Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 185

November 9-10, 2019: Must-Read Scholarly Blogs

[This week marks this blog’s 9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up this special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]
Individual blogs:Matthew Teutsch’s Interminable Rambling Rob Velella’s American Literary BlogKevin Levin’s Civil War MemoryL.D. Burnett’s Saved by HistoryRobert Greene II’s Forty Acres and a StarshipJohn Fea’s The Way of Improvement Leads HomeMary-Kim Arnold’s “Process Notes” Damien Shiels’ Irish American Civil WarThe Steel Penand Andrea Kaston Tange’s Thinking about the Humanities, which includes this in-development resource for searching her more than 350 articles.
Group blogs:Pedagogy & American Literary StudiesThe US Intellectual History blogClio and the ContemporaryBlack PerspectivesNursing ClioMass MedievalThe Middle SpacesResearch Insiders
Veteran’s Day series starts Monday,BenPS. Other scholarly blogs you’d add to this list?

November 8, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: What’s Next

[This week marks this blog’s 9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]I thought about writing a post on my own plans and goals for the next year (or nine), but in truth from my perspective they’re extensions of where the blog has been and where it is here on its 9th birthday. Of course I look forward to adding more voices into the mix, through Guest Posts, Crowd-sourced Posts, social media conversations, and more, but otherwise, more from this AmericanStudier is certainly in the offing.However, there’s another and even more impactful way to feature your voices—getting your input on ways AmericanStudies can continue to evolve in the year(s) to come. As always, I’d love to hear from you, including in comments here or by email; even just letting me know who you are, what brings/brought you here, and the like would be very much appreciated. But to create a space for even further response and conversation, I’ve created a Google Doc that anyone with the link can contribute to. That link is here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gttmEkK7bGsNDz0KKVwP65CmAsksUqldJgmPnUE3xsQ/edit?usp=sharingPlease feel free to share your responses, ideas, suggestions, and more for the future of AmericanStudies (or, again, just say hi and introduce yourself a bit if you would)! The future is up to all of us, and that’s just as true in this space as it is in America. List of other scholarly blogs to check out this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list? And please do add your thoughts to the Google Doc if you get a chance!

November 7, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Other Online Gigs

[This week marks this blog’s 9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]Over the last 9 years I’ve had the chance to write for many different online spaces, whether scholarly, political, or mass media. But I’ve had three main, multi-year such online gigs, and each has both reflected and contributed to my blog writing:1)      Talking Points Memo (TPM): In November 2014, Avi Green of the Scholars Strategy Network helped me land my first op ed with Josh Marshall’s political and social commentary site TPM. Written in response to President Obama’s immigration executive order, that op ed remains my most viral to date—it received over 110,000 views and became TPM’s 4thmost-viewed op ed of 2014. I had to write that 750-word op ed in just a couple hours, and I’m quite sure that my then four years of blogging experience were crucial to my ability to produce a strong short-form piece so quickly. But it, and the 15 months of bimonthly pieces I would go on to write for TPM, also changed my blogging and public scholarship in clear and crucial ways, helping me become both more responsive to our current moment in my topics and ideas and more aware of audience in my voice and form. 2)      Huffington Post: When my TPM editor left for another job and the site’s “Café” op ed section began to disappear, I found a second consistent online gig—as a blogger for the Huffington Post (the in the process of morphing into its current form as HuffPost ). My HuffPost work wasn’t as consistent, not least because I didn’t work with an editor and so didn’t have the same expectations and schedule. That meant I could write pieces when the need arose, but also made the gig feel both less collaborative and less central to my evolving public scholarly career. But I wrote about 20 pieces for HuffPostover a year and a half period, and that work did force me to continue thinking about the questions of style and form, audience and response that I had begun developing during my TPM tenure. In particular, I would argue that I began finding ways to bring my own voice and experiences into the HuffPost columns more consistently, which both derived from and continued to influence my blogging voice as well.3)      The Saturday Evening Post: In late 2017, I connected with Jennifer Bortel, then the new (or least new-ish) web editor for the Saturday Evening Post . That connection quickly led to my bimonthly Considering History column for the Post, now nearing its 2-year anniversary and by far my most enjoyable and meaningful online writing gig to date. There are lots of reasons why, including how much of a pleasure Jen is to work with; but if I had to sum it up, I would go back to three reasons for starting this blog about which I wrote in Monday’s post: adding to our collective memories in order to counter contemporary political myths and propaganda; finding a space to do public scholarly writing; and finding community and connections. The Posthas helped me do all those things, and has in many ways become a true complement to AmericanStudier and second home for my online public scholarly work and identity. Here’s to what’s next (on which more tomorrow)!Last anniversary reflection tomorrow,BenPS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?

November 6, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Sharing Your Voices

[This week marks this blog’s 9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]On three stages in my evolving, increasingly central goal of making my individual blog also a communal, multi-vocal space.1)      Guest Posts: I knew from the outset that I wanted to include voices other than my own in this space, and so I featured my first Guest Post (from a very special Guest Poster!) after just over two months, in early January 2011. Since then I’ve been delighted to feature more than 50 such posts (you can find them all by clicking on the Guest Posts label in this blog’s right-hand column), up through Ariella Baker-Archer’s Halloween-tastic Guest Post a couple weeks ago. They’ve all been radically different in style and structure from my relatively consistent form, which is a significant part of the point—that is, Guest Posts aren’t just about sharing other voices, content, topics, or analyses (although of course that’s all part of it); they also offer other scholars and writers a chance to use this form and this blog in whatever ways will (I hope) most benefit their own thinking and work. I’ve loved every chance to share a Guest Post (well, other than that one, but you know who you are…I kid, I kid), and can’t wait for the next 50!2)      Crowd-sourced Posts: About a year after that first Guest Post, in early 2012, I knew that the blog would have to evolve substantially if I was going to be both able to continue (time-wise) and interested in doing so. One of the most significant changes was the move to weekly series, which allows me to write and schedule blocks of posts much more easily (quite simply the only way I’ve been able to keep writing a daily blog for all these years). And as an unexpected side effect to that shift, I realized that for topics which seemed to speak to many fellow AmericanStudiers, I could use the weekend post to elicit and share collective responses and ideas on that week’s subject. This June 16-17 follow-up to a series on material culture was the first such crowd-sourced post, of which I’ve now had the chance to feature more than 110. They are often some of my very favorite posts (ironically, the annual Non-Favorites post is a particular fav), as they draw out many more voices and perspectives, responses and suggestions, than would ever be possible from Guest Posts alone.3)      Social media: Many of the contributions to those crowd-sourced posts have come from Facebook comment threads, but I’m thinking here especially about Twitter. When I started AmericanStudier I didn’t even have a Twitter account; I opened my account in early 2011 largely as a vehicle through which to share blog posts. I’m ashamed to admit that for the first couple years I mostly used Twitter to that end, to share my own work. But I’ve gradually become (I hope and believe) much better at being a member of the Twitter scholarly community, and while that especially means sharing and engaging with the work and voices of others, it has also fundamentally changed how I share my blog. Now I’m much more likely to create a mini-thread, both to highlight a few sides of that day’s and week’s topics and to encourage responses and conversation from my thousands of fellow scholarly Tweeters. Sometimes those end up being part of crowd-sourced posts (in weeks when I feature them), but they always affect and change and strengthen my own thoughts and the blog. One more way your voices have become increasingly central to this space!Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,BenPS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list? Or ideas for Guest Posts you’d like to contribute (email meif so!)?

November 5, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Personal Benefits

[This week marks this blog’s 9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]On three of the many ways (along with those I highlighted in yesterday’s post, and those to which the rest of the week’s posts will connect) I’ve benefitted immeasurably from my work on AmericanStudier.1)      Experimentation: As I mentioned yesterday, when I started the blog most if not all of my scholarly writing existed within the traditional peer-reviewed formats. Besides the frustratingly long time-lag between writing and publication, another limitation of those formats (which, to be clear, I still value and continue to work in alongside blogging and other forms) is that they require both the writing and the ideas to be entirely developed (indeed, as close to perfect as we flawed humans can produce) by the time of submission. Whereas in this space, I’ve found the opportunity and freedom to write about things I’ve just begun to consider, to explore topics and texts about which I’ve just begun learning, to share partial and preliminary and provisional ideas, to, in a word, experiment. 2)      Books: I genuinely had no idea that this would be the case when I began blogging (nor for at least a year or so thereafter), but it turns out that such experimentation isn’t just a complement to more traditional academic formats—it can also become a starting point for work in those formats. I can’t remember if the final work on my second book, which came out in the summer of 2011, was influenced at all by the blog, although it may well have been. But I know for sure that each of my last three bookshas started quite overtly with posts and ideas here (among other influences of course, but with this space as a consistent and crucial one). When I talk up the benefits of scholarly blogging, as I did earlier this fall at the annual Teaching at Teaching-Intensive Institutions conference, I make very clear that it’s not only not a distraction from our other scholarly writing and work—it’s also and especially a pipeline to that work!3)      A Consistent Scholarly Identity: The title of my TTII talk was “Maintaining a Scholarly Identity on a 4/4 Load,” and that’s perhaps been the most beneficial blogging benefit of all. During semesters and academic years at a teaching-intensive institution, it’s nearly impossible to do any long-form scholarly writing; that’s what breaks and summers are for. But when we get to those times, it can feel like it takes a long time (far too long, indeed) to get back into a scholarly writing headspace. And a daily scholarly blog (or one on whatever schedule works for you, although I do recommend some sort of a schedule) fights that problem head-on, making our scholarly writing and work part of our life throughout the semesters and years. Even though I no longer write the blog each day (writing and scheduling in bunches), I get to see it, read it, share it each day, and that makes my scholarly writing and identity part of my daily life in an incredibly beneficial way.Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,BenPS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?

November 4, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Origin Points

[This week marks this blog’s 9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]On the most overt and a couple subtler reasons why I started AmericanStudying.I didn’t say this explicitly in any of my first blog posts, but I remember quite clearly the most proximate and very specific cause of my starting this blog in the first week of November, 2010: that week’s historic midterm elections. The strident opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency had been building for more than a year by that time (indeed, since the first moments of that presidency), both in terms of the rise of the Tea Party and through widespread, telling phrases like “I want my country back,” but it was those midterm elections which made clear just how deep those sentiments ran. The “I want my country back” narrative, along with the power of political and cultural voices like those of Glenn Beck and his “Beck University,” exemplified for me how much those seemingly contemporary political debates were driven by particular, and to my mind mythologized and propagandistic, visions of American history, culture, and identity. I knew I wanted to space to challenge those visions and write about such topics with the nuance and thoughtfulness they deserved, and to that end decided to start my second daily and first scholarly blog (my first, Ben’s Thought for the Night, was a far more personal one in 2007-2008).The absence of such a public scholarly space in my life prior to the creation of AmericanStudier reflects a second layer to the causes of my starting the blog, although not one of which I was consciously aware at the time. I believe I had already begun trying to place op eds here and there by that time, but entirely haphazardly and without any particular expectation that I would be able to land one (and certainly with no specific knowledge of how to do so). I was still a couple years away from finding and joining the Scholars Strategy Network(SSN), which represented a vital further step in my public scholarly career (and on which more later in this week’s series). So in most ways in late 2010 I still thought of my scholarly writing as existing within the traditional academic spaces of peer-reviewed publications (both journal articles and book projects). I knew that such spaces wouldn’t work for what I felt I needed to do in response to the elections, though (not least because it takes literally years to publish in most of those formats), and so starting a daily scholarly blog comprised an attempt to create a new, more suitable such space.My mention of SSN also reflects one other and perhaps even less conscious factor in my creation of AmericanStudier: a need for community. I was in my 6th year in the Fitchburg State English Studies Department that fall, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that FSU didn’t offer a variety of important and meaningful professional communities; it most certainly did and still does 9 years later. But I think I did feel (again, without being able to put this into words at the time) that those wonderful communities, from the department to the classroom, the university as a whole to treasured friendships with colleagues, needed to be complemented with another type, with connection to fellow scholars interested in public engagement and public scholarship. Much of the story of my professional life over these last 9 years (as the next few posts in this series will trace) has been a continuing and deepening set of steps into such a public scholarly community, one that I have found even more supportive and sustaining and challenging and crucial than I could have imagined, and at the heart of that ongoing and evolving process has been AmericanStudier. Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,BenPS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?

November 2-3, 2019: October 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]September 30: Recent Reads: The Overstory: A series on great books I’ve recently read starts with Richard Powers’ ambitious, messy, vital climate change novel.October 1: Recent Reads: The Nickel Boys: The series continues with Colson Whitehead’s stunning, bracing new novel.October 2: Recent Reads: There There: How Tommy Orange’s debut novel importantly challenges my critical optimism, as the series reads on.October 3: Recent Reads: Heaven, My Home: The newest mystery thriller from one of our great contemporary writers, Attica Locke. October 4: Recent Reads: The Sweetest Fruits: The series concludes with the new historical novel from Monique Truong, which I’ll be teaching in my Spring Capstone course!October 5-6: Crowd-sourced Recent Reads: Another great crowd-sourced post full of suggestions for further reading—add yours in comments! October 7: Domestic Terrorism: The KKK: Inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Days of Rage protests, a domestic terrorism series starts with under-remembered histories of our oldest such organization.October 8: Domestic Terrorism: The Weathermen: On that anniversary, the series continues with the difficulty and importance of writing about domestic terrorists with whose positions we agree.October 9: Domestic Terrorism: McVeigh and Militias: How to see the Oklahoma City bomber as a “lone wolf” and why we shouldn’t, as the series rolls on.October 10: Domestic Terrorism: Edward Abbey and Environmental Terrorism: Three distinct and contrasting ways to contribute to environmental activism. October 11: Domestic Terrorism: Cultural Representations: The series concludes with three cultural texts that reflect three different perspectives on domestic terrorists. October 12-13: 21st Century Domestic Terrorism: A special weekend post featuring an excerpt from my new book on how to contextualize contemporary domestic terrorists and mass shooters. October 14-20: Present and Future Book Talks for We the People: Speaking of that new book, a brief update on my current and future talks—and a request for ideas for more!October 21: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis: A series on a forgotten Worcester convention starts with the Renaissance woman who served as its president.October 22: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Sarah H. Earle: The series continues with the local convention organizer who embodies the era’s many different forms of social activism.October 23: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Sojourner Truth: The benefits and limitations of remembering a striking individual’s communal contexts, as the series rolls on.October 24: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: The Men: Remembering, but not over-emphasizing, the male participants at a women’s rights convention. October 25: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Harriet Martineau and Harriet Taylor Mill: The series concludes with two English women who reveal the convention’s Transatlantic influences. October 26-27: Ariella Archer’s Guest Post: My Scary Thoughts: The Evolution of Three Horror Subgenres: A Halloween series kicks off with my latest Guest Post, the great Ariella Archer on past and present evolutions of horror films!October 28: ScaryStudying: Scary Stories: My annual HalloweenStudying begins with my analytical prejudice against scary stories, and how House of Leaves helped challenge that perspective.October 29: ScaryStudying: Five Masterpieces: The series continues with a handful of the spookiest works in American literature—and a bunch more nominations in comments!October 30: ScaryStudying: American Horror Stories?: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s complaint about the difficulties of writing Gothic stories in America, and how to find horror in the everyday here.October 31: ScaryStudying: The Shinings: How the endings of Stephen King’s and Stanley Kubrick’s Shinings embody hopeful and cynical forms of horror, as the series scares on.November 1: ScaryStudying: Sleepy Hollow: The series concludes with the foundational scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.Special blog anniversary series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

November 1, 2019: ScaryStudying: Sleepy Hollow

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]On the original American scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.I never got the chance to watch any episodes of the recent Sleepy Hollow TV show—if you did, please feel free to share your thoughts in comments!—but it’s certainly further proof of the lasting influence of one of America’s earliest professional writers, Washington Irving. Certainly much of Irving’s extensive body of work, including the History of New York about which I wrote in that hyperlinked post, has largely vanished from our collective national consciousness; but two of the stories in his first collection of fiction, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent . (1819), have endured across those nearly two hundred years about as fully as any American literary works (from any century) have. I’m referring of course to that hen-pecked sleeper Rip Van Winkle and to the focus of today’s post, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”“Sleepy Hollow” has endured because at its heart, as the TV show seemed (from the previews and clips I saw anyway) to understand, it is about a simple conflict that is at the heart of many scary stories: between an extremely ordinary everyman (awkward and shy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane) and an equally extraordinary supernatural foe (the terrifying Headless Horseman). Like many scary story protagonists, Ichabod has an idealized love interest, the buxon Katrina Von Tassel; and finds himself competing for her affections with a far more popular and confident rival, Brom Bones. The culminating intersection between the two plotlines—between Ichabod’s supernatural and romantic encounters—engages the audience on multiple emotional levels simultaneously, just as so many contemporary horror films strive to do. Indeed, the only significant divergence from the now well-established formula is that the everyman hero loses—the Horseman scares Ichabod Crane away, Brom Bones escorts Katrina Von Tassel to the altar, and Ichabod’s story becomes the stuff of local legend.That resolution lessens the story’s scariness factor (it seems clear that Brom was masquerading as the Headless Horseman), but at the same time amplifies its status as an originating American folktale. For one thing, Irving’s fictional narrator and historian Diedrich Knickerbocker presents Ichabod’s story, like Rip Van Winkle’s, as precisely such a folktale, a part of the collective memory of his turn of the 19th century Dutch New York and thus of Early Republic America more broadly. And for another, it’s possible to read Brom Bones’ triumph, and his resulting union with the town’s powerful Von Tassel family, as an ironic reminder—much like Rip’s concluding images—that the more things seem to have changed in this post-Revolutionary America, the more in at least some ways they have stayed the same. America’s landed elites maintain their power, manipulating our folk legends (even our scary stories) to do so—and our overly ambitious schoolteachers flee in terror before that social force, remembered simply as a funny and telling part of those stories. October Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?

October 31, 2019: ScaryStudying: The Shinings

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film. There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I discussed yesterday): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my fourth book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.Last scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?

October 30, 2019: ScaryStudying: American Horror Stories?

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]On whether America can have home-grown horror—and where we might find it.Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously complained (in the Preface to The Marble Faun) about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong … Romances need ruin to make them grow.” Given what he and his era meant by “the Romance,” it’s possible to paraphrase his point this way: America was, at least in the early 19th century but perhaps remains, too young, too devoid of a distant past and the ancient castles and ruins that come with it, to produce a Gothic literary tradition in the same way as Europe. Even Edgar Allan Poe, the Hawthorne contemporary and American Gothic writer who would seem so clearly to disprove this idea, set his most Gothic stories either abroad or (as in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) in an undefined place that could be anywhere (and feels more European than American to be sure). So it might indeed be fair to ask whether there can be a homegrown American Gothic.It was of course in implied response to such a question that Grant Wood painted American Gothic (1930), one of the most famous and most ambiguous works of American art. Using his sister and the family dentist as his models for the iconic farmer and his wife, Wood created what seemed to be a simple and realistic portrait of two average (and somewhat unhappy and stiff, but not particularly mysterious) people. But then he gave it that title, and the whole thing suddenly became a great deal more complex and challenging. Is the title sarcastic, contrasting the simplicity and even boring-ness with those much more mysterious and compelling qualities Hawthorne had listed? Is it genuine, attempting to draw attention to the horrors that can lurk in quiet farmyards or families? Or is it an ironic combination of the two, recognizing that America does not have the overtly gothic qualities but might in its apparent simplicity and ordinariness possess a subtler and very different but ultimately no less horrifying quality?Your mileage may vary, of course, and Wood’s painting will always remain open to those and many other possible interpretations. But I would argue for the ironic interpretation, not least because it fits with the painting’s own two contrasted yet interconnected levels (what’s on the canvas and what’s in the title). And I would connect it to our contemporary popular culture by noting the echoes of Wood’s title in the 21st century hit TV show American Horror Story. From its first season on, Story can be seen as an extended and far more explicit (this is the 21st century, and they’ve had full seasons of episodes to fill) representation of the idea that average American families and homes contain within them great and gothic horrors, that the scariest thing of all might not be a ruined castle full of vengeful ghosts and supernatural terrors, but a sunlit suburban home full of, well, those same things. I’d like to think that Hawthorne would be entirely on that board with that idea.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?