Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 107

May 23, 2022: Star Wars Studying: A Cross-Cultural Force

[May 27thwill see the much-anticipated release of the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the newest Star Wars show. So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. May the Force be with us all!]

On how the original Star Wars was directly influenced by a Japanese film—and, critiques of the American director notwithstanding, why that influence is a positive thing.

As the 2017 40thanniversary celebrations illustrate, few cultural texts have had a more significant and ongoing presence over the last four-and-a-halfg decades than George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and its many sequels, prequels, novelizations, television spinoffs, parodies, merchandising and marketing and material culture connections, animated versions, Wookie-centric Christmas specials, and the like. Because of that lasting presence, and perhaps especially because a whole generation of students and scholars (including this AmericanStudier to be sure) has grown up alongside Luke Skywalker and friends, Lucas’s prominent debt to Joseph Campbell’s analyses of heroism and mythologies has likewise been very well established and documented; which is to say, this is a pop culture text and artist whose multigenerational and cross-cultural (at least in the sense of Campbell’s ideas linking myths from multiple cultures) connections and influences seem already well known.

Far be it for me to disagree with that longstanding and very thoroughly developed assessment—did you note the ridiculously comprehensive Lucas-Campbell chart at that hyperlink?—but there’s another, also very influential and much less broadly known, source for Lucas’s first film. As this website conversation highlights, Lucas’s initial story outline for Star Wars (particularly in the story’s initial events and exposition) closely parallels Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress; Lucas would change certain events and details between that outline and the film’s screenplay, but many of the Kurosawa echoes remained very much present in the finished film, as mashups of the two movies such as this one cleverly highlight. Such mashups could be used as exhibits in a plagiarism case against Lucas, and indeed many who have noted the similarities to Fortress have done so in a critical way, arguing that at least Lucas owed Kurosawa a more overt acknowledgment of the influence as Star Wars gained in popularity and Lucas became one of the most famous and wealthiest filmmakers of all time.

Certainly I believe that Kurosawa’s film should be better known, not only because of its clear influence on Lucas’s early ideas for his own series, but also because it seems (from, admittedly, the handful of clips I have seen and the descriptions I have read) to be an interesting if minor work from one of cinema’s most prolific and talented artists. Yet far from serving as an indictment of Lucas or his film, this additional influence highlights, to my mind, just how genuinely and impressively American Star Wars really is: inspired in equal measure by centuries of cross-cultural mythology and a Japanese film, with the seminal fantasy series by a British author thrown in for good measure; starring young American actors and some of England’s most established screen veterans; shamelessly cribbing from the styles and stunts of early serials and pop culture classics like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; with all those elements thrown into a space opera blender and turned into a hugely unique and engaging entertainments. Lucas had called his first, much more grounded and local and historically nostalgic, film American Graffiti(1973)—but it’s Star Wars that really exemplifies the cross-cultural, multi-genre, intertextual, inspiring mélange that is American culture and art.

Next StarWarsStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?

May 21-22, 2022: Aviation Histories: Amelia Earhart

[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of aviation histories, leading up to this special weekend post on the myths and even more inspiring realities of Earhart!]

As I wrote in Wednesday’s post, Amelia Earhart’s solo flight is, like Earhart herself, justly famed. But it’s also a bit of a legend at this point; and as is so often the case with our collective legends, the multi-layered realities behind and around it are even more interesting and inspiring. Here are a few:

1)      The First Flight: Four years before she made her daring solo journey, Earhart was a passenger on another transatlantic trip, accompanying pilot Wilmer Stultz and copilot Louis Gordon as they flew from Newfoundland to South Wales on June 17-18, 1928 (just a year after Lindbergh’s famous flight). When the three returned to the US in early July, they received a ticker-tape parade in New York and a reception at the White House. Earhart was invited to take part in this historic flight thanks to the efforts of a number of other influential individuals, from aviation ally Amy Phipps Guestto publisher (and Earhart’s future husband) George Palmer Putnam. None of these origin points nor influences take anything away from Earhart’s later solo flight—but they do remind us that any individual achievement is also connected to communal histories that need our collective memories as well.

2)      Fellow Aviator Friends: All of those aforementioned individuals were friends and allies of Earhart’s, but as her career continued to unfold she also became close to a number of other female aviators. Many of them were part of an organization that Earhart herself helped found: known as The Ninety-Nines due to their original number of members, this group started in 1929 and Earhart became its first president in 1930. She also became a mentor to younger female aviators, as illustrated by her relationship with Jackie Cochran, the talented pilot who would go on to become the first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953. And perhaps Earhart’s most interesting relationship was with one of my earlier subjects in this week’s series, Eleanor Roosevelt; after flying with Earhart Roosevelt got a student flying permit, indicative of just how inspiring Earhart was on that notoriously individual and strong-willed friend.

3)      Bessie Coleman: As far as I can tell, Earhart wasn’t friends with Bessie Coleman, which I’m sure was due in part to racism (not Earhart’s, but the collective racism of 1920s America that created such a segregated society in every way) but also perhaps a little as well to competition, as Coleman received her pilot’s license two years earlier than Earhart (but in France, as American organizations wouldn’t give her one). I want to be as clear as I can that I’m not accusing Earhart of anything here, but rather suggesting that, as with every layer of American history and society, there are African American figures and stories that we’ve purposefully forgotten and that demand a place alongside our more familiar ones. So as we commemorate Earhart’s feat this weekend, let’s make sure to remember and celebrate Coleman as well.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?

May 20, 2022: Aviation Histories: Sully

[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of aviation histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the myths and realities of Earhart!]

On the quiet lessons of an averted disaster, and the recent film that didn’t quite learn them.

No disaster is a good disaster (as I traced at length in this series inspired by the 80th anniversary of the Hindenburg fire and crash), but there’s something particularly frightening and horrific about an airplane crash. Perhaps it’s because the very act of flying in a man-made machine still feels (at least to this AmericanStudier) somewhat artificial and even unbelievable, and thus that crashes (rare as they certainly are) feel always possible or close. Perhaps it’s because, compared to most natural disasters or other kinds of transporation accidents, a plane crash feels so assuredly fatal for all involved. Perhaps it’s due to all the continuing mysteries associated with plane crashes, even in an era when we believe we understand technology so well: the Bermuda Triangle, the disappearance of flights like the recent and still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, those infamous black boxes and the stories they do and don’t tell. In any case, plane crashes are uniquely unnerving (to say the least)—which is why, when the actions of a heroic pilot like Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger can help avert a potential crash and save the lives of all on board, they feel particularly impressive.

The details of Sully’s rescue are pretty well known: he was piloting a US Airways flight out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009 when a flock of Canada geese collided with his plane, damaging both engines; Sully and air traffic controllers discussed returning to LaGuardia or trying for New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, but decided both options were too risky and opted for an emergency water landing in the Hudson river; he pulled off that very tricky landing and saved the lives of all 155 passengers and crew. What’s perhaps less well known is that Sully wasn’t just a pilot with nearly 30 years of commercial flying experience; he was also a very experienced instructor and investigator, having provided aerial combat training for pilots during the Vietnam War, and then serving during his commercial flying career as a pilot instructor, an Air Line Pilots Association safety chairman and accident investigator, and an accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. All of which is to say, Sully’s decisions and actions in January 2009 weren’t simply the result of quick thinking or good instincts or bravery (although all those factors were in play); they were also the product of decades of instruction and training, of investigations and expertise in both aviation and crashes. None of that is to take away from what was required of Sully at that particular moment—but I would argue that a career of teaching and learning provided the impressive preparation and tools that Sully was then able to utilize in the most significant minutes of his career and life.

I’ll admit to not having had the chance to see Clint Eastwood’s recent film Sully (2016), starring Tom Hanks as Sullenberger, but from everything I’ve seen and read about the film, it seems to have not taken that lesson of the “Miracle on the Hudson” to heart much at all. Perhaps believing that Sully’s crash landing was either too well known or too anti-climactic to provide sufficient dramatic tension for the film, Eastwood and his screenwriter Todd Komarnicki apparently (again, going on reviews and responses here—feel free to offer corrections in comments!) decided to turn National Transportation Safety Board crash investigators (ie, folks in the same role Sully had performed many times) into villains, out to second-guess Sully’s actions and to threaten and potentially destroy his reputation and career. Besides ramping up the dramatic tension, this choice aligns the film with Eastwood’s overarching perspective as a filmmaker (and, it seems, a person), which often pits heroic individual figures against frustrating and even vindictive institutions and bureaucracies. Clint’s of course entitled to feel however he pleases, and to tell the stories he wants as an artist—but to my mind, the story of Sully and his heroic rescue reveals precisely the opposite lesson: that institutions and communal efforts can help prepare us for the hardest moments, not in opposition to what we can and must do as individuals but as a vital complement to and training for those occasions for bravery and heroism. Now that I think about it, I think that’d make for a pretty good story too.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?

May 19, 2022: Aviation Histories: Howard Hughes

[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of aviation histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the myths and realities of Earhart!]

On how two acclaimed films remember the iconoclastic aviator, and how to complement both narratives.

Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator (2004), starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, seeks to portray Hughes’s roller-coaster life in the most blockbuster epic way possible. Despite the title, and despite a number of bravura aviation action sequences, Scorcese’s film is no more about Hughes’s pioneering aeronautic achievements than it is about his film productions, his numerous liaisons with Hollywood actresses and celebrities, his descent into eccentricity and mental illness, or any other individual stage in this multi-act drama. As he does so many of his heroes and protagonists, even those who don’t seem to deserve any response other than criticism or even condemnation, Scorcese clearly sees Hughes as an embodiment of the best and worst of the American Dream, of the grandest kinds of triumphs and successes and of the cost and pain that they often bring with them. DiCaprio is impressive in the part as he always is, capturing each stage of Hughes’s life from boyhood ambitions through the worst moments of his final years, but to this AmericanStudier the film feels like one of those sweeping biopics that includes almost everything and adds up to nearly nothing. I don’t imagine many viewers would come away learning anything specific or in-depth about Hughes as, y’know, an aviator.

Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980), featuring Jason Robards as Hughes, couldn’t be more distinct in either overall tone or its portrayal of Hughes. Based on the true story (or at least true claims, although they have since received some validation) of a Nevada man who supposedly rescued Hughes after a desert car crash, befriended the aging and iconoclastic tycoon, and ended up receiving a controversial and still contested place in Hughes’s will, Demme’s film is a quiet and quirky character study, one focused much more on Paul Le Mat’s Melvin and his rocky life and relationships, with Robards’ Hughes as a sort of mysterious guardian angel and potential deux ex machina. As such, Robards’ Hughes is defined purposefully and entirely by his eccentric nature, as a man with virtually no remaining human connections sitting on a vast fortune that (due to precisely that eccentricity) might well end up with a schlub like Melvin Dummar. How Hughes got to that point and that fortune isn’t within the film’s purview, and so neither are his aviation achievements; Hughes the reclusive and mysterious billionaire is the character Demme’s film requires, and one that wouldn’t function as neatly if we heard about his high-flying exploits.

Both films are of course free (well, free with the permission of the Hughes estate, I assume, but that’s neither my business nor my concern here) to use and portray Howard Hughes however they see fit. And it’s fair to say that both the sweeping epic story of Hughes’s life and the eccentric details of his final years would be of more interest to audiences than would individual moments of aviation advances. But on the other hand, some of those aviation advances are pretty impressive—most especially Hughes’s record-breaking July 1938 around-the-world flight, which beat the prior record for such a journey by nearly four days (Hughes achieved the featin 91 hours). Moreover, alongside such aeronautic accomplishments that rival (or at least approach) those of Charles Lindbergh and his peers, Hughes was also a highly successful aviation designer and engineer, with his work in advancing aviation technology deemed so significant as to win him (among many other awards) a 1939 Congressional Gold Medal “in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world.” While I certainly wouldn’t entirely equate Hughes with the Wright Brothers, I would say that he’s further toward them on the spectrum of innovation and achievement than many other pioneering aviators. Which might not make for the most exciting epic or intimate character study, but is a history worth remembering as well.

Last history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?

May 18, 2022: Aviation Histories: Eleanor Roosevelt and Tuskegee

[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of aviation histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the myths and realities of Earhart!]

On one of the most famous American flights, and one that should be.

As I’ll write more about this weekend, our national fascination with Amelia Earhart(1897-1937)—I think you could make a case that she’s the most famous 20thcentury American woman—is entirely understandable. Even before she flew off into the unknown just a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, she was a hugely unique and compelling figure who also happened to live at precisely the right time: that era of the first prominent pilots, of the Red Baron and Charles Lindbergh (one of Earhart’s nicknames was “Lady Lindy”) and Howard Hughes, of those terrifyingly fragile-looking planes making their way across the continent and the oceans. And beyond the mythologies, of Earhart’s individual mystery and of those high-flying national figures in general, she was also a genuinely complex and interesting American, one whose identity can help us AmericanStudiers think about technology and progress, the aftermath of World War I and the lead up to World War II, gender and identity, and many other topics besides.

Yet I’d still make the case that Earhart’s final journey has some serious competition for the most significant flight featuring an American woman, and at the very least that her competitor’s flight, like her competitor herself, deserves a lot more attention in our national narratives and memories. In March 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), whose husband Franklin was just beginning his third term as President under the very dark cloud of the ongoing Second World War, visited the Tuskegee Air Corps Advanced Flying School in Tuskegee, Alabama. Self-taught pilot Charles Anderson had founded the school for African American civilian pilot training two years earlier, and was facing in his attempts to support and extend its efforts all of the discrimination and lack of funding and the like that we might expect in the depths of the Jim Crow South and in an era when the military itself (like so many organizations) was fully segregated. And so when the nation’s First Lady not only visited the school, but despite the protests of her Secret Service agents requested a private flight with Anderson and spent over an hour in the sky with him, the event took on a literal and a symbolic significance that is difficult to overstate. Nor was this a one-off for Roosevelt, as she facilitated a White House visit for Anderson and others later that year where they successfully lobbied for more military support and collaboration for Tuskegee.

The thousands of pilots who would graduate from Tuskegee over the next few years and become part of the Tuskegee Airmen, and what that community meant for both America’s war efforts and toward President Truman’s 1948 desegregation of the armed forces, is a rich and powerful AmericanStudies topic in its own right, and one about which I wrote in this post. But Roosevelt’s March 1941 flight likewise serves as a particularly salient single linchpin for her candidacy for my Hall of American Inspiration. While I don’t doubt that Roosevelt’s name is familiar to most Americans, I nonetheless believe that, as has been the case for all of my nominees, our narratives greatly underrate the striking breadth and depth of her contributions to American and world identity and history: from the nearly 100 columnsshe wrote for national magazines during her years in the White House to her service as one of America’s first Delegates to the UN General Assembly, her pioneering work as the inaugural chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights (work that culminated in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” a document that Roosevelt called “the international Magna Carta of all mankind”) to her chairing (the year before she died) of President Kennedy’s groundbreaking President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and in many other arenas and ways alongside these efforts (including her work throughout the 1920s on behalf of the Women’s Trade Union League), Roosevelt was for more than three decades one of America’s brightest lights and most powerful voices.

Amelia Earhart is largely an a-political figure, one whose appeal has (or at least can have) nothing to do with politics or with narratives that can divide as well as unite Americans; I know that it is and might always be impossible to say the same of Eleanor Roosevelt, or of any First Lady. Yet a moment like that 1941 flight with Anderson has nothing whatsoever to do with politics, and the more we can remember and highlight such moments, and the inspiring Americans who made them happen, the more our national community can likewise take flight. Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?

May 17, 2022: Aviation Histories: Charles Lindbergh

[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of aviation histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the myths and realities of Earhart!]

On how history can overshadow history, and why we should partly resist that trend.

I think it’s fair to say that Charles Lindbergh, one of the true aviation pioneersin American history, is remembered in our collective narratives at least as well (if not, indeed, much more fully) for two stories that had nothing whatsoever to do with his flying abilities and achievements. First, there was the horrifying March 1932 abduction and murder of Lindbergh (and wife Anne Spencer Morrow)’s 20-month old son Charles Augustus, a true crime story that gripped the nation both for the 10 weeks that Charles was missing and again after the 1934 arrest and trial of Bruno Hauptmann (a prosecution that led to a new law deeming kidnapping across state lines a federal offense). And then, less than a decade later, there was Lindbergh’s 1938 acceptance of a German medal of honor from Nazi leader Hermann Goering, and his subsequent opposition to U.S. entrance into World War II through his leadership of the American First Committee, an openly isolationist, xenophobic, and anti-semitic organization. Although Lindbergh would go on to fly numerous missions once the U.S. had entered the war, after these dual 1930s histories he would always at the very least remain connected to such broader cultural, social, and political issues alongside his aviation advances and successes.

That’s not particularly fair when it comes to the true crime story—not only because it tells us nothing about Lindbergh as a historical figure or a man, but also because placing that story too much at the center of our collective memories seems to replicate the grisly fascination with a missing and then dead child (one of far too many such true crime fascinations in our cultural history). But the America First history is a far different story. Lindbergh’s association with—really his leading, spokesperson status in—that movement reflects deeply his attitudes and beliefs, his close connection to the Nazi regime in Germany, his actions and activism on behalf of an exclusionary vision of American identity and community. While of course those beliefs of his may have evolved over time, and we can and should consider that question (and thus his World War II service, among other factors) as part of this conversation, the late 1930s and early 1940s were a pivotal moment in American and world history, and Lindbergh aligned himself very fully and vocally with some of the darkest and most destructive forces in that moment. We can’t possibly remember his life and public career without putting that alignment front and center, not only for the sake of an accurate assessment of the man’s role in and influence on America but also because “America First” has, like anti-semitism, returned with a vengeance in our present moment.

Yet at the same time, there’s another way of looking at Lindbergh’s America First alignment in relationship to his aviation achievements. Lindbergh was far from the only isolationist and anti-semitic voice in early 1940s America; the St. Louis and its Jewish refugee passengers were turned away by forces far bigger and more widespread than Charles Lindbergh, after all. On the other hand, Lindbergh was quite literally the first person to make a solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean (on May 20-21, 1927, ironically in a plane named The Spirt of St. Louis), a pioneering and courageous aviation achievement that distinguished him from all of his peers and contemporaries and changed the course of transportation history. History isn’t a competition or a zero-sum game; the courageous moment doesn’t cancel out the horrific one, and we can and should work to remember both as part of Lindbergh’s story. But it’s also important that we remember America First and its bigoted and exclusionary attitudes as a far too widespread phenomenon, one certainly exemplified by but by no means limited to Charles Lindbergh. Whereas when Lindbergh boarded that plane in May 1927 and set off across the Atlantic, he was both literally and figuratively alone, and that’s worth remembering as well.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?

May 16, 2022: Aviation Histories: The Wright Brothers

[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of aviation histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the myths and realities of Earhart!]

Three lesser-known stories of the brothers who helped change transportation and the world.

1)      A Printing Press: In 1888, fifteen years before their pioneering flight and when Orville was still just a junior in high school, the brothers developed their first technological innovation, a printing press that they built themselves. They used it not only to publish their own newspapers in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio (first a weekly [West Side News] and then briefly a daily [The Evening Item]), but also produced publications for other friends and locals. One of them was a high school classmate of Orville’s and a blossoming young writer and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar; the brothers’ printed his newspaper the Dayton Tattler for a time. Such personal and historical details not only remind us that the Wright Brothers moved through many stages of invention and profession before their aviation pinnacles, but also help situate them in their settings, both of place and time.

2)      A Bicycle Shop: Like many talented inventors, the Wright Brothers were never satisfied to stay in one stage or field for long; just four years after they opened their press, they had moved on, opening their bicycle repair and sales shop the Wright Cycle Exchange in 1892. As detailed at wonderful length in Kate Milford’s historical YA novel The Boneshaker (which features a Wright Brothers bicycle in a prominent role), bicycles had become something of a craze in this period, and the brothers quickly realized that they could turn their technological prowess to designing new and improved bikes. By 1896, the Wright Cycle Company was producing its own brand of bikes, machines which would of course also feature prominently in their later aeronautical efforts. But while this business and pursuit offer a direct throughline toward the machine that would propel the brothers into the air at Kitty Hawk, it also links them to a transportation trend and history that were far more widespread and influential throughout the 1890s and well into the early 1900s.

3)      A Museum Feud: The interesting and complex histories didn’t stop with that 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, of course. One of the most compelling was the brothers’ multi-decade feud with the Smithsonian Institution, thanks to a rivalry with the institution’s secretary Samuel Langley over whose manned flying machine should be considered the first successful model. The museum chose to display Langley’s Aerodrome (which he had never gotten off the ground) much more prominently than the Wright Brothers’ model, and the brothers (especially Orville, as Wilbur died far too young in 1912) retaliated by lending their invention to the London Science Museum in 1928. There it remained until Orville’s death in 1948, when a long-negotiated truce allowed the Smithsonian to purchase the flyer and return it to the United States for the first time in decades. Among the many salient lessons from this controversial history is a reminder that museums are living and evolving spaces, reflecting the conflicts and struggles of their societies as much as their ideals and innovations. It’s hard to imagine an American Air & Space Museum without the Wright Brothers—but for a long time, thanks to the tangled history of aviation, that was precisely the case.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?

May 14-15, 2022: Spring Semester Reflections: Adult Ed and Two Sandlots

[The Spring 2022 semester was in some ways more “normal” than the last few have been, but in many other ways just as difficult, if not indeed more so. But y’all know me well enough to know that I’m not going to focus on the challenges in this week’s series, but rather on individual discussions in each of my classes that reminded me of why we do what we do!]

As I highlighted in this semester preview post, I decided to focus my two adult learning courses this semester on my book project in progress, Two Sandlots: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. Partly I wanted to circle back here to note how incredibly helpful that turned out to be, and to make the case to all my fellow educators not only for teaching in such adult learning programs (as I’ve done many times and always will), but also for sharing our scholarly and writing works in progress with these kinds of classes and communities. Their responses and questions, takeaways and connections, could not have been more meaningful nor more crucial as I continued to work (with my agent Suzy Evans) on the proposal and sample chapters for this project. But I also wanted to highlight one particular part of the book about which I learned a great deal more in order to teach it in these courses: the Massachusetts and New England origins of baseball! I then had the chance to share those histories as part of an Opening Day Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, yet another inspiring effect of my continued connection to adult learning communities.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections (in all tones) you’d share, or upcoming projects you’d highlight?

May 13, 2022: Spring Semester Reflections: The Short Story Online

[The Spring 2022 semester was in some ways more “normal” than the last few have been, but in many other ways just as difficult, if not indeed more so. But y’all know me well enough to know that I’m not going to focus on the challenges in this week’s series, but rather on individual discussions in each of my classes that reminded me of why we do what we do!]

Anyone who’s read this blog over the last few years knows how much I stan two particular 21stcentury American short stories: Danielle Evans’ “Boys Go to Jupiter” and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Control Negro.” So it will come as no surprise that the student responses to and conversations about those two stories in my online Short Story section this semester were highlights. But this time I was equally struck by the consistently thoughtful and nuanced takes on another phenomenal 21st century story, Cristina Henriquez’s “Everything is Far from Here.” I don’t know of any piece of writing—in any genre—that both allows and forces us to grapple with the unfolding histories and realities of our immigration policies than does Henriquez’s, and the students did that grappling in their posts (as well, in many cases, as in their close reading Short Papers), while paying close attention to the writing choices and elements through which Henriquez creates that stunning story. The chance to share such a text and create space for such responses and conversations is, quite simply, a huge part of why I do what I do.

Special weekend post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections (in all tones) you’d share?

May 12, 2022: Spring Semester Reflections: 19C Women Writers Grad Class

[The Spring 2022 semester was in some ways more “normal” than the last few have been, but in many other ways just as difficult, if not indeed more so. But y’all know me well enough to know that I’m not going to focus on the challenges in this week’s series, but rather on individual discussions in each of my classes that reminded me of why we do what we do!]

Every class I’ve ever gotten the chance to teach in our English Studies MA program (which I now have the honor of directing) has been not only excellent but rejuvenating, a reminder of why we teach (which is not at all unrelated to the fact that most of our MA students are fellow educators, and very thoughtful and talented ones at that). That held true for this semester’s 19thCentury American Women Writers course, and every discussion was as excellent as the last. But only one was also surprising, and rewarded a choice I don’t usually make: because the class started a week into the semester (it met on Monday evenings and the first week was MLK Day), I decided to share and have us briefly discuss a couple 18th century texts, Annis Stockton’s “Impromptu Answer” (1756) and Hannah Griffitts’ “The Female Patriots” (1768). Those are two of my favorite American poems, but it was the first time we had met as a class, and we were meeting virtually at that, so I didn’t set my expectations too high—but in any case and as ever our grad students far exceeded those expectations, and we had a multi-layered and provocative discussion that was just as good as if they’d had a week to read and respond to these texts.

Last reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections (in all tones) you’d share?