Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 131

August 6, 2021: Crowd-sourced AmericanStudies Websites

[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30thanniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ve highlighted just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring suggestions from fellow AmericanWebStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]

First, a couple favorites I didn’t share in the week’s posts (among many I could highlight here—please share more, all!):

The awesome folks at Pedagogy & American Literary Studies

Heather Cox Richardson & co.’s We’re History

Other AmericanStudies sites:

Scott Saul has a couple great sites, this digital companion to his Richard Pryor bio and this one featuring student-generated projects from an AmericanStudies seminar on the Berkeley Revolution he’s taught a few times.

Floyd Cheungshares Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies.

Annual birthday posts start this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share?

August 5, 2021: AmericanStudies Websites: The Octo

[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30thanniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ll highlight just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Share your favs for a crowd-sourced post, please!]

On the vital role of community and solidarity in navigating the scholarly web.

I’ve written many times in this space about the public scholarly bloggers who served as both models and encouragement for me as I began my own daily blogging, nearly 11 years ago now (well, 10 2/3rds years, anyway). The three who most come to mind (in descending order of how much I’ve had the chance to meet and get to know them) are: Rob Velella and his American Literary Blog; Kevin Levin and his Civil War Memory blog and website; and Ta-Nehisi Coates and his blog for The Atlantic. What I’ve gradually come to realize that I learned from these folks, both directly through connections and indirectly through their work, is much more than just what or how they wrote on and used their sites—it was how they highlighted and shared the work of others, through hyperlinks, through quotations, through guest posts (including, in Rob’s case, ones by me), and in other ways too. Finding scholarly voices has always been something of a crapshoot, but at least in a library you could go to a certain call number and see (for example) all the books they have on that similar subject; online scholarship has no such natural locations, and so if we’re going to find authors and works we need some help, some guidance, some collection and curation.

Individuals’ sites like those I listed above (and this one of course) can do that to a degree, but there’s a vital need for complementary, more collective sites, spaces that exist mostly to provide such community and solidarity for individual online scholars. In our current moment, my favorite such collective site is The Octo. Hosted by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (out of William & Mary University), the Octo features a rotating collection of eight (duh) American Studies blogs, selected by Katy Telling and Joe Adelman. Obviously that’s only a tiny fraction of all the blogs and sites out there, but through its rotation style, the Octo certainly has eventually highlighted many of them (including, at some point, this one, for which I will be eternally grateful) and will keep getting to more still. And in any case, at any given moment I know I can navigate over there and find eight public scholarly blogs and sites, eight (or more if they’re multi-authored blogs) voices with whom I’m in solidarity in this amorphous and awesome community. Not sure there’s a better note to end this series on—and ask once more for your input for tomorrow’s crowd-sourced post—than that.

Crowd-sourced post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What do you think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share for the crowd-sourced post?

August 4, 2021: AmericanStudies Websites: Crossroads

[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30thanniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ll highlight just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Share your favs for a crowd-sourced post, please!]

On the frustrating fragility of the internet, and the need for collective memory.

Many years ago now, probably around the time of my 2011 Presidency of the organization, I worked to create the first (to my knowledge at least) webpage for the New England American Studies Association (that webpage has since been sadly lost to time, a fact very relevant to this post as you’ll see; NEASA does have an excellent new site here, thanks to our longtime webmaster and now incoming President Charles Park). I had a few goals for what I wanted on that site (within my very limited skill set as a web designer), but chief among them was to collect online resources and links for and about New England American Studying. In so doing, I had one very definite model for such a site and collection: Crossroads, or more formally the American Studies Crossroads Project, an American Studies clearinghouse site produced by the American Studies Association and hosted by Georgetown University.

Or, well, it was. The reason that hyperlinked version of the site is now located at the Wayback Machine is that, as this goodbye letter from project director Randy Bass details, at some point not long after I used the project as my model the Crossroads team “archived the site and moved on.” Crossroads had been launched in 1993, the same year as yesterday’s subject The Valley of the Shadow and a strikingly early moment in the history of the scholarly internet (and the internet period, as this week’s series reveals), and so it’s entirely understandable that after two decades of groundbreaking online AmericanStudying (and for all the other reasons described in that letter) the team were ready to move on. That’s not in and of itself a problem for future researchers—but the location at the Wayback Machine reminds us that there’s no guarantee that once a site is no longer active, it will continue to be hosted by/available at its existing web address. Indeed, I can testify from the experience of checking and updating the links on my Memory Day Calendar that a significant percentage of such links (at least half, in my experience) no longer work even a few years down the road—ones hosted by academic institutions tend to be a bit more stable, but the example of Crossroads and Georgetown makes clear that that’s not necessarily the case either.

Such is life on the intertubes—and that’s an important thing for all of us producing online scholarship (or online anything) to remember. There’s no guarantee these sites and spaces will survive (yes, even ones owned by companies like Google as this here blogspot is; or big social media giants like Twitter where I ply so much of my online AmericanStudyingthese days), which means we’d better back everything that we want to preserve up and also that we need to keep finding ways to connect to audiences and communities beyond the online ones (as much as I obviously value those). But at the same time, I think this is a lesson that we can’t simply leave memories to our browser histories (or cookies, or whatever technical term would best apply). Crossroads is a significant part of the story of American Studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, and all of us who work in and around that field need to help remember that, whether we have any way to access the site (as we fortunately currently do through Wayback) or not. The internet may or may not remember, but we can and must.

Last AMST site tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share for the crowd-sourced post?

August 3, 2021: AmericanStudies Websites: The Valley of the Shadow

[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30thanniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ll highlight just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Share your favs for a crowd-sourced post, please!]

On a few key things that we can still learn from a groundbreaking early site.

I’m not sure exactly when it was, but it couldn’t have been more than a year or two after that 1991 WWW origin point that my Dad brought me to a presentation by University of Virginia History Professor Ed Ayers (he has since moved to the University of Richmond, at which he is now Emeritus, and where he co-created and co-hosted the innovative and vital radio program BackStory) on a new online project he was launching. That project, which formally debuted in 1993, was and remains The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. Valley focuses on residents of Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, located at opposite ends of the Shenandoah Valley, using countless historical documents and sources to frame their individual and collective voices and experiences between the late 1850s and the era of Reconstruction.

Both the digitization and presentation of those primary sources are one of the project’s essential elements from which we can still learn a great deal. I’m not sure “digitization” was even a concept when Valleywas launched (it probably was within archival conversations, but not in our broader public ones at least), but I’ve never encountered an online resource that models both the work and the value of digitizing primary sources (in so many different categories, from more obvious ones like letters/diaries and newspapers to complementary ones like church records and census & tax records) better than this one. And they’re so navigable and searchable—from the perfect graphic design of the main page to the multiple, eminently searchable sub-categories that come up when you click on any one of that page’s sections. Of course public scholarly websites can do all sorts of important things, but digitizing and presenting sources (especially harder to find, or at least gather together, ones) has always been and to my mind will always stay at the top of the list, and again I don’t know a better model for that goal, process, and result than Valley.

Any web project, like any other scholarly project, also features its own interpretative and analytical lenses on such sources, of course, and in the case of Valley its comparative lens also remains a powerful takeaway. Linking a Northern and a Southern community might seem obvious in hindsight, but I would argue that at the time it was anything but—especially because of the digitization/archive angle, which might have made it seem logical to focus on working with documents from only one such community. Of course that would have had value too, and it is possible to work with the site’s materials through a more singular focus (which is as it should be, as web projects are more interactive than written/textual ones). But the comparative lens offers such a potent mechanism for comparison and contrast, within particular categories of sources and across them, in one of site’s three time periods and across them, for specific racial and ethnic communities and between them, and so on. That’s a really meaningful resource for thinking about the Civil War era, and it’s also an implicit but crucial model for how we think about America, an additive vision rather than a divided or entirely localized one. Just one more reason to remember and learn from The Valley of the Shadow.

Next AMST site tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share for the crowd-sourced post?

August 2, 2021: AmericanStudies Websites: Steve Railton’s Trio

[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30thanniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ll highlight just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Share your favs for a crowd-sourced post, please!]

In one of my very early posts, I paid tribute to my Dad Steve Railton’swork on groundbreaking American literary & cultural websites. But since then he’s created a third, so for this week’s series I’ll say a bit more about the first two and highlight that new one as well:

1)      Mark Twain in His Times: Railton’s first site turns 25 this year, which, much like watching a child age, makes me feel super old. But I’m very proud of my first-born half-sibling (okay, abandoning that metaphor now), and have used it in countless classes to great effect (most of all my Special Author: Mark Twain course, natch). The separate sections on six of Twain’s major books are phenomenal, as are those on thematic categories like identity and marketing. But my favorite thing is how intuitive and easy the site is to navigate and use—no small feat 25 years ago, and frankly no guarantee in sites created in 2021 either. Don’t believe me? Take it for a trip down the e-river and see for yourself!

2)      Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A couple years after starting the Twain site (which continues to evolve—that’s one thing about online projects, for good and for bad there’s no definitive end; it’s very good for us but can be tough for their creators), Railton launched this second, even more ambitious digital humanities project. Funded by grants from the NEH and the NEA, award-winning, and (I know from countless testimonies) a vital resource for educators and scholars of every type, the UTC site is a true model for online public scholarship. That’s true of the content, which contextualizes this one hugely influential text in history, literature, culture, popular culture, biography, scholarship, and more. But to my mind it’s even more true in its trio of navigation modes—Search, Browse, and Interpet—from which all those working on digital projects can learn a great deal.

3)      Digital Yoknapatawpha: DY is that aforementioned newest project, and is distinct from the other two in one key way: while Railton still created and directs it, it has been developed and built by a team of collaborators from all over the world. It also uses mapping, graphics, and other digital humanities technologies in ways that reflect just how far both DH capabilities and Railton’s own ideas have continued to progress (and of course what collaborators have added to the mix) since those 1990s sites. But at the same time, there’s a clear through-line here: the use of web projects to contextualize and amplify our work with texts and authors, to bring us back to our literary and cultural histories in new and nuanced and even more meaningful ways.

Next AMST site tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share for the crowd-sourced post?

July 31-August 1, 2021: Hettie Williams' Guest Post on Black Women in America

                                                            Unprotected:

The Brutalization of Black Women in American History, Society and Popular Culture

“Black women are so unprotected…It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.”

—Megan Thee Stallion

Historically, African American women have been made subject to egregious levels of fetishization, appropriation and brutalization in U.S. society and the American popular imagination. From Mammy to Sapphire, the figure of the Black woman has gone unprotected—Black women’s bodies have gone unprotected—while white Americans consume and commodify Black cultural identity in the process. Historian Danielle McGuire, in her groundbreaking text At the Dark End of the Street, has assiduously demonstrated how Black women were sexually assaulted with regular occurrence by white men across the American south from the Reconstruction Era through the rise of the modern Civil Rights Era. More recently, Breonna Taylor was slaughtered while asleep in her bed. She did nothing wrong. Her body shot eight times and, near death, she was reportedly not offered immediate medical attention for her injuries. “Black women are so unprotected” in this society and culture as rap artist Megan Thee Stallion recently observed, following a gunshot wound she received at the hands of a male assailant.

Toni Morrison in her important text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992) argues that (white) American identity was constructed “against the black shadow” or in relation to derogatory ideas about Blackness. White people like to “play in the dark” with Black bodies and Black culture including in literary, social, and popular cultural contexts. They play in the dark as if in a macabre dance with Blackness illustrated through fetishization and appropriation while, at times, killing the Black body in the flesh. This extends to appropriating the language of Black protest as exemplified in Portland’s white "Wall of Moms." These cosplaying revolutionaries are ultimately dangerous in the end because the focus in mass media always reverts to the white body in these moments or the humanity of those who play as opposed to that of the Black woman’s body within the larger landscape of mass culture.

In this theater of the macabre, Black women’s bodies have been the most unprotected on the account of gender and race. This essay is a brief look at representations of Black women in American popular culture from the lynching of Laura Nelson to the most recent observations of Megan Thee Stallion and the brutal murder of Ma'Khia Bryant by a white cop. I focus here on the brutalization, fetishization and appropriation of Black women in American history, society and culture by thinking about how whiteness thrives off of the degradation of Black women’s bodies.

The rise of Jim Crow and lynch lawin the early twentieth century witnessed the public degradation of the Black body with the brutal murder of Black women such as Laura Nelson and Mary Turner. Nelson and her twelve-year-old son were lynched on May 25, 1911. The Nelson’s were accused of stealing a cow from a local white farmer. Nelson’s son, though accounts vary, allegedly shot a member of a white mob who stormed the family’s home in pursuit of Laura’s husband (who initially had been accused of theft). Laura Nelson’s dead body appeared in photos of lynching and on postcards in the early twentieth century. Nelson was brutally lynched for fighting back against white racial oppression. Her death commodified and sold on a postcard. Postcards of lynching became a regular part of American popular culture at the turn of century as James Allen has demonstrated in his riveting photo exhibit "Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching." These postcards of lynched bodies were kept as collectibles, distributed through the mail and saved as souvenirs forever etched into the popular imagination. Turner was lynched while eight months pregnant on May 19, 1918 after speaking out against lynching and the murder of her husband. African American visual Meta Warrick Fuller's sculpture “In Memory of Mary Turner: As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence” was created to speak back against white vigilantism a year later in 1919. These cultural artifacts—postcards and sculptures—are dueling in the dark. Fuller’s work is an act of protest and reclamation, while the postcards of lynching are the product of depraved minds who defined their identity upon the bones of the dead.

 

There were a host of Black women visual artists in the New Negro Era who like Fuller fought against the dark and fashioned respectable images of Black humanity including Laura Wheeler Waring and Augusta Savage amid the rise of filmic stereotypes of Black womanhood. Warring’s painted dignified images of blackness including portraits of Marian Anderson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. Savage, a sculptor like Fuller, depicted Black history and culture with works such as “The Harp” and “Gamin.” It is also pertinent to note here, as well, that the Black Blues women of the New Negro Era such as Glady’s Bentley were gender-bending in top hat and tails long before Madonna graced the stage of the MTV Awards.

Historian Crystal N. Feimster in her book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2011) notes that roughly 200 African American women were lynched between 1880 and 1930.

The Civil Rights-Black Power Era brought further indignities to Black women as exemplified in the testimony of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer. That said, Black women continued to make contributions to American society and culture as advocates for social justice and innovators of American music down to the present in the face of oppression. There has also been a regular appropriation of Black women’s music aesthetics from Big Mama Thornton to Grace Jones and beyond. Before there was a Janis Joplin there was a Big Mama Thornton and before there was a Lady Gaga there was a Grace Jones.

More recently, a big butt or excessively chemically induced tanned skin is deemed cute on a black-fishing (chemically altering one’s skin to appear/pretend to be Black on social media) white Instagram influencer or a Kardashian, while individuals such as Megan Thee Stallion or Cardi B are immediately called “ratchet” for twerking on stage. This race-playing by these black-fishing white women is to play in the dark. It is a theatre of the macabre. Meanwhile, Breonna Taylor is dead.

[Hettie Williams is Associate Professor of History at Monmouth University. She's written and edited a number of vital books on race in American history, culture, and contemporary society, and hosts the Intellectual History podcast for the New Books Network. We've been twitter friends for a long time and I'm so excited to share a bit of her work, voice, and ideas in this great Guest Post!]

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?]

July 31-August 1, 2021: July 2021 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

June 26-27: Kurtis Kendall’s Guest Post on Athlete Activism: Ending the month in a few with a great Guest Post, and started it with one too, FSU superstar alum on activist athletes!

June 28: Talking Of Thee I Sing: GCE Lab School: A series on my book talks thus far kicks off with the coincidental timing of my January 7th talk and what it helped me think about.

June 29: Talking Of Thee I Sing: Toadstool Bookshop: The series continues with the limits and benefits of virtual talks for a bookstore where I gave an in-person talk in 2019.

June 30: Talking Of Thee I Sing: The Boston Athenaeum: An excellent audience question that helped me think through an important analogy, as the series talks on.

July 1: Talking Of Thee I Sing: Mass Historical Society: How a wonderful archive helps me highlight the inspiration for the book’s title.

July 2: Talking Of Thee I Sing: What’s Next: The series concludes with a type of talk I’m particularly excited to schedule in the Fall!

July 3-4: Of Thee I Sing and Patriotism in 2021: A special weekend post on education, history, and patriotism in 2021 America.

July 5: Work in American Literature: Melville and the Lowell Offering: A series for one of my summer classes kicks off with two distinct but complementary ways to give voice to working women.

July 6: Work in American Literature: Phelps’ “Tenth of January”: The series concludes with a short story that combines local color and sentimental fiction to become so much more.

July 7: Work in American Literature: Depression Novels: Two unique novels that together help us remember the Great Depression’s effects on America’s workers.

July 8: Work in American Literature: “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper”: A quick but stunning poetic representation of work and identity.

July 9: Work in American Literature: Imbolo Mbue and Behold the Dreamers: The series concludes with two takeaways from a compelling creative reading and talk.

July 10-11: Pop Culture Workers: One of my favorite recent posts, on five pop culture characters—from City of Hope’s Nick Rinaldi to Hustlers’ Destiny/Dorothy—who represent the spectrum of 21C work.

July 12: Summer Camp Contexts: Camp Virginia: A summer camp series kicks off with the unique historical camp without which there’d be no AmericanStudier.

July 13: Summer Camp Contexts: Hello Muddah: The series continues with the very American afterlives of a classic camp (sorry) song.

July 14: Summer Camp Contexts: Jewish Summer Camps: Ethnicity, community, and preservation and revision of tradition, as the series camps on.

July 15: Summer Camp Contexts: Playing Indian: The camp tradition that embodies a troubling American trend, and what we can do about it.

July 16: Summer Camp Contexts: Friday the 13th: The series concludes with what camp has come to mean in the late 20th century, and what to make of the change.

July 17-18: Crowd-sourced Summer Camps: Another fun crowd-sourced post, including also a link to my most personal Saturday Evening Post column ever.

July 19: Expanding Histories: The Treaty of Adams-Onís: On the 200thanniversary of the US acquisition of Florida, a post on the layers to that treaty kicks off a series on expanding our histories of expansion.

July 20: Expanding Histories: United States v. Burr: The series continues with two dark sides to expansion that an infamous trial helps us better remember.

July 21: Expanding Histories: A True Picture of Emigration: A forgotten book that helps us engage with the settler experiences in settler colonialism, as the series expands on.

July 22: Expanding Histories: Life Among the Piutes: The horrifying and inspiring effects of reading a vital text on Native American experiences of an expanding US.

July 23: Expanding Histories: The Squatter and the Don: The series concludes with a handful of pieces where I consider a hugely important Mexican American author and book.

July 24-25: Expanding Histories: How to Hide an Empire: A special weekend tribute to one of the most original and compelling works of historical scholarship in recent years.

July 26: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Ed Simon: The first in a series of tributes to awesome fellow AmericanStudiers!

July 27: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Christina Proenza-Coles: The second in that series!

July 28: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.: The third in that series!

July 29: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Kathryn Ostrofsky: The fourth in that series!

July 30: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: New Podcasts: The series concludes with five recent AMST podcasts you should all check out!

Next series starts Monday, and another great Guest Post coming this weekend first,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

July 30, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: New Podcasts

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

I’m far from a podcast expert, but I’ve learned a lot in the last year, and part of the reason is that there continue to be so many great new AmericanStudies offerings. Here are a handful (in no particular order, although I have been fortunate enough to be a guest on the first four):

1)      Impressions of America: Three British grad students (one of them an American transplant) run this wonderful podcast on politics and pop culture. If you’re a Star Wars fan, listen to the 2.5 hour episode where Vaughn delves deeper into the politics of that series and extended universe than you could have ever thought possible.

2)      Unsung History: Kelly Therese has been the co-host of the Two Broads Talking Politics podcast for a long while, but recently started her own historical podcast, on which I was very honored to be the third weekly guest(talking about Susie King Taylor). I guarantee you’ll learn a great deal from every episode, both from Kelly and her guests!

3)      Axelbank Reports History and Today: Tampa TV reporter Evan Axelbank is one of our most vocal supporters of historical and public scholarly writing, and he started this podcast to highlight new books and authors/voices in those categories. Let’s all make sure we thank him accordingly by listening in!

4)      Drinking with Historians: I can’t imagine too many of my readers don’t already know this unique and fun video podcast(videocast?) from historians Matt Gabriele and Varsha Venkat. So I’ll just say that I think they’ve unlocked a cheat code for having serious fun while getting guests talking casually and sincerely about their work and interests.

5)      Now & Then: It’s probably even less necessary for me to say much about the new podcast from two of our truly preeminent public scholars, Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson. So I’ll just add that I love how from their title on they’re making clear a central tenet of the work we’re all trying to do: those complex, crucial interconnections between past and present.

July Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

July 29, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Kathryn Ostrofsky

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

Gotta frame this post with one of those “small world” kind of moments: one of the best students with whom I’ve worked in my 16 years at Fitchburg State, Rebecca Carpenter, worked for a time post-graduation as an archivist at the Dedham Historical Society & Museum (not far at all from my home in Needham); unrelatedly, over the last year and a bit I’ve become connected to Kanisorn “Kid” Wongsrichanalai, the Director of Research for the Massaschusetts Historical Society; and then, also unrelatedly (I thought), I connected on Twitterwith Kathryn Ostrofsky, a historian and archivist who took over Rebecca’s position at DHSM and is married to Kid! But while all of that is pretty cool, it’s not nearly as interesting as Kathryn’s work, especially her in-progress book and podcast on the history of Sesame Street (for more on both of which, watch this space!). At times it can feel that media and cultural studies and the work of archives and archivists are separate and even potentially opposed on the public and scholarly landscapes—but Kathryn reminds us of how much they’re intertwined, and the role that both will have to play if we’re to move forward with a full understanding of our past and present, our culture and society, and our shared community.

Last highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

July 28, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

The first two scholars I highlighted this week are folks I’ve had the chance to meet in person, but of course there are lots of amazing AmericanStudiers I haven’t yet met—partly because of, y’know, the last 18 months; but also because of a more positive factor, the countless scholars I’ve met online through the #twitterstorians community. One of those is Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., a History Professor at Augusta University whose first book, The Families’ Civil War, will be coming out in June 2022 from the University of Georgia Press. I can’t lie, one reason I’m highlighting Holly in this series is that he’s perhaps the only person I’ve ever encountered who loves the film Glory even more than I do, and that’s not a fact I take at all lightly. But among the many other reasons is that Holly exemplifies how even the most seemingly exhausted topics—like the Civil War—are being given new life and salience through the work of phenomenal AmericanStudiers. Can’t wait to read his book!

Next highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?