Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 142

April 3-4, 2021: March 2021 Recap

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

March 1: Superhero Comics: Captain America: For Cap’s 80th birthday, a superhero series kicks off with how that timing helps us remember the aspirational and political roles of superhero comics.

March 2: Superhero Comics: Batman and Superman: The series continues with two distinct AmericanStudies contrasts between our two most enduring superheroes.

March 3: Superhero Comics: Wonder Woman: The ambiguous creation, evolution, and cultural images of our first female superhero, as the series fights on.

March 4: Superhero Comics: Black Panther: On Black Powers, super- and political.

March 5: Superhero Comics: The Punisher: The series concludes with the character whose ambiguous heroism illustrates a fundamental American duality.

March 6-7: Superhero Comics: Watchmen: A special weekend post, sharing student responses to the meta-superheroic graphic novel!

March 8: Spring Break Films: Spring Break: A series on Spring Break films kicks off with 1983’s Spring Break and more and less destructive pop culture stereotypes.

March 9: Spring Break Films: Spring Breakers: The series continues with 2012’s Spring Breakers and the fine line between challenging and exploiting female objectification.                             

March 10: Spring Break Films: From Justin to Kelly: What wasn’t new about the historic beach bomb, and what was, as the series parties on.

March 11: Spring Break Films: Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise: American intellectualism and the worse and better ways to challenge it.

March 12: Spring Break Films: Baywatch: The series concludes with why those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of AmericanStudies evidence.

March 13-14: Of Thee I Sing Update!: Ahead of my new book’s March 15threlease date, an update on where and how you can get your hands on it (the discount code still works)!

March 15: Models of Critical Patriotism: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”: A book release series on models of critical patriotism kicks off with Frederick Douglass’ stunning speech.

March 16: Models of Critical Patriotism: “Eulogy on King Philip”: The series continues with a speech that offers two complementary models.

March 17: Models of Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the Centennial Exposition: National divisions and critical patriotism at America’s 100thbirthday bash, as the series reads on.

March 18: Models of Critical Patriotism: America is in the Heart: An author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.

March 19: Models of Critical Patriotism: MLK and Baldwin, Kaepernick and the 1619 Project: The series concludes with 21st figures and works that extend the legacies of critical patriotism.

March 20-21: Sharing Of Thee I Sing: A few more details on where and how I’m working to share the book, and how you can help me do so!

March 22: Indigenous New England: The Wampanoag: For the 400thanniversary of a foundational treaty, a series on Indigenous New England kicks off with sources & voices from whom I’ve learned about the Wampanoag.

March 23: Indigenous New England: Tisquantum: The series continues with the most inspiring and most horrific sides to a foundational American life, and how to remember both.

March 24: Indigenous New England: The Peace Treaty: An English account of the 1621 treaty and how we need to go beyond it, as the series rolls on.

March 25: Indigenous New England: The Mystic Massacre: Three texts that help us remember one of 17th century America’s darkest histories.

March 26: Indigenous New England: Brothers Among Nations: The series concludes with a distinct and more inspiring vision of the arrival and contact era.

March 27-28: Reframing the Pilgrims: A special weekend post on how the week’s histories can help us reframe the New England Puritans, and how I still need to go beyond that frame.

March 29: Key & Peele Studying: Negrotown: An April Fool’s series on the comic geniuses kicks off with the many layers to the sketch that first made me fall in love with Key & Peele.

March 30: Key & Peele Studying: Luther: The series continues with one of the smartest comic ideas ever, and the stunning political moment it produced.

March 31: Key & Peele Studying: Country Music: What a silly sketch helps us see about country music’s frustrating race problem, as the series laughs on.

April 1: Key & Peele Studying: Substitute Teacher: How great comedy both reinforces yet can transcend cultural stereotypes.

April 2: Key & Peele Studying: Five More Sketches: The series concludes with five more hilarious and provocative Key & Peele sketches.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

April 2, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Five More Sketches

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21stcentury humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

Five more hilarious (and thought-provoking) Key & Peele sketches to round off the April Fooling.

1)      “Magical Negro fight”

2)      “Black ice”

3)      “Auction block”

4)      “Save the children”

5)      “Text message confusion”

March Recap this weekend,

Ben

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

April 1, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Substitute Teacher

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21stcentury humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On comedy, cultural stereotypes, and how great art can transcend them anyway.

There was a famous plot thread on a Season 8 (1996-97) episode of Seinfeld (the episode titled “The Yada Yada”) about a character (Seinfeld’s dentist Tim Whatley, played by none other than Bryan Cranston long before he broke bad) who had converted to Judaism seemingly just so he could tell Jewish jokes without being labeled an anti-Semite. Like the Key & Peele sketches I’m writing about all week, this funny sitcom character and plot thread also raised thoughtful and significant questions about both comedy and society: namely, whether it’s okay for folks within a particular culture to joke about that culture in ways that would be out of bounds for those outside of it; and if so, what the boundaries and rules are for such stereotyping humor and art. I’m thinking for example about another 1996-97 text, the controversial “Niggas vs. Black People” routine that stand-up comedian Chris Rock featured on his 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain as well as his 1997 comedy album Roll with the New. Pretty much every joke in that routine wouldn’t fly if told by a white comedian (and perhaps not by any comedian in 2021, but that’s a subject for another post), but for Rock it became one of his most popular bits.

Perhaps not coincidentally, one of Key & Peele’s most enduringly popular sketches (it was the first one my sons heard about through YouTube word-of-mouth, for example) is “Substitute Teacher,” the beloved 2012 sketch about Mr. Garvey, the titular substitute who has taught “in the inner city” (as he puts it to the class) for decades and finds himself unable to pronounce the seemingly straightforward names of his white students correctly due to (we assume, until the sketch’s final joke about the class’s one African American student drives the point home) his extensive experiences with African American students and their distinctly pronounced and/or spelled names. I found the sketch hilarious when I first encountered it and have greatly enjoyed returning to it with the boys (and subsequently quoting it with them at random moments, as one does with great comic lines), but at each of those stages I’ve also wondered if it’s appropriate for me to be laughing at a premise that is fundamentally dependent on a cultural stereotype about African American names. That’s a somewhat different question from whether it’s okay for Key and Peele to make these jokes—but since comedy is so defined by audience response, by that desired laughter, it’s certainly not an unrelated question.

I’m sorry to confess that I’m not going to be able to come up with answers to these fraught questions in the last paragraph of this post (and as ever, I welcome your thoughts on them, in comments here or by email). But I will say that as with so much great humor and great art overall, it seems to me that the real secret to what makes “Substitute Teacher” work so well is the writing, characters, and performances, not just from Key as Mr. Garvey (although it’s one of his best performances from the show) but also from all the young actors who portray the white students. These characters are so delightfully human in their reactions—and again, not just Mr. Garvey’s frustrations and anger, but the varied reactions of the student characters—that they required a sequel sketchto flesh out their individual and collective dynamics further. That humorous, shared humanity doesn’t mean that we can or should ignore the cultural and social questions, no more than we can with any of the issues raised by the sketches I’ve examined this week. But it does reflect another layer to the comic genius of Key & Peele, and one that makes sketches like “Substitute Teacher” so enduringly successful.

Last sketches tomorrow,

Ben

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

March 31, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Country Music

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21stcentury humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On what a silly sketch helps us see about country music’s frustrating evolution, and how history counters those trends.

Compared to the multi-layered genius of “Negrotown” and the political savvy and influence of Luther the Anger Translator, Key & Peele’s 2018 sketch “Country Music” is a bit more straightforward, an example of their impressive ability to take a somewhat familiar but funny comic premise and extend it to unexpected levels of silliness in just a few minutes. The heart of this particular sketch, as of many of theirs, is thus the two men’s delightful comic performances and the way they bounce off each other, in this case featuring Key as a country music devotee who only belatedly realizes the racist undercurrents of the songs he loves, and Peele as his new neighbor whose frustrations with Key’s color blindness (so to speak) help produce that belated epiphany.

But I wouldn’t be spending an entire week’s series on Key & Peele if the duo’s more straightforward comic sketches couldn’t likewise help us think about aspects of our culture and society. In the case of “Country Music,” the sketch’s hyperbolic silliness allows us to examine the only somewhat less obvious ways that the genre has in recent decades featured racist imagery and tropes. Take for example mega-superstar Garth Brooks’ 1993 hit “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association,” which builds on Reagan-era narratives about social programs and their recipients, contrasting the hard-working constituents of its titular organization with “all of those/Standing in a welfare line.” Or take for another example the names of the popular late 1990s and early 2000s bands the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum, both of which tap into histories of Southern white supremacy (and both of which were as a result changed in the midst of 2020’s reckonings with race and memory).

So yeah, late 20thand early 21st century country music has a problem with race (or several problems). But as that hyperlinked article reflects, and as I highlighted in this 2019 year in review post on Lil Nas X’s smash country crossover hit “Old Town Road” (2019), the genre’s actual history is far more cross-cultural than those racist undertones illustrate, featuringfoundational African American artists who have influenced the current collection of diverse artists and voices. Seen in that light, perhaps the most telling moment in Key & Peele’s sketch is the early exchange when Peele’s character is so surprised that Key’s character is a fan of country music, a reflection (whether intentional in their writing of the sketch or accidental) of just how under-remembered both these histories and these contemporary legacies of African American country music remain.

Next sketch tomorrow,

Ben

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

March 30, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Luther

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21stcentury humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On one of the smartest comic ideas ever, and the stunning political moment it produced.

There’s no way to know for sure how particular cultural works will be remembered or what their ultimate influences and legacies will be, but if I were a betting man, I would wager that it is the character of Luther, President Barack Obama’s Anger Translator, who will represent the most enduring legacy of Key & Peele. Besides featuring Jordan Peele’s pitch-perfect impression of Obama and Keegan-Michael Key’s inspired creation of Luther, two fantastic comic performances that worked even better in combination and conversation with each other, the recurring Luther sketches tapped into both specific critiques of Obama (as too professorial, too calm, and the like) and broader cultural tropes such as the stereotype of the “angry black man” (and woman). They also made the show topical and responsive to current events in a way that it’s often difficult for scripted work to be, while (I can testify, having watched more than a few before starting this post) holding up very well over time.

All of that would be more than enough to make Luther both a wonderful comic character and a groundbreaking series of sketches, but then came the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. President Obama did a wonderful job at every one of his eight WHCDs, displaying both a capacity for self-effacement and a biting wit that themselves belied those narratives of his overly professorial or formal tone (and that stand in stark contrast to the most recent occupant, whose total lack of a sense of humor or capacity for self-reflection of any kind was on full display in his decision never to attend a single one of the WHCDs during his term). But it was in 2015, at his penultimate WHCD performance, that Obama brought out Luther to serve as his own Anger Translator, in an inspired bit that impressively demonstrated those qualities of Obama’s, took full advantage of the character’s voice and perspective, and, most importantly, yielded one of the single most stunning and significant political moments in recent years.

That moment was the culmination of the bit, the final minute or so of the hyperlinked video in the last paragraph. As Obama turns his attention to the issue of climate change, he begins to grow more heated in his own remarks, with Luther attempting to calm him down so he can do his complementary job as Anger Translator. But Obama rightly cannot be calmed, and the dialogue builds to this exchange: Obama: “The Pentagon calls it a national security emergency, Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate.” Luther: “Okay, okay, Mr. President, I think they got it bro.” Obama: “It is crazy. What about our kids? What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible bull—” and Luther interrupts him to tell him that he doesn’t need an Anger Translator, he needs counseling (before fleeing in fear, and telling Michelle that “he’s crazy”). The moment is very funny, but it’s also profoundly telling, a perfect way to reflect the fact that the urgency of climate change demands righteous anger from every one of us (including the famously calm president). All thanks to the wonderful character of Luther the Anger Translator.

Next sketch tomorrow,

Ben

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

March 29, 2021: Key & Peele Studying: Negrotown

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’m going to be highlighting and contextualizing some of the best sketches from my favorite work of 21stcentury humor, Key & Peele. I’d love to hear your comedy favorites in comments!]

On three layers to one of the truly great comedy sketches of all time.

I had seen and enjoyed various clips from Key & Peele by the time “Negrotown” aired in May 2015 (as a promo for the show’s next season), but it was this sketch which truly convinced me that the pair were American comic geniuses. For one thing, they manage in the course of the brief musical number at the sketch’s center to feature more different racial, cultural, and social issues than many full-length works are able to include, and to do so in a catchy, rhyming song (with a fantastic accompanying dance number) at that. From Redd Foxx to Dick Gregory to Richard Pryor to Whoopi Goldberg to Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock to the Original Kings of Comedy to Dave Chappelle to Wanda Sykes to Tiffany Haddish to so many more, African American comedians have long been at the forefront of our collective conversations on race in America, but I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a more succinct and thoughtful (and entertaining) comic engagement with those topics than “Negrotown.”

At the same time, I don’t think the sketch’s use of a musical number is at all accidental or secondary to its ideas. From its set and costumes and colors to the very tint of the film (I’m sure that’s not the technical term, but you know what I mean), that musical number feels very much like it’s been lifted out of a Rodgers & Hammerstein show—except that the America portrayed in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musicals was all too often quite literally the opposite of Negrotown, a nation and world that seemed to be entirely devoid of African Americans. Moreover, while individual shows like the groundbreaking DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess (1935) did feature African American characters and stories, the overarching history of American musicals was a strikingly whitewashed one until the last couple decades. At the very least, “Negrotown” highlights that legacy by creating an African American-centric musical number and world (which really shouldn’t feel as unfamiliar as it does); but in an implicit way that element becomes yet another racial and cultural commentary in this multi-layered sketch.

And then there’s the sketch’s framing story. Its portrayal of an African American man randomly and frustratingly targeted by a racist white cop has only become more resonant in the nearly 6 years since the sketch first aired, of course. And to my mind, the sketch’s single best line, and perhaps the single best line in any 21stcentury comic work, is the final twist, as the racist cop manhandles the innocent man into his police cruiser: “I thought I was going to Negrotown,” the man complains; to which the cop replies, “Oh, you are.” I’ve spent many years thinking about the evolving histories and issues of race and mass incarceration, as well as reading and teaching the vital work of folks like Michelle Alexander on those questions; and then along comes this talented comic duo to express all that in one pitch-perfect line and moment.

Next sketch tomorrow,

Ben

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

March 27-28, 2021: Reframing the Pilgrims

[March 22ndmarks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Indigenous New England histories, leading up to this weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

On a starting point for reframing our collective histories, and how we (and I) need to go beyond it.

Although it’s been significantly overshadowed by [gestures at everything in 2020-2021], the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower and the founding of the Plymouth colony remains a striking moment for American collective memory. For at least the last couple hundred years, the Pilgrims have functioned for many voices and conversations as a consistent shorthand for a national origin point, a narrative that we see everywhere from anthemic songs like Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” to counter-cultural poets like Sylvia Plath among many, many other places. Even those voices advancing an explicitly alternative or oppositional vision of American identity often use the Pilgrims in this foundational way, as illustrated by Malcolm X’s famous 1964 phrase for the origin point of African American history, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us!” The fact that Plymouth Rock is a mythological (and relatively recent) invention is, I would argue, precisely the point: this is about the creation and perpetuation of a national mythos, and the cultural work that such myths can do across the centuries.

If we’re going to start revising that collective national myth, the vital first step is to reframe Plymouth in the ways that the historic site formerly known as Plimoth Plantation has modeled: first by creating the new introductory film “Two Peoples: One Story,” and then by changing the site’s name to Plimoth Patuxet. Of course the Pilgrims and Plimoth Plantation are part of that foundational moment in American history, but so too are the Wampanoag and all the Indigenous peoples who were part of 17th century Patuxet—and more exactly and crucially, if we are to see that moment as one of the origin points for America, it has to be through the combination of those different cultures and communities, the origins of one story and place out of those multiple peoples. The phrase “E pluribus unum” (Latin for “out of many, one”) has appeared on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, but I really don’t think we’ve even begun to collectively engage with the most accurate and productive meanings of either of the phrase’s key terms: not the diverse collection of cultures and communities that should comprise the “many”; and not the inclusive vision of the nation constituted out of all those cultures that should define the “one.”

Those national reframings and redefinitions have been central goals of mine since at least my second book, Redefining American Identity. But of course I try, while working to share those ideas and perspectives with audiences of all kinds, to keep learning and evolving myself as well, and over the last year in particular I’ve come to believe that my critical optimism and critical patriotism have to be more fully complemented by an even deeper engagement with the darkest and most destructive American histories (an engagement I’ve certainly tried for, to be clear, but that requires further work). The Wampanoag and all their fellow Patuxet Indigenous cultures and communities have endured and continued to contribute significantly to American identity on countless levels—but they did so and have done so despite the best efforts of the English to at best exclude and far too often destroy these native peoples (efforts that the federal government has continued in recent years). Remembering those most horrific histories doesn’t mean dismissing the Pilgrims or Plymouth entirely—but it does mean foregrounding, just as the 1619 Project has done with slavery and African American history, that the most inspiring American communities have been those which have borne the brunt of these horrors and yet continued to exemplify the best of our collective identity.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?

March 26, 2021: Indigenous New England: Brothers Among Nations

[March 22ndmarks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Indigenous New England histories, leading up to a weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

On a different and more inspiring vision of the arrival era.

If you’ve been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I first advanced in this space in my December 5, 2011 post (and have returned to in many others since, including my second book) might be “So what?” I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in the “Whatwouldchange” seriesof posts (written the week that that aforementioned book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like “All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods.

When it comes to the arrival and contact period, for example, for a long time our national narratives of the first European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedyand Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many proteststhat met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s “discovery” for those cultures.

There’s certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt’s Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660(2008). Van Zandt’s book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17thand 18th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21stcentury lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?

March 25, 2021: Indigenous New England: The Mystic Massacre

[March 22ndmarks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Indigenous New England histories, leading up to a weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

On three texts that help us remember one of post-contact America’s earliest dark histories.

The central military action of the Pequot War(1636-37), the first large-scale conflict between the English and Native American communities in colonial New England, was the 1637 massacre of the Pequot village of Mystic (in modern-day Connecticut). A number of Puritan figures and historians wrote about the attack (including William Bradford in Of Plimoth Plantation), but perhaps the most telling such document was composed by military leader Captain John Underhill. In his account Underhill notes that mostly women, children, and the elderly were killed in the massacre (which was timed purposefully for a moment when the village’s warriors were on a raiding mission), and justifies that fact by writing, “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. … We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” Violence and brutality are inevitable in war, but directing them at non-combatants comprises another level of brutality—and using religion to rationalize such actions another level still (if a far-too common one).

Accompanying Underhill’s account of the massacre was a famous woodcutting that has become a central image through which the massacre is remembered (when it is remembered at all). The woodcutting certainly captures just how surrounded the village was, a detail that looks far different if we sympathize with the villagers more than Underhill himself was able to. But it also captures another and even more complex historical detail: the second circle of attackers are Native Americans, an attempt to include in the image the hundreds of Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic warriors who took part in the massacre as allies to the English and/or enemies to the Pequots. That Native American participation does not excuse the English in the slightest, neither for their overall impetus for the attack nor for their particular actions during it. But it does remind us of the quantity and variety of Native American tribes within even a relatively close geographic area, and of the individual and at times conflicting situations and needs facing each tribe (at any historical point, but doubly so in the post-contact era of course). That’s part of the story of Mystic as well, and one that the woodcutting accurately highlights.

While texts such as Underhill’s account and the woodcutting can thus reveal (if sometimes unintentionally) multiple layers to the massacre at Mystic, they nonetheless originated from and are ultimately driven by an English perspective on the battle. Also originating from the perspective of an Anglo American author, but working hard and well to create a Pequot perspective, is the pivotal Chapter IV in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s historical novel Hope Leslie (1827). As I highlighted at length in this early blog post, Sedgwick’s Magawisca—a composite fictional character who is the daughter of an actual historical figure, the Pequot chief Sassacus—offers in her long monologue (to her young English friend and potential love interest Everell Fletcher) about the Mystic massacre what Sedgwick’s narrator calls “a very different picture” of the battle. As with any historical fiction, and certainly any that seeks to cross cultural boundaries, Sedgwick’s chapter and novel are complex and open to critique as well as celebration (and everything in between). Yet I believe that Sedgwick succeeds on a number of levels in this chapter, perhaps especially in her portrayal of the profoundly human effects of the massacre and how those effects echoed and extended well beyond 1637. Such effects must be part of our collective memories of Mystic, and Sedgwick’s text helps us begin to engage them more fully.

Last Indigenous history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?

March 24, 2021: Indigenous New England: The Peace Treaty

[March 22ndmarks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of indigenous New England histories, leading up to a weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

On the English account of the Peace Treaty, and what it does and doesn’t help us remember.

At the start of Book Two of Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford details the colony’s first encounters with Samoset(an Abenaki chief) and Tisquantum (Squanto), the two men who together helped arrange the meeting and peace treaty with Massasoit (I’ve modernized the spelling in the quote):

“His name was Samoset; he told them also of another Indian whose name was Squanto, a native of this place, who had been in England & could speak better English than himself. Being, after some time of entertainment & gifts, dismissed, a while after he came again, & 5 more with him, & they brought again all the tools that were stolen away before, and made way for the coming of their great Sachem, called Massasoit who, about 4 or 5 days after, came with the chief of his friends & other attendance, with the aforesaid Squanto. With whom, after friendly entertainment, & some gifts given him, they made a peace with him (which hath now continued this 24 years) in these terms.

1. That neither he nor any of his, should injure or do hurt to any of their people.

2. That if any of his did any hurt to any of theirs, he should send the offender, that they might punish him.

3. That if anything were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to be restored; and they should do the like to his.

4. If any did unjustly war against him, they would aide him; if any did war against them, he should aide them.

5. He should send to his neighboring confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong them, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

6. That when their men came to them, they should leave their bows & arrows behind them.”

This treaty, and more exactly the way it reflects the Plymouth colony’s perspective on Massasoit and his people, helps us understand the communal event that took place nearly a year later, in the autumn of 1621, and that was known at the time as the Harvest Festival (and more recently as the First Thanksgiving). Massasoit and his Wampanoag tribe were not just friendly neighbors to the Plymouth settlers, they were political and military allies, and the Harvest Festival was very much the equivalent of a State Dinner, hosting the leader of an allied nation to cement such diplomatic relationships through a formal culinary occasion.

Bradford’s not wrong that that alliance and peace continued for decades (long beyond the 1640s momentin which he wrote this passage), and certainly helped ensure the Plymouth colony’s survival in those early years. But during that same period, the English fought an extensive, brutal war against another neighboring tribe, the 1637 conflict that came to be known as the Pequot War (and on which more in tomorrow’s post). There are all sorts of ways to analyze the almost thoroughgoing absence of that war from our collective memories and narratives of the Plymouth colony and early America, but I would certainly argue that our emphases on the peaceful origins and relationship between the English and the Wampanoag plays into that elision. So while we can and should celebrate this cross-cultural diplomacy, we can no longer let it contribute to the disappearance of the Pequot and the Pequot War from our historical awareness.

Next indigenous history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?