Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 170

May 12, 2020: Spring 2020 Tributes: Librarians

[This would be the last week of classes, if the Spring 2020 semester had gone as scheduled. To say that it didn’t is just to scratch the surface of this chaotic, crazy, challenging spring, though. So for my usual semester recaps, this time I’ll focus on brief tributes to those folks who helped us make it through this incredibly tough time, leading up to a weekend post of my own reflections on teaching in this new world.]On one tangible and one intangible inspiration from this vital community.Back in February, which if I’m doing the math correctly was roughly 289,971 months ago, I had the honor of being featured as one of the FSU Amelia V. Gallucci-CirioLibrary’s Spotlight on Fitchburg Faculty Scholarship honorees. This wonderful program and exhibit was started by FSU Library Assistant Jodie Lawton (or at least she has had an instrumental role in it and was the one who interviewed me and put together my exhibit), and offers one small example of the countless (and yet always increasing, I suppose like the universe!) ways that the library and its staff embody, express, and extend the best of the FSU community.Given all of that, it’s no surprise that the library and its staff have continued to contribute to our FSU community in hugely inspiring ways during these last few months. One specific, tangible, and incredible example was their scanning and digitization of the materials that faculty had placed on reserve for their Spring semester courses. For my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class, we use two short story anthologies that comprise a significant percentage of our semester’s readings; I had placed two copies of each on reserve, and the majority of my students were accessing those readings through those copies. When we lost access to the library as a physical space it seemed as if we wouldn’t be able to read any of those stories (none of them are available in full online)—but then our librarians came through, achieving the Herculean task of scanning all the reserve readings that faculty let them know they needed. Thanks to their efforts I could email my students PDFs of all our remaining stories, and we were able to have wonderful (optional but very collective) conversations about these texts.That specific work and tangible effect alone would be more than enough to warrant a tribute post for our FSU librarians, but I also want to highlight the broader, intangible but vital role that librarians play at times like these. I’m blessed to be friends with many librarians and archivists, at academic institutions, at public libraries, at research sites and archives, and more, and saw throughout these months their commitment to their work and to sharing resources with communities near and far. But we also benefitted from a much more focused version of that—my sons’ Mom wrote to the Newton (MA) library asking for book recommendations for their quarantine reading, and one of their Youth Services librarians, Megan Coffey, wrote back with an incredibly thorough list, not just of books but of ones available for the boys to download and read on their devices. One example of the vital presence and role of librarians in our society and culture, never more so than in times like these. Next tribute tomorrow,BenPS. Reflections or tributes of your own on Spring 2020?

May 11, 2020: Spring 2020 Tributes: Lisa Gim and my English Studies Department

[This would be the last week of classes, if the Spring 2020 semester had gone as scheduled. To say that it didn’t is just to scratch the surface of this chaotic, crazy, challenging spring, though. So for my usual semester recaps, this time I’ll focus on brief tributes to those folks who helped us make it through this incredibly tough time, leading up to a weekend post of my own reflections on teaching in this new world.]On the leader who helped one of my favorite communities chart this unprecedented course.Of course the community most affected by what unfolded with the Spring 2020 semester has been our students, and my FSU students—in my classes, as my advisees, and overall—have been my central focus throughout these chaotic weeks, and their resilience and commitment a source of constant inspiration. The second most-affected academic community would have to be adjunct and contingent faculty, and I’ve done what I can to advocate for that community as well (and will try to continue to do so as the ripples of this moment spread out for months and likely years to come). As a tenured faculty member, I’m part of the least affected such community—doesn’t mean I haven’t been affected, of course (or that all the effects in every other part of my life haven’t likewise affected my work), but I want to be clear about that privilege at the start of this post and series.With that said, one of the academic communities that have been more subtly affected has to be departments. I don’t mean in terms of our work, although that work has indeed been largely put on hold and thus an entire year (from hiring requests to curriculum planning to departmental publications to celebratory occasions like our high school writing contest) mostly lost. No, I’m thinking here about the community itself—academic life can at times feel individual and isolating, but the best departmental communities (and FSU English Studies is the best I’ve been around) offer a communal counterpoint to those tendencies. Not getting to see or be around my English Studies colleagues for months thus was and remains an underappreciated effect of, and significant loss from, this damned virus.But that experience would have been infinitely worse were it not for our department chair, my colleague and friend Lisa Gim. Lisa’s been our chair for many years, and has helped us navigate and respond to and move forward successfully in the face of numerous challenges and issues. But it’s fair to say that nothing has been as seismic as this crisis, and that no chair could have expected to have to deal with what Lisa has over these last few months. Yet she’s not only done so calmly and thoughtfully and impressively—she has helped our departmental model the best of community in moments like this. That’s also a reflection of all my colleagues for sure; but if, as this year has so amply demonstrated, bad leadership trickles down to us all, good leadership in contrast brings us all to a higher level and better place. We’re very lucky to have Lisa at our helm, now more than ever. Next tribute tomorrow,BenPS. Reflections or tributes of your own on Spring 2020?

May 9-10, 2020: American Epidemics: Covid-19

[As I draft this series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know more about where things stand in early May.]On two very different sides to life in a pandemic, and the central questions that remain frustratingly unanswered.For me, the hardest part of the day-to-day over these last two months (ie, of the experience of everyday life in this altered moment, rather than the horrific effects and extremes that the pandemic has likewise brought) has been the absence of in-person conversation. Indeed, the only people in my life with whom I’ve had in-person conversations over the last 8 weeks have been my sons and their Mom; all my other conversations have been through online messages or over Zoom, FaceTime, or the phone. [Of course I’ve exchanged brief thoughts with delivery folks, supermarket employees, and the like, but while those have been pleasant they’re not the same as conversations with friends and loved ones, or in classrooms.] I’m certainly grateful for what those technologies have meant (and well aware of how much more isolated things would have been and be without them), including for the kinds of educational realities I’ll discuss in my end-of-semester series next week. But I’ve never understood more clearly, nor felt more viscerally, the value of face-to-face conversations more than I now do in their thoroughgoing absence. To put it simply, there’s a fundamental shared humanity that, much as I value online conversations of all kinds, we feel and express more fully and potently when we are with others. I miss those moments deeply.At the same time (literally), these locked down weeks have required us to find new ways to occupy our days, and one of them has yielded surprising and meaningful benefits for me. I’ve been taking daily long walks (accompanied by my sons when they’re with me, solo when they’re not) around my relatively new (this time around) town of Needham, Massachusetts; the boys have spent much of their young lives in Needham, but I lived in Waltham from 2013 to 2019 and moved back here last summer. Back when the boys were young I used to walk with them in the stroller quite a bit, but that was around the residential neighborhood we lived in then; my new apartment is in a different part of town, much closer to the downtown area. Or so I thought, but on the course of my walks around the neighborhood I’ve realized that this part of Needham also features strikingly wooded, swampy, and even agriculturalareas. All of them have made for very pleasing vistas on my walks, but they’ve also—and for this AmericanStudier most significantly—changed quite a bit my perspective on this town and community that I thought I knew well. I thought of Needham as entirely suburban, in contrast to both more urban neighboring towns (like Newton) and more rural ones (like Dover). But it’s got a more rural side than I realized, and now I’m determined both to explore those areas more fully and to help the boys better appreciate that side to their hometown. So that’s a bit of where I’ve been over these eight locked-down weeks. As for where we go from here, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? As I draft this piece, I’ve been reading both about states reopening or planning to soon (like my home state of Virginia, which currently plans to begin reopening on May 15th) and about the Trump administration’s private prediction of 3000 deaths a day as of June 1st. I know cognitive dissonance is our new default state of existence in May 2020, but how can I be reading both of those things at the same time? It’s one thing not to know what the situation will be in July or September or November—like all of us, I for damn sure do not know, and have gradually (if intermittently) made my peace with such profound uncertainty about the future. But for the present to be so profoundly uncertain and contested in even its most basic realities is both an amplification and deepening yet an extreme explosion of the way things have long felt here in Trump’s America. What has happened? What is happening now? What will happen next? For an analytical person, and an AmericanStudier to boot, the first two questions have always felt crucially important, on their own terms and for our ability to address and answer the third. But I suppose learning to live with the absence of any clear answers to them—and most especially to “what is happening now?”—is yet another effect of life under COVID-19. Reflections on a very different semester start Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?

May 8, 2020: American Epidemics: The Measles

[As I draft this series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know more about where things stand in early May.]On three telling stages in the history of a frustratingly persistent disease.In the mid to late 19th century, outbreaks of the measles devastated two different South Pacific paradises. Beginning with a series of deadly epidemics in 1848-1849 (including whooping cough and influenza as well as measles), and continuing through much of the next decade, the disease took roughly one-fifth of Hawaii’s population. In 1875, the disease was introduced to the tropical island of Fiji by King Cakobau, upon his return from a diplomatic trip to Australia, and before it was contained it had killed 40,000 Fijians, roughly one-third of the small nation’s population. As these and many other outbreaks make clear, measles, often perceived here in the United States as nothing more than a potential childhood annoyance, has been as deadly a worldwide epidemic as any, and remains so: it is estimated to have killed roughly 200 million people between 1855 and 2005, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 158,000 were killed in 2011 alone.The fact that the disease has come to be perceived so differently in late 20thcentury America (and beyond) is due directly to two interconnected individuals. In 1954, medical study of David Edmonston, a 13 year old infected with the disease (one of many affected by an outbreak at a Boston private school), allowed for the virus that causes it to be isolated for the first time; the efforts of one young researcher, Dr. Thomas Peebles, were instrumental in achieving this success. Subsequent work over the next decade to develop a vaccine culminated in the 1963 successful creation of one by Maurice Hilleman, a researcher and vaccination specialist working at Merck; Hilleman’s vaccine (eventually folded into what is now known as the MMR [Measles Mumps Rubella] shot) has been estimated to prevent up to 1 million deaths each year. To my mind, few developments capture the best of the 20th century better than vaccines, and their combination of science, technology, research and collaboration, and international efforts to improve lives and communities; by any measure, Hilleman and the MMR certainly have to occupy prominent spots on that list.Which brings us to now, and a particularly frustrating 21st century trend. As those WHO estimates indicate, measles has never been eradicated; but it has nonetheless made a striking recent return to our conversations, thanks in no small measure to a new American community: the anti-vaccinaters. This community has been around and making its controversial case for nearly two decades, aided and abetted by a fraudulent researcher and his hoax of a scientific study, but a recent outbreak of measles, caused it seems by the presence of unvaccinated and infected individuals at California’s Disneyland, has brought the community and the disease together in our collective consciousness. There are lots of ways to argue against this extreme and dangerous perspective, but to my mind chief among them would have to be a better understanding of each of these prior two stages: the long-term history and effects of measles, and the hugely destructive force of outbreaks such as those in Hawaii and Fiji; and the vital breakthroughs and successes of the vaccines, and the way they have turned measles into something manageable instead. It’s difficult for me to imagine anyone who would want a return to that earlier stage in the arc of this epidemic.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?

May 7, 2020: American Epidemics: Typhoid Mary

[As I draft this series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know more about where things stand in early May.]On an iconic and complex figure and her symbolic American contexts.Just over one hundred and five years ago, on March 27th, 1915, Mary Mallon (1869-1938)—better known as “Typhoid Mary”—was quarantined by public health officials for the second and final time. The Irish immigrant and cook had previously infected numerous New York-area employers, families, and communities with the highly contagious and dangerous typhoid fever; the incidents began around 1900, but it was not until a 1906 outbreak in Oyster Bay that Mary’s role in them was discovered, and she was quarantined from 1907 to 1910 in a clinic on North Brother Island. Upon her release she agreed to change professions, but instead changed her name and began working as a cook once more. Arrested in 1915 after starting yet another typhoid outbreak, this one at New York’s Sloane Hospital for Women, Mary was taken once again to North Brother Island, where she would remain in quarantine for the final twenty-three years of her life.Typhoid Mary’s striking story can be contexualized in a number of AmericanStudies ways. The public fascination with her (she was interviewed numerous times during those final decades of quarantine) reflects our longstanding interest in “true crime” narratives and figures, in seeking to understand and perhaps even empathize with those who do horrific or sociopathic things to their fellow citizens. At the same time, but on the other end of the emotive spectrum, the fearful and paranoid responses to Mary (and it is possible to see those responses as extreme at the same time that we recognize her culpability in her arc) were undoubtedly connected to equally longstanding narratives of dirty and diseased immigrants and the threats they pose to our communities and culture: narratives that had long been associated specifically with Irish immigrants; and that in response to the late 19th and early 20th century waves of arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America were newly energized in this period. In both these ways, the Mary of North Brother Island—quarantined away from the rest of America and yet forever available for interviews and pictures—could be said to represent a twisted American ideal.Comparing Mary’s life and history to a more genuinely idealized American story offers another lens through which to analyze her, however. As part of a September 2013 series on Newport’s The Breakers, I wrote a post on Rudy Stanish, the son of Eastern Europe immigrants who would rise to become the “Omelet King,” one of the most famous chefs in American history. Stanish’s Newport experiences began in 1929, while Mary was still alive and quarantined; in that, and even more in their shared profession, social status (as servants of wealthy families), and immigrant background, the two offer a compelling and complex comparison. Each life and identity is individual and shouldn’t be reduced to types or mythic narratives, but it’s hard for me to resist noting that Rudy and Mary represent two sides to the same coin, the American Dream and American Nightmare respectively. Their versions are extremes, of course—few Americans end up in either lifelong quarantine or as a chef to the stars—but that doesn’t mean they can’t be connected to more typical communal experiences. And it’s fair—if more pessimistic than I like to be—to say that more Americans experience the nightmare than the dream; and thus to note that we might understand how such a nightmare might lead to the life and choices of a woman like Typhoid Mary.Last epidemic tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?

May 6, 2020: American Epidemics: Xenophobic Fears

[As I draft this series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know more about where things stand in early May.]On the long history of associating illness with foreign and immigrant communities.First things first: by challenging, as I did in my Saturday Evening Post column , our president’s and his supporters’ attempts to brand Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” (a central goal of theirs, at least as of the March moment in which I’m drafting this post); and linking that trend, as I will in this post, to longstanding and discriminatory historical narratives, I don’t mean to minimize the frustrating ways in which the Chinese government seems to have covered up the initial outbreak and spread of the epidemic. While of course our own American government did the same for crucial early months (really all of January and February), that doesn’t at all elide the Chinese government’s responsibility for the world’s early failures to recognize and respond to the virus in ways that might have limited its scope and effects. All of that is part of the story of this pandemic—but none of it has much if anything to do with why so many xenophobic Americans insist on calling the disease the Chinese virus.How do I know that, you might ask? Because Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans have been linked to illness in xenophobic and bigoted fears and narratives for nearly two centuries now. The 19th and early 20th century “Yellow Peril” narrative featured many distinct types of anti-Chinese sentiments, but these fears of illness (and accompanying images of Chinese immigrants and Chinese American communities as unclean and the like) were consistently central to that narrative. Indeed, some of the most common arguments in favor of our earliest national immigration restrictions (which just happened to be our earliest national immigration laws of any kind), from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Immigration Act of 1917 to the 1920s Quota Acts, were those which accused Chinese immigrants (and gradually those from many other nations as well, but Chinese Americans quite clearly comprised the origin point for the links between these fears and national immigration restrictions) of carrying incurable diseases such as smallpox and the bubonic plague. That narrative became an enduring basis for broader anti-immigrant sentiments and narratives throughout the 20th century. Take for example Texas Congressman John Box’s 1928 arguments on the floor of the House of Representatives for extending the 1924 Quota Act to cover the Mexican American border; Box argued that “Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border.” Box traffics in some dozen xenophobic stereotypes in that one sentence, but I think it’s no coincidence that at least three of his eight adjectives (“dirty,” “diseased,” and “unclean”) are closely linked to narratives of illness and contagion (while two have to do with literacy/knowledge and two with class/poverty). Quite simply, there’s no way to understand the long history of anti-immigrant sentiments in American society, culture, and laws without a full engagement with the centrality of disease fears and narratives to those perspectives—and thus no way to disentangle our current moment’s fears and xenophobia from all those interconnected histories. Next epidemic tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?

May 5, 2020: American Epidemics: Yellow Fever

[As I draft this series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know more about where things stand in early May.]On the Early Republic outbreak that very nearly changed everything, and why it didn’t.Yellow fever has been a recurring threatto American communities and populations (along with many places, in the Western Hemisphere and around the world), and one that has most frequently targeted the South and the Gulf Coast. From the numerous 19th and early 20th century outbreaks in New Orleansand the Mississippi River Valley; to an 1858 outbreak that killed more than 300 members of a single Charleston, South Carolina, church; to the 1878 Memphis outbreak that forced a steamship, the John D. Porter, to travel up and down the Mississippi for two months, a floating quarantine unable to unload its passengers for fear of infection; much of the region’s history has been shaped by the disease’s presence and effects. Yet Northern cities such as New York and Philadelphia experienced their share of yellow fever outbreaks as well—and it was a late 18th century Philly epidemic that came close to forever altering American history.Few Americans remember that it was Philadelphia which served as the nation’s capital for most of its first post-Revolutionary years, including the majority of George Washington’s time as president. Washington was inaugurated in New York City but served most of his first term (1789-1793) and all of his second (1793-1797) in Philadelphia; John Adams (president from 1797 to 1801) would likewise lead from Philadelphia, as Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration was the first in the newly completed Washington, DC. And so Washington, his administration, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the whole of the young federal government were located in Philadelphia during the 1793 yellow fever outbreak, the worst in the city and one of the most devastating in American history. The summertime epidemic claimed the lives of more than 5000 Philadelphians, with more than 100 dying each day at its height; Washington and the rest of the government managed to flee the city safely, but given the potency and rapidity with which infection spread (local merchant Samuel Breck noted that many of those affected were “in health one day and buried the next”), it’s very easy to imagine Washington stricken by the illness. What that might have meant for the nascent republic is an interesting and provocative question to say the least.We don’t and can’t know what that alternate history might have comprised, but we can say with far more certainty how and why the city beat back the epidemic. That story would have to start with Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician and founding father (he signed the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Constitutional ratification debates, among other contributions) who refused to leave the city and spearheaded its efforts to contain and combat the outbreak (Rush did contract the disease in October but fortunately survived; his methods for fighting the disease were and remain controversial, but became the norm for many decades thereafter). But equally important to the city’s efforts was its substantial free African American population—Rush believed that the African American community were immune to the epidemic, and asked its members to serve as nurses and in other medical and support roles; while he was almost certainly wrong in his assumptions, many nonetheless answered his call and performed vital duties that the fellow citizens were unable or unwilling to execute. In a subsequent memoir, community leaders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones wrote that they felt, in response to Rush’s call, “a freedom to go forth, confiding in Him who can preserve in the midst of a burning fiery furnace, sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our suffering fellow mortals.” Alternate histories can be compelling, but none holds a candle to this actual, inspiring American history.Next epidemic tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?

May 4, 2020: American Epidemics: The 1918-20 Influenza Pandemic

[As I draft this series in late March, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States and the world. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of prior epidemics, leading up to a weekend post that I’ll wait to draft until we know more about where things stand in early May.]On the lessons we can learn from a century-old global pandemic.This piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column features much of what I would want to say about the echoes between the influenza pandemic (which I won’t call the Spanish Flu for reasons detailed in the piece) and our current unfolding global health crisis, and more exactly what we can learn (in both cautionary and inspiring ways) from that historical moment. So I’ll ask you to check that out if you would, and will just add one further thought here.I don’t know that I said this clearly enough in that piece, but the Philadelphia parade which jump-started the epidemic in late September 1918 took place after the epidemic seemed to have quieted down a bit over the summer. Yes, there had been news of recent outbreaks on military bases, but it might have seemed that those were isolated or contained. So as much as I hate to say this (and believe me, I really hate to say it), it seems clear that one lesson from 1918 is that we will have to remain vigilant, and quite possibly practice frequent social distancing, well into the fall. As the Dad to two sons who have absolutely hated missing school this spring, and for many other reasons as well, that thought is a deeply unhappy one for me. But it’s yet another lesson we have to be willing to take from the influenza epidemic.Next epidemic tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other thoughts on this epidemic or any prior ones?

May 2-3, 2020: April 2020 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]March 30: 80s Comedies: Airplane: An April Fool’s series kicks off with what makes a successful comic parody, and what makes a truly great one. March 31: 80s Comedies: Ghostbusters: The series continues with two distinct ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic horror comedy. April 1: 80s Comedies: Back to the Future: What the time-traveling comedy gets wrong and what it gets right, as the series laughs on. April 2: 80s Comedies: Home Alone: The interesting and very American layers beneath the silly surface of the mega-hit Christmas comedy. April 3: 80s Comedies: Working Girl: The series concludes with one inspiring and two more frustrating female characters in a socially thoughtful dramedy. April 4-5: Dolemite is … the Subject of This Post: A special post on two ways a wonderful recent comic film thoughtfully engages cultural history, and one way it falls a bit short. April 6: Poets We Should All Read: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: A National Poetry Month series kicks off with three of Harper’s many compelling and vital poems. April 7: Poets We Should All Read: Martín Espada: The series continues with a few complementary ways the Puerto Rican poet portrays his heritage. April 8: Poets We Should All Read: Joy Harjo: The significance of a Native American Poet Laureate and why Harjo goes way beyond it, as the series reads on. April 9: Poets We Should All Read: Li-Young Lee: The power of a single perfect poem and the need to go beyond it nonetheless. April 10: Poets We Should All Read: Robin Jewel Smith’s Suggestions: The series concludes with a mini-Guest Post, as one of our most talented young poets nominates other current poets we should all read.April 11-12: Crowd-Sourced Poets We Should All Read: But wait, there’s more—including more nominees of mine and a ton from fellow PoetStudiers—add yours in comments, please!April 13: Arab American Stories: Estevanico: A National Arab American Heritage Month series kicks off with the enslaved explorer who helps revise our understanding of early American histories. April 14: Arab American Stories: Yarrow Mamout: The series continues with the Early Republic figure who became an iconic image of the new nation. April 15: Arab American Stories: Omar ibn Said: How an inspiring figure and text have finally started to enter our collective memories and why there’s still more to do, as the series rolls on. April 16: Arab American Stories: Muhammad Ali “Nicholas” Said: How a striking American life and book help us engage with a few key historical questions. April 17: Arab American Stories: Abdallah Ingram: The series concludes with the inspiring individual who exemplifies the contributions of Arab American communities to our nation and world. April 18-19: 21st Century Arab American Writers: A special weekend post highlighting a handful of the many talented and influential Arab American writers and works in our current moment.April 20: Patriots’ Day and Critical Patriotism: My annual Patriots’ Day post, on the only time and way we can be genuinely patriotic. April 21: Models of Critical Patriotism: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”: A critical patriotism series kicks off with the stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 165 years ago.April 22: Models of Critical Patriotism: “Eulogy on King Philip”: The series continues with one speech that offers two complementary modes of critical patriotism. April 23: Models of Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the Centennial Exposition: National divisions and critical patriotism at America’s 100thbirthday celebration, as the series rolls on. April 24: Models of Critical Patriotism: America is in the Heart: The series concludes with an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity. April 25-May 1: Update on Of Thee I Sing!: A special week-long update on the status of and a few takeaways from my next book, on competing visions of American patriotism. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 25-May 1, 2020: Update on Of Thee I Sing!

[In honor of Patriots’ Day, and inspired by my book-in-progress for the American Ways series on the history of American patriotisms, a series on that topic and examples of critical patriotism from across American history. Leading up to this special post on that next book project of mine!]It's done (a draft of the manuscript, that is)!What, you want to hear more? Okay, here are three more things about my next book, which I’m hoping will be out before 2020 is done:1)      A Sequel, but Not the Same: Of Thee I Sing is in the same Rowman & Littlefield American Ways series as was my last book, We the People , and it would certainly be fair to describe it as a sequel, presenting a parallel lens through which to analyze debates over American identity (this time the spectrum between celebratory, mythologizing, active, and critical patriotisms, rather than exclusion and inclusion). But it’s of course not identical to that prior book, and one definite difference is in the structure: while We the People moved roughly chronologically, each chapter focused on a particular ethnic/cultural group; while the eight chapters of Of Thee I Sing focus directly on eight historical moments: the Revolution, the Early Republic, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Depression/WWII, the 60s, and the 80s (with a conclusion on the age of Trump, natch). That meant I could explore a number of distinct histories and stories from each time period, which helped lead to the other two elements I’ll highlight here.2)      Hidden Gems: One benefit of that time period approach was that for each chapter I could in my research/reading dig deep into that period for histories and stories that seemed to have something to do with my focal forms of patriotism, and in the process I uncovered many that were entirely unfamiliar to me and I have to believe are likewise relatively unknown to most Americans. Here’s one compelling example: under the World War I-era Espionage and Sedition Acts, a silent film about the Revolution entitled The Spirit of ’76 (1917) was seized by the government for portraying the English (now America’s wartime allies) too harshly, and the film’s producer, a Jewish American immigrant from Germany named Robert Goldstein, was sentenced to ten years in prison; at the sentencing Judge Benjamin Bledsoe told Goldstein, “Count yourself lucky that you didn’t commit treason in a country lacking America’s right to a trial by jury. You’d already be dead.” There’s a lot more such amazing, largely untold stories in the book!3)      Rethinking the Familiar: The chapters’ time period focal points also, and I would say just as importantly, allowed me to focus on histories with which we are all generally familiar, and reexamine them through the lens of these debates over patriotism. That started with the very first chapter, on the Revolution, and with a great question asked of me by series editor John David Smith. He pushed me to think about the era’s Loyalists, which nicely lined up with my longtime interest in that community and sense of the Revolution as at its heart a civil war. To that end, I argue in my Revolution chapter for the value of seeing Loyalists as critical patriots—not quite to the United States of America, both because the nation didn’t exist yet and because they weren’t advocating for its creation; but to the American community of which they were just as much a part as the Revolutionaries. That’s one example of many such reframings in Of Thee I Sing, which I can’t wait to share with you all soon!April Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other examples or forms of patriotism you’d highlight?