Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 152

December 8, 2020: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Conspiracy Theory

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory that doesn’t hold up but is illuminating nonetheless.

I wrote an entire weeklong series on American conspiracy theories a few years back, but managed to avoid writing about one of the most prominent historical conspiracy theories: the theory that high-ranking U.S. government officials, up to and in some of the theories including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and let it happen (or even, in some of the most extreme theories, encouraged it) in order to push the United States into the European theatre of World War II through a so-called “back door.” Such theories go back at least as far as 1944, when John Flynn, a journalist and co-founder of the isolationist America First Committee, published a pamphlet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor (that’s the full text of the 1945 British edition, which seems unchanged other than a new “Publisher’s Preface”). A World War II naval officer, Rear Admiral Robert Theobald, wrote his own 1954 book, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Background of the Pearl Harbor Attack, developing the argument more fully. And in recent years, the most prominent of these conspiracy theorists has been World War II veteran and journalist Robert Stinnett, whose 1999 book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor lays out the theory at particularly elaborate length.

I could pretend that I’ve done all the research myself to disprove those sources and theories, but in truth I’ve mainly relied on this excellent Wikipedia page, which takes the different theories one-by-one and takes them apart quite effectively. Highlighting any one tends to reveal just how easily and thoroughly they can be debunked, as illustrated by the argument that the absence of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers from Pearl Harbor indicates advance knowledge of the attack (and a desire to protect the carriers from it). For one thing, one of those carriers, the Enterprise, was on its way back to Pearl Harbor that morning (having delivered fighters to Wake and Midway Islands), and had been scheduled by arrive at 7am (about an hour before the attacks commenced) but was delayed by weather. And for another, even more important thing, at that time carriers were considered far less central to naval strategy and warfare than battleships; if the U.S. had wanted to protect key elements of its fleet, it would certainly have not had all 8 of its Pacific Fleet battleships in the harbor at the time. Certainly after the attack carriers became central to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific, but that represents both a strategic shift and a direct response to the attack’s destruction of the U.S. battleships and navy.

So there really doesn’t seem to be much to the various layers to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories—but they have endured for more than 75 years, and I think there are a couple significant reasons why (besides our general societal and perhaps human fascination with conspiracy theories, about which I wrote many times in that aforementioned series). For one thing, few if any other military moments in American history have been as surprising and embarrassing for the U.S. forces, and thus in need of alternate explanations for the disaster; this was even more true in the 1940s, when the U.S. had not yet suffered what is considered its first defeat in an international military conflict, the Vietnam War (and that conflict has its own share of “The powers that be wouldn’t let us win” theories). And for another thing, Franklin D. Roosevelt has in my experience received about as much extreme and vehement hate as any American president not named Lincoln. Since Roosevelt was president during a war that should have united Americans, rather than one that directly divided us, that vitriolic opposition is a bit harder to understand; but I’ve encountered it time and again, and I believe it helps again why so many Americans can apparently continue to believe that FDR allowed a catastrophic attack on the United States to take place on his watch.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 7, 2020: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Attack

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories and contexts related to the 1941 attack.]

On three little-known histories that add layers to the Pearl Harbor attack.

1)      The Other Attacks: On the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese forces also launched attacks on three other US territories (the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island) and three British ones (Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong). Compared to the immediacy and intense focus of the Pearl Harbor bombings, those other attacks tended to be the start of multi-day and –week (or even –month) campaigns, and so they were less dramatic, produced far fewer casualties in that first day, and generally don’t stand out in the same ways as did and does Pearl Harbor. All of which is to say, I understand why Pearl Harbor drew the lion’s share of the outrage, attention, and collective memories, in its own moment and down into ours. But when it comes to collective memories I’m an additive guy, and so I think it would still be interesting and important to make these other attacks, and thus these other spaces and communities, part of our remembrances on December 7th as well.

2)      The First Prisoners of War: Despite that central focus on Pearl Harbor, there are of course also histories related to that attack with which we’re not as collectively familiar. For example, while the bulk of the attack was from the air, the Japanese sent five two-man “midget submarines” to raid the harbor; all five were sunk, and nine of their ten crew killed. The tenth, Japanese sailor Kazuo Sakamaki, lost consciousness while trying to detonate an explosive device in his submarine and was found and captured by an American infantryman, Native Hawaiian and Hawaii National Guard member David Akui. Sakamaki became the first Japanese prisoner of war in the U.S., and his submarine became the second: it was recovered and exhibited around the country as part of wartime propaganda and fund-raising efforts. After his return to Japan at the war’s end, Sakamaki wrote a memoir, apparently an honest and thoughtful attempt to grapple with both his role in the attacks (the English title is I Attacked Pearl Harbor) and his time as a POW (the Japanese one is Four Years as Prisoner of War Number One), each of which make Sakamaki one of the war’s most significant individual figures.

3)      The Niihau Incident: Another prominent Japanese individual, Shigenori Nishikaichi, was part of a more complex and fraught post-Pearl Harbor history. Nishikaichi’s Zero fighter was damaged during the attack, and he flew to Niihau, a small nearby Hawaiian island that the Japanese had chosen as a landing and rescue point for such damaged aircraft. Niihau had no radio or other means of hearing about the attacks, and that separation contributed to a complex and controversial next few days for Nishikaichi and the island’s few inhabitants, a period that ended with Nishikaichi dead, a Japanese American islander committing suicide after allegedly collaborating with the pilot to recover maps and documents taken from the plane, and a set of questions that remain open to this day. As that last hyperlink notes, a new film in production about the incident seems likely at the very least to reopen all those questions, and perhaps stir up anti-Japanese American fears at a moment when such xenophobia is literally the last thing we need. But such is the complex ongoing legacy of Pearl Harbor and its many historical contexts and echoes.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 5-6, 2020: AIDS and COVID

[December 1 is World AIDS Day, an occasion to remember not just the global epidemic overall, but also and especially the individual and communal stories within it. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied the commemoration and a few of those stories, leading up to this weekend post on whether and how we can learn from those stories in our own ongoing pandemic moment.]

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this weekend post was not one where I should pretend to be an expert. So instead, here are a handful of pieces on the links and distinctions between the AIDS and COVID pandemics, from a few genuine experts:

1)      William Haseltine for Scientific American

2)      And Haseltine for Forbes

3)      UNAIDSwith practical medical and social tips

4)      Nursing Clio offering phenomenal contexts as ever

5)      And Masha Gessen in the New Yorker

Pearl Harbor series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Connections to our present moment you’d highlight? AIDS stories or histories you’d share?

December 4, 2020: Stories of AIDS: The Deuce and Gay New York

[December 1 is World AIDS Day, an occasion to remember not just the global epidemic overall, but also and especially the individual and communal stories within it. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the commemoration and a few of those stories, leading up to a weekend post on whether and how we can learn from those stories in our own ongoing pandemic moment.]

On an initially minor character who more fully emerges alongside a community and a crisis.

One of the most enjoyable things for those of us who have followed the David Simon Extended Universe (DSEU) for a couple decades now is seeing some of his favorite actors appear in multiple projects. The Deucefeatured a number of those folks in both major roles and cameos (one of my favorite of the latter variety was Clarke Peters as a retired pimp), and among the former was the return of Chris Coy. Coy appeared in the third and fourth seasons of Tremeas investigative journalist L.P. Everett, one of my favorite characters on that show (which is a very competitive list), and I was very excited to see him in the opening episodes of The Deuce as Paul Hendrickson, a bartender befriended and then hired by James Franco’s Vincent Martino. During the first season (as I remember it, anyway—I watched that season a couple years back), Paul seemed as if he would be a relatively minor character, helping flesh out the world of Vincent’s bar (a key season one setting that carries forward into the later seasons, although it changes ownership multiple times among the show’s characters) but not necessarily having too much to do outside of that space.

Paul gradually took on a far larger and more significant role in the show’s second and third seasons, however, and that emergence reflects two key aspects of both his character and New York City in the 70s and 80s. He’s the show’s most prominent gay character (although far from its only one), and because the show’s three seasons take place across a decade and a half of history (they are set in 1971-72, 1977, and 1984-85 respectively), through Paul’s eyes and experiences (as well as his professional and romantic relationships) we get to witness substantial changes in both the city’s gay culture and the very possibility of living as an out gay man in late 20th century America. Indeed, while both Vincent and the audience know that Paul is gay relatively early in his time at the bar and on the show, I believe it is only in the second season when we start to see Paul present his sexuality as part of his public identity. Of course the Deuce is a neighborhood and New York a city where it was more possible to be openly gay in the 1970s than in much of the rest of the United States, which makes Paul’s identity and journey an important part of how the show represents that world but which also illustrates that even in such a diverse and progressive community to be gay in the 70s was to live a frequently, frustratingly fraught existence.

Of course that existence became infinitely more fraught, and indeed constantly endangered, with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s. Until I began watching season three I didn’t realize it would be set in the mid-80s (although I should have suspected as much, given the time jump between seasons one and two), and so didn’t see coming just how fully that final season would focus on the presence and effects of the AIDS crisis. It does so for most of the show’s characters (since the worlds of porn, prostitution, and sex work were particularly threatened by that epidemic), but it is Paul who becomes a strikingly intimate lens on the crisis, both through his long-term partner ( Todd Lang, an actor who is already dying of AIDS when the season begins) and through his resigned acceptance that the disease will eventually claim his life as well. Moreover, while the show certainly does justice to the AIDS epidemic on its own specific terms, it also utilizes the epidemic symbolically, as a striking parallel to the themes of continuity and change, loss and persistence, that are at the heart of how The Deuce portrays its titular neighborhood, New York City, and late 20th century America. Season three’s final 1985 line (before the 2019-set coda) is given to Paul, and works on all those levels: “I love the change of seasons now,” he says wistfully, before walking slowly away (he now must use a cane) into the early fall evening.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share?

December 3, 2020: Stories of AIDS: Three Novels

[December 1 is World AIDS Day, an occasion to remember not just the global epidemic overall, but also and especially the individual and communal stories within it. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the commemoration and a few of those stories, leading up to a weekend post on whether and how we can learn from those stories in our own ongoing pandemic moment.]

On three novels that help us trace an epidemic’s cultural evolutions.

1)      Alice Hoffman’s At Risk (1988): I read Hoffman’s best-selling novel, about an 11 year old girl infected with HIV after a blood transfusion, for the AIDS chapter in History & Hope in American Literature. It’s as well-written and moving as all of Hoffman’s works, and charts all the identities and perspectives in both her focal family and the small town around them with nuance and power. But it also reflects some of the same fraught motivations behind the early, children- and family-focused Worlds AIDS Day themes I highlighted on Tuesday, or the prominence of the Ryan White story on which Hoffman partly based her novel: an understandable desire to dispel the association of AIDS with only gay men, but an accompanying unwillingness to look closely at precisely what the epidemic was doing to that community in (and well beyond) the late 80s.

2)      Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man (1994): As I wrote in yesterday’s post, both Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) and the film Philadelphia (1993) helped turn the national conversation around AIDS back toward that devastated community. But I’m not sure any literary or cultural work did so more stunningly than sci fi titan Delany’s “pornotopic fantasy” novel (his own term for it). Like all of Delany’s books, The Mad Man crosses genres with willful abandon, featuring a murder mystery, magical realism, graphic sex scenes, intellectual digressions (the narrator and protagonist John Marr is a philosophy grad student), and more. But at its core the book is a historical novel of early 1980s New York, a deep-dive into the sex and stigmas, the love and fear, the loss and resilience, of the outset of the AIDS epidemic in the place that was and would remain its epicenter.

3)      Carol Rifka Brunt’s Tell the Wolves I’m Home (2012): I haven’t had the chance to read Brunt’s best-selling and critically acclaimed debut novel, but it seems to combine elements of each of these other two works: focusing on a youthful protagonist (in this case 14 year old June Elbus) as part of a historical fiction depicting 1980s New York at the depths of the AIDS epidemic (and in direct relationship to the city’s gay community, as June’s uncle Finn is a gay man and artist who passes away from AIDS when the novel opens). And in so doing, I’d say that Brunt’s book reflects a later stage in the cultural representations of histories like the AIDS epidemic: a moment where such subjects move beyond controversy to becoming part of the communal histories from which literary and cultural works can draw to tell a nation’s stories. I look forward to seeing where AIDS novels go from here!

Last AIDS story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share?

December 2, 2020: Stories of AIDS: Angels in America and Rent

[December 1 is World AIDS Day, an occasion to remember not just the global epidemic overall, but also and especially the individual and communal stories within it. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the commemoration and a few of those stories, leading up to a weekend post on whether and how we can learn from those stories in our own ongoing pandemic moment.]

On the popular musical that helped change our national conversations.

When it comes to a controversial or difficult social and cultural topic, one of the more interesting lenses through which we can analyze the issue is to consider when and how overtly popular representations of it developed. I’m not talking about explicitly or centrally political or statement-making representations, but rather images of the issue in entertainments intended first and foremost to be popular, to be successful, to attract and affect a broad audience. So with an issue like interracial relationships and marriages, one could point for example to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967); certainly the film has a definite and even in the final scenes a pedantic message, but on the whole it tries to be a successful drama, one that will keep its audience interested and entertained throughout.  Or if Spencer Tracy’s final speech makes the film too political to fit this category, one could look just a few years down the road, at the many episodes of All in the Family (and then its spin-off The Jeffersons) that prominently featured an interracial couple (the Willises) who unsettle both Archie Bunker and George Jefferson; those episodes are, as the show always was, played first and foremost for laughs, without losing any nuance in their representations of the thorny issue itself.

If we turn to one of the most difficult and controversial issues in American society in the 1980s (and beyond), the AIDS epidemic, I’d say it’s pretty tough to pin down when that kind of popular representation really emerges. A case could definitely be made for Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America (1991), which despite calling itself A Gay Fantasia on National Themes and focusing almost entirely on gay characters is in many ways a big-budget blockbuster award-winning (including the Pulitzer Prize) kind of drama, featuring scenery-destroying descending angels, hallucinations of long-dead American historical figures who exchange witty banter with the play’s characters, and some of the foulest and funniest dialogue I’ve ever read (mostly spoken by the play’s fictionalized version of Roy Cohn). Or maybe the answer would be the Academy Award-winning hit film Philadelphia (1993), which starred two of Hollywood’s most prominent actors (Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington), featured musical contributions from legendary rock stars (including a great tune by some dude named Bruce), and relied on one of the oldest thriller plot devices, the courtroom drama, for much of its very effective creation of suspense and entertainment. And certainly both of these works, along with Magic Johnson’s much-publicized 1991 announcement of his own HIV-positive status, contributed to a sea-change in public consciousness about the illness in the early 1990s.

But for my money (and it’s gotten plenty of it over the years), I think the first truly popular entertainment to grapple with AIDS is Jonathan Larsen’s rock musical Rent (1996). It’s hard to argue with any measure of the musical’s popular successes: it was when it closed in 2008 the 9th longest-running Broadway show in history, at 12 years and over 5000 performances; it spun off into dozens of national tours and foreign productions, as well as a 2005 movie version featuring almost all of the original cast members; it grossed almost $300 million and won a Tony for Best Musical; and the list goes on. But in keeping with the show’s mantra, “No Day but Today,” I’d say you don’t need any of those facts or statistics to assess the show’s popular success: all you need to do is go see it somewhere if you get the chance, or watch a video of the production, or even just listen to the soundtrack (which features virtually the whole production, since there’s very little non-sung dialogue). The play pretty much literally has it all—it’s funny and angry, hugely emotionally affecting and cynical and smart-ass, big and sentimental and intimate and realistic, has a perfectly constructed circular structure (it starts and ends on Christmas Eves one year apart and uses New Year’s to bridge the two Acts), includes almost every genre of popular music in one or another of its songs, is based in great detail on a 100 year-old opera (Puccini’s La Boheme) and yet grounded in 1990s New York City and America in every way, and just plain sings, all the way through and by any measure. And at the same time it is deeply engaged at every moment—and politically engaged in many crucial ones—with the issue of AIDS and its many different communities and identities, causes and effects.

Larsen died, unexpectedly and tragically, of a brain aneurysm on the day the play was to make its Off-Broadway premiere, and an entirely different and equally rich analysis could connect to great artists who died too young and the masterworks they left behind. But if Rent is any indication, Larsen would want his legacy to be precisely his achievement in finding that perfect combination of popular and political, successful and social, and thus contributing more (I believe) than any other single work to bringing AIDS out of the shadows and into the mainstream of American culture and consciousness. Next AIDS story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share?

December 1, 2020: Stories of AIDS: World AIDS Day

[December 1 is World AIDS Day, an occasion to remember not just the global epidemic overall, but also and especially the individual and communal stories within it. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the commemoration and a few of those stories, leading up to a weekend post on whether and how we can learn from those stories in our own ongoing pandemic moment.]

On two telling ways that the global commemoration has evolved, and where we go from here.

World AIDS Day was the brainchild of James Bunn and Thomas Netter, two journalists and public information officers at the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Program on AIDS; Bunn and Netter brought the idea to their boss, Dr. Jonathan Mann, in August 1987, and with his support they launched the first annual commemoration the following year, on December 1st, 1988. It made sense for the day to originate under the auspices of a global health organization, of course, but the truth about a pandemic like HIV/AIDS is that it’s far more than just a health or medical crisis—it’s a profoundly social and collective one, affecting every level of society and culture. So when the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) began in 1996, it made sense for the planning for World AIDS Day to shift to that more multi-tiered global operation—and UNAIDS immediately and importantly broadened the focus, turning the single day into component of a comprehensive World AIDS Campaign (which since 2004 has been a stand-alone operation unto itself).

Since that first 1988 commemoration, World AIDS Day has consistently featured an annual theme, and the evolution of those themes likewise reflects an important paradigm shift in the day’s meanings and purposes. The first few themes—Communication (1988), Youth (1989), and Women and AIDS (1990)—were overtly intended to dispel one of the central myths around the pandemic: that it only affected adult gay men. While that early focus did represent an understandable attempt to broaden the conversation, it neither suggested ways to combat the pandemic nor addressed the way it was indeed ravaging the gay community. That early focus continued for some time (cf. 1997’s Children Living in a World with AIDS) but also began to evolve toward more activist purposes (cf. 1998’s Force for Change: World AIDS Campaign with Young People). And with a series of four straight themes between 2005 and 2008, all with the central title of Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise, the day became much more fully and aggressively activist still, recognizing the disease’s continued global destructions and asking all people to commit to being part of fighting that pandemic. Recent themes have only amplified that continued shift toward an appropriately aggressive tone and collective goal, such as 2012’s Together We Will End AIDS and 2015’s On the Fast Track to End AIDS.

We do indeed seem to be on that track, but if I can quote two moments from the chapter on AIDS in my book History & Hope in American Literature: “Such changes are all for the better, but they come with an unexpected and troubling side effect: they can make it very difficult for us to remember and engage with the dark realities and histories that defined the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.” And “In the introduction to her book, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning, Sarah Brophy impressively argues for the stakes in countering both our historical amnesia toward and our relatively triumphal contemporary narratives of the AIDS epidemic: ‘The epidemic’s ghosts protest through the voices of their spokespersons against their being exorcized, rendered untroublesome by a public rhetoric of AIDS that would fast-forward public consciousness to a sometime future world, one purified of the scourge and its ‘victims,’ a world, in other words, purified of grief and of mourning.’” Remembering the stories of AIDS offers one vital way to challenge that amnesia, and there’s no better time to do that than on World AIDS Day.

Next AIDS story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share?

November 30, 2020: Stories of AIDS: Mark Doty

[December 1 is World AIDS Day, an occasion to remember not just the global epidemic overall, but also and especially the individual and communal stories within it. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the commemoration and a few of those stories, leading up to a weekend post on whether and how we can learn from those stories in our own ongoing pandemic moment.]

On three genres through which a preeminent contemporary writer considers art, sexuality, and identity.

1)      Poetry: I wrote about two of Mark Doty’s poems, “Faith” (1995) and “Turtle, Swan” (1989), in this long-ago post on Plath, Doty, and the confessional. As I argued there, Doty’s poems, like Plath’s, consistently blend seemingly overt autobiographical moments and themes with dense and ambiguous imagery, offering us glimpses into identity but doing so through a clearly poetic and symbolic lens. As a result, Doty’s poems both have a great deal to tell us about topics like gay identity and the AIDS epidemic and yet resist being read in any overt or straightforward way as social activism or political polemic about those issues. While I’m more familiar with such earlier works of Doty’s than with his subsequent decades of continued and acclaimed poetic production (he won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry, among many other awards), I have little doubt that his more recent works likewise engage identity questions with the slant perspective that all of the best poetry can provide.

2)      Memoir: Each of Doty’s three memoirs—Heaven’s Coast (1996), Firebird(1999), and Dog Years (2007)—represents a distinct version of how this complex genre can engage with identity questions. Firebirdis the most conventional autobiographical work, tracing Doty’s early years (mainly between ages 6 and 16) and dealing in particular with his gradual realization of his sexuality. Heaven’sdeals in depth with one particular, crucial period and subject, Doty’s multi-layered thoughts after he learns in 1989 that his partner Wally Roberts has HIV. And Dog Years focuses on two longtime canine companions and how they helped Doty cope with his partner’s experiences with that terrible illness, along with many other life challenges and stages. Taken together, these three acclaimed texts form a compelling overall and evolving autobiography, one powerfully linked to issues of sexuality and AIDS but far from solely defined by them.

3)      Essay: Doty’s two book-length essays—Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001) and The Art of Description (2010)—are seemingly quite distinct from any of these other works. Both concern objects and perception: Still Life through a focus on 17th century Dutch painters; and Description through Doty’s own decades of experiences attempting to “render experience through language.” While these books are different from Doty’s others, both in genre and in focus, they thus also offer a lens on understanding his lifelong writing project, and for that matter the work of all writers. “It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see,” Doty begins The Art of Description; any of us who write for a living know that doing so is anything but simple, but it’s also a vital part of literature and culture, and across his many decades, genres, and works Mark Doty has consistently managed to bridge the gap and say things that illuminate his and our worlds very powerfully.

Next AIDS story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Stories or histories you’d share?

November 28-29, 2020: November 2020 Recap

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

October 31-November 1: Robin Field’s Guest Post on Toni Morrison & The Rape Novel: I was fortunate enough to share two great Guest Posts this month—here’s the first!

November 2: Pivotal Elections: 1800: An election week series kicks off with the election when everything could have changed—and, thankfully, didn’t.

November 3: Pivotal Elections: 1860: The series continues with a contemporary comparison that’s become even more ominous and what we can do about it (for more, see the weekend post).

November 4: Pivotal Elections: 1876: What really happened in 1876 and why it’s a vital lesson for 2020, as the series rolls on.

November 5: Pivotal Elections: 1932: A frustrating undercurrent to a landslide election, and why the positive remain nonetheless.

November 6: Pivotal Elections: 1968: The series concludes with a striking and influential choice, and why it’s far from the whole story.

November 7-8: Pivotal Elections: 2020 and the New Lost Cause: A special post reflecting on the (then still unfolding) 2020 results, and on the danger (still unfolding) of a new white supremacist lost cause.

November 9-13: AmericanStudies’ 10th Anniversary and Online Public Scholarship: For the blog’s 10th anniversary, a special post reflecting on where we started, where we’ve gone, and where we go from here.

November 14-15: Anniversary Acknowledgments: Accompanying the anniversary post, a handful of thanks to folks who have meant so much to the blog’s first decade.

November 16: Serial Killer Studying: Bundy and Dahmer: A serial killer series kicks off with how two pop culture genres portray monstrous murderers.

November 17: Serial Killer Studying: H.H. Holmes: On the anniversary of his arrest, the series continues with two layers to the infamous murderer beyond the 1893 World’s Fair.

November 18: Serial Killer Studying: Executioner Songs: Two striking similarities and one important difference in a pair of pop culture texts, as the series slays on.

November 19: Serial Killer Studying: Lizzie Borden: What we’ll never know about the famous crime, and what it can help us understand nonetheless.

November 20: Serial Killer Studying: Dexter: The series concludes with antiheroes, vigilante justice, and serial killers.

November 21-22: Laura Franey’s Guest Post on The Keepers: My second great Guest Post this month, Laura Franey on the absent serial killer in the Netflix true crime documentary!

November 23: Book Thanksgivings: Jon Sisk and Rowman & Littlefield: A Thanksgiving series on my forthcoming book starts with my wonderful R&L editor.

November 24: Book Thanksgivings: Joan McClymer and the Women’s Circle Breakfast: The series continues with one of the many places I’ve gotten to share these histories, and the woman who made it happen.

November 25: Book Thanksgivings: Keri Leigh Merritt and Twitter: The wonderful scholar who blurbed my book and the social media community where I connected to her, as the series thanks on.

November 26: Book Thanksgivings: Podcasts: Three distinct and complementary podcasts where I’ve had the chance to talk Of Thee I Sing.

November 27: Book Thanksgivings: Y’all: The series concludes with my most heartfelt thanks, to you all!

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!

November 27, 2020: Book Thanksgivings: Y’all

[For this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to share a few words of appreciation related to my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing. I’d love to hear what y’all are thankful for in comments!]

I’ve said it many times before, but I never get tired of saying it: y’all, my fellow AmericanStudiers, are the reason I think and write about these things. I’ve been able to connect to many different communities and conversations over my decade of public scholarly writing, online especially but also in adult learning programs and book talks and organizations and so many other spaces. But as I tried to indicate in my 10-year anniversary post earlier this month, this blog is not just where that all began—it has been by far the most consistent and central place for me to do this work, and has been a profound influence on every aspect of my career, certainly including my books. So I’m deeply thankful for it and for y’all, and would just ask (as I also say all the time, and always mean) for you to say hi, in comments or by email, if you get a chance!

November Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What are you thankful for (other than the approaching end of this damn year)?