Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 145

February 27-28, 2021: Adam Golub’s Guest Post on Creativity and American Studies

 [Adam Golub is Professor and Graduate Advisor in the phenomenal American Studies program at Cal State Fullerton. Along with Heather Richardson Hayton he edited the wonderful collection Monsters in the Classroom, and writes and teaches about a wide and deep variety of American Studies subjects. And he’s one of my oldest Twitter follows and connections, and I’m so excited to finally share a Guest Post of his on the blog!]

In his 2018 book Creative Quest, musician Questlove examines the role of creativity in everyday life and offers a guide to the creative process. Questlove, the drummer and co-frontman for the hip-hop band The Roots, writes that creativity is the “personality that makes it possible that something new and somehow valuable can be formed.” How does one foster this creative personality? Creative Quest abounds with Questlove’s insights and advice. For example, the would-be creative should encourage their own “cognitive disinhibition,” and permit oneself a “wider range of ideas.” Creative types should “try to always be inspired by something surprising—or to surprise yourself by always being inspired.” Creativity is about “refusing to keep things out.” To be creative is to “pay attention to seeds,” to be a “tourist in other perspectives,” and to “unfocus your eyes in the right way.” Ultimately, a creative person is “anyone who is making something out of nothing by virtue of their own ideas.” 

Reading Creative Quest, I couldn’t help but think about American Studies. Questlove’s book is one of many meditations on creative thinking that have captured our imagination in recent years—"creativity studies” is newly in vogue in education, business, and artistic circles. In light of this resurgent interest in creativity, I think it is worth reflecting on the myriad ways American Studies is itself a creative field. After all, in American Studies, we effectively practice “cognitive disinhibition” by refusing to be confined by conventional disciplines, methods, archives, or areas of inquiry. In our study of relationships between diverse cultural “texts” (broadly conceived—a song, a statue, a sermon, a gesture, a shirt, a game, a Tweet…), we pay attention to seeds and refuse to keep things out. As we uncover hidden histories and counter memories, we unfocus our eyes from master narratives and give voice to marginalized and silenced perspectives. American Studies is about interdisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, is about creating something new that belongs to no one.

In his oft-cited and oft-assigned essay, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies” (1979), Gene Wise characterizes American Studies as the practice of the “connecting imagination.” While we in the field have talked much about the “connecting” part of Wise’s formulation—in American Studies, we build connections among diverse texts, contexts, disciplines, and publics—I wonder if we’ve fully explored the “imagination” part of his phrase. What is the role of imagination in American Studies? How is American Studies creative? How does the field cultivate a creative mindset and encourage creative work? 

I certainly think American Studies is a field that values play. We play with cultural puzzle pieces, trying to make meaningful connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena and experiences. In doing so, we recombine, we refashion, we remix, we rearrange in order to discover new interlocking webs of meaning. In The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World (2017), Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman argue that new ideas evolve as the result of three cognitive operations: bending, breaking, and blending. “Bending” is when “an original is modified or twisted out of shape.” “Breaking” is when a “whole is taken apart.” And “blending” is when “two or more sources are merged.” American Studies is arguably the studio where we are given free license to bend, break, and blend cultural texts, historical narratives, and the stuff of everyday life. The field invites joyous exploration. We play to innovate.   

American Studies is also an intellectual project invested in creating new visions of culture. The field has an activist tradition, one that strives to reach outside of the classroom and “go public.” American Studies is not just an interdisciplinary mode of analysis; it is a public practice. Through critical pedagogy and public engagement, American Studies endeavors to make us all take another look at the taken for granted, to understand the workings of power and oppression, to learn to listen for the silences in our cultural mythos. And American Studies recognizes that there are ways to communicate new knowledge to the public beyond the traditional research paper and the academic monograph. When we “go public” in American Studies, we try to innovate new and different ways to “decolonize minds and imaginations,” as bell hooks puts it. We study culture, and then we try to create it.

I suspect there are many more ways that American Studies involves creative work, and I’ve only imagined a few here. If it is true that the 21st century has seen the rise of what is called the “creative economy,” and that more jobs today require college graduates to possess cognitive flexibility, the drive to innovate, and the ability to rephrase problems as questions, then it seems worthwhile for American Studies to reflect on the role it can play in cultivating a creative mindset in students. Beyond this, though, I think it is important to consider the value of simply trying to lead a creative life. In her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015), Elizabeth Gilbert posits that “a creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life.” Similarly, in The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday (2019), Rob Walker observes that trying “to stay eager, to connect… to notice what everybody else overlooks” are all important, skills-wise, for a creative thinker, but to live this way is also just delightful. And good for the soul.

If we conceive of American Studies as creative work, we open the possibility that it may not just be about the practice of cultural analysis. American Studies could very well inspire us to lead an amplified life of joyous exploration, one where we constantly dwell in the possibility of making something new. A creative quest, indeed. 

 [Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies projects or work you'd highlight?]

February 27-28, 2021: February 2021 Recap

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

February 1: Sports in 2021: COVID: A Super Bowl series on sports in 2021 kicks off with playing & watching sports during a pandemic, past and present.

February 2: Sports in 2021: Activism: The series continues with the huge step that athlete activists took in 2020, and where we go from here.

February 3: Sports in 2021: The Olympics: The limits of traditions and how one can potentially evolve into something better, as the series plays on.

February 4: Sports in 2021: The NCAA: What this year has revealed and reaffirmed about college athletics, and what’s still possible.

February 5: Sports in 2021: Banning Football?: Revisiting a prior and still relevant debate at my university.

February 6-7: Sports in 2021: Revolutionary Change: The series concludes with how the evolution of black quarterbacks reveals how sports can challenge and change their and our limits.

February 8: Short Stories I Love: “My Kinsman,  Major Molineux”: My annual Valentine’s Day series focuses on short stories I love, starting with Hawthorne’s ambiguous historical fiction.

February 9: Short Stories I Love: “The Tenth of January”: The series continues with a short story that combines local color and sentimental fiction, and becomes so much more.

February 10: Short Stories I Love: “A Sweatshop Romance”: Romance and realism and why they don’t have to be at odds, as the series reads on.

February 11: Short Stories I Love: “Yellow Woman”: A more problematic kind of fictional ambiguity and why it’s well worth reading nonetheless.

February 12: Short Stories I Love: 21st Century Stories: The series concludes with a host of contemporary short stories and authors I love.

February 13-14: Short Stories I Love: Ilene Railton’s Stories: A Valentine’s weekend special post on the evolving career of my favorite writer, and why we should all be following it.

February 15: Non-Favorite American Myths: The First Thanksgiving: For my annual non-favorites series, a collection of non-favorite national myths begins “The First Thanksgiving.”

February 16: Non-Favorite American Myths: Pocahontas: The series continues with some of the myths behind one of our most mythologized historical figures.

February 17: Non-Favorite American Myths: George Washington: Three of the many inaccuracies at the heart of the Washington mythos, as the series trolls on.

February 18: Non-Favorite American Myths: The Self-Made Man: How a national mythos develops, and the multiple reasons why it’s so destructive.

February 19: Non-Favorite American Myths: The Greatest Generation: The series concludes with the limits to a mythic vision of an iconic American community.

February 20-21: Crowd-sourced Non-Favorites: Another installment in one of my favorite posts of the year, the crowd-sourced airing of grievances!

February 22: Florida Histories: The Treaty of Adams-Onís: On the Treaty’s anniversary, a FloridaStudying series kicks off with how the historic agreement that brought Florida into the US reveals the darker sides to American expansion.

February 23: Florida Histories: St. Augustine: The series continues with how and why to better remember the foundational Hispanic American community.

February 24: Florida Histories: The Everglades: The very American story of the woman who saved the Everglades, as the series rolls on.

February 25: Florida Histories: Parkland: What’s frustratingly not new and what’s inspiringly changed when it comes to an infamous school shooting.

February 26: Florida Histories: Cuban American Artists: The series concludes with a trio of exemplary Cuban American musical artists.

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!

February 26, 2021: Florida Histories: Cuban American Artists

[On February 22, 1819, the Treaty of Adams-Onis that brought Florida into the United States was initially negotiated; this year marks the 200th anniversary of its 1821 ratification as the Transcontinental Treaty. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Treaty and other Florida histories!]

On a trio of talented and influential Cuban American musical artists who also reflect their respective generations and periods.

1)      Arturo Sandoval (born 1949): Sandoval, one of the 20th century’s most talented and influential jazz trumpeters and composers(and he’s still going strong into the 21st!), first became a force within the worlds of jazz and music while still in Cuba: he helped establish the Orquestra Cubana de Música Moderna in 1967 (when he was only 18), and began touring with his own band shortly thereafter; in 1982 he toured with the legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and they began a close working and personal relationship. It while on a 1990 world tour with Gillespie that Sandoval defected to the U.S. embassy in Rome, beginning the Cuban American stage of his life and career that included his 1998 citizenship and his 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Although, again, he has continued to work prolifically in recent years, and although any figure this pioneering unquestionably transcends historical circumstances, Sandoval’s connections to both jazz and to Cold War Cuban and American dynamics embody the baby boom generation in many ways.

2)      Gloria Estefan (born 1957): Although she was born only eight years after Sandoval (and left Cuba long before him, in 1960 as her family fled Castro’s revolution), I would nonetheless locate salsa and pop singer, songwriter, and superstar (and now businesswoman and entrepreneur) Estefan in a subsequent generation and artistic period. “Conga,” the 1985 song that launched Estefan and her band Miami Sound Machine (she had been singing with them since 1977, when they were known as Miami Latin Boys) into international superstardom, mixes Latino rhythms and influences with the legacy of disco and the currents of 80s pop, yielding a new sound that would make Estefan and the band into perennial chart-toppers for the rest of the decade. After Estefan went solo in 1991 with the album Into the Light, she continued to build on those interconnected musical and cultural influences over subsequent decades, moving back and forth between English and Spanish songs and albums in the process (and receiving her own Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with her husband and lifelong collaborator Emilio, in 2015). In all those ways, Estefan reflects the evolution of popular music and culture in and after the 1980s, an evolution that continues to shape our 21st century world in every way.

3)      Pitbull (born 1981): Armando Christian Pérez, the Cuban-American rapper and producer known by his stage name Pitbull, is the only one of these three artists to be born in the United States; his parents had fled Cuba many years earlier, and he was born in Miami (a fact he includes in many, many songs). It is thus perhaps no coincidence that Pitbull has risen to musical prominence in the genre of rap, one of the most uniquely American musical genres; while it’s true that he frequently raps in Spanish as well as English, I would (as any reader of this blog likely knows) call that a distinctly American combination as well. So it’s certainly possible to say that Pitbull represents an overtly post-Cuban identity and generation, one where Cuba is of course a heritage but where the United States—not only geographically, but in its art and pop culture—is the central presence and influence. Yet at the same time, we AmericanStudiers know that identity, community, and culture are never that simple—and in this particular case, Miami in particular is a setting that over the last half century has come to be defined as fully by Cuba as by any influence. So Pitbull really reflects a new Cuban-American generation and community, one helping them and all of us move into the 21st century.

February Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Florida histories or stories you’d highlight?

February 25, 2021: Florida Histories: Parkland

[On February 22, 1819, the Treaty of Adams-Onis that brought Florida into the United States was initially negotiated; this year marks the 200th anniversary of its 1821 ratification as the Transcontinental Treaty. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Treaty and other Florida histories!]

[NB. I initially wrote this post for my 2018 year in review series, but I believe it’s topics are only more relevant still here in early 2021.]

On what’s not new, kind of new, and entirely new about our worst contemporary tragedies.

Seven years ago to the day, I wrote a year in review piece on the January 2011 Gabrielle Giffords shooting, and on how pioneering scholar Richard Slotkin’s AmericanStudies analyses of violence and guns in American history and identity could help us understand such shocking and disturbing acts of political and social violence. The fact that I’m writing a year in review piece seven years later about another mass shooting—and, more exactly, the fact that I could have picked any one of the almost literally countless other 2018 mass shootings as a starting point for this post; although we must keep counting, and must keep thinking about each of them and their victims individually—proves Slotkin’s theses and then some. The final book of Slotkin’s trilogy called America a “gunfighter nation,” and hardly a day has gone by in 2018 that hasn’t featured literal, painfully exemplary acts of gun-fighting. Indeed, one of the most frustratingly common responses to such mass shootings—the idea that we just need more guns and shooters to intervene—represents yet another layer to that symbolic but all-too-real gunfighter nation mythos.

So we’ve always been a nation deeply linked to images and realities of violence and guns, and mass shootings like the February 14th, 2018 massacre at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have to be put in that longstanding and foundational American context. But at the same time, no AmericanStudier or American historian (or even slightly knowledgeable and engaged observer of American society) could possibly argue that mass shootings have not become more ubiquitous, more of a fact of American daily life, over the last few years; that whatever the longstanding impulses or inclinations to which they connect, these horrific acts of mass violence have not found more consistent outlets in the 21st century. Or, to put it more exactly and crucially, that white Americans have not been forced to deal with the threat of mass violence more fully—as African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans(among other groups) can attest, such threats have been part of the American experience of too many communities for centuries. But in 2018, the threat of mass violence has for the first time become a genuine possibility for every American community at every moment and in every space, from night clubs to synagogues, supermarketsto high schools.

That constant threat comprises a dark new reality, perhaps especially for American parents (my sons have to do monthly active shooter drills in their schools, something I can’t quite bear to dwell on). But in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, young students at the high school also modeled another and very different new reality: a generation willing and able to use their voices, their social media presence, and their activist acumen to challenge such dark histories and their causes. We’ve only just begun to see the potential effects of this group of young people and the broader generation they represent, although the November midterm elections certainly exemplified the kinds of victories this cohort can help produce. But while electoral and political results are certainly important, the fundamental truth is that the Parkland students have already and significantly changed the conversation, making clear that both gun victims and student communities will have a say in the ongoing debate around mass shootings and guns in the United States.

Last Florida history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Florida histories or stories you’d highlight?

February 24, 2021: Florida Histories: The Everglades

[On February 22, 1819, the Treaty of Adams-Onis that brought Florida into the United States was initially negotiated; this year marks the 200th anniversary of its 1821 ratification as the Transcontinental Treaty. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Treaty and other Florida histories!]

On the very American story of the woman who helped save the Everglades.

Over the last few years, the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas has likely and tragically become synonymous with the Parkland, Florida mass shooting in February at the high school named for her. But while of course we can and should continue remembering the Douglas High shooting (and celebrating the amazing group of Parkland students who have turned that tragedy into an occasion for activism, on whom more in tomorrow’s post), Marjory Stoneman Douglas deserves separate and full commemoration as well. In a 108-year life that spanned nearly all of the 20th century (she was born in April 1890 and passed away in May 1998), Marjory Stoneman experienced a number of striking and very telling moments, including many by the time she turned 25: from watching her mother, concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen, get committed to a mental hospital in Providence for being “high-strung” to attending Wellesley College and helping form its first suffrage club; from a brief marriage to charming con artist Kenneth Douglas (who was already married at the time and subsequently attempted to defraud Marjory’s father) to a groundbreaking 1915 divorce and move to Miami (then a small town of less than 5000) to rejoin her father and join the staff of his decade-old newspaper The Miami Herald.

For the next few decades, Douglas (she continued to go by her married name for the rest of her life) made quite a name for herself as a South Florida (and national) journalist and literary figure. (After serving in both the navy and the Red Cross during World War I.) Besides her work for the Herald, which included long stints as Book Review Editor and Assistant Editor, she also worked extensively as a freelance and creative writer; she published forty stories in the Saturday Evening Post, for example, and also wrote a number of one-act plays for the Miami Theater as well as the foreword to the WPA’s 1941 guide to Miami. Around that same time, however, Douglas became involved with the cause that would define her second half-century of life, and all of America, very fully. The publisher Farrar & Rinehartapproached her to write a book on the Miami River for their new Rivers of America series; as she began her research Douglas found herself unimpressed by the river but profoundly moved by the Everglades, and convinced F&R to let her research and write a book on them instead. She spent five years researching and writing, working closely with geologist Garald Parker, and the result was The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a monumental achievement that sold out its initial printing in a month and remains one of the most significant and influential works of American naturalism.

River of Grass was just the beginning, however (and not even that, as Douglas had been fighting for local environmental causes for decades by that time). Over the next half-century, Douglas would more than earn her nickname “Grande Dame of Everglades,” waging continual war to protect and preserve the wetlands from developers, politicians, corporations, sport hunters and fishermen, and just about every other adversary one could imagine. Douglas titled the last chapter of River of Grass “The Eleventh Hour,” warning that the region was on the brink of destruction; but in December of that same year Everglades National Park was dedicated, and thanks to those federal protections and Douglas’s lifelong efforts, the area instead has become the largest tropical wilderness in the US and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi. No individual can achieve such milestones single-handedly, of course; but at the same time, American history reminds us time and again of the power a determined and impressive individual can have to help shape the future. Marjory Stoneman Douglas most definitely did so for the Everglades and South Florida—and having had the good fortune to visit the Glades a few times as a kid (my maternal grandparents had retired to South Florida), I can testify that she helped preserve a truly unique and amazing American space.

Next Florida history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Florida histories or stories you’d highlight?

February 23, 2021: Florida Histories: St. Augustine

[On February 22, 1819, the Treaty of Adams-Onís that brought Florida into the United States was initially negotiated; this year marks the 200th anniversary of its 1821 ratification as the Transcontinental Treaty. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Treaty and other Florida histories!]

First, a couple paragraphs from We the People on the foundational Hispanic American histories exemplified by St. Augustine:

“So these longstanding Mexican American communities were threatened, oppressed, and often dispossessed and displaced in the decades after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. During the same period, and in direct relationship to those unfolding histories, collective memories and national narratives often defined the Hispanic American presence in the United States in overtly exclusionary ways. That presence was a far older one than that of any other European culture or community in America, with a continually occupied city like Florida’s St. Augustine having been settled by Spanish arrivals in 1565, nearly half a century before the English arrived in Jamestown. Yet in the terms of these exclusionary narratives, Hispanic communities constituted part of the prior history of these American territories, thus rendering them fundamentally outside of and foreign to the new and evolving, overtly non-Hispanic “American” communities in these places.

One way to challenge those narratives and argue for an alternative, inclusive vision of these places, and of America through them, is to note that numerous Hispanic and Mexican American communities did not go anywhere, resisting these oppressions and exclusions, remaining part of these changing American spaces, and evolving with them in the decades and now centuries beyond the treaty. That’s true of St. Augustine, to this day the longest continually occupied European American community and one that features sites and monuments which foreground that Hispanic American heritage and presence, including statues to Juan Ponce de Léon (the region’s first Spanish explorer), Pedro Menéndez (the city’s founder), and Father Pedro Camps (the spiritual leader of one of the city’s most significant Hispanic immigrant communities, the Minorcans). But it’s also and even more tellingly true of many spaces within the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s purview, including both the Tejano community of South Texas and the Old Town community in San Diego.”

I said much of what I want to highlight here in that excerpt, but here will add one additional and important 21st century effect of better remembering that foundational history and community. To this day, the Spanish language is perceived as a new part of American society, whether in a racist way (such as the whole “Why do I have to press 1 for English?” narrative) or in a supportive way (such as those voices who support including Spanish more in such public and collective spaces). But in truth, the exact opposite is true: Spanish is the oldest European American language, and has been a continual part of places like St. Augustine for nearly 500 years (much longer than English or any other European language has been in the continental US). If we have finally begun to include Spanish more fully in our public and collective conversations in the 21st century, that is both a very overdue change and a reflection of some of our most foundational histories and communities, as exemplified by the Florida story of St. Augustine.

Next Florida history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Florida histories or stories you’d highlight?

February 22, 2021: Florida Histories: The Treaty of Adams-Onís

[On February 22, 1819, the Treaty of Adams-Onísthat brought Florida into the United States was initially negotiated; this year marks the 200th anniversary of its 1821 ratification as the Transcontinental Treaty. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Treaty and other Florida histories!]

On two darker sides to the history of American expansion that the historic treaty exemplifies.

The long and windy road to the 1821 Transcontinental Treaty and the finalized acquisition of Spanish Florida by the United States took more than a decade. In 1810, American settlers in West Florida—who had been immigrating to the region since the late 18th century—rebelled, declaring themselves an Independent Republic separate from Spanish rule. Although that republic did not last long, the event encouraged the US government to claim that the region had in fact been part of the Louisiana Purchase, setting in motion extended negotiations with Spain that began in earnest with Spanish Minister to the United States Don Luis de Onís’ arrival in Washington in 1815. Those negotiations continued for years, both exacerbated yet also pushed forward by General Andrew Jackson’s semi-authorized seizure of multiple Spanish forts as part of an 1818 raid against the Seminole tribe during the conflict that came to be known as the First Seminole War. Eventually Onís and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams reached an agreement in February 1819, “whereby” (quoting this State Department website) “Spain ceded East Florida to the United States and renounced all claim to West Florida. Spain received no compensation, but the United States agreed to assume liability for $5 million in damage done by American citizens who rebelled against Spain.”

Those histories are specific and complex on their own terms, but they also illustrate two broader (and quite dark) threads within the pattern of 19th century American expansion. For one thing, the US acquisition of Florida began quite similarly to the Mexican American War which produced the century’s single largest land acquisition (through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo): with an illegal incursion into a sovereign nation’s territory, one undertaken in support of American rebels fighting against that nation’s legal sovereignty over its own land. Jackson’s seizure of Spanish forts was even more blatant and aggressive than the actions undertaken by US forces in both the Nueces Strip and Alta California in late 1845 and early 1846; but in both cases, these were illegal occupations of sovereign foreign territory, and ones used by the US government as a pretext for further conflict and, eventually, the acquisition of a great deal of that territory. While we’ve begun in recent decades to collectively grapple with the ways in which American expansion depended on the theft of Native American land, I don’t know that we’ve even considered yet the illegal invasions of Spanish and Mexican territory without which the US might never have acquired Florida and much of the Southwest and West respectively.

Moreover, Jackson’s invasion also reveals even darker layers to the white supremacist histories that motivated such military actions (and the First Seminole War as a whole). His authorized invasion was motivated not just by a desire to destroy the Seminoles, but also to recapture enslaved people who had escaped from Georgia plantations and joined the Seminole nation; this cross-cultural Florida community was perceived as a threat to Georgia and the US. Indeed, as part of his invasion Jackson famously and controversially executed two British citizens, Alexander George Arbuthnot and Robert C. Armbrister, who were accused of encouraging both those runaway enslaved people and the ongoing Seminole resistance to the United States. Neither that action nor Jackson’s invasion overall were solely responsible for the US acquisition of Florida, of course—but they both played a significant role and reflected the overarching reality that such territorial expansions were always intertwined with white supremacist American histories and narratives. All part of the story of Florida and the expanding early 19th century United States.

Next Florida history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Florida histories or stories you’d highlight?

February 20-21, 2021: Crowd-sourced Non-Favorites

[Given my overall 2021 goal of better remembering all of American history, for this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series I wanted to highlight some of the historical myths of which I’m decidedly not a fan. Leading up to this crowd-sourced airing of non-favorites and other grievances—get it off your chest in comments, please!]

In response to Monday’s post, my childhood friend (and one of the best musicians and composers out there) Charles Sammons shares this great piece from the Zinn Ed Project.

 

Following up Thursday’s post, other non-favorite mythic narratives:

Jenny Fieldinghighlights, “The bootstrap myth. Through much of American history if you belonged to any group other than white, straight, male it didn't matter how hard you worked. The rare exception is held up as the rule, which has greatly damaged community investment, both economically and sociologically. It also pits the lower socioeconomic classes against one another when the field is nowhere near level by design.”

Charles Grimm tweets: “Socialism means only a few work while the rest glom off of them; Unions are greedy organizations exploiting workers and hurting employers (hello from someone raised in Alabama).”

Jeff Renye critiques, “The myth that ‘we're all in this together.’ Total bs.”

Lara Schwartzbemoans, “The myth that ‘revisionist history’ means rewriting history to meet your ideology, and implies that there was once a ‘real’ history that people (usually POC, women, and allies) are re-writing to suit them. NO! Whatever version of ‘history’ we read was created by someone, and looking critically at those texts as artifacts informed by the values, context, and agenda of their creators is important to understanding the past. We must always write and re-write history, and not treat whatever history was in our textbook as a law of physics or universal truth.”

Matthew Goguen writes, “It took me a long time to forgo the ‘history is a steady drumbeat towards progress’ which is absolutely not true once you get knee-deep in any substantial history. That doesn’t discount the efforts or actual progress made but the narrative that we are always headed towards that horizon is bunk.”

Caroltweets, “The myth of virgin land! Which tries to completely eliminate indigenous peoples when attempted genocide failed! It is the myth the others are built on, including the myth of exceptionalism.”

James Golden writes, “The biggest for me is that the Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom. That's crap. They left the Church of England because they didn't agree with it--yes--but a large part of what they hated was that it allowed a spectrum of belief and practice (and bishops). They wanted religious exclusivity: they wanted the right to persecute. The puritan migrations of the 1630s echoed this. We've built a large narrative about freedom of religion which has warped into freedom for religion (very different), and it's founded on a myth of fleeing persecution rather than eschewing a comprehensive national church in favor of religious narrowness.”

Lori Steckervetz laments, “The mythology that Native Americans were found living ‘at one with nature’ implying a complete lack of the intentional and sophisticated land management systems developed by many indigenous peoples across the continent to manipulate nature from irrigation to forest management, using fire to create grazing lands, etc.”

Anne Stanton adds, “These myths explain so much of why we are who we are today (especially in comparison with western Europe) with regard to access to medical care, etc.”

 

Other non-favorites:

Joanne Catherine writes, “James K. Polk and James Buchanan were the worst presidents ever (before 2017). Polk was just a weaker, less effective Jackson who fulfilled his promise to use his one term to further Manifest Destiny and harm native populations. Buchanan was the most ineffective president who used his niece’s free labor as a stand-in First Lady while not taking care of day to day matters so badly that a civil war started as soon as someone else took office. I cannot decide which one is my most non-favorite, so I propose both.” Rob Velellaagrees, “I recently listened to an audiobook on Buchanan and he really was terrible.”

 

Derek Tang argues, “I'm prepping for upcoming lessons on slavery dividing the nation. After not just his majority opinion in the well-documented Dred Scott case but in his concurrence in Prigg v. Pennsylvania as well, how is it that Roger Taney is still somehow considered as having a ‘mixed record’???????”

 

Emily Hamilton-Honey critiques, “Gone with the Wind (book and film), and also the idea that women didn't do anything in WW1. Women did a LOT in the Great War, and it is their WWII descendants who get the most recognition. As they should! But give the Great War women their credit and props, please! Oh, also, for 19C - the idea that Frances Willard and the WCTU were somehow not important, just because we don't like their politics now. The WCTU was a political FORCE, for many good reasons worth examining.”

 

Anne Holub shares, “I can't stand that the new not-literal use of "literally" is now accepted. (As in, ‘I literally died.’)”

 

Tim McCaffrey gripes, “I think I’ve complained about this before, but I’ll be reading a perfectly good piece of writing and then the author will use the phrase ‘in my heart of hearts’ and I will audibly groan. I don’t even know why I hate it, but I do.” He adds, “Also, Don Denkinger calling Jorge Orta safe in the 1985 World Series was total bullshit. And the Red Sox trading Mookie Betts is largely responsible for my current disinterest in the team—a situation I would not have thought possible just a few years back.”

 

Rob Bartolomewrites, “It really bothers me that the phrase ‘toxic positivity’ has become a thing recently. That just sounds some negative-ass thinking to me.”

 

Melissa Kujala grieves, “When someone types ‘lmfao’...did you really though? Did you really laugh your ass off? I doubt it. When anyone eats cereal and I have to hear them eat it. Mosquitos.”

 

Matthew Goguen laments, “They no longer make Maple Life cereal and I am reminded of this fact every time I am in the cereal aisle.”

 

Anna Wilkins exclaims, “Mylar balloons. Really people?!? REALLY?!?”

 

Olivia Lucier critiques, “Binge watching. I don’t understand the concept of just sitting all day watching a show and doing nothing else! However, my children can watch multiple episodes of Paw Patrol over and over again, even the same episode and have no problem with it....maybe I need to adopt their mentality of ‘binge watching.’”

 

Lori Steckervetz writes, “There are so so so many serious and rational grievances from people refusing to use a person’s pronouns to fat-shaming doctors to abled bodied people using disabled people for inspiration porn, to living in a city that seems to be unable manage winter despite it being in IN New England! (the lack of sidewalk snow removal enforcement is just shameful). BUT what I really need to get off my chest is my utter frustration with people’s misuse of the term daylight saving time (saving not savings). We enter in the spring and leave in the fall but SO many people do not seem to understand this concept. And who cares? I do for some irrational reason! It’s so silly that I care but there you have it.”

 

Indigo Eriksen goes short and not at all sweet: “Columbus.”

 

Diane Hotten-Somers attacks, “Joni Mitchell (I think she's totally overrated, sorry if that offends), closed-mindedness, the fact that there are people—people across this nation and close to me in my life/family—who do not believe in the existence of systemic racism nor that democracy was interrupted on Jan. 6, 2021, and white chocolate (not worth the calories).”

 

Robin Field goes with Jonathan Franzen.

 

Paige Wallace writes, “Shakespeare. Everyone thinks that since I have two degrees in English Lit means I must LOOOOooOoOove Shakespeare.” She adds, “Actually, let me amend. I like Shakespeare live, since his work was meant to be experienced that way. I do not like reading it.”

 

 

To end on a very 2021 and very serious note, Nikolai Soudek bemoans, “The utter deficit in attention span that we're all grappling with in this day & age. I find my own brain timing out if it doesn't get its dopamine fix within 5 seconds from whatever stimuli is popping up that second. Social media, relentless news cycles, constant interruptions from texts, Slacks, social media notifications, etc. It's gotten to the point with me where if someone doesn't get to the point of what they're trying to say within a few seconds I feel physical pain.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Non-favorites (historical or otherwise) you’d add to the mix?

February 19, 2021: Non-Favorite American Myths: The Greatest Generation

[Given my overall 2021 goal of better remembering all of American history, for this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series I wanted to highlight some of the historical myths of which I’m decidedly not a fan. Share your own non-favorites, historical and every other type, for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year!]

On the limits to a mythic vision of an iconic American community.

First, two paragraphs from Of Thee I Sing’s World War II chapter:

“Those celebratory patriotic images of an American community unified in its fights against and triumphs over first the Great Depression and then World War II’s adversaries have endured over the decades since, and toward the end of the 20th century were given a particularly clear expression in journalist Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation (1998). Brokaw builds on the period’s celebratory views, including an emphasis on “ordinary” Americans who nonetheless rose to face and conquer extraordinary—in Brokaw’s argument genuinely unprecedented—challenges. As he puts it in his Preface, “I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives are laced with the markings of greatness. At every stage of their lives they were part of historic challenges and achievements of a magnitude the world had never before witnessed.” While this Greatest Generation ideal built on the celebratory patriotisms I’ve traced in each chapter and time period, it also took that form of national celebration to a whole new level.

That celebratory patriotic emphasis on unity would seem to suggest, if not indeed depend upon, all Americans being part of those struggles and triumphs. But instead, many American communities were purposefully left out of those celebrations, and not only through political calculations like Roosevelt’s decision to exclude African Americans from many New Deal programs in order to secure the support of the era’s white supremacist Southern Democrats. Both the Depression and World War II likewise featured exclusionary myths, visions of the United States that defined particular communities as outside of their unifying definitions of the nation, often with divisive and destructive consequences for those excluded Americans.”

That’s the real issue I have with collective myths like the Greatest Generation narrative. It’s not that it doesn’t genuinely capture certain elements of its subject—as I’ve argued here, for example, my paternal grandfather Art Railton did reflect this community’s greatness. It’s that far, far too often, these American myths focus on white Americans, and in this case they do so in two equally frustrating ways: ignoring the kinds of exclusions I mention in that second quoted paragraph; and, relatedly, leave out some of the period’s greatest communities (such as the Varsity Victory Volunteers or the Tuskegee Airmen) because they don’t fit that white supremacist narrative. In many ways America during this period was not at all great—and when it was, it was often due to members of oppressed communities challenging those discriminations and embodying an America that truly reflects our greatest, most inclusive and inspiring national ideals. As I’d say about all of our national myths, including the Greatest Generation narrative, a vital first step is thus redefining and expanding them to include all American communities.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Non-favorites (historical or otherwise) you’d share?

February 18, 2021: Non-Favorite American Myths: The Self-Made Man

[Given my overall 2021 goal of better remembering all of American history, for this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series I wanted to highlight some of the historical myths of which I’m decidedly not a fan. Share your own non-favorites, historical and every other type, for a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year!]

On how a national mythos develops, and the multiple reasons it’s so destructive.

I wrote in one of my early blog posts about the ubiquitous American narrative of the “self-made man” and how it (along with its principal complement, the “rags to riches” narrative) developed in particular in the Gilded Age. Certainly the self-made man narrative had been associated with prominent figures before then, from Ben Franklin to Andrew Jackson to Frederick Douglass and beyond. But as I wrote in that blog post, it was through such parallel, popular Gilded Age stories as the fictions of Horatio Algerand the sentimentalized biographies of men like Andrew Carnegie that these narratives moved from exemplary individual figures to truly collective national myths, images of an idealized American identity to which all Americans could and should (as presented in such bestselling and influential stories, along with the many others that extended and amplified them) aspire.

Those myths have endured into the 21st century, as we see through their (generally erroneous) applications to contemporary figures like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (or, yes, our 45th president). The “generally erroneous” part really isn’t parenthetical, as one of the most destructive elements of the “self-made man” narrative is precisely its inaccuracy in most cases. John Steinbeck once argued that the poor in America continue to support policies and narratives that benefit only the wealthy because they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” and a key part of that delusion is the idea that any one of us can become just as successful as these iconic figures. Whereas the reality is that the single greatest indicator of elite status in America is inherited wealth, and that has been the case for a long, long time (if not to a significant degree throughout our history). None of which means that defining and working for our own vision of success aren’t valuable goals, just that we shouldn’t point to imagined myths of “self-making” as a key component of such goals.

Moreover, that mythic emphasis on individual self-making and success brings with it a corresponding and destructive de-emphasis on community. I don’t just mean that we fail to recognize the central role of communal support systems (not just family, but also education, government programs, and more) in the successes of such individuals, although that’s certainly the case. I also mean that these individualized myths make it harder for us to remember collective histories, including two that in many ways define the Gilded Age: the period’s deepening levels of inequality; and the role of activist movements from a variety of communities (labor, women’s rights, anti-lynchingactivists, immigration advocacy, Chinese Benevolent Associations, and many more) in challenging those inequities. At least part of the reason why we’ve had such difficulty collectively remembering those histories is precisely our focus on individual figures and stories, even in more critical ways (like the “robber baron” imagery). Changing that trend will thus require challenging national myths like the self-made man.

Last non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Non-favorites (historical or otherwise) you’d share?