Dubious American license: The first in flight
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Date
2010
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The symbols, colours and slogans on vehicle registration plates are part and parcel of the United
States iconography. While not everybody relates readily to Ohio’s license plate motto “Birthplace
of Aviation”, everybody seems to know North Carolina’s motto “First in Flight”. (Although the
Wright brothers came from Ohio they chose North Carolina as the site for their 1903 groundbreaking
experiment.) With the open horizon as the obligatory conceit of the U.S. landscape,
North Carolina’s license plate projects a homonymic mis-association with the dominant motif of
American popular cultural discourse recognized emblematically by Leslie Fiedler (1960: 318) as
the razzle-dazzle of escape.
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Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 46.4 (2010), pp. 97-105