Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 114

February 28, 2022: National Park Studying: Yosemite

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting the new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

On six figures who help narrate the unfolding history of an early National Park.

1)      Chief Tenaya and Lafayette Bunnell: The first European Americans that we know for sure entered California’s Yosemite Valley were a battalion of US Army soldiers led by Major James Savage; the so-called Mariposa Battalion were chasing Ahwahneechee Chief Tenaya and his forces as part of 1851 military efforts to destroy the area’s Native American communities. That’s a pretty bleak starting point for a US relationship to Yosemite, but it didn’t go entirely unchallenged—traveling with the battalion was Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, and the physician would go on to interview Tenaya at length, learn the region’s name and history from him, and eventually author the book Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 which Led to that Event (1880). Bunnell of course was wrong to call it a “discovery,” a choice that reflected and reinforced a Eurocentric view of the region to be sure. But his book helped make more Americans aware of this beautiful and important space, and was a crucial step toward conservation.

2)      John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson: As with virtually all of the late 19th century’s conservation efforts, the push to preserve Yosemite was led by the Scottish-born naturalist, scientist, and activist John Muir. Muir became enamored of Yosemite at a young age, writing frequently about the region’s wonders and even helping develop (in his first published work!) the controversial (and now widely accepted) theory that they had been created by alpine glaciers. But Muir alone could not persuade the federal government to help conserve Yosemite, and thankfully he had help from other prominent Americans who shared his views. Chief among them was Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the era’s most famed literary figures (he edited Century Magazine among many other roles); Johnson camped in Yosemite with Muir in 1889 and went on to help him successfully lobby Congress to pass the October 1, 1890 Act that created Yosemite National Park. Their partnership exemplifies the best of the nascent Progressive Era and of how allies from different communities can help advance causes of environmental justice.

3)      Ansel Franklin Hall and Rosalie Edge: National Park status ensures a certain level of conservation and protection, but of course doesn’t necessarily guarantee enough travel and support to keep a park thriving beyond that starting point. One of the most important figures in the park’s early years, Park Naturalist (and later the National Park Service’s first Chief Naturalist) Ansel Franklin Hall, was crucial in moving the parkin those directions: he founded the Yosemite Museum (which featured Native American craftspeople and interpreters), developed numerous interpretive programs, and edited the 1921 Handbook of Yosemite National Park. Complementing Hall’s efforts from inside the park were those of external advocates like Rosalie Edge, creator and head of the National Audobon Society’s Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC); in 1937, Edge lobbied Congress to purchase 8000 acres of forest on the park’s edge that were scheduled to be logged, making them part of the park’s expanding identity instead. Thanks to Hall, Edge, and their peers, Yosemite not only endured but expanded and thrived throughout the 20th century, and remains a vital American space and destination into the 21st.

Next Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

February 26-27, 2022: Crowd-sourced Non-Favorites

[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year, a collective airing of grievances—please add more non-favorites in comments!]

Other grievances:

Joanne Baranofsky writes “I never had the opportunity to study Greek myths as much as I wanted in school so I started listening to the podcast “Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!” Now that I know more, I gotta say that Artemis can suck it. She is the goddess of chastity but she punished Medusa for being a victim of sexual assault in her temple and I’m not about it. Some other stories have been sketchy about her, too, and I expect more from my role models.”

My colleague Kisha Tracy shares, “I tell my students sometimes that, if I believed in censorship, which I clearly do not, I would get rid of Catcher in the Rye.”

Melanie Mazzarini pulls both these threads together, writing, “Me and my future Holden Caulfield tattoo just gonna drop this meme right here and dip. But first—to contribute—Medusa did nothing wrong.”

My colleague Elise Takehana adds, “I could count on one hand the number of non-anglophone author we read. What’s wrong with reading translated texts? I’d also say it’s a true disservice to assign Dante’s Inferno without some pretty deep lessons on Italian political history alongside it. Language and context!”

My colleague DeMisty Bellinger highlights “Charles Dickens. I want him to be a side note, a footnote, an also-ran. Or—or!—I want him to meet a good editor in the past who wouldn’t be afraid to cut, cut, cut.”

Susanna Ashton writes, “My head nearly explodes when I see or read references to the imaginary presence of willing Black Confederates in the Civil War. Also, the well intentioned nonsense about 19th century quilts supposedly showing secret routes on the Underground Railroad drives me nuts.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites you’d share?

February 25, 2022: Non-Favorite Myths: The Invention of Baseball

[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to my favorite crowd-sourced post of the year, so please share your own non-favorites—in every category—for that collective airing of grievances!]

[N.B. I’ve dealt with some pretty heavy topics throughout the week, so wanted to end with a lighter myth-busting post.]

On what’s not the case about the sport’s origins, and two interesting details of the (uncertain) real story.

So apparently Abner Doubleday had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of baseball. I’m not gonna pretend for a second that I knew that before researching this post—indeed, blog completists might remember that I highlighted Doubleday as at least a strong contender for the title in this long-ago post on Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (if you are really that long-standing and attentive of a reader, please please please leave a comment or email me and say hi!). But while former baseball player, club executive, and sporting goods entrepreneur Albert Spalding really pushed the narrative of Doubleday as the sport’s inventor—going so far as to commission his friend and former National League President Abraham Mills to “investigate” the question, leading to the highly suspect Mills Commission report of December 1907—the truth is that there is no specific evidence in Doubleday’s life or writings, or any peripheral materials, to support the myth. That’s particularly ironic because the Mills Commission identified Cooperstown, NY as the site of Doubleday’s invention (in the equally fabricated year of 1839), leading to the eventual location of the Baseball Hall of Fame in that town.

Doubleday’s lack of involvement with the sport’s invention is far more certain than the question of when baseball was invented, and by whom. Indeed, what is far more definite is the late 19th and early 20th century featuring warring camps, and that those camps were often explicitly linked to the ongoing rivalry between England and America. The English historians traced the sport’s origins to various traditional folk games, from archaic games like “stoolball” and “trap ball” to the more familiar (and still played) parallel sports of cricketand rounders. Their American rivals acknowledge these antecedents and influences, but focus instead on more direct references in early American texts and documents to games like “baste ball” (mentioned in the 1786 diary of Princeton University student John Rhea Smith), or to “baseball” being included (alongside “wicket, cricket, batball” and others) in a 1791 bylaw in Pittsfield, MA. In truth, what these various historical examples and details indicate is that the sport developed over centuries, through various iterations and stages, and was played in both England and America for many years before being standardized and professionalized (on which more in a moment). But that’s not as sexy as a fight to the death between Revolutionary rivals, so I’ll let the transatlantic diamond turf war proceed unchecked.

Apologies to my EnglishStudying colleagues and friends, but it was more definitely in an American setting that the sport’s rules were first laid down in a more standardized way. That setting was New York City in September 1845, where the Knickerbocker Club and its officers Alexander Cartwright, William Wheaton, and William Tucker published a set of rules that came to be known as (duh) the Knickerbocker rules. These rules were close enough to the modern game that in 1953 Congress credited Cartwright as the sport’s inventor, which was a total slap in the face to the Williams but that’s another story for another post. But in any case I think we can all agree that the most compelling thing about the Knickerbockers was their decision later in 1845 to move their home games to Hoboken, NJ’s Elysian Fields, which remains the most impressively named field or stadium I’ve ever encountered. As I’ve highlighted in just about every post I’ve written about baseball in this space, the sport captures certain fundamental, pastoral, idyllic American images in a legendary, mythological way that defies precise histories, which might just explain why the history of its own invention remains and likely will always remain an open debate.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other non-favorites, myths and everything else, you’d share?

February 24, 2022: Non-Favorite Myths: The Frontier

[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to my favorite crowd-sourced post of the year, so please share your own non-favorites—in every category—for that collective airing of grievances!]

On one more important and one complementary reason to challenge a frustratingly persistent myth.

Until relatively recently I would have said that we had mostly moved past mythological narratives of the American West as a “frontier” into which heroic white “pioneers” journeyed, but in recent years I was forcefully reminded of that myth’s persistence in our collective memories and popular culture alike: by David McCullough’s latest narrative history bestseller The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West(2019), a book that in its title alone that introduces a handful of layers to that mythos; and then this past year by the promos for the new streaming TV show 1883(a prequel to the hugely popular Yellowstone, which itself seems to depend a good bit on frontier myths), promos that include lines like “The road West was paved with blood.” Clearly our frontier/pioneer myths are still with us, and still defining far too much of our collective memories and narratives of the Western United States across the centuries.

The clearest and most important reason to challenge those myths is that they are literally white supremacist, focusing centrally (if not entirely) on white communities and histories to the blatant exclusion of the many other communities and cultures that were present throughout the West (often, indeed consistently, before the United States was part of those settings). I like to point to California as a particularly clear example: by the time Anglo settlers began arriving in the region in the late 1840s, there had already been longstanding Native American, Mexican American, and Chinese American presences there; any vision of those Anglo arrivals to California as “pioneers” requires erasing those cultures just as fully as discriminatory practices like squatting and laws like the Foreign Miners’ Tax and Anti-Vagrancy Act sought to. Some of the best and most consistent challenges to those erasures and constructions of more genuinely multi-cultural histories of the West can be found in Megan Kate Nelson’s phenomenal books, including The Three-Cornered War, her new Saving Yellowstone(from which she’ll share some stories in a Guest Post in this space very soon!), and her next book, a multi-cultural history of the West about which I’m very excited.

If that more genuinely multi- and cross-cultural history is the most important reason to challenge our frustratingly persistent frontier/pioneer myths, however, there’s also a second, complementary reason: how fully those myths likewise flatten the experiences and identities of the Anglo/European American arrivals. One of the books I read in college that has most stuck with me over the decades since is the anthology So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier(1990), edited by the historians Ruth B. Moynihan, Susan Armitage, and Christiane Fischer Dichamp. The anthology features numerous unique and compelling individual voices and stories, but I can’t say I remember any one of them specifically at this distance; instead, what continues to stand out is the way all of these readings helped me push past my own frontier/pioneer myths (created in my case, as for many of us of a certain generation, by the video game Oregon Trail) and toward a far more nuanced and multi-layered understanding of these lives, families, and communities. Ultimately, myths don’t serve anyone well (other than perhaps the most powerful), and challenging them benefits us all.

Last non-favorite myth tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites, myths and everything else, you’d share?

February 23, 2022: Non-Favorite Myths: Religious Freedom

[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to my favorite crowd-sourced post of the year, so please share your own non-favorites—in every category—for that collective airing of grievances!]

On one way to challenge a foundational myth and one way to reframe it.

First things first: I believe it’s important to say that I’m by no means a hater of the Massachusetts Pilgrims/Puritans. To put it most simply: anyone who visits the recreated Plimoth Plantation site (now part of the renamed Plimoth Patuxet museums and historic site) can’t help but feel just how isolated and frightening that space would have felt to this community of exiles as they emerged from a horrific Atlantic voyage and tried to survive in this new home. Of course they were significantly helped in that effort by Tisquantum, a fact that William Bradford himself acknowledges in his chronicle of the community Of Plimoth Plantation and that to my mind adds to the inspiring elements (if, as I write in that post, not only them) of this early American cross-cultural community. All of which is to say, if we remove the mythologizing pressure of “America’s Hometown” and just think about what this community experienced, there are plenty of reasons to see the Massachusetts Puritans as an impressive part of early American history.

The problem is, that “America’s Hometown” label and all the related mythologies of the Pilgrims/Puritans as a collective origin point has endured and continues to operate in our national narratives. One of the central elements of that mythos is that the Pilgrims/Puritans journeyed across the Atlantic in search of “religious freedom,” thus originating that essential element of America’s ideals. They certainly were looking for a place where they could practice their own extreme Protestant religion without being persecuted, but it’s just as accurate (and when it comes to these myths more important) to note that said practice depended precisely on persecuting those who didn’t adhere to their beliefs. Don’t believe me? Just ask Anne Hutchinson, or Roger Williams, or Thomas Morton, among many others. For those of us who would agree that the protection of religious freedom was one of the most radical ideas found in the U.S. Constitution and framing, it’s just not the case that we can look to the Puritans as an origin point or embodiment of that principle.

However, to repeat the final point from my first paragraph, if we can set aside that false and destructive mythos of the Puritans as America’s originating community, there are indeed inspiring histories and stories there, including those around cross-religious relationships. One of the best scholarly books on that latter topic is my colleague and friend Michael Hoberman’s masterful New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (2011). The relationships Hoberman traces in his book weren’t simple or solely supportive, but neither were they anywhere near as divisive or discriminatory as the treatment of Hutchinson/Williams et al. Indeed, one of Hoberman’s main arguments is that, perhaps despite their own instincts or intentions, many Puritans did learn about religion, spirituality, culture, and more from their encounters with Jewish Americans throughout the colonial period. That’s a history, rather than a mythology, of religious tolerance well worth remembering.

Next non-favorite myth tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites, myths and everything else, you’d share?

February 22, 2022: Non-Favorite Myths: The Supreme Court

[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to my favorite crowd-sourced post of the year, so please share your own non-favorites—in every category—for that collective airing of grievances!]

On two myths about the nation’s highest court, and why they might need to be challenged together.

For the first of the two Supreme Court myths I want to bust in this post, I’d ask you to check out this 2016 HuffPost column of mine on why the idea that the Court was initially or ever apolitical is entirely inaccurate. See you back here in a few, and thanks!

Welcome back! So yes, the Supreme Court is the nation’s highest legal authority, but it’s also part of our political and governmental systems and processes, and always has been. Another and even more blatantly inaccurate myth is that the Court’s current size is either foundational or Constitutional. In fact, the Constitution doesn’t define the number of Justices, and as I described in that HuffPost column, there were initially six Justices. The number would change six total times over the next century, reaching a high of ten Justices in 1863, before settling at its current total of nine in 1869—and that particular moment was especially political and fraught, as the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866 (passed by Congress in attempt to limit President Andrew Johnson’s power) led to the shrinking of the Court from ten to seven Justices (when three retirees were not replaced) before the Judiciary Act of 1869 allowed President Ulysses S. Grant to immediately add two Justices and return the number to nine. The fact that it has remained at nine for the 150 years since doesn’t change the more foundational fact that the Court’s composition is flexible and has changed with political trends and influences.

I suspect you know where I’m going with this, and I don’t need to dwell on it at length. None of those histories mean that we necessarily should expand the Court here in early 2022—but they certainly do mean that any argument against expansion based on either of these myths (ie, “We shouldn’t embroil the Court in current politics”; “We can’t mess with something as foundational as the size of the Supreme Court”) is a non-starter from the jump. And I would add this: there’s been a lot of understandable conversation in the last year about how much our own moment seems linked to Reconstruction. I agree, and would add that it’s far from coincidental that that was the last time when the Court’s size changed. To my mind, it’s long past time we made such changes once more, which will require challenging a couple significant myths along the way.

Next non-favorite myth tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites, myths and everything else, you’d share?

February 21, 2022: Non-Favorite Myths: The Founding Fathers

[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to my favorite crowd-sourced post of the year, so please share your own non-favorites—in every category—for that collective airing of grievances!]

On two interconnected problems with the mythic category, and one way to move past them.

In one of those non-favorites posts from last year’s series, I focused on a few different myths about George Washington to which we frustratingly still cling. The deeper truth, of course, is that the entire concept of “Founding Fathers” is itself a myth, and one that operates in similar ways to those specifically Washingtonian myths: flattening any and all biographical and historical complexities in service of simplified and larger-than-life images of heroic icons. That means that when historians and other folks try to remind us of some of those complexities—such as Washington’s dogged pursuit of escaped enslaved people, undertaken while he was President of the United States no less, as I discuss in that post and as Erica Dunbar has done such a phenomenal job tracing—it seems to far too many Americans not like an addition to our collective memories, but a fundamental threat to those originating and defining myths, a seditious attack that must be resisted at all costs.

That’s one problem with the Founding Fathers category, and it’s a significant one. But there’s another, distinct but interconnected and to my mind even more serious problem with the concept: it at least implies, and often states outright, that these individuals represent starting points for American identity. There’s no doubt that many of these folks helped start and lead the Revolution, which originated the United States as a nation; and, more importantly, that many of them later took part in the Constitutional Convention, which constructed that nation’s enduring set of governmental and legal ideas. Those are important influences, and certainly make these individuals and this community worth remembering (if in those more three-dimensional and nuanced ways for which I argued above). But I don’t believe very many of us would say that American identity is equated with our government and laws, or even with our nation’s existence as a distinct political entity. So the idea that because someone contributed to the origins of those elements they comprise a “founding” American is quite simply putting undue weight and pressure on their lives and stories, and leads directly to that mythic lionizing.

Challenging that longstanding trend will take more than just complicating the simplified vision of these figures and this community, I’d say. Instead, I would argue for a more comprehensive and overarching shift, one that I first articulated in this Twitter thread late last year: defining this group as Framers (a term that is used at times, but in my experience not nearly as consistently; note that that hyperlink still defines them as “founding fathers” in the URL) rather than Founders. That would not only help us focus on their role in framing those key governmental and legal elements, but also and more importantly achieve two other effects: lessening the need to view them as iconic heroes (and thus to see attacks on them as attacks on America itself); and, as I traced in that thread, opening up space to consider other Revolutionary figures and communities as “founders.” Like my friend Christina Proenza-Coles, I would call African Americans like Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker particularly great candidates for this revised vision of “American Founders”—but in any case, creating room for many different Revolutionary Americans to be considered Founders would be a long-overdue and important change.

Next non-favorite myth tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites, myths and everything else, you’d share?

February 19-20, 2022: More Podcasts We Love

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful podcasts on which I’ve been honored to be interviewed. Leading up to this weekend post highlighting a handful of other great podcasts—share other ones you love, please!]

This week’s podcast highlights were ones on which I was honored to appear, but of course there are many others I love as well! Here are a few more, and I would love further suggestions from fellow AmericanPodcastStudiers:

1)      Ben Franklin’s World: Liz Covart’spodcast on all things early American is really the gold standard for historical and public scholarly podcasts, and is still going strong with well more than 300 episodes.

2)      Welcome to Your Fantasy: Another form of podcast is the limited series, a podcast that tells one compelling story in all its depth and complexity. The best public scholarly such podcast I’ve encountered is Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s justifiably acclaimed series on the wild true crime story behind the Chippendales.

3)      Now & Then: I don’t know that I need to say much about this smash hit, featuring two of our (if not the two) most prominent public scholars, Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson. What I love most about it is right there in that titular ampersand—the consistent way this podcast reveals the deep interconnections between present and past.

4)      Drafting the Past: One of the newest public scholarly podcasts is Kate Carpenter’s unique and awesome Drafting the Past, which debuted its first episode this week (featuring the awesome Megan Kate Nelson). I just recorded my own episode on Friday, which I can’t wait to share with you all soon!

Anti-favorites series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Other podcasts you love?

February 18, 2022: Podcasts I Love: Unsung History

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful podcasts on which I’ve been honored to be interviewed. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting a handful of other great podcasts—share ones you love as well, please!]

When I had the chance to appear on each of the last few podcasts I’ve highlighted, it was to talk about my most recent book, Of Thee I Sing. I value every opportunity to share that project (and would love opportunities to continue doing so, on podcasts and everywhere else), but, as I hope this blog illustrates, I’m also interested in expanding our collective memories in many, many other ways. One of the new public scholarly podcasts that most exemplifies that goal of expansion is Kelly Therese Pollock’s Unsung History, on which I had the chance to appear to talk about one of my favorite Americans, Susie King Taylor. I’ve learned something (and often many things) from every Unsung History episode so far, and there’s nothing I could love more than that!

More great podcasts this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: Podcasts you love?

February 17, 2022: Podcasts I Love: Impressions of America

[For this year’s Valentine’s Day series, I wanted to highlight some of the wonderful podcasts on which I’ve been honored to be interviewed. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting a handful of other great podcasts—share ones you love as well, please!]

Great public scholarly podcasts are partly about their specific niche and angle, as I discussed yesterday; but they’re also about the particular voices and perspectives of their hosts. Another excellent new podcast on which I was honored to appear last year is Impressions of America, a podcast co-hosted by three UK graduate students (Vaughn, Simon, and Tobi) that explores all things American Studies from that international perspective. Even when their episodes feature just those three hosts (as is often the case), the combination of their individual perspectives and their shared dynamics make the episodes must-listen—and when they bring in a guest, as they did for my episode, it only adds another layer to that unique and compelling existing dynamic. I love this trio and can’t wait to see where they take the podcast (and its spinoffs!) next!

Last podcast tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Podcasts you love?