pre-World War Research Articles

A transcriptome software comparison for the analyses of treatments expected to give subtle gene expression responses

BackgroundIn this comparative study we evaluate the performance of four software tools: DNAstar-D (DESeq2), DNAstar-E (edgeR), CLC Genomics and Partek Flow for identification of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) using a transcriptome of E. coli. The RNA-seq data are from the effect of below-background radiation 5.5 nGy total dose (0.2nGy/hr) on E. coli grown shielded from natural radiation 655 m below ground in a pre-World War II steel vault. The gene expression response to three supplemented sources of radiation designed to mimic natural background, 1952 – 5720 nGy in total dose (71–208 nGy/hr), are compared to this “radiation-deprived” treatment. In addition, RNA-seq data of Caenorhabditis elegans nematode from similar radiation treatments was analyzed by three of the software packages.ResultsIn E. coli, the four software programs identified one of the supplementary sources of radiation (KCl) to evoke about 5 times more transcribed genes than the minus-radiation treatment (69–114 differentially expressed genes, DEGs), and so the rest of the analyses used this KCl vs “Minus” comparison. After imposing a 30-read minimum cutoff, one of the DNAStar options shared two of the three steps (mapping, normalization, and statistic) with Partek Flow (they both used median of ratios to normalize and the DESeq2 statistical package), and these two programs identified the highest number of DEGs in common with each other (53). In contrast, when the programs used different approaches in each of the three steps, between 31 and 40 DEGs were found in common. Regarding the extent of expression differences, three of the four programs gave high fold-change results (15–178 fold), but one (DNAstar’s DESeq2) resulted in more conservative fold-changes (1.5–3.5). In a parallel study comparing three qPCR commercial validation software programs, these programs also gave variable results as to which genes were significantly regulated. Similarly, the C. elegans analysis showed exaggerated fold-changes in CLC and DNAstar’s edgeR while DNAstar-D was more conservative.ConclusionsRegarding the extent of expression (fold-change), and considering the subtlety of the very low level radiation treatments, in E. coli three of the four programs gave what we consider exaggerated fold-change results (15 – 178 fold), but one (DNAstar’s DESeq2) gave more realistic fold-changes (1.5–3.5). When RT-qPCR validation comparisons to transcriptome results were carried out, they supported the more conservative DNAstar-D’s expression results. When another model organism’s (nematode) response to these radiation differences was similarly analyzed, DNAstar-D also resulted in the most conservative expression patterns. Therefore, we would propose DESeq2 (“DNAstar-D”) as an appropriate software tool for differential gene expression studies for treatments expected to give subtle transcriptome responses.

From Corsets to Communism: The Life and Times of Zofia Nałkowska; A Biography

Zofia Nałkowska was one of the most innovative prose writers of Polish literature. Her work spanned three periods: from pre-World War I Young Poland, through the Inter-war years, to post-World War II communist Poland. Her writing, some of which has been translated into English, is a valuable addition to modernist literature and deserves to be known outside of Poland.In From Corsets to Communism: The Life and Times of Zofia Nałkowska; A Biography, Jenny Robertson has undertaken a challenging task. Moving chronologically through Nałkowska's life, in successive chapters, she intertwines events from the author's life with interpretations of her various works, as well as important political, historical, social, and cultural phenomena. Robertson shows how Poland's history influenced Nałkowska's writing, from her father's socialist activities in partitioned Poland to her often criticized work as a parliamentarian during the Stalinist years. At the same time, Robertson demonstrates how important Nałkowska's personal life was for her writing. Bits and pieces from various love affairs, marriages, flirtations, and financial struggles all made their way into her works. Moreover, unexpected, sometimes quirky observations of people and things similarly resurfaced in the texts. Sometimes, the observation entered a text directly. This was the case with her anthology of short stories, Dom nad łąkami [The house by the meadows 1925]. The Nałkowski family owned a summerhouse in the countryside and, as Robertson writes, “[t]heir neighbors were simple people whom Zofia would later immortalize in her much acclaimed book, The House by the Meadows” (p. 19). At other times, the event that inspired her would be much more transposed and changed. For example, in 1907, her first husband, Leon Rygier, “seduced and made pregnant” (p. 24) a country girl who worked for the author as a servant. “Far into the future [1934], the seduced country girl would become one of the greatest characters in pre-war Polish literature: Justyna in Zofia's much acclaimed novel, Boundary” (p. 24). The connection could be even more distant. The title of Nałkowska's last novel, Węzły życia [Knots of Life, 1948], is based on an inscription on a Jewish tombstone that the author noticed as a teenager and noted in her diary (p. 215).The back and inner jackets suggest a popularizing biography written in an emotional tone. Yet, for a popularizing work, Robertson very thoroughly supports her biography with sources. She quotes from or refers to not only Nałkowska's own diaries and fictional works, but also to the writing of numerous of her contemporaries, people who knew her either in a personal capacity or as a fellow artist or both. The wealth of biographical detail will be of interest not only to the casual reader, but also to the scholar of Nałkowska's writing. In that respect, the notes are especially valuable, as they direct the reader to exact citations in primary sources, some of which, like the author's Dzienniki 1899–1954 [Diaries, 1970–2001] are voluminous.For the casual reader, unfamiliar with Polish history and/or culture, Robertson's book may be a bit of a challenge. The constant intertwining of the personal, literary, and cultural information, the constant changing of direction may require concerted effort. This is especially true of the political and cultural background, which is presented clearly, but very briefly. I am uncertain if the casual reader will be able to understand the significance of each given phenomenon for Nałkowska. One would hope that the brevity of the descriptions might inspire the reader to search for more information on Poland.Those interested in the Western suffragist era and fin-de-siècle, might find her pre-World War I novels of interest. Written in a Neo-romantic flowery style that Nałkowska later rejected, they offer daring descriptions of women's psyche and emotions, often breaking thematic taboos. As Robertson writes, “she wrote as a woman about women, penetrating deep into the female psyche and sexuality” (p. 22). Robertson further demonstrates how the author's Inter-war novels and one great play, Dom kobiet [House of women, 1930] constituted her best, most mature works, and are an important addition to late modernist psychological literature. Finally, there is the post-World War II period. Robertson herself had first encountered Nałkowska's work through her important collection of stories, Medaliony [Medallions, 1946]. Nałkowska participated in the Commission to Investigate War Crimes, interviewing numerous survivors of concentration camps. The result was a collection of chillingly matter-of-fact stories that described Nazi atrocities; a collection translated into numerous languages and today considered a classic of genocide literature.Overall, Jenny Robertson's From Corsets to Communism is a worthwhile and successful endeavor. Well-documented and written in a lively style, the book makes a convincing case for Nałkowska's innovative writing being of interest to a wide variety of readers.

Egypt's Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics

Carl Rommel, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, has written an intriguing anthropological study on Egyptian football and politics set against the background of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Using media analysis, interviews, and fieldwork, this study reveals how prevailing political and emotional attitudes toward the game changed after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's fall. Rommel's central argument revolves around what he refers to as an “emotionally charged and highly politicized ‘bubble’” (2): the intertwining of Egyptian football with the Mubarak family's political agenda, with hegemonic masculinity, and with an outpouring of uncontrolled emotion. When the regime fell and the bubble burst, Rommel claims, images of the game were transformed and stigmatized due to fear of the game's ability to produce extreme emotions that could be cynically exploited for political ends that do not benefit the people (siyasa).This thought-provoking argument is written in a clear and engaging style that will appeal to scholars from various disciplines. As the book's title and subtitle inform us, Rommel's narrative intersects several fields of study, yet the monograph's main theme is primarily directed to modern Egypt and Middle East scholars. Egypt's Football Revolution is an important addition to the recent wave of sports publications on the Middle East and the ever-growing literature that uses sport as a fruitful lens through which to examine social and cultural issues. Sport historians, in particular, will be interested by the study's claim that the emotions generated by sport are a product of politics.The book is primarily based on fifty interviews Rommel conducted in Egypt during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, picky readers (mostly historians) will need to adjust themselves to sentences that start with: “When I have asked friends” (49) and “I often heard” (215). However, when the narrative forces Rommel outside of his interview-based comfort zone, his work becomes, as he stated, more “methodologically eclectic” (21). Such integration is especially clear in the first two chapters, which focus on the football bubble during the Mubarak regime. The lack of contemporary interviews compels Rommel to do some “real” historical research. But the selection of the newspaper articles, TV appearances, and other media sources is relatively scant. Moreover, the narrative decision to fluidly shift from examining “historical sources” to post-2011 interviews can sometimes lead to a messy integration of “history” and “memory.” In itself, this overlap is hardly problematic. As numerous postmodern scholars have convincingly shown, history and memory are connected by an intimate and reciprocal relationship. Nevertheless, if Rommel's thesis is correct and an emotional change toward the game indeed occurred after the uprising, the post-uprising interviews on their own can only indicate an altered perspective on the old regime's culture and not, as the book implies, provide definitive evidence of the existence of such a “bubble” during the Mubarak era.One element that might have further enriched and strengthened the book's argument is incorporating a more transnational perspective. For example, early in the text, when attempting to establish the connection between football and Egyptian nationalism, Rommel informs the readers that already in the interwar period “the team's performances in those [international] tournaments were followed with great anxiety among what was then an emerging national public” (7). That might be correct, but as the extensive work on the 1920s and ’30s has repeatedly shown, such a claim could easily describe many cultures in this pre–World War II era and their fear of “degeneration.” Similarly, Rommel argues that the revolution failed because of Egyptian politics’ inability to conform with the imagined needs of the nation. As he rhetorically asks in his conclusion, “If all actors striving to effect change are required to remain nationalist and nonpolitical, then what kind of changes are possible at all” (217)? However, this sort of political toothlessness is not exclusive to the Egyptian uprising, and it also describes to some extent the disillusionment of Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 global protests in general. Moreover, a more cynical reader might even say the story of contemporary Egyptian football is less about revolution, emotions, and bubbles and more about a winning team that was beloved by the people and the regime and a relatively mediocre team that is unable to repeat its predecessor's three consecutive wins in the Africa Cup of Nations.Despite these issues, the book is a welcome addition to scholarship on sport and society. The diverse themes and thought-provoking thesis make the study a fruitful object for future debates, and it is a must for scholars and graduate students of sport in the middle east.

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

When Energy Efficiency Begets Air Pollution: Fuel Conservation in Japan's Steel Industry, 1945-60.

Between 1945 and 1960, Japan had some of the most energy-efficient iron and steel industries in the world. Two technologies-heat management and oxygen steelmaking-were key enablers of significant energy conservation, an industrial success story commonly attributed to Japan's post-World War II development. Contrary to current understanding, both technologies had deep pre-World War II roots. Their development accelerated after the war through institutionalized exchanges of experience and expertise among Japanese companies. However, these energy conservation technologies had unintended and little-known consequences: they were a major source of air pollution. This article provides two correctives. First, energy conservation technologies took longer to develop than previously thought. Second, saving energy can dramatically increase an industry's environmental footprint. Japan's industrial experience provides an example of how the road to air pollution hell was paved with the best energy conservation intentions.

Regarding Arthroscopy: Can Orthopedists and Rheumatologists Be Friends?

Rheumatologists' interest in arthroscopy began before the 1980s, when many era practitioners began to take up the procedure in earnest. Some of the important players in pre-World War II explorations of arthroscopy were rheumatologists, and the father of modern arthroscopy Makei Watanabe counted many rheumatologists among his postwar students, who were publishing about arthroscopic insights into rheumatic conditions in the 1960s and 1970s. We chose to review this evolution to demonstrate the diverging interests of rheumatologists and orthopedists in arthroscopy and emphasize the chances for reconciliation and cooperation. Methods involve our personal recollection and review of the literature. Guidelines for the practice of arthroscopy were published by the American Rheumatism Association (now the American College of Rheumatology) 7 years before similar guidelines appeared from the Arthroscopy Association of North America. American rheumatologists ceased arthroscopy when controlled trials showed no effect in osteoarthritis beyond placebo and biologics for synovitis virtually eliminated situations in which synovectomy might be considered. The research potential of arthroscopy has been realized mainly by European rheumatologists, although the ultrasound-guided biopsy is supplanting arthroscopy as means to secure synovium for investigation, despite the advantages of the latter, such as the ability to obtain larger amounts of tissue, select tissue based on macroscopic appearance, sample multiple area in the same joint, and deliver the potentially therapeutic effect of washout. New miniscopes suitable for office use could restore some of the lagging interest in arthroscopy for investigation. Orthopedists have generally been resistant to rheumatologists doing arthroscopy but would not be sharing any turf with rheumatologists using the miniscope. We hope that we orthopedists and rheumatologists could be friends as we enter this new phase of arthroscopy as we use the technique for different purposes.

Plamy na honorze

HONOR DISGRACED: PRE-WORLD WAR II DESERTIONS OF POLISH ARMY OFFICERS
 During the Interwar period, desertions plagued the Polish Army. Many officers were counted among the thousands of rank-and-file soldiers who deserted prior to 1939. The desertion of officers was the most shocking of all peacetime abandonments, as they were supposed to be patriotic leaders of the men under their command. Officers deserted for myriad reasons, including fear of prosecution for illicit behavior, such as theft, and the discovery of cooperation or collusion with foreign agents. Of all the officer desertions during this period, the most spectacular took place in 1930 when Major Stanisław Krauss defected to Belgium and France. In 1934, a French court sentenced him to 5 years in prison for spying on French forces for Germany. The trial hit press headlines worldwide.

Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule by Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

<i>Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule</i> by Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Reading Projects

Reading Projects William Roebuck (bio) Some people collect stamps. Others throw axes or play quidditch. From the Middle English term hobyn, denoting a toy horse and hence an activity done for fun, "hobby" today seems like a pretty inclusive term, although a quick search on Wikipedia, turning up nearly four hundred hobbies, did not include my personal go-to recreational activity, reading projects, perhaps because it sounds about as cutting-edge as a minuet dance club. And unlike a rash of coolly obscure names for practitioners of their hobby, whether old reliables "philatelist" and "lepidopterist"—not to invidiously single out stamp and butterfly collectors—or lesser-known practitioners such as badge-collecting "scutelliphilists," "reading projectologist" just doesn't have a lot of fizz and pop to it. But there it is; to paraphrase a familiar public confessional formula: "My name is Bill, and I'm a reader." When I was a young person growing up in North Carolina, I would try to pass off my love of reading as a hobby. "Why, son, that ain't a hobby," I remember being told. Over the years, despite that cool reaction from various gatekeepers intent on not letting reading stink up the pristine standards of hobbydom, I found myself forging ahead and organizing my reading activity into the somewhat more cataloged, rounded activity I call "reading projects." Sometimes this has meant tackling an author's entire body of work, at least as I defined it, or the major novels or one topical hit, such as Daniel Defoe's powerful A Journal of the Plague Year, read in our year of coronavirus, three hundred years after it was first published. Occasionally it has denoted efforts to educate myself on a particular topic, whether the history of Saudi Arabia or the migration of the blues out of the Mississippi Delta. From time to time, I've gone for a "this and that" pattern, reading a novel recently published in alternation with something more classic and extending the pattern. At one point, for example, in a possibly misbegotten effort to read the major novels of Henry James, works of [End Page 184] increasing density and difficulty from his late-career, pre–World War I years, I spiced things up by reading a novel each by Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty, and Jennifer Egan—razor-sharp contemporary novelists—in between my Ironman efforts with The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. In addition to the change of pace, there were some interesting literary ricochets between works: for example, Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and the background that shaped James's early years under the watchful abolitionist eye of his father and James senior's company of famous family friends and John Brown supporters Emerson and Thoreau. Beatty's merciless, satiric wit, on display in The Sellout, with equal measures of Jonathan Swift and Dave Chappelle, provided fierce respite from James's spirited but doomed American heiresses in Europe. And while nothing contemporary quite prepared me for the high-toned rigors (and occasional longueurs) of James's The Ambassadors, I do believe that Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, with its beautifully interlocking stories, served as a nice chaser—or, more precisely, morning-after hair-of-the-dog concoction—to ward off the reading hangover James had given me. Egan's novel, ranging over forty-plus years in the rock music industry, also managed, with its dizzying multiple perspectives, to half capture, half anticipate the e-podified emotional zeitgeist we inhabit. This brings me to that delicate but unavoidable issue that any reading projectologist faces when they start showing off their collection. Other hobbyists have collected different stamps or polished rocks or postcards—or books read. Does anyone care what this rail fan or that reader has to say about his or her favorite model trains or novels? The answer, surprisingly enough, is that people do, in limited but important ways. I believe readers, with regard to other readers, are willing to suspend resistance or perhaps apathy towards others' reading choices in order to facilitate the ongoing conversations constantly in play among book lovers: "What do I like?" "Why did you...

Klangfarbenmelodie in 1911: Timbre’s Functional Roles in Webern’s Opp. 9 and 10

Anton Webern’s pre-World War I aphoristic works sometimes appear to defy comprehension, but through the lens of Klangfarbenmelodie organizing principles of this music come into focus. Klangfarbenmelodie is a multifaceted principle of musical organization. It is how Klangfarbenfolgen—timbral progressions—are structured into music. This article explores timbral progressions in Webern’s music and some of the types of timbre-based musical logic that organize them. Timbre and pitch are simultaneous, codependent, and symbiotic. With the notion of timbre as the totality of musical tone, this article examines how timbral-registral space is employed to compose timbral trajectories like expansions, contractions, and crossing lines. In addition to drawing out timbral lines, the analyses focus on how timbre helps delineate pitch constructs, timbre’s role in structuring gesture and theme, and various types of timbral symmetry. Rather than a shift away from pitch analysis, this article proposes a repositioning toward the inclusion of timbre in analytic discourses.

Portret antropologiczny rdzennych mieszkańców pogranicza polsko-niemieckiego urodzonych przed 1945 rokiem

An Anthropological Portrayal of the Native Inhabitants of the Polish-German Borderland Born Before 1945The article presents the results of field research carried out among the native inhabitants of the Lubusz Voivodship who were born in the former eastern territory of the then German state before 1945. Between 2009 and 2011, the authors conducted in-depth anthropological interviews with 28 informants in 17 localities in the Voivodship. These informants are the last remaining representatives of the former populace in this area, since the majority of the local inhabitants left Poland: some were evacuated or fled in the face of the advancing Red Army in 1945, others were victims of the so-called “wild” expulsions as well as resettlements, and still others emigrated under family reunification programs. One more factor was economic emigration, which has continued up to the present day. Thus, those inhabitants who remained are the last witnesses to the history of life experiences which began here already in pre-World War II times. This makes them special as they have a unique sense of rootedness in the region, unlike other inhabitants, who are newcomers there.The external identity of the interviewees, that is, the identity given to them by others, is often different from their internal, subjective identity, which is felt and expressed in narratives. In the period following World War II the native populace was termed “autochtons”. The category of “autochton” was constructed from the outside, taking into consideration only elements of Polish culture, and completely ignored any ties with German culture. The presence of the “autochtons” officially served the purpose of legitimizing the so-called “recovered territories”, that is, the territories incorporated into Poland in 1945. On the other hand, the autochtons were ascribed a German identity by new settlers who arrived in the Lubusz land from different regions of Poland, and who labeled the locals “Germans” or “Nazis”. The internal identity of the interviewees is characterized by Polish-German cultural bivalence, which shows most of all in their active bilingualism and often in denominational conversions or bivalent (Catholic-Evangelical) faith as well as a lack of a univocal acceptance of just one national option.

Review: Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma, by Lisa M. Hoffman and Mary L. Hanneman

In 2004, as part of its downtown campus expansion, the University of Washington Tacoma demolished the old Tacoma Japanese Language School (TJLS) building, one of the few remaining landmarks from the pre-World War II Tacoma Japantown (Nihonmachi). Once a vibrant urban ethnic enclave, Nihonmachi was home to the city’s Japanese American families and businesses before their displacement by Executive Order 9066 in 1942 and the mass wartime incarceration that followed. When a call went out for a public history project to preserve the legacies of TJLS, Lisa M. Hoffman and Mary L. Hanneman stepped up to document a rich history of Tacoma’s prewar Japanese American community. Based on forty-two interviews with former Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) Tacoma residents combined with rigorous archival research, Becoming Nisei offers a unique translocal and transnational approach to the often-overlooked interwar period in the twentieth-century Japanese American experience.Throughout the book’s six chapters the authors bring together the interviewees’ vivid recollections of the cityscape—neighborhood streets, family-owned businesses, houses of worship, and the language school— that they had navigated as children. These “structures of memories” (pp. 11–12) help the authors reconstruct the historical landscape of prewar Tacoma Japantown through their extensive analysis of the archival records and maps at the UW Library Special Collections. Tacoma’s Japantown served as a unique space in which the young Nisei developed their sense of belonging and their understanding of race politics and power relations in American society during the era of Asian exclusion. Becoming Nisei makes an important contribution to urban history by recovering the important but often ignored role that non-white communities like Tacoma’s Japanese Americans have played in shaping the socioeconomic, cultural, and physical landscapes of American cities.Among the many cultural and socioeconomic institutions of the prewar Tacoma Japanese American community, the language school serves as the focal point of the authors’ analysis of Nisei’s multiple transnational and inter-generational positionalities (p. 107). Established by Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) educators, TLJS brought the cultural and social ethos of Meiji Japan into the diasporic lives of Nisei students (pp. 36–37). The nonsectarian language school allowed Nisei children across religious and prefectural affiliations to learn the linguistic, cultural, and ethical nuances of their parents’ homeland and develop close transnational ties to Japan (p. 50). In this way, the book demonstrates that the immigrant parents, who were “products of the Meiji Era” (1868–1912), had played a critical role in transplanting the institutions of modern Japan and its education system to Tacoma’s Japanese community. Future studies on the prewar Japanese American experience would benefit from further examination of how the sociopolitical and cultural dynamics of the transpacific world during the Taisho Era (1912–1926) and the prewar Showa years (1926–1941) also shaped the Nisei experience, as both Issei and Nisei were products of these volatile interwar periods as much as they were products of Meiji Japan.Overshadowed by the memory of the World War II incarceration in both the scholarship and public narrative of Japanese American history, the interwar period nevertheless has attracted the attention of a growing number of historians as a crucial formative era that shaped Nisei’s identities. Becoming Nisei is a unique and timely addition to this understudied chapter in Japanese American history. Despite the prevailing image of the Nisei before the war as dependent on their immigrant parents and too young to muster a voice of their own, the book demonstrates that Tacoma’s Nisei were “active participants in constituting their own” positionalities through their relationship to the community’s history (p. 12).

Entrepreneurial Finance without Investor Protection: Evidence from IPOs in pre-World War I Belgium

Entrepreneurial Finance without Investor Protection: Evidence from IPOs in pre-World War I Belgium

Writing on Water by Judit Niran Frigyesi

Reviewed by: Writing on Water by Judit Niran Frigyesi Jonathan Boyarin (bio) Writing on Water By Judit Niran Frigyesi. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018. This is a very special book. It is a poetic, autoethnographic, and ethnographic memoir of research done first in the late 1970s and then in the 1990s among elderly and religiously observant Jews in Budapest (and a little bit in Prague). The research focused on the traditional liturgical music of these congregations, and then later, on the life histories of these elderly Jews. Although the research was conducted in the field of musicology, this is not a musicological study in the traditional sense by any means. Indeed, much of the eloquent reflection here is on precisely why the author found it impossible to do a comprehensive, "objective" musicological study of the old-fashioned sort. In doing so, she offers a very lucid (and to me, utterly convincing and recognizable) meditation on the fragmentation of memory and on the forms of spiritual identity or of being-in-the-world that are represented by the musical forms that were the ostensible topic of her research. Cumulatively, the book gives a very rich sense of the humility, tenuousness, and profundity of these peoples' lives. It is also an extremely valuable account of the flavor of life in Budapest during the last years of Communism. The author has gotten it right; both the form and the content ring true. I did not live or move in these circles in Budapest in those years, but I did do ethnography of elderly Polish Jews in Paris in the early 1980s, which I think is a good basis for judgment and comparison. There is a loving but not overly sentimental respect for the elderly here, and both the reasons for the author's attraction to their milieu and the distance she had to maintain from the full-scale adoption of traditional Judaism for herself are convincing. In the process, a great deal is conveyed about the dynamics of Jewish dis/continuity. The first part focuses on the period in the late 1970s, and details precisely—honestly but not pedantically—the author's visits to a range of Jewish prayer settings (from the Friday night gatherings of academics, to the Neolog synagogue, and the more intimate but less welcoming Orthodox synagogue), and her observations of and meetings [End Page 167] at home with a range of prayer leaders who became her guides to the traditional liturgy she was studying. A significant latter section, based on material collected in the 1990s, details early life memories of some of these same individuals and others whom she met later, and serves to give the reader a picture of the "traditional," pre-World War II and often small-town life in which much of this liturgy was first learned. The tone of the narrative throughout is personal but, far from being solipsistic, I find it extremely rigorous. Without indulging in extensive references to secondary or theoretical literature, it is very much within the scope of the turn to reflexive and self-critical ethnography. Precisely its refusal to hypostatize the "traditional culture" of the subject population, and the tension it depicts between the specificity of individual lives and the communal idioms in which they come together, are evidence of its author's very sophisticated scholarly sensibilities. The writing is overall beautiful and evocative, and sounds quite appropriately like it comes from another place. Ethnographers of music, Eastern Europe, and aging (and classes in these subjects) would be a natural audience for this book, as would anyone with a serious interest in everyday life in Central Europe under Communism, or the fate of "traditional" Jewish culture and sociality in the postwar decades. Giorgio Agamben, drawing on ideas first expressed by Walter Benjamin, wrote in The Man Without Content that "the breaking of tradition does not at all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence it never had before".1 Confronted with Judit Niran Frigyesi's Writing on Water, I am struck at once by both the power and the seductive...

An optimality-theoretic account of syllable restructuring in Early Bislama

The paper looks at syllable restructuring in Early Bislama. The analysis is couched in the framework of Optimality Theory. The empirical evidence considered is from a corpus of pre-World War II records of Early Bislama, covering a period ranging from 1867 to 1935. It is shown that Early Bislama tends to disallow complex syllable margins and employs mostly vowel epenthesis and, to a lesser extent, consonant deletion as repair strategies for the resolution of etymological onset and coda clusters. Also discussed are the quality of the epenthetic vowels (minimally marked vs. contextually coloured), and the relevance of Early Bislama to the transformations undergone by otherwise stable features of English syllable structure.

Trends in Public Stigma of Mental Illness in the US, 1996-2018

Stigma, the prejudice and discrimination attached to mental illness, has been persistent, interfering with help-seeking, recovery, treatment resources, workforce development, and societal productivity in individuals with mental illness. However, studies assessing changes in public perceptions of mental illness have been limited. To evaluate the nature, direction, and magnitude of population-based changes in US mental illness stigma over 22 years. This survey study used data collected from the US National Stigma Studies, face-to-face interviews conducted as 1996, 2006, and 2018 General Social Survey modules of community-dwelling adults, based on nationally representative, multistage sampling techniques. Individuals aged 18 years or older, including Spanish-speaking respondents, living in noninstitutionalized settings were interviewed in 1996 (n = 1438), 2006 (n = 1520), and 2018 (n = 1171). The present study was conducted from July 2019 to January 2021. Respondents reacted to 1 of 3 vignettes (schizophrenia, depression, alcohol dependence) meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, criteria or a control case (daily troubles). Measures included beliefs about underlying causes (attributions), perceptions of likely violence (danger to others), and rejection (desire for social distance). Of the 4129 individuals interviewed in the surveys, 2255 were women (54.6%); mean (SD) age was 44.6 (16.9) years. In the earlier period (1996-2006), respondents endorsing scientific attributions (eg, genetics) for schizophrenia (11.8%), depression (13.0%), and alcohol dependence (10.9%) increased. In the later period (2006-2018), the desire for social distance decreased for depression in work (18.1%), socializing (16.7%), friendship (9.7%), family marriage (14.3%), and group home (10.4%). Inconsistent, sometimes regressive change was observed, particularly regarding dangerousness for schizophrenia (1996-2018: 15.7% increase, P = .001) and bad character for alcohol dependence (1996-2018: 18.2% increase, P = .001). Subgroup differences, defined by race and ethnicity, sex, and educational level, were few and inconsistent. Change appeared to be consistent with age and generational shifts among 2 birth cohorts (1937-1946 and 1987-2000). To date, this survey study found the first evidence of significant decreases in public stigma toward depression. The findings of this study suggest that individuals' age was a conservatizing factor whereas being in the pre-World War II or millennial birth cohorts was a progressive factor. However, stagnant stigma levels for other disorders and increasing public perceptions of likely violence among persons with schizophrenia call for rethinking stigma and retooling reduction strategies to increase service use, improve treatment resources, and advance population health.

Memories of Terror: Essays on Recent Histories

<i>Memories of Terror: Essays on Recent Histories</i>

How social and cultural values can transcend the politics of totalitarianism: the dynamics of teacher education in Albania

ABSTRACT Teachers matter. They make a difference in the life of the individual and the society at large. Hence, their education and training has always been at the centre of any government’s education policy. This paper focuses on teacher education in Albania. The narrative describes and analyzes the main milestones in teacher education during the four historical periods of Albania: the National Awakening, Independence, Totalitarianism and Post-totalitarianism. The main thrust of the paper is to examine how the historical, political and socio-cultural factors interrelate to influence on teacher education and pedagogy at certain points in time of Albania’s history. The paper reveals the way the western educational ideas that emerged and evolved during the pre World War II period were suppressed during totalitarianism, but were reasserted when Albania transitioned to democracy.

Nostos, Nostalgia and Italian Migration

The Italian immigrant experience in North America is discussed in relation to the concepts of nostos and nostalgia. The first term, normally referring to the return home from a sea voyage, is discussed comparing the foundational account of nostos, the Odyssey, with the early sojourn phase of Italian migration. By comparison, nostalgia, which can take the form either of homesickness or a longing for the past, is found in the permanent settlement phase, wherein the sense of homesickness predominates pre-World War II while that of longing for the past best defines the post-war period.

Will rheumatologists ever pick up the arthroscope again?

Conditions prompting physicians and surgeons first adapting endoscopes to peer into joints were mainly the sort of synovial conditions that would concern today's rheumatologists. Rheumatologists were among the pre-World War II pioneers developing and documenting arthroscopy. The post-War father of modern arthroscopy, Watanabe, found rheumatologists among his early students, who took back the technique to their home countries, teaching orthopedists and rheumatologists alike. Rheumatologists described and analyzed the intra-articular features of their common diseases in the '60s and '70s. A groundswell of interest from academic rheumatologists in adapting arthroscopy grew considerably in the '90s with development of "needle scopes" that could be used in an office setting. Rheumatologists helped conduct the very trials the findings of which reduced demand for their arthroscopic services by questioning the efficacy of arthroscopic debridement in osteoarthritis (OA) and also developing biological compounds that greatly reduced the call for any resective intervention in inflammatory arthropathies. The arthroscope has proven an excellent tool for viewing and sampling synovium and continues to serve this purpose at several international research centers. While cartilage is now imaged mainly by magnetic resonance imaging, some OA features - such as a high prevalence of visible calcinosis - beg further arthroscopy-directed investigation. A new generation of "needle scopes" with far superior optics awaits future investigators, should they develop interest.