Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 143

March 23, 2021: Indigenous New England: Tisquantum

[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 most inspiring and most horrific sides to a foundational American life, and how to remember both.

I’ve made the case for an inspiring take on the life and influence of the Patuxet man named Tisquantum (and known to the English and in much of our collective memories as Squanto) both on this blog and in my Saturday Evening Post Considering Historycolumn, and for this post’s first point will ask you to check those pieces out if you would and then come on back here for more.

Welcome back! In that Considering History column I also highlighted some of the far darker sides to Tisquantum’s story: his 1614 kidnapping and enslavement by English explorer and slaver Thomas Hunt; his five or so years of slavery across much of the early 17thcentury Atlantic world; and his discovery upon his return to New England in 1619 (with another English slave-owner, Thomas Dermer) that the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been destroyed by an epidemic brought upon them by European arrivals. Those horrors don’t just delineate the cost that Tisquantum had to pay for his status as a foundational cross-cultural American (a defining national identity for which I’ve been arguing since at least my second book, and even earlier on this blog); they remind us that the multiple layers of genocide (at times somewhat accidental but also and especially profoundly purposeful) we now rightly associate with Christopher Columbus were just as present and destructive for indigenous cultures in New England, and indeed everywhere in the Americas.

Remembering Tisquantum requires us to recognize those historic horrors, and to consider their effects on individuals like him as well as on entire cultures. To celebrate the ways in which he sought to use his cross-cultural experiences and identity (such as his ability to speak English) to connect indigenous and European cultures does not and cannot mean eliding those horrors, nor the implication of all European arrivals to the Americas in them. But at the same time, it’s vitally important not to see indigenous peoples solely or centrally as victims, no more in the 17th century than in the 21st. Even in the face of those settler colonial horrors and violences, individuals like Tisquantum—and cultures like the Wampanoag as a whole—chose to model a very different form of community, one that we can see as a distinct foundation for American history (a topic to which I’ll return throughout the week, and especially in the weekend post). That’s far from the only lens through which to view contact and conflict in 17th century New England, but to my mind it’s a crucial one.

Next indigenous history tomorrow,

Ben

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

March 22, 2021: Indigenous New England: The Wampanoag

[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.]

Rather than pretend that I’m any kind of expert on the Wampanoag tribes, I wanted to start this series by highlighting a handful of vital voices and resources from which I’ve learned and we can all learn a great deal about these New England native nations:

1)      Linda Coombs: I’ve had the chance to work with and learn from Linda since the 2011 New England American Studies Association Conference at Plymouth Plantation, and am still learning from her through our work together on America the Atlas this year. In my experience, there’s no voice, historian, scholar, activist, and community member who has more to tell us about the histories, identities, and ongoing story of the Wampanoag than Linda.  

2)      The Aquinnah Cultural Center: While Linda lives and works in the Cape Cod indigenous community of Mashpee (on which more in a moment), she is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard, and has worked quite a bit over the years at the tribe’s Aquinnah Cultural Center (also known as the Aquinnah Wampanoag Indian Museum, and located near the historic Gay Head cliffs and lighthouse). I don’t know any space, in-person or online, that has more to tell us about the tribes and their histories and culture.

3)      Dawnland Voices: Much of what I’d want to say about the wonderful Dawnland Voices anthology (now also an evolving website) was said by my friend and the project’s editor Siobhan Senier in that hyperlinked Guest Post. It can feel at times difficult to connect with the voices and perspectives of pre-contact indigenous communities (including the Wampanoag), in part because much of what was published for many centuries came from (or at the very least was filtered by) European American arrivals and cultures. But Dawnland Voices has helped change all that, and as a result is a truly must-read text and collection of voices.

4)      The Wampanoag Homesite: After a few years when I spent quite a bit of time at and around that Plimoth Plantation (now renamed Plimoth Patuxet), both because of my 2011 NEASA Conference and because both boys went there on 4th grade field trips, I haven’t had the chance to get down there in a while (not , in fact). So I’m not sure whether and how they’ve continued to develop my favorite element, the Wampanoag Homesite. But I sure hope that visitors (post-COVID, at least) can continue to learn from the indigenous performers and historians who share Wampanoag and other cultural and communal histories, information, and present realities at that vital interpretative space.

5)      Mashpee: I’ve written a lot, in this space and elsewhere, about the complex and vital histories of the Mashpee community, as well as their ongoing 21stcentury battle for sovereignty and survival. It’s that final subject that I want to emphasize once more here: the Mashpee Wampanoag, like the Aquinnah Wampanoag and every other indigenous tribe and nation, are entirely present in our 21st century American society, in its political and social divisions and debates, and in our overarching identity and community. All the more reason to listen to and learn from these voices and resources.

Next indigenous history tomorrow,

Ben

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

March 20-21, 2021: Sharing Of Thee I Sing

[In honor of the official March 15th release of Of Thee I Sing, this week’s series has highlighted exemplary American critical patriots. Leading up to this weekend update on the many ways I’ve been able to share the book over the last few months, and my request for opportunities to keep doing so!]

As I highlighted this past weekend, I’ve created a blog page that lists all the past, present, and future book talks, podcast episodes, and columns on Of Thee I Sing. I’ll keep updating that with links and info as things develop, and it’ll always be linked on the right-hand column of this blog as well. The next virtual talk is next Saturday, March 27th, at 2pm for the great local indie bookstore Toadstool Books!

As of the morning I’m drafting this post (Friday, March 19th), Of Thee I Sing is Amazon’s #1 new release in Civil Rights, which is profoundly moving to me. One of my book’s central arguments is that critical patriotism is embodied in protest, and most especially protests for rights for all Americans, for equality and justice for all. It means a lot to have my book in conversation with all the other great ones that address such histories and issues, and I'd love to talk more about those connections in book talks & pieces of all kinds. (After I scheduled this post, it looked like the book became also the #1 new release in Political History, which is fun to think about too!)

Finally (for now!), I’ll just reiterate that I’d really love the chance to talk about the book and the contested history of American patriotism with any and all audiences and communities—not just bookstores, libraries and cultural sites, podcasts, and the others listed on the above page, but also (and in some ways especially) classes and student communities, book and reading groups, websites and online spaces, and other conversations. Please feel free to reach out (here or by email) with ideas, leads, invites, whatever you’ve got!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben                                                                                      

PS. So what do you think? Communities and audiences with which I could share the book and the contested histories of American patriotism?

March 19, 2021: Models of Critical Patriotism: MLK and Baldwin, Kaepernick and the 1619 Project

[In honor of the official March 15th release of Of Thee I Sing, a series on exemplary American critical patriots. Leading up to a weekend update on the many ways I’ve been able to share the book over the last few months, and my request for opportunities to keep doing so!]

I’ve written about critical patriotism a good bit over the last year, including for both the History News Network (HNN) and the United States Intellectual History (USIH) blog. But I would say that I expressed both my vision of the concept and my case for its vital importance most clearly in this January 2020 Saturday Evening PostConsidering History column on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Colin Kaepernick, the 1619 Project, and more!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

March 18, 2021: Models of Critical Patriotism: America is in the Heart

[In honor of the official March 15th release of Of Thee I Sing, a series on exemplary American critical patriots. Leading up to a weekend update on the many ways I’ve been able to share the book over the last few months, and my request for opportunities to keep doing so!]

On an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.

One of my bigger pet peeves with the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).

Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial book A Different Mirror (1993),recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American migrant worker, novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, deeply moving, and critically patriotic novel America is in the Heart (1946).

For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence the designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar)—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath. But despite that tone, Heart’s ultimate trajectory (like that of Steinbeck’s novel, which is why I paired them in a chapter in my fourth book) is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful. That’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully, as a unique and potent literary model of critical patriotism.

Last model of critical patriotism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

March 17, 2021: Models of Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the Centennial Exposition

[In honor of the official March 15th release of Of Thee I Sing, a series on exemplary American critical patriots. Leading up to a weekend update on the many ways I’ve been able to share the book over the last few months, and my request for opportunities to keep doing so!]

On national divisions and critical patriotism at America’s 100th birthday celebration.

Birthday parties tend to bring out both the best and the worst in those being celebrated, so perhaps it should be no surprise that America’s 100th birthday party, the Centennial Exposition held over the six months between May and November of 1876 in Philadelphia’s newly designed Fairmount Park, was nothing if not profoundly divided in all sorts of complex ways. I’ve written at length (in the Intro to my first book) about the most defining such division, between the Exposition’s ostensible purpose (to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and thus reflect on America’s historical origins and identity) and its central focus and tone (a thoroughly forward-looking celebration of the nation’s material and cultural prowess and possibilities for continued upward progress). But on any number of specific issues and themes the Exposition displayed similarly multiple personalities: for example, it featured the first American statue dedicated to an African American figure (African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen) but also included a restaurant known as the Southern Restaurant where a group of “old-time darkies” continually serenaded patrons with happy songs of the antebellum South.

Of the many such divisions and contradictions present on and around the Exposition grounds, though, I don’t know that any were as striking as those connected to women’s identities, perspectives, and issues. The Exposition was the first World’s Fair to include women’s voices in a central way, both in planning (through an all-female Women’s Centennial Executive Committee) and on the ground (through the Women’s Pavilion that was created as a result of that committee’s efforts and fundraising). The Pavilion was certainly a striking success in many respects, featuring work created and designed solely by women; yet it was equally striking for the near-complete absence of political perspectives or issues, including the most prominent such issue of the period, women’s suffrage. Since the inception of the Women’s Committee organizations such as the National Woman Suffrage Association had protested the absence of such perspectives and voices from the committee and in the planning process, not only from a representational standpoint but through the lens of a particularly salient irony: that women from around the country were asked to contribute money and support to this federal organization, but could not themselves vote in a federal (or any other kind of) election. The NWSA in fact scheduled their national meeting for Philadelphia in May, on the same day that the Exposition (including the Women’s Pavilion) opened, presenting another division within that city and moment for sure.

Yet the most overt and symbolic (yet also very real and critically patriotic) such division would be presented on July 4th. On that day, for obvious reasons, the Exposition reached its fever pitch, with numerous activities and events focused around a main stage where impressive speakers and Americans gathered to lead the festivities. The NWSA asked if they could be a part of that stage and those festivities and were refused, but in truly American (and Revolutionary) fashion they created a second stage of their own elsewhere on the grounds. From that stage they read the full text of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments of Women,” a text that had been initially composed for the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY, and had become as much a founding document for this organization and cause as the Declaration of Independence was for the nation of which they were a complicated but vital part. Those contrasting stages were only one of many July 4th, 1876 events that highlighted such complex national conversations and divisions—word was just reaching the East on this day of Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn; a group of parading black militiamen in Hamburg, South Carolina refused to cede the sidewalk to a white group, leading to a violent reprisal and the start of multiple days of anti-black violence in the town—but their location and proximity can drive home just how multi-vocal America was in this Centennial year, and in particular how much critical patriots like these suffrage activists were adding their voices to the mix.

Next critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

March 16, 2021: Models of Critical Patriotism: “Eulogy on King Philip”

[In honor of the official March 15th release of Of Thee I Sing, a series on exemplary American critical patriots. Leading up to a weekend update on the many ways I’ve been able to share the book over the last few months, and my request for opportunities to keep doing so!]

On one speech that offers two complementary models of critical patriotism.

Many of the ways I’d make the case for William Apess as an exemplary American critical patriot were summed up in this post. I don’t think it’s the slightest bit hyperbolic to describe Apess as the 19th century’s Martin Luther King Jr.—a fiery preacher of supreme oratorical and rhetorical talents who dedicated his life to pursuing civil and human rights for his people and for all his fellow citizens of the world, one whose life was tragically cut short but who achieved a great deal in that time and has left a lasting legacy down into our own. If Apess’ era had had the technology to record and broadcast his speeches, or even to publish his writings in more mass-market ways, I have no doubt that we’d listen to and read his voice and words alongside those of King (and yesterday’s subject Frederick Douglass) and our other most potent orators. And however and wherever we encounter them, we consistently find in Apess’ works models of bitingly critical yet still patriotic visions of our shared American society, community, identity, and history.

In that prior post I focused on Apess’ 1833 essay/sermon “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” but I would argue that his critical patriotism is best illustrated by his January 1836 speech “Eulogy on King Philip.” Delivered at Boston’s Odeon lecture and concert hall, which had opened the year before and would go on to host speeches and readings by such luminaries as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe, Apess’ stunning speech uses his own life story and mixed-race heritage (as scholar Patricia Bizzell traces at length in this excellent piece) to argue for his alternative vision of American history, community, and identity. While much of the speech is as righteously angry about both past injustices and present oppressions as was “Looking-Glass,” the final lines, addressed overtly to his (likely entirely non-native) audience, reflect the optimistic core of Apess’ critical patriotism: “You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers’ crimes; neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it; and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever, is the wish of a poor Indian.”

While Apess thus ranges across a number of topics and themes in the course of his speech, its central focus is indeed King Philip (Metacomet), the 17th century Wampanoag chief and distant ancestor of Apess’ mother who was and remains best known in American collective memory for the 1670s war that came to bear his name. Yet from the start of his speech, Apess presents a stunning shift in those narratives, arguing that this supposed enemy of the English should be collectively remembered instead as a revolutionary hero: “so will every patriot, especially in this enlightened age, respect the rude yet all accomplished son of the forest, that died a martyr to his cause, though unsuccessful, yet as glorious as the American Revolution.” Arguing for that vision of Philip, in the same 1830s Boston that was cementing its collective narratives of the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, was as bold a rhetorical move as Douglass’ July 4thspeech. Yet if we can see the Massachusetts Puritans and the Wampanoags as two founding American cultures (as I’ve argued multiple times in this space and elsewhere), there’s no reason why we can’t see Philip as a revolutionary, critical patriot, one whose tragic end shouldn’t overshadow his work toward a collective American community.

Next critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

March 15, 2021: Models of Critical Patriotism: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”

[In honor of the official March 15th release of Of Thee I Sing, a series on exemplary American critical patriots. Leading up to a weekend update on the many ways I’ve been able to share the book over the last few months, and my request for opportunities to keep doing so!]

On the stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 165 years ago.

I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and their Revolutionary-era peers. Freeman and Walker, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked, used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence (along with the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution) in support of their anti-slavery petitions and legal victories, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in this piece) that black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Freeman and Walker’s cases were representative ones, either in their era or at any time in the more than two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor would I want to use Freeman and Walker’s successful legal victories as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include (indeed, embody) a central strain of hypocrisy.

If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.

As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Freeman and Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to begin this week’s series on critical patriotism with Douglass’s speech. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American enslaved person is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Freeman and Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrisies and flaws. And despite the ridiculous recent attacks on “too negative” histories or the concept of “apologizing for America,” there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement with precisely the critically patriotic lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.

Next critical patriot tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?

March 13-14, 2021: Of Thee I Sing update!

On Monday, my new book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, goes on sale everywhere! (You’re also still able to get it for 30% off, both print and e-book versions, through rowman.com with the discount code RLFANDF30, if you’re interested.) This coming week I’ll highlight figures, texts, and histories that exemplify the concept of critical patriotism, one of the book’s central topics. So this weekend I just quickly wanted to share this new page I’ve created with past and future book talks, podcasts, and articles on the book, and which I’ll keep updating as more develop. If you have ideas or leads for future such conversations, in any format, please let me know!

Critical patriotism series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Got ideas or questions about the book or the history of patriotism in America? Lemme know!

March 12, 2021: Spring Break Films: Baywatch

[Like many universities, Fitchburg State cancelled Spring Break for this academic year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t jet off to Daytona Beach in our imaginations, with the help of the Spring Break films I’ll AmericanStudy this week. Share your own Spring Break texts or contexts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll have a little umbrella in its drink!]

[NB. Yes, I know Baywatch is neither a Spring Break film nor a film at all (I’m writing about the TV show, not the film adaptation, here). But this is one of my favorite posts of all time and I couldn’t resist a chance to share it once more!]

On why those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.

Back in the blog’s early days, I humorously but also earnestly noted that to a dedicated AmericanStudier, any text, even Baywatch, is a possible site of complex analysis. I stand by that possibility, and will momentarily offer proof of same. But before I do, it’s important to foreground the basic but crucial reason for Baywatch’s existence and popularity, one succinctly highlighted by Friends’ Joey and Chandler: pretty people running in slow-motion in bathing suits. While I plan to make a bit more of the show and its contexts and meanings than that, it’d be just plain cray-cray to pretend that either the show’s intent or its audience didn’t focus very fully on those beautiful bodies. Moreover, such an appeal was nothing new or unique—while the beach setting differentiated Baywatch a bit, I would argue that most prime-time soap operas have similarly depended on the attractiveness of their casts to keep their audiences tuning in.

If Baywatch was partly a prime-time soap opera, however, it would also be possible to define the show’s genre differently: in relationship to both the police and medical dramas that were beginning to dominate the TV landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baywatch debuted in 1989). After all, the show’s plotlines typically included both rescues and crimes; while the lifeguards often dealt with romantic and interpersonal drama as well, so too did the docs of ER or the cops of Miami Vice (to name two of the era’s many entries in these genres). Seen in this light, and particularly when compared to the period’s police dramas, Baywatch was relatively progressive in the gender balance of its protagonists—compared to another California show, CHiPs, for example, which similarly featured pretty people solving promised land problems but which focused almost entirely on male protagonists. Yes, the women of Baywatch were beautiful and dressed skimpily—but the same could be said of the men, and both genders were equally heroic as well.

The creators of Baywatch tried to make the cop show parallel overt with the ill-fated detective spinoff Baywatch Nights, about which the less said the better (even AmericanStudiers have their limits). But the problem with Baywatch Nightswasn’t just its awfulness (Baywatchitself wasn’t exactly The Wire, after all), it was that it missed a crucial element to the original show’s success: the beach. And no, I’m not talking about the bathing suits. I would argue that the most prominent 1970s and 1980s cultural images of the beach were Jawsand its many sequels and imitators, a set of images that made it seem increasingly less safe to go back in the water. And then along came David Hasselhoff, Pam Anderson, and company, all determined to take back the beaches and shift our cultural images to something far more pleasant and attractive than . Whatever you think of the show, is there any doubt that they succeeded, forever inserting themselves and their slow-mo running into our cultural narratives of the beach?

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Responses to this show or other Spring Break texts you’d share?