Given and News : Media discourse and the construction of community on national days

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times, sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories. The analysis shows that on national anniversaries, nations tend to be metaphorized as persons having birthdays, to whom politeness should be shown. The face of the nation is to be respected in the sense of identifying the nation's interests as one's own (positive face) and speaking of citizen responsibilities rather than rights (negative face). Resources are available for both positive and negative evaluations of events and participants and the newspaper deftly changes footings (Goffman 1981) to demonstrate the required politeness while also heteroglossically allowing for a certain amount of disattention and even protest - within limits, for state holidays are almost never construed as Bakhtinian festivals, as they tend to reaffirm the hierarchy rather than invert it. Celebrations are evaluated mainly for impressiveness, and for the essentially contested quality of appropriateness, which covers norms of predictability, size, audience response, aesthetics, and explicit reference to the past. Events may also be negatively evaluated as dull ("banal") or inauthentic ("hoopla"). Audiences are evaluated chiefly in terms of their enthusiasm, or production of appropriate displays for emotional response, for national days are supposed to be occasions of flooding-out of nationalistic feeling. By making these evaluations, the newspaper reinforces its powerful position as an independent critic, while at the same time playing an active role in the construction and reproduction of emotional order embodied in "the nation's birthday." As an occasion for mobilization and demonstrations of power, national days may be seen to stand to war in the relation of play to fighting (Bateson 1955). Evidence from the newspaper's coverage of recent conflicts is adduced to support this analysis. In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on "ground" news values such as continuity and predictability rather than "figure" news values such as negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation of given and new information (Chafe 1994).

A subculture of mental toughness in an Australian Football League club

Objective The current study aimed to provide a subcultural analysis of mental toughness in a high-performance context in sport. Design Using Schein's (1990) framework of organisational culture, an exploratory qualitative analysis, employing focus group and individual interviews, was used to investigate mental toughness in an Australian Football League club. Method Nine senior coaches and players participated in focus group and individual interviews. Photo elicitation was used as a method to capture mental toughness through the identification of prominent club artefacts. Participants were considered to have significant subcultural knowledge of their football club and were willing to describe personal experiences and perceptions of mental toughness through this cultural lens. Deductive and inductive analyses were conducted to capture the core themes of mental toughness across the disparate levels of Schein's organisational framework. Results Mental toughness was found to be a socially derived term marked by unrelenting standards and sacrificial displays. These acts were underpinned by subcultural values emphasising a desire for constant improvement, a team first ethos, relentless effort, and the maintenance of an infallible image. At its core, mental toughness was assumed to be an internal concept, epitomised an idealised form of masculinity, elitist values, and was rhetorically depicted through metaphors of war. Conclusions It may be difficult to understand mental toughness without giving attention to the contextual norms related to the term. Appreciating how people promote, instil, and internalise prized ideals coveted as mental toughness could be intriguing for future research in sport psychology.

Gottschalk children at swim club forming a pyramid; Hannover, Germany.

Seated on grass Kurt Godshaw; left to right Walter, Freddy, Ursula; seated on ball Hal Godshaw

Gottschalk children at swim club forming a pyramid; Hannover, Germany.

Seated on grass Kurt Godshaw; left to right Walter, Freddy, Ursula; seated on ball Hal Godshaw

Freddy Godshaw (Gottschalk) while President of his Rotary Club. Portraits Men

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Henny Molling with Therese, Hal, Kurt and Elizabeth Gottschalk at the swim club; Hannover, Germany.

From left to right: Therese Gottschalk, Hal Gottschalk, Kurt Gottschalk, Henny Molling; on the ground: Elizabeth Gottschalk

Die Bonke; News from the Frontline in Latrine B IV Artworks

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Die Bonke; News from the Frontline in Latrine B IV Posters and Signs

postwar version of F 38368

Gottschalk children at swim club forming a pyramid; Hannover, Germany.

Seated on grass Kurt Godshaw; left to right Walter, Freddy, Ursula; seated on ball Hal Godshaw

Gottschalk children at swim club forming a pyramid; Hannover, Germany.

Seated on grass Kurt Godshaw; left to right Walter, Freddy, Ursula; seated on ball Hal Godshaw

Freddy Godshaw (Gottschalk) while President of his Rotary Club. Portraits Men

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Italian Alpine Club Portraits Groups

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The Myrtle Rust pathogen has arrived - and South African Myrtales are at risk : green news - plant disease alert

For many years Australian forest pathologists and other scientists have dreaded the arrival of the rust fungus, Puccinia psidii, commonly known as Myrtle Rust, in Australia. This pathogen eventually did arrive in that country and was first detected in New South Wales in 2010 on Willow Myrtle (Agonis flexuosa). It is generally accepted that it entered the country on an ornamental Myrtales* host brought in by a private nursery. Despite efforts to eradicate the invasive rust, it has already spread widely, now occurring along the east coast of Australia, from temperate areas in Victoria and southern North South Wales to tropical areas in north Queensland.

German-Jewish Club of 1933, Los Angeles : Ein vergessenes Kapitel der Emigration /

Radio speech on the writers, actors, artists, and others who emigrated from Nazi Germany to the Los Angeles area.