The Introduction lays out connections between Parables unique to Luke and stories about Israel’s founding families. Like Jesus who looked to stories of Israel’s origins when explaining matters relating to himself, Luke reworked well-known Genesis texts to convey ideas.

As a field of knowledge History is exceptionally interested in the particular and specific rather than the universal and general – it is primarily idiographic rather than nomothetic. It is also centrally concerned with change over time. These two characteristics make History fundamentally a storytelling discipline. Its findings are most often presented in narrative form. Of course, many books do not follow one narrative from cover to cover. But research findings are most often presented as stories – not as reports of particular key results (as, for example, in a scientific lab report) or as the results of statistical analysis. Nomothetic disciplines tend toward examining a relatively narrow set of features of multiple cases in order to create generalizing theories and establish laws of regularity that define what will happen under a given set of circumstances at any and all times and places. History instead usually aims to organize into a coherent interpretation many features of a single case, exploring in detail what happened at a particular time, in a particular place. It often also aims to give us a complex, multifactor causal explanation of why it happened as it did, but usually that causal explanation is embedded in the narrative.

This autobiographical fragment begins in a working-class high school and traces a career trajectory shaped by the world I grew up in and the world I entered. As a White woman from an American working-class background, I was an uneasy fit for the academy, circa 1979. I experienced obstacles and intellectual pleasures. I found many fascinating topics to study (e.g., class and cultural variation in early narrative) and many fascinating colleagues and students to work with. The outsider/insider position I occupied offered novel vantage points on the what, who, and how of developmental inquiry and on its telling omissions. My story of marginalization intersected with a historical moment when developmental psychology began to reckon with its narrowness and ethnocentrism. Thanks to the efforts of many developmental scholars, the field is now headed in a more context-sensitive and pluralistic direction while still contending with entrenched deficit discourses and other blind spots.

This chapter argues that the 1870s witnessed the final hegemony of a cause-and-effect form of thick temporality that arguably still dominates our lives. It asks if digital tools open up alternative ways of thinking about chronology, our experience of time, and the possibility of action. The chapter examines two digital projects that change how we approach the 1870s: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History or BRANCH at branchcollective.org, and Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education or COVE at covecollective.org.

The book so far has focused on the interaction between L2 and L1 speakers in Chapters 2 to 4 and on how distinct those interactions are, given the same tasks, compared to interactions between L1 and L1 speakers. However, we have no sense of how naturalistic the interactions in the exams that are the focus of these chapters are. In this chapter we present a short-text MDA of discourse units in general conversational English, using the BNC 2014 as our data. The analysis reveals a range of discourse functions at both the micro- and macro-structural levels.

Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud outline a narrative approach to strategy as practice. They draw on the work of Paul Riceour and Michel de Certeau to elucidate the various narrative practices that constitute an inherent part of strategy and strategizing. This involves the production of texts in strategy formulation, but also the consumption of texts in the ‘implementation’ of strategies. They offer a model that focuses on the writing and reading of texts and narratives as ongoing activities in organizations. This view allows one to understand the crucial role of strategy texts and ongoing interpretations in strategizing – and thus challenges the conventional view that focuses on formal strategies without considering the ways in which they are ‘talked into being’.

This chapter explores the actual reading event. It considers what kinds of pleasure readers seek from book reading and rereading (in different settings and at different times), and the ways in which an e-book does or does not deliver such satisfactions. Examining aspects such as tactile dimensions of embodied reading, the role of the material object, convenience and access, optimisation and customisation, and narrative immersion, it contextualises original findings with recent empirical research on screen reading and offers insights on how, where, and when intimacy, sense of achievement, and the feeling of being ‘lost in a book’ can be found in e-reading. Pleasures such as immersion and sense of achievement appear to be impeded by digital for some readers but facilitated for others. The chapter further examines how an e-book can be framed as an incomplete book (frequently as ‘content’ or ‘story’ and hence the ‘most important part’) without losing its power to satisfy.

In this chapter we explore a manually annotated subset of data from the corpora studied in this book, which have been analysed to show the presence of narratives as understood by researchers studying this concept. In this narrative study we return to an exploration of differences arising from L1 and cultural background and, inter alia, conclude that cultural background may have an important role to play in the frequency and nature of narrative. In drawing such conclusions, we refer, where appropriate, to existing research on SLA and narrative. Overall, the study suggests that, while there are similarities between L1 and L2 narrative use, there are also differences, some attributable to the learner, others to the task/context in which the data was gathered.

So far in the book the concept of narrative has been left largely unexplored except in so far as it has arisen as a functional labelling of data emerging from the short-text MDA of the corpora examined. However, while these labels were applied using the expertise of linguists, the fit between narrative so described and narrative as studied by linguists is unclear. This chapter sets the background for the examination of narrative, as defined by the model of Labov and Waletzky, both by introducing the model and working through an example of the intersection of these researchers’ approach to narrative and the micro- and macro-structural analyses in our data.

The concluding chapter of this book aims to remind the reader of the purpose of the book, which is to help BSL learners to improve their sign articulation accuracy, recognise the kinds of errors they are likely to make, and gain a better understanding of the visual nature of BSL. The importance of practice to enhance fluency is emphasised in Section 5.1, which also encourages the learner to make every effort to understand the cultural aspects of the social life and everyday lived experiences of Deaf people. Section 5.2 contains a good number of exercises that incorporate aspects of the previous three chapters so that you can continue working on the areas that you have identified for improvement. Each exercise contains a clear aim and provides activities with instructions that will help you to continue improving your sign articulation. This chapter emphasises the fact that the ability to recognise and correct your errors is an important part of the learning journey. It helps you to self-reflect and stay on track with the development of your BSL skills as you progress further on your journey to becoming a fluent BSL user.

In chapter 7, Releasing the BIS credit (May 29 - June 5), the BIS credit of 150 million schilling is released to the ANB as a moratorium is averted and a guarantee. Meantime, the issue of an Austrian government loan, re-emerges and it becomes clear that the French may not be able to or wanting to take the lead in organizing the loan. In Basel, the BIS is getting ready for the upcoming board and governors’ meeting, where the decision about another credit to the ANB will have to be discussed. Rodd prepares several notes and a plan for the meeting.

In chapter 3, preparing for crisis, the narrative begins. It is told mainly chronologically and this chapter deals with the period between May 11 and May 19, but only after a brief focus on January 1931 where Harry Siepmann on the basis of the socalled Bagehot model considers what to do in case of a major financial crisis in Europe. The Bagehot model for a lender of last resort and its inadequacy in the face of an international crisis, is a theme that goes through the book’s narrative. On May 11 the Credit Anstalt failure is made known and the central bankers get ready to make sense of the information they get from Austria and elsewhere. The BIS sends Francis Rodd to Vienna and the chapter follows him closely as he communicates his findings back to the BIS and Bank of England. In a world where debt is abundant and credit scarce, Rodd presents a plan to the upcoming BIS board meeting.

Chapter 10, A world political problem (June 11 - June 16). This chapter recounts the endgame of the Austrian crisis, while instability spreads to Germany. Norman comes to realize that in reality there is not much the central banks can do, since the real issue is "a world political problem" going all the way back to the Versaille Peace Agreement of 1919, the German war reparations and the allied’s war debts. The International Creditors Committee negotiate in Vienna with the Credit Anstalt and the Austrian government and at the very last minute they succeed in getting guarantee for their deposits, while promising to leave them for at least two years. At the same time, on June 16, negotiations with French bankers over the Austrian bond loans fails, and the Bank of England singlehandedly steps in with a bridge credit to the government. Together, the loan and the standstill agreement stops the Austrian crisis, at least for a while.

Chapter 18, The End (1931 - 2022). Since the narrative IS the analysis, there is no conclusion as such. Instead, The End provides a discussion of what a forward looking, thick description, humanistic approach to the financial crisis of 1931 have contributed to our knowledge in combination with the concepts embodied in the narrative. First, it is argued that the historical narrative provides new information exactly because writing the history forward brings out the uncertainty and need for sensemaking and narrative emplotment. This argument is discussed briefly in the context of the historiography of the 1931 crisis. Secondly, I ask what this narrative approach has contributed to our emprical and theoretical understanding of decision-making. By very briefly comparing with the Great financial crisis of 2008 I argue that uncertainty is a basic condition that requires sensemaking and narrative construction. I end by suggesting that rather than drawing lessons from history, history can be used as a way to reflect upon the past and the present.