauma and solace. The trauma of Baghdad inheres in the fact of its exile from Israeli memory, but, as the film underscores, it is only through memory that Baghdad can be recuperated and reclaimed as part of Israeli cultural history. Baghdad appears in the film as a place of origin, a cultural reference, and a genealogy.4 But, as I highlight in this essay, the film is not so much about Baghdad and everyday life there prior to emigration, but about the memory of the city as it is informed by the experience of being Israeli today, fifty-two years or so later. The idea of "going back," therefore, is part of a wider discussion of discursive legitimacy and recently invented strategies to effectively participate in the public debates on ethnicities and cultures of origin.5 The key questions are what kinds of narratives are produced from this cinematic site, and what is the nature of this memory? The main issues at stake are not only the permission to go back, in conjunction with the nostalgic and sentimental value inherent in going back, but...

Memory's Guilted Cage: Delany's Dhalgren and Gibson's Pattern Recognition

Memory’s Guilted Cage:Delany’s Dhalgren and Gibson’s Pattern Recognition Jason Haslam (bio) In 1996, American expatriate William Gibson—the "father" of cyberpunk, living in British Columbia after moving to Canada to evade the Vietnam draft1 —wrote an introduction to the re-release of the novel Dhalgren, originally published in 1974, written by Samuel Delany, often described as a precursor to or inspiration for later authors of cyberpunk.2 In his introduction to Delany's eight-hundred-page opus, Gibson writes that he "place[s] Dhalgren in history," a history he then specifies: No one under thirty-five today can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the generation that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial. But something did happen: a city came to be, in America. (And I imagine I use America here as shorthand for something else; perhaps for the industrialized nations of the American Century.) The city had no specific locale, and its internal geography was mainly fluid. […] The city was largely invisible to America. If America was about "home" and "work," the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for America to see. […] I would not suggest that Dhalgren is any sort of map of that city, intentional [End Page 77] or otherwise, but that they bear some undeniable relationship. (Those who would prefer to forget the city say that it produced no true literature, but that too is denial.) […] When I think of Dhalgren, I remember this: A night in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., amid conditions of civil riot, when someone, as the police arrived with their staves and plastic shields, tossed a Molotov cocktail. (xii–xiii) Gibson implies, or intones, that Dhalgren is a novel not just about American civil unrest, but that it is an encapsulation of that unrest, "the unmediated experience of the singularity […], free of all corrosion and nostalgia" (xiii). Gibson thus places Dhalgren at the crux of memory and nation, suggesting that what Toni Morrison has elsewhere called the "national narrative"—the "official story [that] obliterates any narrative that is counter to it" (xvi, xviii)—has either intentionally "forgotten" the civil unrest of the 1960s or rendered it nostalgic, while Dhalgren stands not just as a final testament to, or reflection of, but a nearly magical incarnation of those events. Delany's postmodern, circuitous, self-reflexive, exploration of the fictional city of Bellona represents, for Gibson, the recent radical, if not revolutionary past which has been subsumed by the "long slough" (xiii) of the national narrative which, in turn, is created for and by what is so often referred to as "middle America." Little wonder, then, that Gibson revisits issues of amnesia, denial, and their relations to American national identity (again figured by him as "shorthand for something else; perhaps […] the American Century" of globalization) in his 2003 novel, Pattern [End Page 78] Recognition, possibly the first literary, fictional exploration by an (ostensibly) American author of the position of 9/11 within an American and global history—and future.3 Gibson's and Delany's novels construct a similar tension related to the past and to a largely unspoken sense of a guilt that concerns memories (personal and cultural) of inaction in the face of (cultural and personal) moments of violence. The past becomes a space of both individual neuroses and communal guilt. I argue that both Delany and Gibson use a thematic focus on a past that has gone missing (the protagonist's amnesia in Delany's text, a missing father in Gibson's) to discuss the ways in which the American national narrative, in order to maintain a self-cohesive vision of the nation, needs to repress its very creation of and relation to a silenced other (represented through the inner city by Delany, and the history of global conflict by Gibson). Following the mechanics of ideology, this decontextualization or a-historicizing transforms a given historical moment, with its specificities (of a given system of power relations, for example) into a universalized myth and therefore into a supposedly unassailable truth—in Barthes's terminology a "global sign, the final...

Why True Globalization Depends on New Scientific Models

Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Akashic Field is vital to our transition from a long epoch of empire building—of the drive to control Earth's resources by fierce competition in a situation of perceived scarcity—to a future of truly cooperative global family. Laszlo's universe is a far cry from the one Western science has taught us and compatible with my own views as a “post-Darwinian” evolution biologist. In fact, no small number of Western scientists today have defected from the official scientific story of How Things Are to create or adopt various versions of the new scientific worldview Laszlo presents—a worldview rooted in older sciences and cultures such as Vedic, yet ultimately not just timely, but futuristic. These new scientific models, integrating ancient and modern knowledge, represent a paradigm shift greater than the Copernican revolution and are crucial to the next stage in humanity's evolution as a planetary species.

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11

studied American history, so I knew that the US government had fabricated 'incidents' as an excuse to go to war several times before. Nevertheless, although the thought did cross my mind that 9/11 might likewise have been arranged, I did not take this possibility seriously. So writes David Ray Griffin, an eminent philosopher and theologian, in his introduction to The New Pearl Harbor. From this sceptical vantage point Griffin brings together an account of a terrible tragedy that is far more logical than the one we've been asked to believe. Gathering stories from the American press, from the work of other researchers and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves, Griffin presents a case that leaves very little doubt that the attacks of 9/11 need to be further investigated. He begins with these questions: Once radio contact was lost with the various hijacked aircraft, why weren't jets immediately scrambled from the nearest military airport, something that is routine procedure, according to the FAA's own manual? And why did the administration's story about scrambling jets change in the days following the attacks? The disturbing questions don't stop there: they emerge from every part of the story, from every angle, until it is impossible not to doubt the official story, and suspect its architects of enormous deception. Long a teacher of ethics and theology, Griffin writes with compelling and passionate logic, urging readers to draw their own conclusions from the evidence outlined. The New Pearl Harbor rings with the conviction that it is possible, even today, to search for the truth; it is a stirring call demanding a real investigation into what happened on 9/11. David Ray Griffin has been a professor of philosophy of religion and theology at the Claremont School of Theology in California for over thirty years. He is co-director of the Center for Process Studies there and the author or editor of over twenty books.

Stalin, the Russians, and their war, 1941-1945

Until the advent of glasnost began to lift censorship in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, it was impossible for Russians in Russia to truthfully depict their own struggle against Nazi Germany. Even before World War II was over, the Soviet propaganda machine began to construct an official story: through enormous sacrifice, the Soviet people had gloriously freed themselves and the world from fascism, raising the hammer and sickle higher than ever on the ruins of Hitler's imperialist dreams. In Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, however, Marius Broekmeyer presents the testimony of Russian participants, eyewitnesses, and historians of World War II to reveal not a heroic struggle, but a war marred by catastrophes, errors, and lies. These testimonies openly discuss subjects omitted from official Soviet propaganda or glossed over in popular Western histories of the Allied victory in WWII - from purges within the Red Army and Soviet use of punitive brigades to the deployment of millions of poorly-equipped soldiers to the front lines.

Riding the American Dream: The Official Story of Excelsior-Henderson MotorcyclesRiding the American Dream: The Official Story of Excelsior-Henderson Motorcycles By HanlonDaniel L.. Saint Paul, MN: Union Hill Press, 2003. 401 pages, hard cover, $32.95

This article presents a review of the book “Riding the American Dream: The Official Story of Excelsior-Henderson Motorcycles,” by Daniel L. Hanlon.

Gendered Self-Fashioning: Adelaide Casely Hayford's Black Atlantic

times of Africans who were subject to colonialism. This interest has not only been spawned by a desire to outline a deeper literary history of the African continent than has often been assumed by its academic postcolonialist consumers, but it has also arisen out of a genuine concern for the ways in which and African agency, in particular, have been represented in the colonial and indeed, often, the postcolonial archive. So, for instance, the lay version of the story of African literary production would continue to see the beginnings of a written literary tradition in with the publication of Achebe's Things Fall Apart or, at best, in the earlier writings of Amos Tutuola and his Palm Wine Drinkard. Everything before this, so the story assumes, was oral tradition. To be sure, this version of the story has never been the official story of the discipline, but it continues to be part not only of the popular consciousness but also often of the professional unconscious. And it is for this reason that titles of scholarly articles, such as Albert Gerard's 1500 Years of Creative Writing in Black Africa published in Research in African Literatures in 1981, still come across as a little provocative, a little jarring. that article, Gerard states categorically, In historical fact, important segments of subsaharan had been introduced to writing and to written literature long before the first white man-whether explorer or philanthropist-reached her shores (147). He continues to outline the growth of a written African literary tradition in the Ge'ez language of Ethiopia, in the Arabic of the East African coast, and in eighteenth-century Swahili. Before concluding with the generation of postcolonial writers with whom we are most familiar, he pays significant attention to the nineteenthand twentieth-century development of missionary presses in colonial Africa. These presses, primarily interested in producing translations of the Bible in the indigenous languages of Africa, found it necessary at first to develop an orthography

The Eros of Memory

… Let us situate ourselves vis-à-vis the judge that affects each of our hours and that we call ‘memory’. Memory is a law-court in permanent session but it is arbitrary: it hands down gratuitous reward and generous punishment. Whole years of our existence remain buried under the weighty stones of oblivion and, in contrast, dazzling deeply rooted moments rise to the surface. The peculiarity of this inner court is its utter amorality. It does not act in accordance with codes or established moral laws, not is it founded on any ethical values, whether positive or negative. Of course it cannot be said that it is unconnected with consciousness, but it acts, so to speak, according to the instinct of consciousness.

Families, Fields, And Fighting For Land: The Spatial Dynamics Of Contention In Rural Brazil

This article analyzes the formation of the largest grassroots social movement in Brazilian history: the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (MST). In movement literature and academic discourse, MST's formation has been consistently attributed to three factors— agricultural restructuring, political transition, and religious organization. These three factors form what I call an "Official Genesis Story." I argue that although the Official Genesis Story fits together well at the macro level, it cannot explain who decided to join MST or why, because the story does not locate acts of resistance in either people or place. A comparison of MST members in two different regions of Brazil shows how the spatial constitution of production and reproduction informed individual decisions to join MST. By geographically situating the official story, we uncover the contentious actors behind the contentious actions.

Reconfiguration in the context of BPR

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between organising knowledge and process in the context of business process redesign (BPR). Empirical evidence was collected from one of the biggest retailers in the UK. Findings derived from a qualitative analysis of longitudinal case study data suggest that change involves complex battles of stories that inform and shape both how knowledge is organised and how knowledge organises. These contested stories illustrate how there is rather more going on than a simple replacement of one organisational narrative with a new consensual meta-narrative. Although BPR introduced a version of change that seeks to claim a preferential right of interpretation and officiality, the ambiguity of the concept leaves open room for political manoeuvring. We conclude that the emergence of dominant official story of change (which represents a form of stored knowledge on change) remains open to redefinition. The coexistence of competing narratives demonstrates how the collective sense making of new business processes is not simply based on an uncontested version of past and present experience, but is intrinsically a process in which organisational members attempt to re-landscape collective views on change.

“You Must Remember This”: Traumatic Postmemory and the “Cold War” Construction of Canon in Joyce Carol Oates’s Recent Fiction

event of narcissism [i.e., the true structure of trauma] ... is really a question of something never occurs, and at the same time never passes away, something is impossible, a self-apprehension of the ego is not a self-apprehension, a splitting brings death at the very moment it brings the subject into being. --Charles Shepherdson, Telling Tales of Love: Philosophy, Literature, and Psychoanalysis It is the fluidity of experience and not its Platonic essence is significant, for truth is relative, ever changing, indeterminate.... [Accordingly,] identity is not permanent; it is a philosophy of the individual, stubborn, self-reliant, and ultimately mysterious. --Joyce Carol Oates, (Woman) Writer Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be, Felix wondered. --Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This IN HIS MOST RECENT NOVEL, THE COMING STORM (1999), Lambda Literary Award finalist Paul Russell draws the reader sympathetically into the lives of Claire Tremper and Libby Fallone, two unhappily married women who at one time roommates together at Barnard College during a time when the world was settling in for the long haul of a cold war (31). At time, The Bomb loomed over everything, Russell writes. Spies and traitors lurked--in friends, family, perhaps even in oneself. So the official story ran (31). To compensate, we're told further, Claire and Libby had invented other lives, a private world meant to augment the stifling, suspicious America hemmed them in on all sides (31). Such an America would perhaps have been more suited to the happily married Douglas Brill and his energetic wife Mary Ann--a couple straight out of the fifties, Russell's narrator observes, a minor characterization uncomplicated, so dreary, in many ways perfect for the [prep-]school world (190) in which all of the major characters in Coming Storm are situated later in the 1990s. For these major characters in the present day, the novel's prepschool--the very tony Forge School located in New York state's Hudson Valley--thus becomes the site of some extraordinary machinations in Russell's compelling narrative the apparent simplicity and naivete of the Cold War 1950s can only serve to contrast. Headmaster Louis Tremper (Claire's husband), for instance, is clearly motivated by something more than a simple desire to fill an unexpectedly vacated English teaching position on his faculty when he hires the extraordinarily handsome and charismatic twenty-something Tracy Parker, a former Forge School alumnus. Tremper's conflicted marriage to Claire, and his continuing to work on the novels of the sexually embattled German novelist Thomas Mann, present the troubling case of a closeted homosexuality can only be the match of the even more troubled Tracy Parker himself, whose same-sex attraction to the underage Noah Lathrop III excites and repulses Parker by turns given his longstanding friendship with the -positive Arthur, another Forge alumnus. Moreover, the fact Claire Tremper now finds herself attracted to Parker like her older severely repressed husband adds a further storm of emotional complication (to go with Russell's title) intensifies even further when it is gradually revealed the apparently innocent Noah Lathrop may be consenting to an illicit sexual relationship with his new Engish teacher merely as a means of striking out at the callous indifference of his usually coked-up and not easily scandalized father. Would those apparently uncomplicated and perhaps now welcomingly dreary fifties might return in the face of such present day sexual and emotional turmoil. For Russell, therefore, one important aspect of his project in a novel dealing with traumatic subjects like paedophilia, intergenerational sex, queer sexuality and would appear to be the development of an arguably more current perception that life might be rich, complicated, ambiguous . …

The Evolution of a Pauline Toxic Text

The earliest followers of Jesus authored their identity narrative within the metanarrative of Jewish faith, thereby creating a new Jewish-Jesus sect. The Christian identity narrative arose as a new story and could not call upon either a Jewish or a Pagan metanarrative for its justification. It was a new creation inspired by the Spirit and authored by Paul. With his guidance, the Pagan followers of Jesus, Christians, articulated their personal and communal experiences of empowerment by the Spirit in a new identity narrative that would in time establish itself as the dominant metanarrative for Western civilization. Members of the Jewish-Jesus community in Jerusalem immediately denied the validity of the Christian narratives. They sought to subjugate the new story to their official and dominant story: that one had to be Jewish in order to follow Jesus. Paul urges the Christians to remain faithful to their personal stories of empowerment by the Spirit. Unfortunately, he also resorts to the use of toxic texts to disenfranchise his Jewish opponents.

Reclaiming SPSSI's Radical Promise: A Critical Look at JSI's “Impact of Welfare Reform” Issue

Studies of the impact of welfare reform reported in the Winter 2000 issue of JSI uniformly conclude that the results are mixed. Uncritically accepting the “official story” that success can be evaluated by the numbers of former welfare recipients who are working, the researchers, adopting a neutral “objective” perspective, focus on “barriers” to achieving this goal. We argue that this “honest broker” model, in which researchers provide “scientific” data to those in power, neglects the roles of social psychologists as social critics and political activists that were among the diverse perspectives among SPSSI's founders. We call for a rebirth of these more radical orientations and offer examples of research approaches that involve entering into alliances with oppressed groups in society. We hope our critique will stimulate wider discussion about SPSSI's future mission.

Freud's alleged repudiation of the seduction theory revisited: facts and fallacies.

Over the decades the official story, nay, the shibboleth of orthodox psychoanalysis (as represented, for example, by Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, James Strachey, and Kurt Eissler), has been that Freud retracted the false seduction theory of the neuroses in favor of the true theory, infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. This change of causal theory, analysts believed, stemmed from clinical experience and was an act of intellectual courage. Freud’s own account of his revelation (Freud, 1896a), recantation (letter to Fliess of September 1897), and rehabilitation of the seduction theory stands in stark contrast to the official story. In 1981 Jeffrey Masson transformed the controversy into a cause celebre by claiming, upon reading letters from Freud to Fliess (Freud, 1887–1904), previously expurgated by Anna Freud from their first publication in 1950, that Freud abjured the seduction theory out of cowardice and dishonesty. These views were sensationalized by reporters Ralph Blumenthal in 1981 and Janet Malcolm in 1983 (Malcolm, 1984), in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, respectively, to climax in 1984 in the no less sensational best-seller by Masson (1984a) The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. But even before the book appeared, Malcolm’s portrait of Masson in The New Yorker made him look like a mix of modern-day Rasputin with women and a seductive manipulator of his elders—in the words of psychiatrist Robert Coles writing in The Boston Globe, “a grandiose egotist—mean-spirited, self-serving, full of braggadocio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a self-destructive fool . . . his own words reveal this psychological profile” (quoted in

Re-Creating the Wilderness: Shaping Narratives and Landscapes in Shenandoah National Park

The view at Sawmill Park Overlook in Shenandoah National Park encompasses private woodlands in the distance, agricultural lands in the valley, and park forests in the foreground. An interpretive sign at the overlook describes Patchwork Forest and explains that the visible differences in vegetation occur because Non-Park areas are subject to direct human change which Park lands no longer experience. This wayside provides one short passage in a longer story told by the National Park Service (NPS) about Shenandoah, a story that has coevolved with the landscape during the last seventy-five years. This official story highlights certain aspects of Shenandoah's history and shades others, and recent expressions of the park narrative have downplayed the integral role of human beings in shaping the Blue Ridge Mountains. One does not have to stray far from Sawmill Park Overlook to find places where the landscape contradicts the narrative. At the foot of the sign are rows of tree stumps neatly cut to maintain the vista. For as long as they have been inhabited, Shenandoah National Park lands have been subject to direct human change. Homesteads, farms, cattle pastures, and orchards dotted the slopes of the Blue Ridge until the NPS took possession of the lands in 1936, and, to use the landscape architect's term, obliterated almost all traces of human history. In recent decades, the official story of Shenandoah has been one of re-creation, of a wilderness lost to human exploitation and then restored by natural processes. But nature alone did not re-create a lost wilderness. The NPS and the Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc) created a landscape never before seen oIn the BIlue Ridge, through fire suppression, road construction, wildlife protection, human removal, landscaping, and engineering. Through the various stages of acquiring park lands, establishing Shenandoah, and re-creating the landscape, park officials and supporters told a variety of stories that justified both the preservation and the transformation of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Throughout Shenandoah's history, stories and landscapes have re-created each other. This history of storytelling and land management in Shenandoah National Park attempts to make two contributions to the broader study of environmental history.

Cavemen in Eden? Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain Offer Radical Revisions of Genesis

summer of 1999 by dropping Darwin's theory of evolution from the required state science curricula, the prospect of a new Scopes trial began to seem possible in the twenty-first century. This apparent resurgence of Creation Science has inspired fundamentalists with the hope of a return to Genesis as the official story of humanity's origin, even as Darwin's defenders redouble their efforts to keep evolution in the classrooms.1 In 1923, two years before the original Scopes trial, Shaw depicted a similar ideological struggle between Genesis and evolution in The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, the second play of his metabiological pentateuch, Back to Methuselah. In the play, a scheming Liberal politician exultantly describes his plan to pull in both conservative and nonconformist voters with an explanation of evolution that seems effortlessly to reconcile the religious and the scientific factions by treating their stories as essentially equivalent, as simply different ways of explaining the same facts: take your school children, your Bible class . . . into the museum. You shew the kids the Piltdown skull; and you say, 'That's Adam. That's Eve's husband.' You take the spectacled science student from the laboratory in Owens College; and when he asks you for a truly scientific history of Evolution, you put into his hand The Pilgrim's Progress.2 Although it sounds like a silly, shallow subterfuge in the mouth of the politician, the effort to reconcile the scientific explanation of humanity's origin with the religious myth has provided an irresistible temptation ever since those disturbing fossils from prehistory were first unearthed, not only for public figures seeking too look both orthodox and modern, but also for writers seeking to understand and express the Zeitgeist of their time.

Revisiting Spain as Liberation from the Past in "Irse de casa" and "A Woman Unknown: Voices from a Spanish Life"

The phrase is gained currency during the Franco years as a tourist industry marketing slogan. In that context, Franco's sinister slogan sounds positive, and it was effective in boosting a seriously depressed economy; tourists began to pour into Spain during the 1960s.' The extent to which Spain was profoundly from their home countries was not apparent to casual visitors. For them, different might mean picturesque, exotic, or inexpensive. The effect of their presence was the gradual infusion of ideas and customs that contradicted the official story of Spain that had been developed by the Franco regime, a Spain that had emerged from a second reconquest strong, traditional, united, Catholic, and closed to ideas that might threaten its conservative ideology. For the Republicans and other dissidents who had been reconquered, Spanish culture was oppressive, and change was painfully slow. Women experienced it somewhat differently from men, and in the post-Franco years they have been eager to tell their stories. Two books published in the last two years of the twentieth century offer a retrospective consideration of Spain from the point of view of two women who internalized the oppression that permeated the culture in which they spent their formative years. Carmen Martin Gaite's novel, Irse de casa (1998; Leaving Home), and Lucia Graves's personal memoir, A Woman Unknown: Voices from a Spanish Life (1999), tell the stories of women who escaped from Spain but not from the effect of repressed memories of their lives there.2 For Amparo Miranda Drake, the protagonist of Martin Gaite's novel, and for Lucia Graves, revisiting Spain is an unexpectedly liberating and rich, albeit anxiety-producing, experience. Lucia Graves returns to Barcelona, which she describes as high-tech and postmodern (6), and Amparo discovers that the provincial town in which she was raised has been transformed by the Movida (post-Franco cultural revolution). Irse de casa is a work of fiction that in many ways reads like a memoir, and A Woman Unknown is a memoir that weaves together the stories of the author and several other women in such a way that it reads like a novel. Both works seem to be constructed on the

Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb: The Loyalty Case of Harald U. Sverdrup

In the summer of 1941, Harald Sverdrup, the Norwegian-born Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in La Jolla, California, was denied security clearance to work on Navy-sponsored research in underwater acoustics applied to anti-submarine warfare. The clearance denial embarrassed the world renown oceanographer and Arctic explorer, who repeatedly offered his services to the U.S. government only to see scientists of far lesser reputation called upon to aid the war effort. The official story of Sverdrup's denial was the risk of blackmail over relatives in occupied Norway. Declassified documents tell a different story. Although Sverdrup's integrity was defended on the highest levels of U.S. science, doubt was cast upon him by members of his own institution, who accused him of being a Nazi sympathiser. Personal distrust, rooted in scientific and intellectual disagreement, spilled over into questions about Sverdrup's loyalty and judgement. These doubts were considered sufficient grounds for withholding clearance, until Roger Revelle, a former student of Sverdrup now working within the Navy, was able to obtain a limited clearance for Sverdrup to develop techniques to forecast surf conditions during amphibious assaults. After the war, this work was credited with saving many lives, but at the time it placed Sverdrup out of the mainstream of Navy-sponsored oceanographic research. In being denied access to major areas of scientific work, Sverdrup's position as a leader of American oceanography was undermined. The loyalty case of Harald Sverdrup illustrates the emergence of an institutional apparatus through which the U.S. military began to control and shape the organisation of American science in the twentieth century. Military sponsorship of scientific research, begun during the open conflicts of World War II and continuing into the simmering tensions of the Cold War, involved explicit control by the U.S. military of who had access to critical information. This in turn meant who could do science in conjunction with the military. As the U.S. Navy became the principal sponsor of oceanography in the post-war years, clearance to do military work became to a great extent clearance to do oceanography. Choices about who could be trusted were also choices about who would do science, and what kind of science they would do.

The Thin Line between Loyalty and Treachery in Mao's ChinaThe Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution. Jin QiuThe Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971. Frederick C. Teiwes , Warren Sun

The Lin Biao affair still stands today as one of the most puzzling events in the history of the People's Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution was beginning to quiet down when out of the blue it was announced that the heir apparent had attempted to assassinate the Chairman and that he had fled the country in a plane that crashed in Mongolia, killing him, his wife, Ye Qun, and his son, Lin Liguo. Having once been hailed as a national hero, Lin Biao was overnight denounced as the most vile of people, a Liu Shaoqi-type swindler. Then, five years ago, without any change in the official story, the commemorative stamp bearing Lin Biao's picture was suddenly reissued signifying that he had been reinstated in the pantheon of China's 10 great marshals. The puzzle only gets more peculiar.