Unreliable Memories Research Articles

The Illusion of Truth in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje's Anil’s Ghost, a literary masterpiece, focuses on the distortion of truth. Set against the backdrop of civil unrest in Sri Lanka, the novel follows forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera as she exposes the complexities of revealing truth in a world rife with political and personal turmoil. This research abstract delves into the multifaceted layers of reality distortion portrayed in Ondaatje's work .At its core; the novel questions the notion of objective reality. Ondaatje masterfully employs fragmented narratives, shifting perspectives, and unreliable memories to diminish the lines between truth and fiction. Through Anil's investigation into the skeletal remains of victims of political violence, Ondaatje exposes the subjective nature of memory and the inherent biases that shape our understanding of past events. Moreover, the novel explores the psychological toll of living in a reality distorted by trauma and political oppression. Characters like Anil and Sarath, haunted by their pasts, grapple with the existential question of whether it is possible to reconcile personal truth with the external realities imposed upon them. Ondaatje's lyrical prose evokes a sense of disorientation, mirroring the characters' internal struggles as they confront the elusive nature of reality. Furthermore, the novel examines how power dynamics influence the construction of reality. Ondaatje exposes the ways in which those in positions of authority manipulate narratives to serve their own agendas, perpetuating falsehoods and suppressing marginalized voices in the process. Through Anil's quest for justice, the novel underscores the importance of bearing witness to the silenced truths obscured by those in power. The novel serves as a profound exploration of the distortion of reality in the face of political upheaval and personal trauma.

The Sense of an Ending: A Postmodern Challenge of Truth

Throughout the history, one of the interests of humankind has always been to search for what reality/truth is, how they are formed, and how they can be tested, and has thus become a matter of debate among scholars from different fields of study such as sociology, psychology, history and literature. As this is the case, the very latest approach put forward and encapsulated by postmodernists as a claim, which is also supported by new historicists, that reality/truth is formed through or feeds on memory and can never be limited to one unchangeable fact is treated as the core of this research and study to shed light on the essence of reality/truth from a literary point of view (Bradley, 2011, p. 387). The essence of this claim lies in the fact that it is quite personal and versatile and is formed through myriad ways of interpretation from different aspects that are liable to change on different contexts (Lansdown, 2017, p.38). In this regard, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), written in the form of ‘vollendungsroman’, meets his readers as a direct response to postmodernists’ and the new historicists’ claim about the reliability and accessibility of the reality/truth that there’s no pure truth. Drawing his character Tony Webster in such a realist way who is trapped in his present due to his unreliable memories from his past, Barnes enables his readers to test the reliability and attainability of the reality/truth based on memory and to come to a striking realisation that there can never be objective reality/truth based on memories. To crown it all, reality/truth based on memories can even have potential for misguiding one in his/her present or future deeds in the wrong way just like the protagonist Tony Webster.

Writing the Lives of Ordinary People—Opportunities and Challenges

ABSTRACT This article explores my experience of undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing using as a starting point my own family history, with its inevitable gaps and unreliable memories. It outlines my reasons for adopting a hybrid structure that includes both fiction and nonfiction and situates the book that I subsequently published in the context of recent writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people by historians, biographers and autobiographers. I reflect on the feedback that I received on my work-in-progress from both historians and the writing community and suggest that their apparently contradictory recommendations to be either more emotional or more factual had the same underlying aim, to transform my writing into a recognisable genre that was not ‘just’ family history. The article describes briefly how self-publishing has democratised the publishing process and allowed me to remain true to my vision for my book. The recognition I have received as a writer about history leads me to hope that, similarly, collaboration between family historians and the academy can democratise the ways in which historical knowledge is acquired and disseminated.

Design for Test With Unreliable Memories by Restoring the Beauty of Randomness

In nm-technologies and especially under voltage scaling, memories require costly protection to provide 100% reliable operation. However, many recent studies show that application fault-tolerance can provide acceptable average-quality even with unreliable memories. Unfortunately, this popular approximate computing concept is often justified with random fault injection simulations which are deceiving since faults caused by variability in the manufacturing process are different (in fact often deterministic) for each die. However, established test procedures can not distinguish dies delivering poor quality from those with acceptable quality. To solve this fundamental issue, we describe a new design-for-test strategy that allows to provide reliable quality-guarantees for each die in the presence of reliability issues in memories with a straightforward standard test procedure.

Optimizing the Energy Efficiency of Unreliable Memories for Quantized Kalman Filtering

This paper presents a quantized Kalman filter implemented using unreliable memories. We consider that both the quantization and the unreliable memories introduce errors in the computations, and we develop an error propagation model that takes into account these two sources of errors. In addition to providing updated Kalman filter equations, the proposed error model accurately predicts the covariance of the estimation error and gives a relation between the performance of the filter and its energy consumption, depending on the noise level in the memories. Then, since memories are responsible for a large part of the energy consumption of embedded systems, optimization methods are introduced to minimize the memory energy consumption under the desired estimation performance of the filter. The first method computes the optimal energy levels allocated to each memory bank individually, and the second one optimizes the energy allocation per groups of memory banks. Simulations show a close match between the theoretical analysis and experimental results. Furthermore, they demonstrate an important reduction in energy consumption of more than 50%.

The Dubious Representations of Histories in Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje

Coined by Stephan Greenblatt in 1980s, new historicism flourished as a literary approach which presents new perspectives on the perception of history. It basically challenges the traditional understanding of history which claims that history records and interprets past events objectively in a chronological order. New historicists, therefore, centre on the representations of history, not the history itself as they assert that there is not a single objective history, but there are multiple subjective histories. As new historicism claims that history may be represented only subjectively, truths for new historicists are always unstable. Thus, new historicism states that history is not regarded as a grand narrative dictating a single meaning, truth or essence. The purpose of this article is to examine how history is represented in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, which is described as a fictionalised autobiographical memoir, from a new historicist perspective. As a Canadian diasporic writer returning to Sri Lanka, his birth place, after a long absence, Ondaatje reconstructs his family history by depending on memories, gossip, and rumour all of which are unreliable and subjective. Similarly, while reconstructing Sri Lankan history, the narrative is based on colonial discourse which fantasies or even mythologizes the island. Therefore, this article attempts to demonstrate how history is reconstructed and narrated in subjective ways which bring out multiple histories by focalising the unreliable memories and colonial discourse.

Child witness expressions of certainty are informative.

Children are frequently witnesses of crime. In the witness literature and legal systems, children are often deemed to have unreliable memories. Yet, in the basic developmental literature, young children can monitor their memory. To address these contradictory conclusions, we reanalyzed the confidence–accuracy relationship in basic and applied research. Confidence provided considerable information about memory accuracy, from at least age 8, but possibly younger. We also conducted an experiment where children in young (4–6 years), middle (7–9 years), and late (10–17 years) childhood (N = 2,205) watched a person in a video and then identified that person from a police lineup. Children provided a confidence rating (an explicit judgment) and used an interactive lineup—in which the lineup faces can be rotated—and we analyzed children’s viewing behavior (an implicit measure of metacognition). A strong confidence–accuracy relationship was observed from age 10 and an emerging relationship from age 7. A constant likelihood ratio signal-detection model can be used to understand these findings. Moreover, in all ages, interactive viewing behavior differed in children who made correct versus incorrect suspect identifications. Our research reconciles the apparent divide between applied and basic research findings and suggests that the fundamental architecture of metacognition that has previously been evidenced in basic list-learning paradigms also underlies performance on complex applied tasks. Contrary to what is believed by legal practitioners, but similar to what has been found in the basic literature, identifications made by children can be reliable when appropriate metacognitive measures are used to estimate accuracy.

Genesis: Donald J. Greene and the Founding of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Genesis:Donald J. Greene and the Founding of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Howard D. Weinbrot (bio) Donald Greene was teaching at the University of California, Riverside, in 1966–67. Probably late in 1967, he asked his three eighteenth-century junior colleagues if they were interested in forming a national eighteenth-century society. We were. Enthusiastically. Greene, after all, studied the relationships between religion, literature, and politics and had written a major revisionist book on Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century politics. He was among the most eminent students of eighteenth-century British culture. He embodied multidisciplinary scholarship. Greene never was awed by the Great and the Good because he was among them. A few days after the invitation, John Norton, David Hansen, and I joined Greene for lunch at a local restaurant and discussed possibilities. The interdisciplinary society would of course encourage research areas other than literature. Its official journal would reflect such breadth of interest. The society would be North American and encourage regional branches. It would have geographical and disciplinary representation. When occasion allowed it would be more broadly international. It would have an elected executive board and secretary as cementing forces. My own efforts were to begin by organizing a western and, for the time being, largely Californian regional society for eighteenth-century studies. The talk was good and [End Page 3] the options many. In the event, Messrs. Norton and Hansen soon left the Riverside English Department, and in the summer of 1969 I departed for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After I arrived in Wisconsin, I continued to exercise Greene's vision of supporting regional eighteenth-century societies. He saw these as a way of furthering eighteenth-century studies locally in order to expand them nationally. On 28 July 1970, he told Peter Stanlis that five regional societies had been established: "All to the good, I'm convinced—the wider the 'grass roots' are extended, the stronger and healthier the whole organization will be, I'm sure."1 I hoped to put that concept into practice. I paid special attention to the Johnson Society of the Central Region, which soon was invited to become an affiliate of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and is now a thriving sixty-one-year-old scholarly enterprise. I encouraged the University of Wisconsin Press to offer a three-year contract for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. I attended several regional ASECS meetings during my amiably long tenure in Madison. As President of the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1979–80, I hosted a large conference in Madison. I also served on two national meeting planning committees, presented a plenary paper and thereafter the Clifford Lecture for the national conference, and had the pleasure of serving on the Editorial Board of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1977–80) and on the Executive Committee (1996–99). Greene's vision of international affiliations never left my mind. I was part of the joint exchange committee for ASECS and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (1999–2000) and the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS)'s planning committee for the wonderfully successful 2003 meeting in Los Angeles. That happy conclave exemplified Greene's concept of regional, national, and international eighteenth-century societies as a unified and unifying intellectual and social force. I confess to special delight in returning to the fledgling ASECS's founding and to Donald Greene's seminal role during those years. I now write with a combination of always unreliable memories and the more reliable ASECS archives. Paul Alkon, Greene's successor as Leo S. Bing Professor at the University of Southern California, wisely arranged to have these moved to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, where they have been stored since 1994. The volunteer archivist Ann Soady expertly sorted them into useful preliminary files. The Society owes thanks to each helpful individual as well as the Clark Library. Some of the information I cite below comes from my own experience. Most of the narrative, however, draws upon the Clark's ASECS archives. They demonstrate our founder's extraordinary vision and manifold generosities. Predicting the past is almost [End Page...

Juxtaposing and Jostling: The Art of Writing History?

This reflective essay seeks to question, through my creative practice, methods of writing the history of post-1945 events for a young adult reader. Using creative techniques to add depth to the research, I explore the scope of the future project through a palimpsest diagram as well as poetry, word association and vignettes of my lived experiences. I compare how other creative writers have treated historical narrative in fiction, memoir and drama. Building on schoalrly debate on the role of life writing in historical processes, both source materials and historiography, the essay analyses the scholarship on postmodern representations of the recent past in literature, including personalised life writing and autobiography as well as novels. Problems jostle for attention: blank spaces of the historical records, unreliable memories, competing definitions of truth, Western class-bound identity and twenty-first century retrospection. My conclusions suggest that novelistic and lyrical techniques and voices may be an effective medium for shining a spotlight on the themes of the late twentieth century. The resulting work of auto/history will be written and read through a personal lens which that is at the same time a memoir, history and historiography, which juxtaposes a microscopic life against the constellation of world events.

Memory: Irreducible, Basic, and Primary Source of Knowledge

I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge generated by other basic types of sources. I show how memories can and do generate knowledge that is irreducible to other basic sources of knowledge. In some epistemic contexts, memories are primary basic sources of knowledge; they can generate knowledge by themselves or with trivial assistance from other types of basic sources of knowledge. I outline an ontology of information transmission from events to memory as an alternative to causal theories of memory. I derive from information theory a concept of reliability of memories as the ratio of retrieved information to transmitted information. I distinguish the generation of knowledge from reliable memories from its generation from unreliable memories. Reliable memories can generate new knowledge by forming together narratives and via colligation. Coherent, even unreliable, memories can generate knowledge if they are epistemically independent of each other and the prior probability of the knowledge they generate is sufficiently low or high. Ascertaining the epistemic independence of memories and eliminating possible confounders may be achieved through the generation of knowledge from independent memories in different minds, when memories are primary basic sources of knowledge and the testimonies that report them are trivial.

‘My Memory Gropes in Search of Details’: Memory, Narrative, and ‘Founding Traumas’ in John Banville's The Sea

Many of John Banville's novels engage issues of loss, memory, and identity, but The Sea provides the most comprehensive portrait of traumatic loss in his canon. Protagonist Max Morden presents a textbook example of one who has experienced significant trauma. His fragmented, unreliable memories; his dissociated affect and emotional alienation; his self-destructive behaviours; and his obsessive recourse to the past all reflect typical manifestations of emotional and/or psychological distress and the workings of traumatic memory. By tracing Morden's experience of trauma and its narrative remediation, The Sea also replicates the frustrating and often painful process of identity reconstruction pursued by the traumatized. In this way, the narrative is not only a reflection on identity, trauma, and loss, but also a model of the possibility of healing from a traumatic past.

Resilient Dynamic Programming

We investigate the design of dynamic programming algorithms in unreliable memories, i.e., in the presence of errors that lead the logical state of some bits to be read differently from how they were last written. Assuming that a limited number of memory faults can be inserted at run-time by an adversary with unbounded computational power, we obtain the first resilient algorithms for a broad range of dynamic programming problems, devising a general framework that can be applied to both iterative and recursive implementations. Besides all local dependency problems, where updates to table entries are determined by the contents of neighboring cells, we also settle challenging non-local problems, such as all-pairs shortest paths and matrix multiplication. All our algorithms are correct with high probability and match the running time of their standard non-resilient counterparts while tolerating a polynomial number of faults. The recursive algorithms are also cache-efficient and can tolerate faults at any level of the memory hierarchy. Our results exploit a careful combination of data replication, majority techniques, fingerprint computations, and lazy fault detection. To cope with the complex data access patterns induced by some of our algorithms, we also devise amplified fingerprints, which might be of independent interest in the design of resilient algorithms for different problems.

Surviving: One Family’s Experience with Cancer

People experience trauma in many ways. Discussing the trauma in the form of illness narratives can be beneficial, not only to the patient, but for their families as well (Hydén, 1997). Illness narratives are becoming more popular in the medical field, but mostly are written from the perspective of the patient and their spouse. Little is written from the perspective of the children. In this article, my immediate family and I write our narratives detailing the experience of my father’s cancer. Major themes that emerged from our stories are disbelief, unreliable memories, wanting to forge ahead, and a stronger family. Although we experienced the same event, our narratives differ. By sharing our perspectives, we were able to further heal. Illness narratives can be therapeutic but should be critically examined, as memories are not always trustworthy.

Textual Entanglement: Jean Rhys’s Critical Discourse

Textual Entanglement: Jean Rhys’s Critical Discourse J. Dillon Brown (bio) Jean Rhys has led multiple lives in the literary critical world, so much so that Jean D’Costa sees fit to begin her entry on Rhys in Fifty Caribbean Writers with a warning about the oddly fissiparous nature of Rhys criticism, noting that several different critical constituencies “lay claim to Jean Rhys” as residing squarely in their field (390).1 Delia Konzett, too, has emphasized how the complex nature of Rhys’s work has “given rise to ambivalent assessments in her literary reception, which has difficulties in classifying her work” (64), while Pierrette Frickey maintains that Rhys’s own “double identity” as both West Indian and European causes a “polarization of criticism” into camps treating her in the preestablished terms of either a Caribbean or continental literary tradition (1). This last binary, broadly discernible as a divide between critics seeing Rhys either as a modernist (European) or a postcolonial (Caribbean) writer, is prominent and long abiding, and it frequently coalesces around the discussion of two of Rhys’s novels: Voyage in the Dark, her 1934 novel portraying the experiences of a young West Indian woman trying to survive on her own in England, and Wide Sargasso Sea, her 1966 novel depicting the early life story of the Bertha Rochester character from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. These two novels can be seen to employ themes and formal features that resonate importantly with readers sympathetic to both modernist and postcolonial approaches, making them ideal proving grounds for [End Page 568] this seemingly perennial controversy surrounding the proper critical categorization of Rhys. Voyage in the Dark has traditionally attracted attention from scholars of modernism. The novel, episodic and fragmentary in its narration, employs a disjointed interior monologue to portray the thoughts of its protagonist, Anna Morgan. In addition to being published in the midst of what is now understood as the (late) modernist period, Voyage in the Dark appears to emblematize Virginia Woolf’s insistence that modern fiction acknowledge that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (287–88).2 More recently, likely as a result of its explicitly colonial themes, Voyage in the Dark has also been considered through a postcolonial lens by critics such as Emery, Carol Dell’Amico, Teresa O’Connor, and Urmila Seshagiri.3 On the other hand, Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, has become, in Peter Hulme’s words, “firmly established as an essential text for West Indian literature [and] for ‘third-world’ or post-colonial writing more generally” (10). The book’s intertextual retort to Brontë’s novel has been seen to represent a classic instance of writing back to the colonial center, a paradigmatic postcolonial gesture intended to highlight the self-serving blind spots and ideological dispositions of imperial cultural production. Nevertheless, Wide Sargasso Sea also shares a number of stylistic traits with Rhys’s more chronologically modernist works, employing a shifting, multiperspectival narration to portray its characters’ interior thoughts (and thus exposing their grounding in unreliable memories and misapprehensions) in order to address the narrative and ideological shortcomings of a Victorian fictional form. Thus, critics, including Carole Angier, Saikat Majumdar, and Thomas Staley, have often viewed Wide Sargasso Sea as explicitly modernist, while one scholar, Jane Neide Ashcom, has even made the case that the novel in fact has more of a kinship with high modernist fiction than Rhys’s earlier work (Aschom 7).4 In the context of the critical discord over the proper literary classification of this pair of novels, it seems important to note a fundamental resemblance between the two works: their shared thematic and formal interest in exploring the structuring effects of cultural, verbal, and written production. Both Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea focus intensely on books and textual representation and display a distinct self-consciousness about writing and interpretation. Ultimately, both suggest the pragmatic necessity of a careful and consistent hermeneutic of suspicion when approaching any system of signs, whether in life or on the page. Indeed, this concern with discursive construction...

War, Senseless and Necessary

War, Senseless and Necessary George Garrett (bio) Time at War by Nicholas Mosley (Dalkey Archive, 2006. 186 pages. Illustrated. $12.95 pb) In hospital and on my journeys down I had been thinking—If ever in later life I come to write about all this I must try to find a style in which to express the contradictions of war—the coincidence of luck and endurance; of farce and fear; of anarchy and meaning. —Nicholas Mosley Time at War took a while coming to be. Nicholas Mosley, writing in his late seventies, tells us that he had to wait patiently for the right time to deal with the subject and with his own recollected memories, meanwhile being fully engaged in a busy writing career producing seventeen novels—one of which, Hopeful Monsters, won the Whitbread Award for 1990—and nine works of nonfiction before he felt able to offer up a truthful accounting of his experiences as a young infantry officer in World War II. Freshly out of Eton and just nineteen years old in 1942, he enlisted in the army and managed to overcome "the two grave impediments to my being accepted as a potential officer." These were a bad stammer, one that was not overcome until well after the war was over, and the awkward public fact that his father, Oswald Mosley, right-wing politician and the leader of the British Union of Fascists, was in prison as a security risk. The intricate networking of the British upper classes (for example, Churchill himself was a social friend of Oswald Mosley and went out of his way to ensure that Mosley's confinement was as comfortable as possible) helped to override and overcome those impediments. As for the stammer: "Irene Ravensdale, my dead mother's older sister and a Baroness in her own right . . . was acquainted with the Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade: these were the days of the old-boy net, when people supposedly of influence could be expected to know one another. So my aunt had a word with the Colonel and explained—I have no idea what she explained, but by the time a Rifle Brigade recruiting team came down to Eton to hold interviews with potential officers, I was told that I would be accepted as a trainee, although this did not guarantee that I would graduate." Of a much more liberal persuasion than his father, Nicholas nevertheless took the British class system for granted. He writes: "Most Etonians who had not got family connections with the other services or with the cavalry regiments opted to go into one of the Guards regiments; or if they wished to be slightly less conventional, into the Rifle Brigade or the King's Royal Rifle Corps." One way and another Nicholas ended up serving most of the war in the 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles, a lively but distinctly unfashionable outfit. He served in North Africa, then during the long and brutal Italian campaign, and finished his war in 1945 in occupied Austria. We follow him closely, first in various training camps and then in combat. He is wounded, captured once [End Page lxxix] (briefly), and is awarded the Military Cross for bravery—all of this is being narrated not only by the boy-soldier but also by the old man now looking back to his beginnings and sifting unreliable memories. The immediacy of the story is gained and enhanced by excerpts from the diaries that he kept for at least part of the time; by letters to and from his father and family and friends; and by photographs, mostly casual snapshots that he took with a camera he bought while on leave in Egypt in 1944. As in metafiction, Time at War follows the process, a search by the author here and now for a way, an appropriate "style" to tell his story of the then and there as honestly as he can and, if possible, to make good sense out of both his remembered experiences and the search itself. As he puts it near the end of this remarkable book: "For many years I forgot I had planned an epic. But here...

On model checking data-independent systems with arrays without reset

A system is data-independent with respect to a data type $X$ iff the operations it can perform on values of type $X$ are restricted to just equality testing. The system may also store, input and output values of type $X$. We study model checking of systems which are data-independent with respect to two distinct type variables $X$ and $Y$, and may in addition use arrays with indices from $X$ and values from $Y$. Our main interest is the following parameterised model-checking problem: whether a given program satisfies a given temporal-logic formula for all non-empty finite instances of $X$ and $Y$. Initially, we consider instead the abstraction where $X$ and $Y$ are infinite and where partial functions with finite domains are used to model arrays. Using a translation to data-independent systems without arrays, we show that the $\mu$-calculus model-checking problem is decidable for these systems. From this result, we can deduce properties of all systems with finite instances of $X$ and $Y$. We show that there is a procedure for the above parameterised model-checking problem of the universal fragment of the $\mu$-calculus, such that it always terminates but may give false negatives. We also deduce that the parameterised model-checking problem of the universal disjunction-free fragment of the $\mu$-calculus is decidable. Practical motivations for model checking data-independent systems with arrays include verification of memory and cache systems, where $X$ is the type of memory addresses, and $Y$ the type of storable values. As an example we verify a fault-tolerant memory interface over a set of unreliable memories.

Unreliable memories and other contingencies: problems with biographical knowledge

This article addresses two concerns that are central to much of the qualitative research currently ongoing in both the social sciences and other fields of social research: the status awarded to biographical knowledges and, associatively, how such knowledges are dealt with in concrete research. The first section calls attention to the unreliability of memory in order to cast doubt on the veracity of lay actors’ accounts and thus question their position in social research. The second section, taking up this challenge, addresses a number of critical issues related to both the theoretical and the empirical status of biographical knowledges in qualitative research. Foremost of these are how both ‘ignorance’ and the dynamic nature of memory are integral to the construction and reconstruction of biographical knowledge. The methodological considerations that arise from this discussion are then considered more explicitly. The article seeks to provoke, rather than foreclose, critical thought and debate.

Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents

Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents. Reed Larson & Maryse H. Richards. New York: Basic Books. 1994. 256 pp. ISBN 0-465-01662-6. $26.00 cloth. Family researchers, and social scientists generally, are often frustrated by the limitations of the methods available to them. Questionnaires rely on people's notoriously unreliable memories. Laboratory studies always beg the question of how much they resemble real life. A fantasizing family researcher might ask, wouldn't it be nice to be there during family interactions, as they occur naturally, and ask people about their moods and perceptions of those interactions as they occur? Remarkably enough, this idea turns out to be more achievable than it might seem, and the results of its fruition have been presented in a new book on adolescents and their families by Reed Larson and Maryse Richards. The authors used a unique methodological approach known as the experience sampling method, or ESM, in which participants carried beepers around and were beeped at eight random times during the day between 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. for 7 days. When beeped, family members would report in a booklet what they were doing, thinking, and feeling just before the beep, on rating scales as well as in their own words. The study included 55 two-parent, middle-class families living in suburban Chicago, all with adolescent in fifth through eighth grade. All members of a particular family were beeped at the same time, so that more than one perspective was obtained when they were beeped while together. The result is what authors call an emotional photo album of their family life, a set of snapshots of what one young adolescent and her parents go through in average week (p. 9). These snapshots are fascinating and revealing. Most striking is the disparity in moods and perceptions that family members often experience when together, and how oblivious they can be to one another's emotional realities. For example: Mom is shopping for clothes at the mall with her adolescent daughter, and reports thoroughly enjoying herself and thinking that her daughter is, too; at the same time, the daughter reports being bored and thinking about a prospective boyfriend. Family members often do not even agree about whether they are together; the wife cooking dinner in the kitchen reports being with her husband, who is watching TV; he reports watching TV, alone. Husbands and wives disagreed one-third of the time about whether or not they were together; mothers and children disagreed one-half of the time about this. …

The African-American Working Class in the Jim Crow Era

Before the 1960s, white historians of North American slavery justified the absence of slaves' perspectives from their accounts on the basis of a regrettable lack of sources. Planters and white politicians may have left behind diaries, newspaper essays, treatises, and record books, but their human property ostensibly had not. What sources did exist?fugitive slave testimonies and subsequently recorded interviews with scholars or government officials ? were presumed to be tainted either by the propaganda purposes to which they were put, the power dynamics between interviewer and interviewed, or unreliable memories. Such dismissals proved self-serving and premature. Beginning in the early 1960s, historians revolutionized our understanding of America's peculiar institution, utilizing both traditional and untapped sources, making slavery one of the most dynamic fields in American historical scholarship for several decades. The world of the southern slave community has been reconstituted, and the values, aspirations, and perspectives of the unfree have been placed at its center. Until recently, the same could not be said for their descendants in the nation's urban centers. From the 1950s to the 1980s, historians of the urban African American experience examined in great depth northern black communities and their occupational and class structures, the contours of residential ghettos, the evolution of Jim Crow and white racism, religious and fraternal life, and the political struggle of northern blacks for representation, inclusion, and equality. But the accounts of the struggles against exclusion and discrimination were dominated by the black elite?entrepreneurs, the clergy, lawyers, and other