Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 148

January 25, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: First-Year Writing II

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On deadlines, process, and teaching writing during a pandemic.

As part of my Fall 2020 reflections series, I wrote about my choice to do away with late paper penalties of any kind (and thus with deadlines; I still had them, but obviously this change meant that there was no requirement for students to meet them) in my Fall courses. As I noted there, I believe this policy change was the correct one, not only during these extreme times but in general given the realities of my students’ lives, and I plan to carry it (or at least a modified version of it) forward into the Spring semester and likely beyond. But as I also highlighted in that post, the change brought with it some not unexpected and less than ideal results, and at the top of that list was the fact that a not-insignificant number of students turned in all of their papers right at the end of the semester, making it impossible for them to incorporate any feedback from me into their work. That problem was particularly apparent with my two sections of First-Year Writing I, for which the five papers are explicitly designed to build upon one another (more so than with any other type of class I teach).

This Spring I’m teaching one section of First-Year Writing II (a section in this case specifically for our Honors program/students, but it’s the same basic class), which has its own five-paper sequence, one that parallels my Writing I syllabus but with much more of an emphasis on research. That latter emphasis (one shared by all Writing II courses at FSU, as we in the English Studies department have defined the two-course sequence over the years) makes it even more important that the papers build on one another, especially in terms of the students’ work with sources and with the vital skill of putting their own voice and analyses in conversation with those they’re finding. Paper 5 is a full-blown research analysis essay, and in my experience the variety of skills and layers that go into such a paper require that multi-part process and development to work as well as possible (and thus, and more importantly as far as I’m concerned, to help the students practice work that they will then carry forward into other classes and settings across their respective majors and educational arc).

So how to balance these respective needs? That’s the kind of question I’m asking about every Spring 2021 class, and I’m likely to leave the last paragraph shorter in every post this week as I’m mostly both a) still thinking about it and b) hoping to hear your thoughts as well. As I wrote in the Fall reflection post, I do plan to have somewhat more rigid deadlines this time around, still more flexible than usual and with no late penalty, but not simply “by the end of the semester”; that might be particularly the case for Writing II, in order to achieve that goal of feedback/development at least in part. But is that enough? Are there other ways to balance flexibility and fairness with process and scaffolding? How do we best teach first-year writing during a pandemic?

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?

January 23-24, 2021: MLK’s 21st Century Heirs

[For this year’s MLK Day series, starting as always with my annual post on remembering the full King, I wanted to return to that source, focusing on a few under-remembered moments from King’s tragically brief but strikingly full activist life. Leading up to this special weekend post on a handful of King’s 21st century heirs!]

On five figures who carry King’s legacy into the 21st century (along with the five I highlighted in this post):

1)      Coretta Scott King: As I referenced in that post, King’s widow continued his work immediately after his assassination and throughout the next few decades, becoming a leader of the movement throughout the 70s and 80s and into 90s as well. But it’s not just that she passed away in 2006 and thus also represented a bridge to 21st century figures and activisms; in 2005, just a year before her death, she supported and helped found an institution to carry forward that work very overtly: the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom at Antioch College in Ohio.

2)      Reverend William J. Barber II: As co-chair and leader of the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign, Reverend Barber is the figure most directly carrying forward King’s work (especially in that final year of his life, as I discussed in Friday’s post). But the legacies and parallels don’t stop there—Barber’s work in organizing and running both the Moral Mondays movement and the Breach Repairers organization represent two of the most prominent and inspiring examples of a 21st century civil and human rights leader and movement that I know of.

3)      Stacey Abrams: As I discussed in Tuesday’s post on “Give Us the Ballot,” voting rights was perhaps the most consistent cause across King’s career as a civil rights leader and activist, and no 21st century figure is carrying forward that legacy than Abrams. That’s not simply because she’s fighting for voting rights so powerfully, both in her individual voice and work and through organizations she’s founded such as Fair Fight. It’s also and especially because Abrams, more than any other contemporary figure, seems to recognize as King did that the right to vote is an essential human right, full stop.

4)      Ibram Kendi: Like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and so many others before him, King was (as I argued all week) as much an author and scholar as an activist and organizer. In 2021, no author and scholar better illustrates King’s legacy than Kendi, who weds anti-racism theory and practice to historical scholarship, and who in his new role as the director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research will be helping so many young activists and scholars extend those legacies even further into the 21st century.

5)      JoséAntonio Vargas: I wrote about Vargas in that prior post hyperlinked above, but I needed to include him this time too, for the simple and crucial reason that civil rights activism isn’t and has never been limited to questions of race. That doesn’t mean that African American issues and contexts aren’t specific and central, which they certainly are; but Vargas’ work for undocumented immigrants, all immigrants, and inclusive definitions of American identity also reflect what King understood well: that the fight for civil rights is a fight to extend and guarantee those essential rights to all Americans, and the most vulnerable of us most of all. One of many King legacies we desperately need to carry forward in the 21stcentury.

Spring previews series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other MLK heirs or legacies you’d highlight?

January 22, 2021: MLK Histories: The Poor People’s Campaign

[For this year’s MLK Day series, starting as always with my annual post on remembering the full King, I wanted to return to that source, focusing on a few under-remembered moments from King’s tragically brief but strikingly full activist life. Leading up to a special weekend post on a few of King’s 21st century heirs!]

On the second of two ways to think about King’s work resonating beyond his death.

In yesterday’s post, I considered what King’s fourth and final book, 1967’s Where Do We Go from Here, helps us think about when it comes to where his work was in his final years of life and how his legacy has extended and deepened from there. But while King was a hugely gifted author (of written prose just as much as oratory), his most consistent and crucial efforts were in the organizing and leadership of collective actions and movements, of public protest and civic action. And for the final year of his life, inspired in part by an October 1966 march on Washington on behalf of welfare rights and in part by his own deepening sense of the need for immediate, revolutionary economic activism (as illustrated by his embrace of Henry George and the concept of a guaranteed income in Where Do We Go from Here), King was the principal organizer of a strikingly radical and important such collective action, the Poor People’s Campaign (also known as the Poor People’s March on Washington).

King conceived of the campaign in a couple of key 1967 stages: first proposing the idea to the May 1967 SCLC retreat in Frogmore, South Carolina; and then, in response to the July 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit, co-authoring with his friend and colleague Stanley Levison a report entitled “The Crisis in America’s Cities” which called for a campaign of urban disruption focused on Washington, DC. Around that latter time, Senator Robert Kennedy likewise proposed to their mutual friend Marian Wright Edelman that she “tell Dr. King to bring the poor people to Washington to make hunger and poverty visible since the country's attention had turned to the Vietnam War and put poverty and hunger on the back burner.” In early December the SCLC and King formally announced the campaign, which they then launched in January 1968 with an “Economic Fact Sheet” and with a series of more specific demands in February and March (including guaranteed income, an antipoverty bill, and the annual construction of at least half a million affordable homes). Despite King’s tragic April assassination, the campaign continued, culminating in a six-week march on and occupation of DC in May and June.

That May-June march and occupation thus illustrated a particularly overt and potent extension of King’s work beyond his life, one that built on his own ideas and inspirations but of course featured the crucial contributions of and leadership by many other figures as well (including Ralph Abernathy, Bernard Lafayette, Corky Gonzales, Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and many more). But I would also note that this final activist focus of King’s—which also included specific complementary causes such as the Memphis sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis in April—helps us see past the artificial division between race and class that too often continues to plague our narratives of identity, community, and activism. King fully recognized the intersections and interconnections between those elements, and saw his work across these years as precisely fighting for that larger vision of identity: as he put it to the March SCLC conference, “We have moved from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights.” As I’ll discuss in the weekend post, the 21st century Poor People’s Campaign has carried forward that legacy, helping us continue to hear and respond to King’s culminating calls and causes.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other MLK histories or contexts you’d highlight?

January 21, 2021: MLK Histories: Where Do We Go from Here?

[For this year’s MLK Day series, starting as always with my annual post on remembering the full King, I wanted to return to that source, focusing on a few under-remembered moments from King’s tragically brief but strikingly full activist life. Leading up to a special weekend post on a few of King’s 21st century heirs!]

On the first of two ways to think about King’s work resonating beyond his death.

There is of course no shortage of tragedies associated with the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by white supremacist domestic terrorist James Earl Ray, with the way the murder tore him away from (and permanently affected) his young family atop the list. But on the collective and national levels, it is likewise profoundly tragic to have lost all that the not-yet-40-year old King would have contributed to our conversations, to our culture and society, to the quest for liberty and justice for all, to our efforts to create a more perfect union over the many decades of life and work that were denied him by Ray’s bullet. While his widow Coretta Scott King and so many others took up his work and legacy, the loss was and remains truly incalculable. But over the last two posts in this week’s series, I’m going to try to highlight a couple different aspects of King’s final years of activism that can help us both imagine what he might have done with his next 40 years and understand his powerful enduring legacy.

Yesterday I wrote about King’s first book, and today I’ll write about his fourth and final one: 1967’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? It’s a coincidental but striking fact that King focused that final book (which of course he did not know would be his final one, although he was well aware of the constant threats on his life) on precisely questions of legacy and the future, both for his individual work and for the Civil Rights Movement and the nation as a whole. As a result, the book features some of his most overt and fleshed-out engagements with such contemporary forces as the Black Power movement, the Lyndon Johnson administration, and white liberals, with King viewing each and every such community sympathetically but with a critical eye toward its flaws and shortcomings. The book also—especially when read in correlation with his third book, 1964’s Why We Can’t Wait, about which I wrote in Monday’s post—makes clear that King continued to believe in the vital need for immediate and radical action and change, giving the lie to any voices who would use King to criticize 21st century radical activists or movements.

Many of Where Do We Go from Here’s arguments for such radical change interestingly utilize a far-too-forgotten late-19thcentury radical reformer: the economist and activist Henry George (not forgotten to me: I teach the introduction of his 1879 book Progress and Poverty in my Honors Lit Seminar on America in the Gilded Age, so I think about George quite a bit). King engages George at length, and uses his economic and social ideas to advance an argument about what American society needs if it is to achieve more genuine equality: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Over the last few years, the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) has returned to our political and social debates, making it particularly important to trace a through-line for that concept from George to King to 21st century voices and arguments—one clear and potent example of a legacy for this culminating book and work of King’s.

Last MLK history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other MLK histories or contexts you’d highlight?

January 20, 2021: MLK Histories: Stride Toward Freedom

[For this year’s MLK Day series, starting as always with my annual post on remembering the full King, I wanted to return to that source, focusing on a few under-remembered moments from King’s tragically brief but strikingly full activist life. Leading up to a special weekend post on a few of King’s 21st century heirs!]

On a more specific and a more overarching significance to King’s first book.

I’ve written a couple different pieces for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, and my central goal in both has been to push beyond some of the most familiar collective memories of that moment and early Civil Rights Movement activism. Certainly there’s more to the story of Rosa Parks than the familiar narratives generally capture; but similarly, the boycott is often framed as an early example of King’s leadership, while in truth his role was entirely that of a supporting figure, arriving to bolster the already underway and impressive efforts of local leaders like Parks and her colleagues (many of them women, as I also highlighted in those pieces). King did give an early December speech at the city’s Holt Street Baptist Church that powerfully expressed the boycott’s origins and goals, but (to reiterate one of my main points from Monday’s post and really for this whole week’s series) to focus too much of our attention on that speech is to miss quite a bit of the more multi-layered histories of this crucial event.

Interestingly, one of the texts that can most effectively help us push beyond those more narrow and partial histories of the boycott was also authored by King: his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Because King had become so closely associated with the boycott, publishers began approaching him to write a book about it, and in October 1957 he signed a contract with Harper & Brothers for the manuscript that would become Stride. Although by 1957-8 King was already hugely prominent as an individual voice and leader of the evolving movement, he saw this first book of his as far more of a collective history than a personal memoir, calling it in its Preface “the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.” As such, Stride is a text that help us understand not just the details and stages of the boycott, but also some of the ways in which those who organized and took part in it perceived their efforts, making it a striking and significant combination of a primary and a secondary source.

That specific historical and analytical lens makes King’s book well worth a read, but it’s not the only significant layer to Stride Toward Freedom. Roughly halfway through, in the book’s sixth chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King takes a step back to consider his own arc and influences when it comes to that philosophy of nonviolent activism and civil disobedience, writing publicly for one of the first times about such what he had learned from figures as Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and others. As with every other aspect of King’s life and legacy, his ideas about those topics have been at best simplified and often misrepresented over the years since, especially by conservatives who seek to claim that they are the true descendants of King and his movement. Fortunately, King left a rich archive through which we can engage his own perspective and ideas, about specific histories like the bus boycotts, overarching concepts like nonviolence and civil disobedience, and most every other aspect of his work and the movement, and this chapter in Stride represents an early and important piece within that collection.

Next MLK history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other MLK histories or contexts you’d highlight?

January 19, 2021: MLK Histories: “Give Us the Ballot”

[For this year’s MLK Day series, starting as always with my annual post on remembering the full King, I wanted to return to that source, focusing on a few under-remembered moments from King’s tragically brief but strikingly full activist life. Leading up to a special weekend post on a few of King’s 21st century heirs!]

To continue last week’s book release series: I wrote about one of King’s earliest prominent speeches, 1957’s “Give us the Ballot,” as part of my 1960s chapter in Of Thee I Sing, so for today’s post will share that section of the book:

“One of the [Civil Rights] movement’s central goals was to give African Americans the same rights that had been defined as core American principles since the Revolution; that goal was potently illustrated by the push for voting rights, which had been legally promised to African American men since the 15th Amendment in 1870 and women since the 19th in 1920 but had in practice consistently been denied. In his prominent early speech ‘Give Us the Ballot,’ delivered at the May 17th, 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom demonstration in Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. both expressed that goal clearly and linked it to an active patriotic vision of African American and American identity. He opens by noting that ‘The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.’ In the speech’s most famous section, he lists a series of politically and socially progressive results (for all Americans) that will follow if you ‘Give us the ballot.’ And he concludes with an overarching, idealized vision of how such fights for African American rights constitute as well active patriotism on behalf of the nation’s future: ‘when the history books are written in the future, the historians will have to look back and say, ‘There lived a great people . . . a people who injected new meaning into the veins of civilization; a people which stood up with dignity and honor and saved Western civilization in her darkest hour; a people that gave new integrity and a new dimension of love to our civilization.’”

Next MLK history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other MLK histories or contexts you’d highlight?

January 18, 2021: MLK Histories: The Real King

[For this year’s MLK Day series, starting as always with my annual post on remembering the full King, I wanted to return to that source, focusing on a few under-remembered moments from King’s tragically brief but strikingly full activist life. Leading up to a special weekend post on a few of King’s 21st century heirs!]

On the limits to how we currently remember King, and how to get beyond them.

It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my AmericanStudies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the “I Have a Dream” speech is kind of overrated. I’m sort of saying that for effect, since I don’t really mean that the speech itself isn’t as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that’s true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King’s “content of their character” rather than “color of their skin” distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen “one day”—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.

But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of “one day”) has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King’s philosophies and ideas and arguments. There’s no question that the speech’s liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King’s work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X’s. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King’s rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the “Poor People’s Campaign” and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.

To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King’s perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can’t Wait, the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don’t think any American text can top the “Letter” itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King’s first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I’ll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter’s opening sentence, of his audience’s description of his protest activities as “unwise and untimely.” And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter’s closing paragraphs: “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”

I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of “I Have a Dream” is like remembering Shakespeare for the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that’s a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there’s, y’know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn’t bad either. It’s about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future. Next MLK history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other MLK histories or contexts you’d highlight?

January 17, 2021: Emily Hamilton-Honey's Hope-full Guest Post

[Last weekend I shared my favorite crowd-sourced post ever, featuring nominations of hope-full texts and voices from so many fellow AmericanStudiers. One of them, Emily Hamilton-Honey, followed up with a bunch more great suggestions, so I wanted to share them in a mini-Guest Post this weekend, not least to encourage you all to keep the hope coming!]

Emily writes:

“I loved your blog post on hopeful media and scholarship, and I know I promised you some childhood scholarship that gives me hope. The thing that I love about scholarship on American childhoods is that it is so good at looking for the voices we don't normally hear or see in the archive, and so many scholars are doing wonderful things, in very interdisciplinary ways.

So, some wonderful books on my shelf:

Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys, by Vincent DiGirolamo. I keep talking about this book even though I am not all the way through it - it's huge, about 650 pages, and it is absolutely breathtaking in its scope and depth. It crosses so many disciplines: childhood history, urban studies, labor studies, and media studies, just to name a few. The number of voices that are present is just stunning, and DiGirolamo pays attention to race and gender as well. The book has already won many prizes, and I think deservedly so - it is one of those books that is a defining piece of scholarship, one that everyone who comes after will have to reference.

Another one that is waiting for me, and looks just wonderful: Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. Pamela Wojcik looks at the ways that we portray childhood neglect in popular books and film, and I'm very excited to read this book. Her sources are broad, and she appears to be a keen reader of narratives. How we think about and portray child neglect (or, on the flip side, whether that neglect offers some kind of fictional freedom) seems to me to be really important, in terms of the stories we tell ourselves about what childhood should be like.

Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, by Anne Boyd Rioux. I'm reading this one right now as well, and I am already delighted by the ways that Rioux is thinking about why this this 153-year-old story endures, what we still find in a narrative about a time that is so different from our own, and what girls learn about themselves by reading about the March sisters.

Finally - and this is not childhood scholarship - Eddie Glaude's Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. I cried reading this book. I love Baldwin, and we are living through a historical moment in which his writing once again feels so urgent, so immediate, and so necessary. Glaude does an incredible job of distilling that urgency, while at the same time not losing Baldwin's compassion and hope.

A couple of other things that have brought me hope recently:

The Broadway cast recording of Bandstand: A New Musical. It has been ages since I have loved a Broadway show to the degree that I love this one. It is such a beautiful, heartbreaking story about veterans persevering through loss, and trauma, and mental illness, to find some healing through music, and by telling their truths.

The choral compositions of Ola Gjeilo - they are just stunning, and so uplifting. I have sung a couple of them myself, as part of a chorus, and it is hard to explain how gorgeous they are.

Vaughn Williams' “The Lark Ascending.” There is something about knowing that Vaughn Williams lived through all the horror of World War I, and still managed to write such an incredibly beautiful piece of music in spite of that, which is very comforting and hopeful to me.

Thank you for listening! I look forward to seeing another list, if you get more contributions.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other hope-full texts or voices you’d share?

January 15-16, 2021: Sharing Of Thee I Sing

[This release date for my new book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, has been pushed back a bit, but I don't know there's ever been a more important moment to talk about patriotism. So this week I’ve used portions of the book’s Introduction to briefly highlight each of my four categories of American patriotism, leading up to this special post on my goals for the project over the next couple months—and how you all can help!]

On five of the many places and ways I’d love to talk about this book and these histories:

1)      Online writing: I’ve already had the chance to write about Of Thee I Sing and American patriotism for HNN, the USIH blog, and my Saturday Evening Post Considering Historycolumn. But lifelong devotee of online writing that I am (duh, he wrote on his 10+ year old blog), I’d very much appreciate ideas, leads, connections of all kinds to other spaces where I could share such pieces, including individual and collective blogs and other websites of all kinds. Email me with your thoughts, please!

2)      Podcasts: As I wrote back in my Thanksgiving series, I got to talk about the project on a series of great podcasts throughout the fall, from the historical to the political to the drunken, and am looking forward to doing so on Keri Leigh Merritt’s awesome Merrittocracypodcast soon as well. Which only illustrates my desire and willingness to do so on any and all other podcasts too! So, I say again, email me with your thoughts, please!

3)      Classes: Perhaps my favorite opportunities to share my projects and work are when I’ve been able to do so with classes, whether those taught by colleagues at FSU or those to which I’ve been able to connect around the country and world, whether in-person or (these days in particular, of course) remotely. By the time this post airs, I’ll have been able to do so with students at an innovative and inspiring high school, Chicago’s GCE Lab School. Which is to say, I’d love to get connected to any and all classes and institutions, of all types, including yours—so, y’know, email me with your thoughts, please!

4)      Bookstores: You will not be shocked to learn that I’m a lifelong bookstore bookworm, including stints working at Lexington (MA)’s Waldenbooks and Charlottesville (VA)’s Barnes & Noble. I got to give a book talk at that Cville B&N as part of Virginia’s Festival of the Book back in 2014, and have likewise had the opportunity to talk at other great bookstores, from Toadstool Bookstore in Peterborough (NH) to the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg (PA) to Scuppernong Books in Greensboro (NC). Now that such talks are remote, there are really no geographic or time limits, so I would genuinely love to learn of great bookstores in your area where I might share Of Thee I Sing. So, duh, email mewith your thoughts, please!

5)      Everywhere else!: And that’s not all! Librariesand archives! Museumsand historic/cultural sites! Discussionand book groups! Adult learning programs! I could go on, but you get the idea—there is no community, no space, no conversation and audience with which I don’t want to share this project and these histories. Got an idea, of any type? Well, you can always…email me with your thoughts, please!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. I bet you know what to do!

January 14, 2021: Of Thee I Sing: Critical Patriotism

[This release date for my new book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, has been pushed back a bit, but I don't know there's ever been a more important moment to talk about patriotism. So this week I’ll use portions of the book’s Introduction to briefly highlight each of my four categories of American patriotism, leading up to a special post on my goals for the project over the next couple months—and how you all can help!]

Here are two spots in the intro where I define my fourth and final category, critical patriotism (the second alternative to celebratory and mythic patriotisms, and the category for which I would ultimately argue, as I did in this USIH blog post):

1)      “Kaepernick’s anthem protests thus also embody a fourth vision of patriotism, a critical patriotic perspective that highlights the nation’s shortcomings in order to move it closer to its ideals. An exemplary contemporary expression of such critical patriotism is the New York Times magazine’s 1619 Project, a work of public scholarly journalism, created by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and written by a group of historians and artists, that defines the arrival of enslaved Africans as a national origin point in order to analyze the foundational and enduring histories and legacies not just of slavery, but also of African American protest and patriotism. As Hannah-Jones puts it in her Pulitzer Prize-winning introductory essay to the project, “It is black people who have been the perfecters of this democracy.” The 1619 Project thus echoes and extends one of America’s most succinct and moving expressions of critical patriotism, from the African American writer James Baldwin: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.””

2)      “At the same time, examples of active patriotism are often driven by a sense of wrongs that need righting, by a perspective that the nation needs to be moved forward from past or present failings toward a more perfect future. Bates’ fourth and final verse offers a vision of this critical form of patriotism: “O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years/Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears!” Written at the depths of Gilded Age inequalities, of the rise of Jim Crow and the lynching epidemic, of the culminating genocides of the “Indian Wars” and the nation’s expansion into new imperial arenas, these lines implicitly but importantly contrast present “tears” with a “patriot dream” of a more beautiful future. That expression of critical patriotism can be linked to both historical and 21st century examples of that perspective, models of criticizing national flaws and failures in the hopes of moving the nation closer to its ideals and forward toward a more perfect union.”

Special weekend post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Examples of critical patriotism you’d share?