American Story Research Articles

THE ROLE OF AMERICAN STORIES IN TEACHING ENGLISH

This study examines the effectiveness of using American stories in ESL education to enhance cultural understanding, vocabulary, listening, and pronunciation skills. By engaging with American folktales and literature, students gain exposure to idiomatic expressions, cultural nuances, and diverse language structures within meaningful contexts. Storytelling reduces language anxiety, promotes critical thinking, and provides practical language use models. Suggested classroom applications include storytelling circles, role-playing, and thematic discussions, which collectively foster cultural literacy, engagement, and language proficiency.

“Red Gold” by Upton Sinclair and Piotr Pavlenko: Unwritten Soviet-American Novel

On April 16, 1938 Upton Sinclair sent a letter to the editors of the Soviet magazine International Literature, in which he shared the idea of a new novel Red Gold and asked to find him a co-author among Soviet writers. In his letter U. Sinclair gave a detailed synopsis of the novel: the plot was to be based on the story of a young American engineer who in the mid-1920s goes to Siberia to provide Soviet gold mining with the American technology. There on the banks of the river Lena he meets a Russian Bolshevik girl and they fall in love. As an American “bourgeois specialist” he used to believe that capitalism is the most effective social and economic system; his belief, however, was shaken in the course of ideological disputes with his girl-friend, and the Great Depression of the 1930s increased his doubts. Soviet partners proposed Piotr Pavlenko as co-author, and the writers began to exchange letters, discussing their future work and various details of the planned novel. The project was supervised by the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union; its functionaries reported to party and government organs (the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Peopleʼs Commissariat of Foreign Affairs). Letters signed by Pavlenko were read, edited and approved at several levels of Soviet bureaucracy, from the Writersʼ Union to the Press Department of the Central Party Committee. Thus, Upton Sinclair, in fact, negotiated and argued not just with his co-author, but with a hierarchial administrative body with a strict chain of command. Due to the obvious discrepancy between his own and Soviet attitudes, Sinclair soon decided to abandon the idea of a “collective novel”. The study is based on the materials from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Arts and Literature (RGALI).

Unjust: Publishing Black and African American Children’s Books and School Availability

Traditional book publishing has a pronounced and unjust deficiency of Black and African American voices. White culture, thoughts, and rules are the standard in traditional publishing. Black and African American authors are not typically picked up by white-dominated publishing companies. In traditional publishing, mostly white literary agents are gatekeepers and acquisition editors shut the doors too frequently to non-white authors. Aspiring Black authors then resort to hybrid or vanity press companies that often use unscrupulous practices, charge exorbitant fees, accomplish little or low-quality work, and deny authors’ agency and full rights in the final disposition of a book. Because a majority of traditionally published children’s books featuring Black or African American stories or characters are written by or illustrated by non-Black people, the wide possibilities of adventure, celebrations, discovery, and friendship stories are not published for Black children. Instead, publishers favor stories about slavery, the civil rights movement, famous Black people, and hair tales as well as racially ambiguous characters. Regrettably, Black and African American culturally relevant stories written and illustrated by Black or African Americans are not readily available to children in school and library settings consistent with schools’ community or student demographics. This article shares research findings and viewpoints of Kathy Anderson and Karen Bowlding, two Black children’s book writers and publishing consultants who are also parents. Black and African American students encounter education and cultural injustice because of the practices of traditional publishing companies, educators, and librarians. Parents and guardians can ameliorate these issues with discernment and action. Foremost, publishing company decision-makers must acknowledge their own racial biases that deny representation and authenticity to all children in our US classrooms.

Where should we begin? Teaching Vietnamese American Stories through an Antiracist Lens

Where should we begin? Teaching Vietnamese American Stories through an Antiracist Lens

Perspectives on Practice: Asian American Stories Are for Everyone: Highlighting the Universal Themes in Asian American Children’s Literature

Perspectives on Practice: Asian American Stories Are for Everyone: Highlighting the Universal Themes in Asian American Children’s Literature

From Language Arts to Learning Communities: Amplifying Asian American Stories through Reading, Composing, and Enacting Counter-Stories

From Language Arts to Learning Communities: Amplifying Asian American Stories through Reading, Composing, and Enacting Counter-Stories

Focalization, Subjectivity, and Magic(al) Realism in “Night in the Woods”

The main aim of our analysis is to consider the use and function of focalization in Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017) and the resulting magic(al) realism subjectivity of perception and fluidity of the gameworld in the framework of post-classical narratology. Our suggestion is that the specific ludonarrative features and functions of the game and its playable protagonist, Mae Borowski, pose questions pertaining to the ontological status of the gameworld, making it an in-between, undetermined magic(al) realism space. Taking into account the conventional formulas and themes utilized in the game, it has already been discussed as an American story following the tradition of the so-called Rust Belt Gothic. This approach, albeit highly accurate, fails to exhaust the possibility that the events presented in the game, specifically in the fourth act, are only subjectively perceived by the protagonist/focalizer, Mae Borowski. In our text, we discuss the potential markers of subjectivity present in the game, with a focus on the game music and soundscape.

Between a Dream and Its Realization: Locating Utopia and Zionism in Kafka’s American Story

Abstract This article analyzes Franz Kafka’s first novel, Der Verschollene, as an extended meditation on the immigrant’s experience of frustration when he relies on old national, social, and familial constellations grounded in another, far-off place; it thereby demonstrates how the novel depicts immigration as primarily a tale of loss, rather than gain. The article then pivots to situate Der Verschollene, and especially the novel’s final fragment, in light of Kafka’s passionate consumption of both American travelogues and Zionist periodicals and literature. In light of this literary-historical backdrop and the Kafka short story, Wunsch, Indianer zu werden, it argues that the departure of the novel’s main character for “Oklahama” at the end of the work is an implicit celebration of literary travel narratives for their ability to achieve something real-life migration never can: a utopian moment suspended between a dream and its fulfillment.

Keynote: Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work

Keynote: Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work

Artistic Thinking in Scientific Research

Doctoral programs in the fine arts, instead of coming up with their own ways of doing things, tend to adopt standards from the humanities, which themselves tend to adopt standards from science. Because of being preoccupied with trying to look like other disciplines, artistic thinking within artistic doctorates gets suppressed. But if we look into science directly and not through this second-hand approach, we can find aspects of scientific thinking that are closer to art than to the humanities.
 In this paper, I give examples of artistic thinking in the work of various scientists and mathematicians: a non-fiction book that uses fiction (Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach), a linguistic analysis that concludes with a story (Livia Polanyi’s book Telling the American Story), scientific lectures with unusual formal aspects (Roger Penrose’s “VJing” of multiple layers of foils through an overhead projector, David Deutsch’s Lectures on Quantum Computation), and a collective hiding behind a fictional mathematician (Nicolas Bourbaki). I also briefly introduce the problem of verbal overshadowing and the effects it may have on the creative process in art.

Review of Tasneem Mandviwala, South Asian American Stories of Self: the Dis/United States of Muslim Womanhood

Review of Tasneem Mandviwala, South Asian American Stories of Self: the Dis/United States of Muslim Womanhood

Tropika gatunkowa, fabularna, sfery bohaterów w najnowszej prozie postrealistów polskich

The monograph by Dariusz Piechota analyses some images, motifs, and types of characters that go back to Polish prose of the second half of the 19th century as well as modernism. The book deals with the global problems of civilization that have determined the consciousness of modern society. The author demonstrates that addressing specific topical issues (ecology and climate change, diseases, and destruction of personal identification under the influence of pop culture and the digital age) acquires genre characteristics in post-realist prose. Traditional genres (soap operas, family sagas, melodrama, etc.) have been enriched with features of other genres or methods of seeing the world. The author traced the features (signs) of a fairy tale, dystopia, or anti-utopia, a psychological story in the latest Polish and American stories.

Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea

Reviewed by: Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea Caroline Wood Newhall (bio) Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Gordon C. Rhea. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 200. Cloth, $29.95.) Gordon C. Rhea’s latest work on Stephen A. Swails is a welcome and compelling biography of a “long-forgotten central participant” in the “political history [of Kingstree, South Carolina], in the story of African Americans’ participation in the Civil War, and in South Carolina’s Reconstruction experience” (xi–xii). Swails, a Black Pennsylvanian who achieved fame as the first Black commissioned officer in the history of the United States, spent his life after the war dedicated to the intertwined causes of justice, Black equality, and uplift through education and property holding in South Carolina. This quick read serves as an informative microhistory of the tumultuous events that informed Swails’s life from the early 1830s to his death in 1900. As Rhea notes, “Biographies of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the war are exceedingly rare” (xii), and his research into Swails is a necessary step in bringing greater attention to Swails and to the devastatingly difficult circumstances African Americans faced in the South after the Civil War. Earlier works have examined Swails’s career to some degree, [End Page 266] including Eric Foner’s Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Office-holders during Reconstruction (1996) and William E. Jenkinson III’s Stephen A. Swails: Soldier, Politician, and Lawyer (1998), but no published works have so thoroughly examined Swails’s life from childhood, to his military service, to his tumultuous career in Reconstruction-era South Carolina as a member of the Freedmen’s Bureau and later the state legislature. The book is composed of eleven brief chapters. The first six largely focus on the lead-up to the Civil War and the service of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, as well as background information on reactions to Black soldiers and their experiences in war. Chapters 7 through 11 deal with Swails’s postwar life and career and form the bulk of original research and insights that make this work a significant contribution to the historiography of the period. Rhea relies on the research of Hugh MacDougall, an attorney in Cooperstown, New York, and Jenkinson, an attorney in South Carolina, as well as Swails’s personal papers, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and Swails’s correspondence with South Carolina governors and federal officials. Rhea’s work is a welcome addition to the field wherein the complexities of Reconstruction and the persistent terrorism embittered white supremacists used against African Americans and pro-equality whites receives significant examination. As such, it is in good company with the work of historians such as Cynthia Nicoletti, Bradley Proctor, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Adam Domby, and presents an excellent discussion of South Carolina’s highly contested postwar elections. Rhea’s discussion in chapter 9 of white supremacists’ use of violence to undermine democratic processes is especially rich in detail on the challenges that people like Swails and his family faced, as well as the connections between violent events in South Carolina, the passage of federal legislation such as the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871, and the end of Reconstruction with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in 1877. Rhea illuminates Swails’s involvement in these processes, including a near firefight on the floor of the state legislature in 1876 and a horrifying day in 1878 wherein Red Shirt members of the Democratic Executive Committee nearly lynched Swails in front of one of his children. White residents threatened to execute Swails if he remained in South Carolina, while both President Hayes and Governor Wade Hampton, a former Confederate, proclaimed they could do nothing about it. This violent intimidation and thwarting of justice meant that Swails was forced to live in Washington, D.C., for the next twenty-two years while his family, whom he often visited, remained in Kingstree, South Carolina. One critique of this work is that Swails’s story does not begin in earnest until chapter 7, in part...

The American story of apomorphine: between mistrust and remarkable discoveries (P4-3.006)

<h3>Objective:</h3> To review the history of apomorphine in the United States of America (USA) and the stigma surrounding it, taking into account both its medical and non-medical uses <h3>Background:</h3> Despite extensive and worldwide evidence of clinical efficacy and safety in the management of Parkinson’s disease (PD), and despite being approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as both an injection (2004) and a sublingual film (2020), apomorphine is currently not available in the USA as a continuous subcutaneous administration infusion (CSAI). In October 2022, the FDA issued a Complete Response Letter for the new application as a drug infusion device. <h3>Design/Methods:</h3> Nonsystematic database (MEDLINE, NCBI, PubMed, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Internet Archive) search and screening of online American newspapers archives (Newspapers.com®) with the search terms <i>apomorphine</i> and <i>apomorphia</i> (1845–2022) <h3>Results:</h3> Following its European synthesis in the mid-19th century, apomorphine was successfully and extensively used by American clinicians from the 1870’s onwards, in the management of both pediatric and adult patients. However, its unsubstantiated inclusion in the Harrison Narcotic Tax Law put a major stop in its clinical use. Despite these limitations, the USA was the first country to conduct clinical trials using apomorphine for PD in 1951. Apomorphine non-medical use, including abusive practices (vomiting punishment) in boarding schools and hospitals (1900’s), truth serum (1920’s), tranquiliser gun or race horse drugging (1970’s) have surely contributed to damage its reputation. <h3>Conclusions:</h3> It is difficult to explain the residual stigma surrounding apomorphine in the US without considering the intertwining of the medical &amp; non-medical worlds, the long-lasting effects of “fashion” or reputation, as well as the political and economic context. <b>Disclosure:</b> Dr. Auffret has received personal compensation for serving as an employee of France Développement Electronique. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received personal compensation in the range of $500-$4,999 for serving as a Consultant for Britannia. Dr. Auffret has received personal compensation in the range of $500-$4,999 for serving on a Scientific Advisory or Data Safety Monitoring board for Britannia. Dr. Auffret has received personal compensation in the range of $5,000-$9,999 for serving on a Speakers Bureau for Britannia. Dr. Auffret has received personal compensation in the range of $500-$4,999 for serving on a Speakers Bureau for Aguettant. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from Association France Parkinson. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from Homeperf. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from LVL. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from University of Rennes 1. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from Aguettant. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from Linde. The institution of Dr. Auffret has received research support from Plateforme Nationale pour la recherche sur la fin de vie. Dr. Auffret has received publishing royalties from a publication relating to health care. Dr. Lees has received personal compensation in the range of $5,000-$9,999 for serving as a Consultant for Britannia. Dr. Lees has received personal compensation in the range of $5,000-$9,999 for serving as a Speaker with Bial Pharma. Mr. Verin has nothing to disclose.

Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis, Sydney A. Halpern

Sydney Halpern’s book Dangerous Medicine tells the American story of hepatitis research with human subjects from 1940 through 1974. The book is an expression of moral outrage at researchers’ discriminatory decisions about whom to use in human experiments and policy elites’ complicity with the research — as well as their convenient spins on the studies, which they fed to a fawning media. The book is interested in the failure of moral imagination by elite researchers and government funders around long-term disability from research. Halpern situates the book in the historiography of “research abuse narratives,” and charges that histories to date are flawed because “they obscure the web of institutional and cultural supports that gave momentum to the now-condemned research” (p. 179). In three sections of three chapters each, enriched by four oral histories, the book tracks stakeholders’ “normalizing narratives,” which I understand to be justifications of research agendas and practices that aimed to neutralize criticisms and fears.

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Katherine J. Cramer about Listening as a Way of Democratic and Scholarly Life

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Katherine J. Cramer about Listening as a Way of Democratic and Scholarly Life

A Corpus-based Concordances Analysis of Tommy Orange’s There There in Relation to Monistic Philosophy

The present paper is an attempt to discuss monism in Tommy Orange’s There There by using selected concordance occurrences. Monistic philosophy rejects the post-modern concept of pluralism and instability. Using the Antconc toolkit, the concordance of the terms such as story, history and its plurals too were found and the relation of these words to the signs, situations, characters and themes was tested for textual monism. In addition, if these words help to make the novel a coherent whole, the concordance plots of those words have also been closely studied. The choice of the text for these words was due to the author's own argument that the story of the urban Native American is to be considered within the context of its histories. Despite the fact that characters seem to be fractured 'stories' under the influence of their violent history, phrases that exist in multiple ways, incidents and themes seem to serve as links and turning points to maintain a connected and coherent overall narrative about the urban Native American community.

Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby

Reviewed by: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby O. Alan Weltzien and emeritus Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York: Liveright Publishing. 335 pp. Hardcover, $27.95. Montana novelist Thomas Savage, a gay man heterosexually married, threw his overtly gay novel manuscript into the Atlantic (ca. 1964) when his literary agent advised him it couldn’t be published let alone widely read. As we all know by now, his character, repressed gay Phil Burbank (The Power of the Dog), who contains strands of Savage, meets a painful death as he tries to come out again. In his friend Annie Proulx’s best-known short story, “Broke-back Mountain,” Ennis angrily asks his lover, “This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” and Jack responds, “It don’t happen in Wyoming and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” As you might remember, a year after this short story was published, Matthew Shepard, a Wyomingite, didn’t make it that far. Even now, how much safe space exists for sexual minorities in the rural West away from the coastal region? That question arguably represents the central prompt behind Taylor Brorby’s beautifully written memoir. He reminds us that it’s unsafe, outside some urban precincts, for a man to hold another man in public. Brorby’s story shows him inexorably torn between his western North Dakota home and exile. He insistently and lyrically paints his native topography in the country’s least visited state. He’s a poet of a landscape few of us know let alone cherish, and his love runs deep. At the same time, as his title and subtitle clarify, this memoir tells an all-too-familiar story of environmental degradation and destruction, of callous extractive industries that strip-mine surfaces, gouge the depths, and leave scarred ground that’s the short-grass prairie equivalent of Pacific Northwest clear-cutting. He knows the Bakken oil patch and the Dakota Access Pipeline personally and painfully, as his anthology Fracture (2016) attests. He records his Iowa arrest for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (260–61), about which he’s written elsewhere. Brorby knows fracking means fucking the ground beneath: yet another example of Rob Nixon’s slow violence. North Dakota means [End Page 80] a horizontal place defined by a five-hundred-foot smokestack and a dragline and endless derricks; it is a “story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction, now from the outside” (7). Our endless pursuit of oil leaves only wreckage in its wake—no new news—and the kind of boys (and girls) drawn to oil patches pose direct threats to the Native boy who, by adolescence, in familiar fashion, discovers himself a sexual minority subject to insult, ostracism, and worse. Brorby begins, “Center [North Dakota] is a place where people only end up” (5). His memoir makes a strong case for escape. He’s escaped to Bismarck by high school and St. Olaf’s College then the Twin Cities as he struggles through identity formation. It’s the old American story of getting the hell out of Dodge particularly if one doesn’t conform to local majority preferences, including heterosexuality. Brorby lives through extensive pain and seasons of tears as he negotiates his emerging self between his roots, his family and place, and new, more tolerant and cosmopolitan geographies. What a courageous story of redefining what and where one belongs. The most painful part of Brorby’s story concerns his parents who provided him and his older sister a range of creature comfort but who turned their backs when he came out to them. In such a memoir, coming out, unsurprisingly, forms a main theme and Brorby sketches several scenes in which his older sister, his grandfathers, and ultimately his two older nephews, affirm him and their unqualified love. Those embraces make his parents’ silent hostility all the more excruciating (they’ve not spoken in years). The...

The Work of Retirement

AbstractIn the past few decades, caregivers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, have come to compose the fastest-growing segment of the paid workforce in the United States. At the same time, corporate caretakers of workers’ savings, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have become the nation's largest investors, bound by fiduciary duties of trust. And unprecedented numbers of elder employees and retirees have become the biggest supposed beneficiaries of both care labor and trust capital, depending on health workers and asset managers in their daily lives. At the center of this emerging structure of work, wealth, and welfare lies the pension system, a telling crucible of class relations in our time. Several recent books across different disciplines examine the shifting politics of pensions in the United States and around the world. The spate of new studies presents an opportunity to explore the remarkable role of retirement funds in reorganizing labor and finance over the past fifty years. Rather than offering a historiographical critique of current work, this expository essay surveys the main findings of a larger and longer body of scholarship on organized labor and investment related to pensions. Though focused on the United States, it places the American story in a comparative context. The survey points to a fertile field for further study: as retirees have increasingly relied on professional asset managers and caregivers, the finance and health sectors have undergone converging crises over fiduciary duty and elder care, posing parallel challenges for organized labor.

Best-Selling Author to Discuss How Psychiatrists Can Help Create More Equitable World

Best-Selling Author to Discuss How Psychiatrists Can Help Create More Equitable World