Version Of Events Research Articles

Attack in the Form of Defense? Populist Anti-media Tactics to Avoid Being Blamed

This article explores the relationship between blame and populism by analyzing the defensive communication strategies employed by right-wing populist leaders in their attacks on the media. The study focuses on Jair Bolsonaro and concludes that he used various strategies to avoid taking responsibility for adverse outcomes while blaming the media as one of his favorite targets. The explorative study draws on qualitative discourse analysis of the presidential narratives to shed light on the paradoxical nature of these defensive strategies. Bolsonaro’s political style involved preemptively neutralizing the media’s critical performance and reacting negatively to any critical coverage that contradicted his version of events and undermined his authority.

Anatomy of a Song

Anatomy of a Song

‘What was moderate about the enlightenment?’ Moderation in eighteenth-century Europe

ABSTRACT : What does it mean to refer to the enlightenment as ‘moderate’? One answer to this question, and the one which abounds in historiography of enlightenment in the past two decades, is that of Jonathan Israel. For Israel, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ is the half-baked counterpart to the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Where the Radical Enlightenment, in Israel’s version of events, was the crucible within which progressive modernity was forged, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ was the regressive vehicle for accommodating elements of this agenda within the social, political and intellectual structures of the ancien regime. This essay, and the special issue it introduces, seeks alternative ways to understand the prospect of a moderate enlightenment by inviting reflection on currents of moderation in eighteenth-century Europe. Turning the tables on moderate enlightenment, and framing it as an episode in a history of moderation, it proposes a range of lenses onto the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Europe.

Ghostwriting History: Churchill, Kennedy and the Authenticity of Authorship

This article explores how ghostwritten works of history compromise the authenticity of authorship as a process and have a tainted historiographical utility as source material in international relations. Using the examples of Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy we analyse how these famous politicians-cum-historians used research assistants to gather and analyse historical documentation whilst preserving their right to claim authorship of prize-winning works of history. Despite being a long-established practice in the English-speaking literary world, ghostwritten works of history have significant, yet underexplored, implications for shaping historiographical trends. Churchill, for example, was able to place himself at the centre of all events in the Second World War, whilst Kennedy shaped perceptions of how his own vision of leadership should be historically compared. Deepening our awareness of ghostwriting as process tells us something important about the relationship between politicians and the history they try and tell whilst also revealing the impact of ‘collaborative history’ as a method. The result is a version of events that inevitably places positionality over objectivity, demonstrating the myth-making power of ghostwritten works to impact historiography.

Anticolonial Mapping and the 1877 Nez Perce War

In 1927, historian Lucullus V. McWhorter traveled with veterans of the 1877 Nez Perce War to key sites from the conflict. Part of the research material generated from the trip included several maps co-created by Nez Perce War veterans, today housed in Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Library as part of the Lucullus V. McWhorter Collection. These maps, many drawn in the tradition of American Indian ledger art, provided spatial details of key battle sites and visual representations of specific incidents that occurred throughout the Nez Perce War. In this paper, I argue that these maps constitute examples of Indigenous anticolonial mapping and that they enabled McWhorter to communicate the veterans’ version of events that transpired throughout the war. This, in contrast to other accounts of the period which tended to disregard the white settler theft of lands that prompted Nez Perce resistance and to justify the colonial violence of the U.S. settler state.

The Life and Travails of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Nuclear Scientist

‘Oppenheimer’ is a 2023 epic, biographical film about an American theoretical physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer. He is considered the “father of the atomic bomb”. The film is brilliantly written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The film, based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, chronicles the complex and consequential career of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The story begins with Oppenheimer's postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge (England) and at the University of Göttingen (Germany), details his direction of the Manhattan Project during World War II in developing nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico (USA), and ends with his eventual fall from grace due to his 1954 security hearing based on the false premise that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a communist spy who was passing secret information on nuclear research to the Soviet Union. Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is the pinnacle of movie making. Nolan has delicately interwoven the intricate domains of quantum physics, human ingenuity, cruel politics, morality, legality, and ethics into a timely masterpiece and into an explosive emotional thriller. The four principal cast members (1) Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, (2) Emily Blunt as Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer (wife), (3) Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, and (4) Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss perform their role flawlessly. Murphy, in particular, uncannily acts and resembles the real─life J. Robert Oppenheimer. In addition, the performances by Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and by Tom Conti as Albert Einstein are superb. The story is told in alternating black and white (Strauss’ version of events) and color (Oppenheimer’s version of events) scenes. The haunting musical score by Ludwig Göransson synchronizes perfectly with the movie plot. When the bomb explodes at the Trinity climax scene, the sound goes totally silent! Oppenheimer’s story is the real─life vindication of the truth after 68 years (1954─2022). A must watch Nolan’s thriller for this Nuclear Age! Thus, the said movie has triggered me to make an attempt to comprehensively capture the chronology of events covering 153 years of history (1870─2023) associated with J. Robert Oppenheimer, some events not covered in the movie plot is included in this review article with 48 Figures and 8 Appendixes. The purpose is to permanently etch in history the scientific contributions made by J. Robert Oppenheimer and by his colleagues at the Manhattan Project, which not only ended the World War II, but also sprung open a new world of freedom for humanity. Let there be no doubt that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a genuine patriotic American of our time and therefore, my only fervent hope is that our generation acknowledges, remembers, and admires their contributions and sacrifices, without which the fragile freedom that we enjoy today, even after 80 years later, would not have been possible. His legacy is one of historical greatness.

Fathers, daughters, and matters of trust

Abstract This article arises from a complex family dispute and some difficulty in determining the full facts underpinning the complaint. Information given by the parties grudgingly, partially, and in very poor order, caused the primary judge in the penultimate case considered herein to no doubt reluctantly prefer the daughter’s version of events over that of her father. The primary concern is whether or not the father loaned money to his daughter in the purchase of a house in her own name, giving rise to a concomitant responsibility on her part to repay the said loan, or whether, because of the nature of the arrangement, monies advanced by the father might instead be interpreted consistent with an intention on his part to have a beneficial interest in the property.

The 1999 Moscow Bombings Reconsidered

Abstract This paper examines the evidence that the Federal Security Service (FSB) was behind the 1999 apartment bombings to bring Vladimir Putin to power. Although this version of events may prove true, this article posits that evidence for this assertion is lacking and that current arguments for this version have considerable flaws. In addition, although the official version, despite its weaknesses may also well prove true, the paper posits an as yet an unexplored version to explain the bombings as an “inside job.” The paper looks at the atmosphere prevailing in Moscow that Fall and Berezovskii’s purported role in bringing Vladimir Putin to power which is often overstated. Nonetheless, Putin’s failure to conduct a proper investigation of the bombings makes him complicit in them.

Cegpy: Modelling with chain event graphs in Python

Chain event graphs (CEGs) are a recent family of probabilistic graphical models that generalise the popular Bayesian networks (BNs) family. Crucially, unlike BNs, a CEG is able to embed, within its graph and its statistical model, asymmetries exhibited by a process. These asymmetries might be in the conditional independence relationships or in the structure of the graph and its underlying event space. Structural asymmetries are common in many domains, and can occur naturally (e.g. a defendant vs prosecutor’s version of events) or by design (e.g. a public health intervention). Whilst two CEG packages exist in R for modelling processes with asymmetric conditional independencies, there currently exists no software that allows a user to leverage the theoretical developments of the CEG model family in modelling processes with structural asymmetries. In this paper, we present cegpy: the first Python implementation of CEGs and the first across all languages to support structurally asymmetric processes. cegpy contains an implementation of Bayesian learning and probability propagation algorithms for CEGs. We illustrate the functionality of cegpy using a structurally asymmetric dataset.

Clipping the wings of theorists: the unacknowledged contribution to management thought from the shopfloor

ABSTRACT Mainstream as well as critical management history literature typically establishes theorists as the most consequential protagonists in the process that created the default blueprint for employee superintendence. Accordingly, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the new capitalists and their agents (the emerging management class), were theoretically ill-equipped to oversee large scale productive transformation. Hence, they turned to experts, mostly scholars who straddled the worlds of academia and the nascent enterprise of industrial consulting. In this version of events, employees are represented in strawman terms, as either passive or predictable; in either case, as hostile but unsophisticated actors. This article presents and defends an alternative portrayal. It argues that management thought was not born of purely theoretical perspectives but, rather, is the product of a contest between theory and what employees, acting as intellectual equals, revealed to employers and pundits when theories were being applied.

Flemish Immigration and Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum

Flemish Immigration and Geoffrey of Monmouth's <i>De gestis Britonum</i>

Norm Contestation for Strategic Effect: Legal Narratives as Information Advantage

Telling stories is intrinsic to legal practice. Clients, lawyers, and courts constantly tell stories about the facts and the law to make sense of the world around them. Legal narration is thus a familiar feature at the domestic as well as at the international level. In formal venues, legal storytelling is subject to arange of procedural and substantive requirements. For example, not everyone enjoys standing before a particular court. By contrast, in informal venues, few if any such conditions apply. Press releases, official statements and social media posts provide legal actors with considerable latitude and communicative freedom to give their version of events. Much of this has emancipatory potential, as it can lend a voice to those who lack representation in more formal circumstances. However, it also enables actors to engage in legal discourse, and to spin their stories, without the various checks and balances that apply in formal settings. Legal narratives are also a source of conflict, polemics and even misinformation. The purpose of this article is to take a closer look at the role that legal narratives play in the contestation of, and contestation through, international norms. The article argues that legal narratives display certain distinct features that set them apart from other types of storytelling. Specifically, they are marked by normative constraints imposed by the formal nature of legal reasoning and interpretation and by the logic of rhetoric and the policy choices they are meant to serve. These two features – the formalism of the law and the demands of rhetoric and instrumentalism – pull legal narratives in different directions. Outside formal processes and venues, this tension becomes acute. In the absence of epistemic scrutiny by experts and authorities, legal narratives may stray far from the formalism of the law in pursuit of competing goals. Where these goals gain the upper hand, attaining an information advantage may become their primary purpose, a point the article illustrates with reference to the justifications Russia offered for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In such circumstances, legal narratives may invoke the language and authority of the law not just unpersuasively, but falsely.

Europeans and Tippu Tip: Accounts of African Encounters Based on European Memoirs and Swahili Autobiography

The article is focused on the clash of two civilizations as a “clash of two colonizations” in East Africa: the centuries-old commercial Arab colonization, which produced a synthesis of cultures and population of mixed origin, and European one that came to the region with the aim of its exploration and further partition. This article analyses accounts of encounters between European explorers and colonial officials of the last third of the 19th century and Hamed bin Mohammed al-Murjabi, better known as Tippu Tip (1837–1905), a representative of the Arab-Swahili elite and the most influential merchant in Central and East Africaof that time. Remarkably, these encounters are reflected both in his Swahili autobiography and in European travelogues and memories. The European views of the Arabs in general and Tippu Tip are of particular interest as they touch upon the racial discourse of that time, the problem of the formation and functioning of group representations and the perception of “the others” as underdeveloped ones: very often this is the view of the “civilizing enlighteners” on the “backward slave traders”. For Tippu Tip, as a bearer of the Arab-Swahili culture, there is no Eurocentric and racial hierarchies. For him, Europeans are strangers, their racial, religious and ethnic identities do not fit into any hierarchy. The article also examines the conflict between Henry M. Stanley and Tippu Tip, which arose during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, since each of them, as well as the other participants of the Expedition, presents his own version of events.

„Nie wierz tak niedorzecznej baśni” . O tożsamości postaci „Królewny Śnieżki” Roberta Walsera i Heinza Holligera

This article is devoted to the characters in Heinz Holliger’s opera Snow White (1998) based on Robert Walser’s dramolette (1901) of the same title. Taking into account the chronology of the plot, the analysis and interpretation focuses on the evolution of the relationships of the characters struggling with the baggage of a difficult past written in the Grimms’ fairy tale. Snow White, the Queen, the Prince and the Huntsman juggle with each other’s versions of events, swapping positions at the expense of the characters’ individual contours, succumbing to the changeability of their feelings and opinions, not stopping in their search for a post-tale identity which would allow them to coexist harmoniously. The discussion emphasises the psychoanalytical approach and criticism of language characteristic of the period in which the dramolette was written. The interpretation of the libretto is complemented by the presentation of selected musical aspects, corresponding with the character of Walser’s text and determining the final meaning of the operatic work.

Investigating false memories among “winners” and “losers” in the prisoner’s dilemma

ABSTRACT Many legal cases hinge on evaluating the veracity of two versions of events (“he said, she said”). Expert witnesses are often called upon to testify on the malleability of memory, most often testifying for the defence. This may lead to the theoretically unfounded assumption that it is only victims who are vulnerable to distorted memories of a crime. Inspired by this question, we conducted a series of five experiments in which 2010 participants played a novel version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Participants could either betray their partner in the game (“winners”) or be betrayed by their partner (“losers”). We exposed participants to misinformation concerning the other player’s statements to assess whether winners and losers may be differentially susceptible to false memories of the event in question. Across our experiments, including where real financial rewards were at stake, we found that winners were just as susceptible as losers to memory distortion. We highlight the need to consider the possibility of faulty memory affecting all parties to in legal cases, though further research is needed beyond this highly artificial paradigm.

Morning Has Broken: Employees as the Intellectual Peers of Theorists in Management Thought

Mainstream management history invariably establishes sidelined theorists as the most consequential protagonists in the quest to create a generic template for employee superintendence. According to this orthodoxy, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the new capitalists and their agents (the emerging management class), where theoretically ill-equipped to oversee large scale productive transformation. Hence, they turned to experts, mostly scholars who straddled the worlds of academia and the fledgling enterprise of industrial consulting. In this version of events, employees are represented in strawman terms: as either passive or predictable and unduly hostile actors. This article asserts and defends an alternative portrayal. It argues that the key influence on the modern template was not a conflict of theoretical perspectives concerning the nature of modernity being played out on the margins but rather a clash between theory itself and what employees, acting as intellectual equals, taught their employers.

In This Issue

In the opening essay of this edition of Utah Historical Quarterly, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich casts a critical eye on the memories handed down about the 1862 murder of Olivia Coombs in Beaver, Utah. Rather than dwell on the man who committed the crime, George Wood, Ulrich seeks to understand the episode through historical fragments and family stories. What emerges is a portrait of not only Olivia but also of her descendants, who struggled to remember and tell the unspeakable tale. Opening with Juanita Brooks's brief if incomplete reference to the murder in The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950), Ulrich masterfully interrogates snippets of tangled family lore and relationships, the connection between memory and storyteller, and the circumstances that motivate the retelling of stories such as the Coombs murder.The second essay introduces readers to Mabel Frazer and a sexual misconduct case directed against her male colleague in the University of Utah's Art Department. Based on information that her own students had confided in her, Mabel Frazer approached university president George Thomas in 1937 with claims that A. B. Wright had engaged in improper sexual conduct toward women students. Emily Larsen and Heather Belnap carefully walk readers through the context and contours of the claims, including the gender power dynamics that then privileged—and continue to privilege—Wright's version of events over Frazer's. The authors also document the negative repercussions that Frazer faced after filing the complaint with the university president.A caution to readers that these two articles may contain content disturbing to some readers—the first for depictions of murder, in this case of a sexual nature, and the second for descriptions of sexual misconduct and reproductions of nude artwork.The next two essays make varying associations between history and place. Brenda Scheer, a scholar of urban design and planning, contributes to the ongoing conversation in the pages of this journal about the configuration of Salt Lake City. Rather than look solely at the design and original layout, Scheer introduces readers to on-the-ground alterations within the city center. Based on the methods of urban morphology, which look at the elements of urban form and their changes over time, this piece provides compelling insights into what may be seen as disjuncture between original design and practical adaptations in Utah's capital city.In a somewhat like manner, James Swensen reflects on whether place names—in this case, biblical and LDS religious names—conformed to the realities and character of their associated towns or landforms. Swensen's subject is Daniel George's photographic documentary series God to Go West. Through the marriage of names, landscapes, and history, with Swensen as guide, readers will come away with deeply incised impressions of the “Mormon Landscape.”

Neural signatures associated with temporal compression in the verbal retelling of past events

When we retell our past experiences, we aim to reproduce some version of the original events; this reproduced version is often temporally compressed relative to the original. However, it is currently unclear how this compression manifests in brain activity. One possibility is that a compressed retrieved memory manifests as a neural pattern which is more dissimilar to the original, relative to a more detailed or vivid memory. However, we argue that measuring raw dissimilarity alone is insufficient, as it confuses a variety of interesting and uninteresting changes. To address this problem, we examine brain pattern changes that are consistent across people. We show that temporal compression in individuals’ retelling of past events predicts systematic encoding-to-recall transformations in several higher associative regions. These findings elucidate how neural representations are not simply reactivated, but can also be transformed due to temporal compression during a universal form of human memory expression: verbal retelling.

What happened in there? Confessions, credibility and automatic exclusion: the case of Artt and confession admissibility

Confessions ought to be excluded if it is shown that credibility of the police’s version of events at interview is disputed, and it is found procedural requirements relating to recording of interviews under Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes were not observed. This article posits that, where the assessment of what occurred in an interview room depends on the trial judge’s assessment of the accused’s credibility versus the police’s credibility, a breach of the relevant Codes should mean a trial judge should doubt the police’s version of events and prefer the accused’s version of events. This leads to the exclusion of the confession.While giving particular attention to the recent Northern Ireland Court of Appeal decision of R v Kevin Artt, this article suggests a policy that can apply to jurisdictions beyond the Northern Irish jurisdiction, especially where recording of interviews is not routine. Analogies will be made with similar provisions in the United States where appropriate.

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail