Professor Erik Erikson was more than justified in 1950 when he asserted that the work he produced on childhood and society was one concerning historicprocesses. He began by documenting certain childhood experiences which he took to be universal, and he continued by urging upon his readers speculative extrapolations that might be seen to apply to society as a whole. Erikson suggested that human beings progressed normally through a chronology of eight ages, the first of which, experienced by infants, involved a psychological dichotomy reflecting the infant's feelings of what he called “basic trust vs. basic mistrust” of the exterior world. Essentially, this early experience, as described by Erikson, was one of tension between a sense of cogency, continuity, and sustenance in the outside world, and an opposite sense that the outer world was unfaithful in its appearances and liable to aberrations in the expected order of things. This antithetical reality, he supposed, was replayed in the wider social institutions of adult life. Experiences of a positive cast, such as basic trust, were so elemental and psychologically crucial that they “bore a special relation to one of the basic elements of society,” and were, thus, re-lived by individuals through the vehicle of some contemporary institution. The past essential crisis, consequently, was eternally present, and historical developments in institutions, to a certain extent, were replays of elemental childhood experiences.

If you kill for money you're a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you're a sadist. If you kill for both you're a Green Beret. (Sign at a Special Forces Camp, Me Phuc Tay, Vietnam.) On 11 March 1983, at a provincial court at Nakhon Phanon in Thailand, Lieutenant-Colonel James Gritz, an ex-Green Beret and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, received a suspended one-year prison sentence for the illegal possession of a sophisticated radio transmitter. Gritz had been using the radio, in connection with a series of secret raids into Laos he had organized to search for some of the 2,500 American servicemen still unaccounted for at the end of the Vietnam War. Though Gritz found no trace, persistent rumour has it that some are still alive, held captive in communist prison camps in Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam.

How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.

When Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was released in November 1947 it was seen by the trade press as an efficient example of an RLO medium-budget thriller. The Hollywood Reporter called it “action-packed and suspenseful” and “solidly entertaining,” suggesting “a profitable box office pay-off.” Film Daily headlined the film's “strong box office possibilities”. Yet, even allowing for this moderate enthusiasm, Variety was surprised to find Out of the Past placed as high as seventh in the listing of the top ten money-making films in the United States for the month of December. This set it just below such films as Hope and Crosby's Road to Rio and the John Garfield boxing movie directed by Robert Rossen, Body and Soul.

The fifth section of William Carlos Williams's Collected Earlier Poems (1951) bears the title “Della Primavera Transportata Al Morale”; this is also the title of the first poem within that section. A close look, however, reveals a slight discrepancy: “Transportata” at the head of the section is spelt “Trasportata” in the poem title on the page following. A mistake perhaps. And yet, if it is a mistake, it is certainly persistent. On the Contents page at the beginning of the volume the word is also shown as “Trasportata”. Thus of three appearances in the book, the word occurs first without an “n”, becomes “Transportata” in the sectional heading, only to contract again in the poem title to “Trasportata”: the “n” seems to ghost through the text as a flickering shape poised between presence and absence. There is insufficient evidence to decide whether this is deliberate or accidental, or even – if it is accidental – whether the anomaly began with Williams or with his printer, but the history of the poem holds so many parallel variations that it is difficult to doubt that Williams enjoyed the anomaly and wanted to preserve it.