American Story Research Articles

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

The Parthian Legacy: Irish Catholicism and Remaking Identity in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy

The Parthian LegacyIrish Catholicism and Remaking Identity in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy Vera R. Foley (bio) Despite its foundation in a romance plot that pits a highly particularized version of Irish Catholic heritage against a more generically Protestant version of the American Dream, Willa Cather’s 1926 novella My Mortal Enemy does not often figure in scholarly explorations of ethnic heritage in America. Like many of Cather’s works, My Mortal Enemy presents ethnic heritage as enriching and even exalting the experience of white American citizens. In this sense she writes in the same tradition as Randolph S. Bourne, who described in 1916 the power and value of what he calls “trans-nationality” (13)1—the belief that the United States is strengthened when the descendants of white immigrants refuse cultural assimilation in favor of retaining “cultural practices” from their families’ European countries of origin (Waters 115). The story of Myra Driscoll Henshawe—who goes from proud Irish American heiress to aspiring New York society wife to lonely, impoverished Catholic enthusiast during the course of her lifetime—embodies the dangers Cather sees for women who eschew ethnic ties in favor of American homogeneity. Based on her own experience growing up on the Nebraska frontier, Cather associated white ethnic particularity with “the splendid story of the pioneers,” in what she calls a “fluid and flexible” society defined by a patchwork of different cultures and heritages working together to tame the landscape and forge their fortunes (“Nebraska” 238). Throughout her career Cather presents retaining specific ethnic roots as symptomatic of strength and integrity; this is the model that her earlier immigrant heroines Alexandra [End Page 51] Bergson of O Pioneers! (1913) and Ántonia Shimerda of My Ántonia (1918) drew upon to become beloved matriarchs in their families and communities. Myra’s Irish American story is thus doubly valuable because Cather offers little insight elsewhere into her specific perspective on Irish immigrants or Irish Americans in the increasingly diverse early twentieth century, although her interest in Catholicism generally is well documented.2 Myra represents a departure from Cather’s usual brand of rural frontier nostalgia—on two levels. First, Cather gives her Irish American heroine, Myra, a birthplace in the United States rather than Ireland. Second, she situates Myra in a series of urban spaces, from the fictional setting of Parthia, Illinois, to New York City, to an unnamed Pacific coast metropolis. As a result Myra must negotiate different strategies for retaining an Irish heritage that meets her needs as an American woman; her definition of what it means to enact her Irish identity remains in flux, morphing to reflect her particular circumstances. The Second Boat: Family Origins and the “blood tie” of Parthia, Illinois Unlike Cather’s Great Plains heroines, with their lived experiences in places like Sweden and Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Myra is doubly removed from what sociologists would call her “ancestral place of origin” (Waters 86). She is not just removed generationally from Ireland but also from the large, established Irish American enclaves in the Northeast and, to a growing extent, the Midwest. Myra’s great-uncle John Driscoll, the original Irish immigrant in her family, would have been one of what David Emmons calls the “two-boat Irish”3: arrivals who did not stop their voyage west once they crossed the Atlantic but continued on into the American heartland (1). Like many such arrivals who emigrated during the famine, Driscoll found himself in a landscape far “more urban and industrial than” that of his Irish compatriots who remained in Boston and New York (Emmons 2). This does not mean, however, that the Midwest did not offer Irish and blended Catholic communities into which he could have integrated, had that been his wish. As Regina Donlon notes, “During the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of Catholics in the United States increased from [End Page 52] 663,000 to 3,103,000,” with established parishes and worshipers in St. Louis and Fort Wayne (149). Far from knitting himself into an existing ethnic or religious community, however, “John Driscoll made his fortune employing contract labour in the Missouri swamps,” exploiting the toil of men...

2020 Keywords Symposium

2020 Keywords Symposium Jennifer C. Nash (bio), Samantha Pinto (bio), Marisol LeBrón (bio), Monica L. Miller (bio), Ann Cvetkovich (bio), Julie Livingston (bio), Psyche Williams-Forson (bio), Ruha Benjamin (bio), Christina Hanhardt (bio), Harris Solomon (bio), Neelima Navuluri (bio), Charles W. Hargett (bio), Peter S. Kussin (bio), Noémi Tousignant (bio), Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio), Tiana Reid (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Racquel Gates, Sari Altschuler (bio), Gayle Wald (bio), and Banu Subramaniam (bio) 2020 (Introduction) Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto 125 Abolish Marisol LeBrón 128 Asynchronous Monica L. Miller 134 COVID Silver Linings Ann Cvetkovich 139 Essential Worker Julie Livingston 144 Food-in-Place (Shelter-in-Place) Psyche Williams-Forson 148 Mask Ruha Benjamin 151 Mutual Aid Christina Hanhardt 152 PPE Harris Solomon, Neelima Navuluri, Charles W. Hargett, Peter S. Kussin 158 Risk Factor Noémi Tousignant 163 Social Distancing Joshua Chambers-Letson 169 Stay at Home Tiana Reid 175 Supply Chain Management Miriam Posner 178 Synchronous Racquel Gates 181 Wave/Forest Fire Sari Altschuler 187 Zoom Gayle Wald 192 Zoonosis (Virus) Banu Subramaniam 196 [End Page 124] 2020 Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto Academic projects are often born from desire. When we began the project of collecting these essays—effectively archiving the present—it was an act of imagining a future when we would look back on 2020. Perhaps this collection—with its snapshot of a horrifying present now past—would offer us one way of remembering how everything about daily life was upended. The promise, always, was that by the time this came to be in print, COVID-19 would be something we needed to remember rather than still part of the ongoing present. Our method was to build a glossary of COVID-19 neologisms, and to come to terms with how 2020 is now its own keyword. This symposium represents the radical and acute—and ongoing—challenges of the pandemic; collapsing social structures that are affecting women, parents, and the economically disenfranchised; the exhaustion of years of unchecked and unbridled White Supremacy in health care, law enforcement, housing, and employment; the contentious election and the Trump administration's refusal to concede. It represents disparate responses to the realities of the "stay at home" orders that started proliferating in the US in March and April of 2020. Essential workers—disproportionately Black and Brown—were ordered to continue working, while others began "panic baking" and "panic shopping" (the disappearance of flour, yeast, and toilet paper from grocery stores marked the first quarter of the year).1 While some buried their dead in anguish and isolation,2 others purchased real estate, thanks to record-low interest rates and new demands for more space as houses were transformed into offices and schools.3 In some ways, this is a quintessentially American story—the variety of ways that crisis is experienced and inhabited, with the starkest and most deathly outcomes reserved for those most precarious as the capitalist machine keeps rolling along. Terms like "the new normal," and the 2020 OED word of the year, "unprecedented,"4 now pepper our collective consciousness as we describe the dizzying changes that 2020 ushered in, and the new endurances it demands of some, as well as the old intractable inequities it brought to the public surface. If the physical and structural shifts were massive and visible in scale, so was the vocabulary introduced to mark these changes, much of it quickly absorbed and normalized. The spring of 2020 called us to "flatten the curve" through social distancing, the summer of 2020 warned us about a "second wave," and the fall and winter of 2020 ushered in discussions about vaccines, immunity, antibodies, and the need to endure the "COVID winter." Bleeding into 2021, crisis and critique have merged into a lexicon that [End Page 125] is repeated, rehearsed, rehashed, remade.5 These terms have become part of a collective vocabulary, a shared index for describing the relentless conditions of the present, even as that present is experienced and endured differently. If we were to continue to build this glossary, we might include terms like Delta, variants, boosters, vaccine mandates, breakthrough infections, and, of course, "the long 2020." In this "long 2020" marked...

The Time to Act is Now: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis

As the first Native American Cabinet Secretary for the United States, Deb Haaland gives an overview of the cultural heritage preservation efforts of the U.S. Department of Interior. Priorities include telling the full American story and addressing the climate crisis.

Book Review: Here, Right Matters: An American Story

Book Review: Here, Right Matters: An American Story

Considering the Revolution

Considering the Revolution

Lessons from a Different Shore: Portrayals of Japanese American Incarceration and the Redress Movement by Western European Newspapers

The history of Japanese American incarceration is traditionally framed as one of the bleakest chapters in twentieth-century US history. Yet interest in the story of Japanese Americans and the lessons of the incarceration are not limited to the United States or the Japanese diaspora. This article examines media reactions to the story of the Japanese American incarceration and the redress movement of the 1980s in four Western European countries—the Netherlands, United Kingdom, West Germany, and France. In each country, media outlets discussed the redress movement and the Japanese American experience, larger issues of racism within the United States, and financial compensation for war victims. In doing so, these media accounts both dramatize the nature of public opinion on the subject of reparations and touch on larger debates on the collective memory of the Holocaust and colonialism that were emerging in Western Europe. 

Hedonism in George Saunder’s The Semplica-Girl Diaries.

George Saunders is an American short story writer. His writings include moral sting and stints of realism. This article is an analysis of one of his famous stories The Semplica-Girl Diaries. The story is a fine example of hedonism which means favouring pleasure and avoiding pain. This article speculates the idea of hedonism in the characters of this story and brings forth the theme of moral myopia. Hedonistic treadmill was at multiple times was being operated by those characters who try to own pleasure in spite of biting bullets. The other elements like American dream and consumerism have been analysed through the lens of narrator.

The Privatization of Human Research Ethics: An American Story

Abstract In recent decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the governance of human research ethics in the United States. A model once based on review by panels of local volunteers has given way to a system dominated by large, for-profit research ethics committees. America’s reliance on for-profit ethics review is unique among wealthy industrialized countries. How can we account for this anomaly? In this article, I show that for-profit irb s represent only the most visible aspect of the privatization of human research protections in the United States. I suggest that private institutions have emerged as “workaround” solutions to systemic problems, in the absence of comprehensive policy reforms.

How pharmacy can start to solve the inequity puzzle

How pharmacy can start to solve the inequity puzzle

2020 Timoshenko Medal Acceptance Lecture: Mechanics: Evergreen and Forever New

2020 Timoshenko Medal Acceptance Lecture: Mechanics: Evergreen and Forever New

A Study on the Construction of Americanism in Mark Twain’s Works

American Writer Mark Twain in his works vividly records social changes caused by the industrialization in the 19th century. His writing could be regarded as a kind of construction of Americanism. He insists on advocating of Puritanism, using the American dialect to tell American stories, displaying the culture in American West and South. He employs humor and irony to combine American history with reality, getting rid of influences of the British literature to illustrate Americanism and the historical process of America.

The Characters of Children in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”: A Comparative Study

This article tries to compare between two well-known American short stories, “A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty and “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, from a comparative perspective. The author of the first of these stories is an African-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. Alice Walker and the other story is written by an American short story writer, novelist and photographer, who wrote about the American South, Audra Welty. The specific reasons behind choosing these two short stories because they are written by women writers from different cultures, both deal with racial issues, but more importantly is that both include children characters that can add an attribution to be representations of the new African- American generation. Walker’s story includes the characters of two African- American daughters; Maggi and Dee, each of these characters behave in a different way, a behavior which consequently represents a special attitude towards the new generation of African- Americans. While in Welty’s story, we find the character of the grandson of the protagonist, Phoenix, who has a disease which deprived him from his ability to speak. This study analyses how these three characters provide different angles of seeing how the new generation of African- Americans is represented through a comparative outlook.

Cyborgian Model Minorities for Environmental Justice: East Asian American Stories from the 1991 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit

Despite the growing social consciousness of issues relating to environmental justice (EJ) and the abundance of literature in the disciplines of EJ studies and Asian American Studies, analysis of As...

A Postmodern Reading of Don DeLillo’s Short Stories

The focus of this paper is to study how different techniques are incorporated in the postmodern fiction to present the multiplicity of meaning and subjectivity of the reality. For this purpose, the researcher has selected American novelist and short story writer Donald Richard DeLillo’s short stories “The Itch” and “Coming. Sun. Mon. Tues”. The researcher has analyzed the selected works using the theoretical frameworks provided by Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Henri Bergson. The theoretical insights of the selected theorists help understand the subjective reality of the postmodernism. Textual analysis has been used as a method to study the selected fictional work. Postmodernism is critical of certain foundational conventions of philosophy, specifically, the Enlightenment thinking, as it symbolizes the pursuit of reason and logic. On the other hand, it focuses on the personalization and subjectivity in the construction of truth and worldviews. The rejection of objective reality gives way to multiple realities and subjectivity. American fiction, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been influenced by postmodernism to a great extent. The analyzed short stories provide a good postmodern reading since they cover a range of features that are relatable in the postmodern world.

Editor's Column

Editor's Column

The American Short Story and Me

The American Short Story and Me

Homeownership for All: An American Narrative

The narrative of homeownership for all citizens is a uniquely American story. Narrative economics is a field that studies the spread of stories to explain economic fluctuations. We quantitatively examine the relationship between the American housing narrative and the run-up in home prices experienced since the Great Recession in the United States. We rely on a natural language processing (NLP) framework to measure the sentiment associated with the narrative. We then use a panel vector autoregression to empirically model the relationship between home prices and homeownership sentiment in the United States. We find that sentiment related to the American homeownership narrative is an important factor in explaining movements in home prices even after taking into account the economic factors typically thought to explain home price fluctuations. Though others have examined the role of sentiment in markets, our study is the first to empirically measure the American homeownership narrative. While this is a narrative promoted at the national level, future research might examine whether sentiment related to homeownership varies across this diverse nation.

NOTES ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short story writer and journalist. His real name is Ernest Miller Hemingway. He is a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. He wrote his first articles in the school newspaper. In 1917, America was slowly joining World War I.Heminquey immediately enlisted in the army, but was not accepted because his left eye was weak. A year later, he entered the Red Crescent and volunteered to drive an ambulance. He was wounded in an explosion near the war, carrying an Italian soldier on his shoulder while he was wounded, and was wounded in the leg. After that, he was declared a hero in Italy and received the "Silver Medal of Honor". While in treatment in Milan, he fell in love with a nurse, and this love led him to write a masterpiece - "Goodbye, guns." Heminquey wrote mainly about his life experiences. This can be seen in "Goodbye, weapons". The writer, who reached the peak of his career with "Who the bells are ringing for", continued his life by participating in wars. Key words: famous writer, Chicago, Nobel laureate, author of short stories, story, old man, sea

Editor's Note

Editor's Note C. Damien Arthur It is nearly impossible to explain the depth and complexity of Robert C. Byrd in a journal volume, especially the vastness of his connections to policy, implemented power, and his involvement in sociohistorical events and ideologies. This scholarly, commemorative journal volume on the ten-year anniversary of his death could never fully address the aforementioned. Yet, even as Byrd said during his life, his involvement in racist groups, ideologies, and actions would follow him forever—even in death. As the guest editor of West Virginia: A Journal of Regional Studies, I offer this editor's note as a very brief summary of a larger, more nuanced history on Byrd and his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist rhetorics, which will be published by Oxford University Press in the definitive biography of Byrd and his life. Was Byrd a racist? This is the question that people, in all the conversations and interactions the author has had, with nearly every interested party, want answered definitively. In asking the question, most already have a preconceived answer they want confirmed by the explanations of my research. Most want to simply say that he moved beyond those early days of Klan behavior and rhetoric and fought for civil rights, which is both true and a completely naïve interpretation of Byrd's latter behavior and rhetoric—nonetheless. Many want to dismiss Byrd, both his legacy and good works, because of the racist ideas he espoused, which are venomous and legion. There is no debate—Byrd did and said racist things. He also did and said antiracist things. This tension is why many called him an enigma. Nevertheless, the public is interested, however, in historical figures of importance precisely because they are flawed, inspiring, and complicated, which challenges our perceptions of conventional archetypes. Byrd's story is a part of the United States' collective story, the American story—his life is paradigmatic of this long, legendary tale. This story is about a promise that all people are created equal and the profoundly real and consequential failure of America and its leaders to implement this for everyone—expressed in the racist, violent institutions that murdered and tortured black humans, or the capital and wealth accumulation from slavery that has not been truly shared with those that earned it, or the perpetuation of the new Jim Crow structures in mass incarceration and disenfranchisement. There is no doubt that it is a difficult story. It is a difficult realization and [End Page v] acknowledgement for anyone to process. Americans should weep each time they think of it. Many Americans are all part of it, participate in it, benefit from it, and, often, continue to perpetuate it. Nevertheless, it is a story that must be told; it must be acknowledged—it is a central part in the American story. Doing so is the only way to move forward. America, and many of those that love their country, did this to other human beings—murdering, torturing, and destroying people in the name of white supremacy, both overtly and inadvertently. In some ways, this is still happening to black Americans. America had, and continues to have, in some instances, political and economic systems that perpetuate white supremacy. By design, the system is difficult to change. So, for those at the helm of, and within, that system that have acknowledged their mistakes, made attempts to rectify the system, tried to close those stunning gaps, dismissing them outright without hearing their story undermines progress and disincentivizes others from acknowledging that more change is necessary for justice for all to be realized. Acknowledgement and change, however, small and incremental, are steps in the direction America must go to fulfill those promises in our founding epiphanies. Of course, Byrd was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, and later in the immutable Southern Bloc's attempt to dismantle civil rights, and few people deny it—to do so irradicates any semblance of scholarly credibility. The controversy will be further complicated when the full story is told in the aforementioned book and it is known that his involvement was more vicious than previously acknowledged or known. Byrd should...