American Story Research Articles

Consuming Subjects: Making Sense of Post–World War II Westerns

IntroductionThe American Western, a popular film genre from earliest days of cinema well into 1960s, has been linked to story of America more insistently than any other genre. Set in American West, that most mythic of spaces, conventional wisdom has these films embodying the spirit, struggle and demise of new (American Film Institute) even as concepts of American spirit and of frontier are taken for granted and thus seemingly self-evident. This article is a revisitation of so-called Golden Age of Western2-roughly 1946 to 1962-a period in which moviegoing3 as well as production of Westerns peaked,4 with both dropping offf precipitously by 1960s. This Golden Age coincided with major social and cultural shifts in United States, and this project takes particular convergences of history in America in postwar period as significant influences nature and reception of Western. It integrates cultural events and phenomena of 1950s in America with an understanding of ways in which Western shaped and appealed to popular imagination in order to better understand how Westerns made sense in post-World War II period. The ubiquity of Western during this time and its normalized rendering of a very particular narrative of America that was projected onto a mythic interpellated viewers into a contemporary consumerist ideology while developing a Western version of Family Romance that was consistent with economic, social, and political goals of configuring nuclear family as bulwark against insecurities of age. The Westerns of 1950s, in their representation of American story and values provided model for how to be an American, which, in 1950s, was to be a consumer for whom market was final frontier.The West of Imagination-History and Myth in WesternThis is West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print legend.-The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, dir. 1962)The Western emerges out of nexus of signifying practices that has come to be called Myth of West. This West of imagination has, since time of Columbus, been integral to story of America, proving a natural image to reality (Barthes 142). That is, west and events and people in it have, through process of mythologization, been emptied of their specific historicity and refilled with meaning-resignified-to appear as if natural. In Western, this naturalization is overdetermined: filmed on location (even if simulated in studio), landscape registers immediately as West, and locates that meaning in nature.5 Scholars of Western are beholden to this Barthesian logic: 1950s Westerns transform history into a species of narrative which we know to be fiction, but which we nevertheless take to have some important element of truth (Cortese 124). Myths are stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage power of symbolizing that society's ideology . . . their identification with venerable tradition makes them appear to be products of 'nature' rather than history-expressions of a trans-historical consciousness (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 5-6). This dehistoricization pertains to narrative level-the mythic-in contrast to background, which has often been characterized as historically accurate. But in film, every aspect of mise-en-scene is intentional. The apparent attention to historical detail is an authenticating gesture, itself a fiction that provides ground, unquestioned routine of insistently recurring that audience apprehends to be that which anchors storyline to a historical context. Throughout, history maintains some kind of ontological reality, with events in retrievable in some unmediated form: one of things which distinguishes bourgeois myth from history is [the] silent and continuous intrusion of present into what ought to be an inviolable past (Cortese 124). …

How to Tell a Story about Indians and Empire

Joshua Piker. The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 320 pp. Map, notes, and index. $29.95. In his essay How to Tell Story (1895), Mark Twain wrote that there are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. According to Twain, this uniquely American form of story is different from comic which is English, and the which is French. Whereas the humorous story depends upon manner of the telling, comic and witty stories depend upon matter. The first is strictly work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it, but no art is necessary to tell the other two—anybody can do In The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America, Joshua Piker offers his own insights into how to tell an American story, often with dash of humor. Like Twain, he is interested in the way story is told, its effects on listeners, and the aims its teller might have in telling it. Indeed, he notes that Twain is his favorite storyteller and cites his address On the Decay of the Art of Lying (1882) to distinguish stories from lies—both of which are abundant in the tales Piker covers (p. 12). As writer, Piker enjoys puns, alliteration, repetition, and colloquialism; and he punctuates his narrative with punchy phrasing, rhetorical questions, and author's asides. His book is about powerful stories, and he wants to tell one of his own, too. Piker has many stories to tell. At the core of the book are four sets of stories from the mid-eighteenth century about single individual, Acorn Whistler, who is first introduced to the reader as a head warrior from the Creek town of Little Okfuskee (p. 4). Piker admits that these accounts would not seem, at face value, to be worth the price of admission. Their subject is simply too obscure—Acorn Whistler's death is not particularly important topic. Yet he argues that the imperial, national, local, and subtexts for these stories were very important (pp. 26-27). These branching, spreading histori- cal narratives about British imperialism, Creek nationalism, Native cultural understandings, and colonial insecurities are Piker's true focus. By exploring the consequences of a very specific event at very particular place with

Maya Angelou: A Trickster’s Tale

Abstract Maya Angelou’s travelogue All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) has been read as a quintessential (African-)American story of self-discovery, with critics celebrating Angelou’s ability to find her own identity within or against prescriptive images of womanhood and blackness. This article argues, quite the contrary, that Maya’s ‘success story’ is due to a constant deferral of identification, which results from a reluctance to fully identify with any image imposed from without or within and thus to become complicit in one’s (self-)containment. To highlight the method and results of Maya’s self-deferral, this article focuses on a central episode in the travelogue reporting an acting trip to Berlin where Maya jokingly sets the stage for a confrontation of the Black, the White, and the Jew. The article describes Maya’s behavior as an act of trickstery, in the sense conceptualized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. based on African-American folklore, and further uses the trickster episode to illustrate, as well as to challenge, Gates’ theory of signifyin(g) as accounting for the discrete black difference of African-American literature.

Inactivated polio vaccine launch in Nepal: a public health milestone.

Inactivated polio vaccine launch in Nepal: a public health milestone.

Feeling your pain Pain A Political History Keith Wailoo Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 292 pp.

Feeling your pain <b>Pain A Political History</b> <i>Keith Wailoo</i> Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 292 pp.

In Focus

Anthropology NewsVolume 55, Issue 9 p. e15-e23 In Focus In Focus First published: 20 January 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2014.55902.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract In Focus: Race in America “The Violence of the Status Quo” by Pem Davidson Buck “Ferguson and the Right to Black Life” by Steven Gregory “Ferguson: An American Story” by Raymond Codrington “Standing their Ground in #Ferguson” by Lydia Brassard and Michael Partis Keywords: Race, racism, Ferguson, violence, America, social media Volume55, Issue9September 2014Pages e15-e23 RelatedInformation

The Rise and Fall of the West: An American Story

Only seventeen years after World War II ended, John F. Kennedy made the trip to West Germany. Speaking there in the summer of 1962, Kennedy was obviously an American president on a state visit. Yet he was something else as well. He went so far as to declare himself a Berliner, in West Berlin, immediately likening his declaration to one from classical antiquity—civis romanus sum—and implying a concordance of spirit between the Roman Empire and the recently fashioned NATO alliance. These august associations heartened his German audience. By placing West Germany in a grand historical continuum, stretching back millennia, Kennedy…

Access American Stories; Stories from Main Street; and Will to Adorn

Access American Stories; Stories from Main Street; and Will to Adorn

Free black communities and the Underground Railroad: the geography of resistance

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, Cheryl LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the geography of resistance tells the new powerful and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

Mad music: Charles Ives, the nostalgic rebel

Mad Music is the story of Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954), the innovative American composer who achieved international recognition, but only after he'd stopped making music. While many of his best works received little attention in his lifetime, Ives is now appreciated as perhaps the most important American composer of the twentieth century and father of the diverse lines of Aaron Copland and John Cage. Ives was also a famously wealthy crank who made millions in the insurance business and tried hard to establish a reputation as a crusty New Englander. To Stephen Budiansky, Ives's life story is a personification of America emerging as a world power: confident and successful, yet unsure of the role of art and culture in a modernizing nation. Though Ives steadfastly remained an outsider in many ways, his life and times inform us of subjects beyond music, including the mystic movement, progressive anticapitalism, and the initial hesitancy of turn-of-the-century-America modernist intellectuals. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this accessible biography tells a uniquely American story of a hidden genius, disparaged as a dilettante, who would shape the history of music in a profound way. Making use of newly published letters-and previously undiscovered archival sources bearing on the longstanding mystery of Ives's health and creative decline-this absorbing volume provides a definitive look at the life and times of a true American original.

The Contested Legacy of a Romantic Historian

The Contested Legacy of a Romantic Historian Thomas Devaney (bio) Albert L. Hurtado. Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xvi + 370 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. When Frederick Jackson Turner redefined the concept of “frontier” in his famous 1893 address, he spoke against the idea that the roots of American institutions could be found in medieval antecedents. Indeed, he later wrote that it was this idea, popular in his time, that led him to develop the frontier theory.1 It is thus a bit ironic that his most successful student—Herbert Eugene Bolton—should also have studied with and been inspired by the preeminent American medievalist of Turner’s generation, Charles Homer Haskins. Bolton’s later work displayed the influence of both of these mentors. From Turner, he gained not only an interest in frontier history but also an appreciation for the Big Idea. But, like Haskins, Bolton was a proponent of “scientific history” who scoured archives and built a documentary edifice to undergird his work. In terms of subject matter, however, Bolton followed directly in the footsteps of neither. Instead, his disparate training and his early career path allowed him to carve out a new field of historical inquiry: the Spanish borderlands, which he defined as those regions “belonging to the United States, over which Spain held sway for centuries” (p. 125). Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Bolton not only held up early Spanish conquerors as heroic figures but also argued that historians must examine the borderlands—the Southwest especially—from a transnational, even hemispheric, perspective. The dichotomy between these stances—Bolton the colonial apologist and Bolton the broad-minded advocate for a multicultural understanding of the borderlands—is one of the themes of Albert Hurtado’s Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. In this book, Hurtado draws on a wealth of archival and published sources, as well as nearly thirty years of research on the subject, to offer an engaging portrait of Bolton’s career and life. In doing so, he provides a relevant update to an earlier Bolton biography, Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Historian and the Man, 1870–1953 (1978). The author of that book, John Francis Bannon, was a Bolton student and distinguished scholar [End Page 303] in his own right whose deep admiration for his former mentor comes through on every page. Hurtado stands at more of a distance, able to weigh Bolton’s “debatable legacy” (p. 265) from multiple perspectives. This is not a simple biography, however. Although Bolton’s personal story is the central theme of this book, Hurtado weaves his travails and accomplishments into the context of institutional history and the evolution of the historical profession. One need not be a borderlands historian or even familiar with Bolton’s ideas to appreciate Hurtado’s deft telling of a career whose impact extended well beyond articles published or students taught. The organization of the book is chronological, and Hurtado begins with his subject’s childhood on a Wisconsin farm. There’s a sense, especially in these early sections, that Hurtado shares Bolton’s appreciation for the romantic. And so we hear of Bolton’s parents “working the raw land to build a new life for themselves” (p. 6) while Bolton himself and his brother decided that education would allow them to escape the rural life. This is presented as a quintessential American story in which hard work, family ties (Bolton and brother Fred alternated work and study to help each other pay their way), and talent led to success. Bolton eventually matriculated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he met Turner and Haskins and decided upon a career in history. He stayed on at Madison for the first part of his graduate studies, but completed his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 1899. After a year of teaching in Milwaukee, Bolton accepted a position in medieval European history at the University of Texas. While in Austin, Bolton became enamored with Southwestern history as a field in which he could make his mark. He learned Spanish, visited archives in Mexico, and began what would be...

Global Journalism in Decision-Making Moments: A Case Study of Canadian and American Television Coverage of the 2009 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen

Climate change is a phenomenon with global causes but local effects, and thus global climate change decision-making moments provide ideal opportunities to examine how local and global discourses work together—or do not—through global journalism. This case study investigates the globally focused vs. culturally bound frames used in television news coverage, in Canada and the USA, of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Initial quantitative findings that Canadian media used many more culturally bound sources than did American media contradict the past findings and suggest Canadian media engaged less in producing global journalism than did American media. A follow-up qualitative analysis not only found more global framing in the American stories, but also concluded that global sources did not necessarily create global journalism; instead, a global orientation is required.

America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation by John R. Haddad (review)

America's First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. By John R. Haddad. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Pp. 283. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Dong WangJohn Haddad has written an engaging and lucid account of Americans' early experience in Qing China from 1784-the year of the maiden voyage of the Empress of China from New York-to the 1860s, following the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion. Drawing on an extensive array of primary and secondary sources, Haddad brings to life the American story of the U.S.-Chinese encounter through skillful biographical studies of important historical figures. This approach lends color to topics covered in the classic works of diplomatic history, the best-known example of which is Kenneth Scott Latourette's The History of Early Relations between the United States and China, 1784-1844, first published in 1917.The nine chapters of America's First Adventure in China focus on three categories of historical actors in early bilateral interactionsAmerican traders, Christian missionaries, and diplomats. Haddad pieces together the kaleidoscopic details of their varied experiences into one credible argument: that during this period the United States successfully established itself as a competitive new power, independent of Britain's dominance, in the Asia-Pacific. More than twenty American trading vessels anchored in Canton (Guangzhou) on average each year, totaling over six hundred ships between 1784 and 1814. The absence of official U.S. protection and bureaucratic institutions in China gave free rein to American entrepreneurism and pragmatism in the Qing Empire (1644-1911).Haddad devotes his first three chapters to the Canton trade. Chapter 1 relates the voyage of the Empress of China in 1784, the first direct contact between the United States and China. Key protagonists such as Samuel Shaw, Daniel Parker, and Phuankhequa (or Puan Khequa) are brought to life not only as merchants but also as individuals. In his vivid account of Perkins and Company in Chapter 2, Haddad argues that the innovative business system devised and practiced by a group of entrepreneurial Yankees-mainly Thomas Perkins, John Perkins Cushing, James Perkins, Thomas Forbes, and John Murray Forbes and their Chinese partners, such as Houqua-contributed to its expansion as a multinational firm that allegedly handled half of America's trade (including opium smuggling) with China.In the third chapter, Haddad explains how America's consumption of tea (ten to twenty million pounds per annum), in addition to the commercial drive for the double profit involved in selling for goods in both China and in the United States, compelled American private merchants to find value-added merchandise suitable for the China market in place of silver. Before the outbreak of the Opium War, Russell and Company, the successor to Perkins and Company, had risen to carry the largest volume of business-primarily opium, tea, and banking notes-in the China trade.Hard on the heels of these pioneering traders came the dynamic American missionaries who are the focus of Chapters 4 and 5. One of the main challenges for Americans in China arose from their relationship to opium, whether they supported or opposed the trade. In the end, each of the individuals involved was permanently affected by his stance on the narcotics issue. Robert B. Forbes, William Low, and others pumped drugs into China to satisfy their financial ambitions, but later found themselves haunted by the scourge of opium. …

Book Review: Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed

Book Review: Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed

Touching America’s History: From the Pequot War Through World War II by Meredith Mason Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Touching America’s History: From the Pequot War Through World War II by Meredith Mason Brown Daniel Vivian (bio) Touching America’s History: From the Pequot War Through World War II. By Meredith Mason Brown. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Pp. 271. $30.00 cloth; $24.99 ebook) In recent decades, studies of material culture have moved into the mainstream of historical scholarship. Once the domain of specialists, object-based analyses are now common in many fields. In Touching America’s History, Meredith Mason Brown undertakes something of the sort without identifying it as belonging to the genre. Instead, he speaks of a “reliquary approach to American history” (p. 2). Using fifteen artifacts as a basis for exploring select episodes and events, Brown recounts ten histories. His “relics” include stone tools used by Algonquin peoples in early New England, two nineteenth-century diaries, a pistol carried by a Confederate officer during the Civil War, and a porcelain fragment reputedly taken from a toilet at Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof. Most have personal associations with Brown, either through ancestry or other connections. Brown’s histories begin with a May 1637 massacre of Pequot Indians near the site of present-day Mystic, Connecticut, and continue through to World War II. Relying principally on secondary sources, he offers readers informative but thoroughly conventional histories of well-known events. Brown’s artifacts introduce each of the ten chapters of the book. The officer’s pistol, for example, is the inspiration for a chapter on William Preston, an ancestor who fought in the Mexican War, served in Congress, and later as a general with the Confederacy. Another item, the transcript of the court-martial of the author’s great-uncle, provides the basis for a chapter on the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902. Because of Brown’s personal ties to artifacts and historical actors, each chapter explains how the author came to possess the artifact in question and how he is related to associated figures. Brown [End Page 136] is, therefore, narrator and participant; his histories are personal, if for no other reason than his role as a collector. His presence is especially strong in the last three chapters, which concern twentieth-century artifacts. These focus on men whom Brown knew personally, and his writing reflects the closeness of his relationships with them. Brown deserves credit for investigating the lives and experiences of his ancestors, and his attempt to highlight the evocative power of artifacts is laudable. His analytic approach, however, falls short. Brown makes no attempt to study the physical qualities and social roles of his artifacts, which robs him of valuable strategies for uncovering historical meanings. His examination of the mnemonic power of artifacts is equally feeble. His “relics” serve solely to introduce historical subjects. Does using them in this fashion really make history “come alive,” the goal announced by Brown at the beginning of the book? Reader’s familiar with the work of scholars such as Henry Glassie, Bernard Herman, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will surely think otherwise. Brown’s basic method of selection is also problematic. Rather than examining artifacts associated with a particular event, place, or socioeconomic group, his choices are based on ownership and personal associations. He is the common characteristic. Without unifying qualities rooted in historical processes, opportunities for meaningful analysis are nonexistent. Brown’s histories leave much to be desired. Although he writes in a clear and lively style, he makes no attempt to situate his subjects historiographically. Instead, he recounts such well-known events as John Brown’s assault on Harpers Ferry, the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga, and the fall of Nazi Germany in familiar fashion. Brown thus imparts nothing new to knowledge of the histories he tells. His interpretations are resolutely whiggish, and he seems unaware that the American story may be something other than a tale of incremental progress over time. Brown has written a book that will interest members of his family and close friends but is unlikely to have a broader appeal. Heavy on antiquarianism and lacking scholarly rigor, its main value lies in [End Page 137] its exploration of material ties to historical figures. By...

The age of Edison: electric light and the invention of modern America

A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison s incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison s invention inspired. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.

Fat Feminism: Reading Shelley Jackson's ‘Fat’ through Elizabeth Wilson's Gut Feminism

In this article, I treat a literary text as a form of somatechnics making an intervention in fat embodiment. I read contemporary American author Shelley Jackson's short story ‘Fat’ from The Melancholy of Anatomy through what Elizabeth Wilson terms ‘gut feminism’, a feminism accounting for the dynamism of the biological body and acknowledging ‘organic thought’ as an alternative to the mind/body split. Wilson's ‘gut feminism’ is related to theories drawing on Deleuze's concept the ‘Body without Organs’ such as hypertheorist N. Katherine Hayles’ argument for the ‘Text as Assemblage’. I show how the seemingly surreal narrative of ‘Fat’ provides crucial insights about fat, understood as an assemblage of images, affects and matter and as a liminal substance questioning the integrity of the subject. Fat is associated with the feminine in a reclamation of the early modern rhetorical term ‘dilation’, which figures the swelling text as a fat, fertile woman with voracious orifices. I describe how Jackson's ‘aesthetics of fat’ works through dilation, disgust and ‘bad taste’ to draw the reader into an experience of fat embodiment. I characterise fat as a ‘sticky sign’ in Sara Ahmed's sense, one that will not stay confined to the page but sticks to the reader and elicit gut reactions. In conclusion, I argue for a non-derogatory model of reading as incorporation

Demography of the Western States: Past, Present, and Future

DOI 10.1515/cjpp-2013-0049 Calif. J. Politics Policy 2014; 6(1): 23–43 Alicia Brown, Ken R. Smith and Tucker Samuelsen* Demography of the Western States: Past, Present, and Future Abstract: Heading west to seek gold, obtain religious freedoms, or settle their own piece of land are old and commonly told American stories. These stories, guided by the dreams of generations before us are the basis for the reality now playing out in the western US with its complex history and remarkable capacity for change. This chapter provides a description and analysis of the demography of all 13 western states. The demographic compositions of the western region as a whole and the US will also be observed, and compared to the other regions the Census Bureau has defined. These latter categories provide both a regional and a national baseline, respectively, on which to make useful comparisons. The focus of this chapter is therefore on Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Keywords: demography; population; public policy; states; US; West. *Corresponding author: Tucker Samuelsen, CPPA, University of Utah, 260 Central Campus Dr. Room 214, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA, Tel.: +(801) 581-6781, e-mail: tucker.samuelsen@cppa.utah.edu Alicia Brown: Leeward Community College, University of Hawaii, Pearl City, Hawaii, USA Ken R. Smith: Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA 1 Introduction Heading west to seek gold, obtain religious freedoms, or settle their own piece of land are old and commonly told American stories. These stories, guided by the dreams of generations before us are the basis for the reality now playing out in the western US with its complex history and remarkable capacity for change. The complexity and variation represented in the western states serve as the motive for this chapter. The framework adopted here is demographic. Demography is the study of populations, how they change, the components underlying these changes, the role of age, and socioeconomic distributions as well as geographic variation. Demographic patterns form the basis of the challenges and opportu- nities encountered by all, especially the government agencies responsible for

Book Review: Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans

Book Review: Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans

Michael Wilding’s Texas Story

ALTHOUGH MOST OF MICHAEL WILDING'S SHORT STORIES ARE SET IN AUSTRALIA, SOME take place in his native England, and a few are scattered among Europe, North Africa, and the US. Of the American stories one of the best is An for Political Dissidents in Texas. Neglected by critics, the story deserves be better known. A story, it combines narrative inventiveness with familiar Wilding themes. Wilding published the story originally in the UK, in Iron (1973), and in Australia, in Westerly (1974), and then collected it in The West Midland Underground ( 1975).He based his story on his experiences during a visit Austin in February 1969. At that time Wilding was returning Australia take up a permanent teaching position the University of Sydney where he had taught from 1963 through 1966, followed by two years the University of Birmingham. Wilding detoured through New York and on his way back Australia. The reason he came Austin was visit his friend John Sullivan, the former dean of Lincoln College, Oxford, who had joined the University of faculty in 1961 (Re: conferences, etc.). Sullivan's best known works include Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (1966) and The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study (1968). He also translated The Satyricon. (John P. Sullivan 1).Many strands went into the making of the story. Wilding's stay in New York is described in NY 1969, collected in This is for You (1994). It is something of a companion piece the one, though not in style or technique. NY 1969 is rendered in a flatter, more reportage style. The story offers a quick five-page window into the radical protest scene of American life in years of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, Black Power, takeovers of universities, Janis Joplin concerts, and drugs. A party scene conveys the flavor of that era: talked a black girl from Pittsburgh about the English class system and the sufferings of the English working class. And the dope went round in a hookah. Generally the whites talked the whites and the talked the blacks (102). The highlight of the visit New York was Wilding's introduction marijuana. His friends smoked nonstop and soon he did too, finding himself laughing hilariously about such mundanities as shoveling snow. Everything that was right-or wrong-with the Sixties is in the story. The link between NY 1969 and An Afternoon is apparent in the last paragraph: caught a flight and talked the girl in the seat beside me (This is for You 103). The big surprise in the second story is that was also a place of political dissidents. An for Political Dissidents in Texas is divided into nine numbered sections. Number 1 is a one-paragraph commentary on the process of writing, letting an undefined audience know that what we're reading will be shorter than the first draft (which we do not have) and that in this version, the one we're reading, there will be cuts, specifically those revelations that come through untransmuted, undisguised; rents through which one's unprotected personality can be glimpsed (153). So, presumably, some things will be hidden, kept disclosed from us.Number 2 introduces an audience inside the narrative, a you, a girl who has been talking the narrator, an unnamed Wilding surrogate, about unicorns. Wilding considers the story sort of a 'to' story addressed her, though, he adds, don't know if I ever had her address write her. Can't recall (Re: Conferences, etc.). A to story is be distinguished from an at story. The first is more benign than the second. Examples of at stories abound in Wilding's short stories. Many of them are directed Frank Moorhouse, fellow editor and writer with whom Wilding was close friends for a number of years. Wilding also wrote several stories for/at Vicki Viidikas, the gifted writer and poet with whom Wilding had a brief affair and a lifelong friendship. …