Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 186

October 29, 2019: ScaryStudying: Five Masterpieces

[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!]
My nominees for five of the scariest works in American literary history (in chronological order):
1)      Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown’s novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.
2)      Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story’s scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.
3)      Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948): I don’t think there’s anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson’s story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I’ve read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I’d say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.
4)      Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt”(1950; don’t know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it’s worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury’s story, the better. Suffice it to say it’s a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has long since sailed for me.
5)      Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000): As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Danielewksi’s novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don’t believe it’s possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?

October 28, 2019: ScaryStudying: Scary 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 the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.
I don’t have any problem thinking of genre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the same ballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my earliest posts here about Ross MacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good time teaching it four times now (with a fifth coming up this Spring). When you get right down to it, it can be pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as genre fiction and what doesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) owes a lot to detective fiction, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque time travel sci fi novel, and, as critic David Reynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporary potboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse to making judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extended attention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc), I try not to base those calls on whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.
And yet, I’ll admit that I have a bit of an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of them at least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me that a desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and stylistic goal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar Allan Poe, whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher”(1839) contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory of the unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires an audience to turn off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primal responses that, while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive than ideal. (I’d compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap into primal responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience to think as well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to Weird Tale kind of scares, ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds and force them to imagine what they might entail and affect; but the more mainstream horror, tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, does often ask an audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’s manipulations.
But like any reasonable person who recognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventually undermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me to begin doing so in this case is Mark Danielewski’spostmodern horror novel House of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-use adjective in any description of Danielewski’s novel, which features, among other things, at least three distinct narrations and narrators (one of whom does much of his narrating in footnotes, and another who does the majority of his narrating in footnotes on those footnotes); pages with only a single word, located in a random location; elaborate use of colored type to signal and signify different (if vague and shifting) emphases; and a large number of invented scholarly works, fully and accurately cited both parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes (alongside some actual works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a very subjective thing, which is perhaps another reason why I have a hard time analyzing it, but nonetheless—the novel is also deeply, powerfully, successfully scary. And moving, for that matter—certainly to my mind the best horror (and Poe would qualify here for sure) reveals and sympathizes with humanity even as it threatens and destroys many of its human characters, and Danielewski’s novel does each of those things, to each character at each level of story and narration, very fully and impressively. Yet I believe that the book’s principal purpose, first and last, is to scare its readers, and for me, at least, it has done so, not only the first time I read it but the second and third as well (another mark of the best horror I’d say).So what?, you might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves, and also let me know your own potent scary story suggestions below! But for me, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to the potential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in any medium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatest works, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next scary story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?

October 26-27, 2019: Ariella Archer’s Guest Post: My Scary Thoughts: The Evolution of Three Horror Subgenres

[As with so many of my AmericanStudies contacts and colleagues, I met Ariella Archer through Twitter, where she’s one of the most consistently compelling voices on American history, social studies education, and more. She teaches in Texas, has an MA in History and will soon be pursuing a PhD, and is a great example of the best of AmericanStudies—and thus a voice I’m very excited to feature in this Guest Post!]
The first scary movie I ever watched was The Wizard of Gore. I was eight or nine at the time and was not supposed to see it. My parents thought I was in bed asleep, little did they know, I was peeking around the corner of our hallway, watching Montag the Magnificent disembowel people on stage. I was terrified. Paralyzed with fear, I watched it through to the end. I have been a fan of horror since that day. The culmination of special effects, music, jump scares, suspense, and wondering if you are brave enough to continue watching makes the movie going experience worth viewing for die hard horror fans like myself. Horror has been around as long as people have been telling stories around a campfire. Urban legends, myths, ghost stories, monsters, and demons are all things that fill the darkness when our imaginations run wild. When moving pictures came on the scene, people no longer had to use their imagination, they could see the worst of mankind played out before their very eyes.
Horror movies have always been an important part of Hollywood. Pop Culture has turned horror into a big business. The Numbers don’t lie! Countless subgenres have flooded the market, which include but are not limited to Slasher, Zombie, Supernatural, Monster, and Found Footage. These give a variety of choices to even the pickiest of horror fans. My favorite is the Slasher subgenre and my first choice for a Slasher feature is Friday the 13th. Jason Voorhees makes a great horror hero. The audience roots for him, just as they root for the lone survivor at the end. Voorhees was not the first horror hero in a Slasher movie; however, that honor can be given to Leatherface. Each subgenre can be traced back to a single movie that changed the future of horror. A movie that was so profound, writers and directors continued to create movies in response to the original’s success. Horror subgenres carry with them a distinct history, which makes them interesting. I pay good money to feel the frights of my favorite subgenres, which themselves have their own interesting backstory. So, in keeping with the spirit of the horror movie lists (and there are plenty), I have created my own that includes my three favorite subgenres, the groundbreaking movies that started them, and how they have evolved over the years.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
1.       Zombies The 1968 movie that started it all was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s movie brilliantly houses a group of strangers together and pits them against hordes of zombies. Knowing they are trapped, the main character, Ben, tries to rally the group, with little success. In the end Ben meets the same fate as the other house guests, but unfortunately, it is at the hands of search and rescue. They mistakenly thought Ben was one of the undead and shot him. This ending was not without controversy. It is hard to ignore the fact that Ben was an African American male trapped in a house with white people that were unhappy with him in charge. In the end, McClelland, the white sheriff, shoots Ben, killing him. Romeroinsists that he was not tackling a race issue, but instead he hired Duane Jones (Ben) because he gave the best audition. Zombies stem from Haitian folklore that is rich in African religious customs. The word zombie first meant, in general terms, spirit or ghost but was later used to describe a person brought back from the dead, and used as a slave. There are tales with zombie themes that have been around for a long time; however, Romero laid the groundwork for today’s popular zombie. Over the last 50 years the dead have taken on many different forms. Romero’s zombies are mindless, slow, and represent the worst of humanity. Slow zombies were a staple in the subgenre for quite some time. In an interview, George Romero said slower zombies are scarier, easier to escape, and more fun to work with. On the flip side, fast zombies, or zombies that run, climb, and jump, are relatively new and have become quite popular.  Movies like 28 Days Later and World War Z have made it difficult for humans to elude the zombies. They include an endless amount of inventive ways to escape precarious situations. The look of zombies has also changed. In Night of the Living Dead, zombies were subtle and hard to distinguish from the living. They almost looked like everyday humans wearing regular clothing. Nowadays, they are rotted, disgusting, dirty, and even look like they smell bad. The more current movies have a backstory exploring the origins of zombies. Some claim viruses and bacteria are the culprit. In Night of the Comet, an opportunity to witness a rare comet creates the violent flesh eaters. One of the scariest things about zombie movies, and even television shows like The Walking Dead,are the people that are trying to survive. They lose their humanity along the way, become desperate, and eventually must kill to survive. It becomes a post apocalyptical world where survivors turn on each other for their most basic needs. This loss of self is terrifying and forces the question; to what lengths would I go in order to survive?
2.       Slashers Slasher movies are known for their memorable villains turned horror heroes. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jigsaw, and Ghostface are extremely popular, and marketable even after all these years. Action figures of these and other horror evildoers are available year-round. The movie given credit for laying the groundwork of the subgenre is the 1974 movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Directed by Toby Hooper, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was brilliantly marketed as a true event. Audiences flocked to see a family of cannibals terrorize 5 friends on vacation. Although the idea is loosely based on the serial killer Ed Gein, the movie plot was fiction. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre led to other very successful Slasher films. Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Saw each have a very similar formula that makes for successful Slasher flicks. Those ingredients include: the murderer with a disturbing past; dark settings; a group of deviant and unsuspecting teens; foreshadowing musical scores; death (lots of it); a number of cheesy sequels; and of course the final girl. The final girl is the last person alive to deal with the villain. She is usually the opposite of every other person in the movie. While the wild teens are off doing drugs and having sex, the final girl is saying no, and rebuffing a prospective boyfriend’s advances. She is seen as strong, smart, and virtuous. The first final girl was Sally Hardesty in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After her, there are other iconic lone survivors including Laurie Strode in Halloween, Alice from Friday the 13th, and Nancy Thompson in Nightmare on Elm Street.  Some say the final girl trope is a misogynistic approach to writing horror. Slasher movies were just gaining their popularity in the 80’s, and since then, studies have shown that a nod to the final girl confirm how adults viewed young people in society at the time. Teens were viewed as rotten and audiences got pleasure from seeing the hooligans meet their end. The final girl has since developed over the past thirty years into a character that is no longer shamed for having sex or enjoying the same indulgences as her counterparts. The movie Scream was a game changer for the horror genre and the final girl.  Wes Craven’s masterpiece broke all of the Slasher film rules and is credited for breathing new life into the horror movie brand. Scream was one of the highest grossing horror films and was successful with the critics. The characters were well versed in the rules of horror. As events happened in the movie, they applied those rules to figure out what was next. Their knowledge of the genre is what makes the movie different. There are no unsuspecting teens wondering what is going on around them. The audience is made aware of this early on in the movie when main character Sidney Prescott is speaking to Ghostface on the phone. She claims her dislike for horror is due to “some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act, who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.”  This was a breath of fresh air for audiences that were used to seeing clueless teens being picked off one by one. Sidney Prescott rebelled against the final girl rules as well. Sidney was a virgin but chose to have sex with her boyfriend. This is usually a death sentence for a character. She does the opposite of what other females in Slasher movies would do as well. She locks doors and chooses safer routes to get away from the killer. Scream has had many sequels, just like any good Slasher movie. Further, the success of Scream led to other satisfying but less successful movies like I Know What You did Last Summer, and Urban Legend.
3.       Found Footage Found Footage are movies where a substantial amount of video is filmed on handheld cameras, much akin to the cheesy family home video of your first birthday that takes a sinister turn. The 2007, Spanish movie [REC] scared me beyond belief. A reporter is tasked with shadowing a fire department into an apartment building which gets barricaded after a woman is infected with a virus. The claustrophobic feeling as the camera searched the dark for some sort of answers was petrifying. Found Footage movies can nauseate and frustrate. Nauseate because of the camera’s constate movements and frustrate because you cannot see what is going on outside of the camera’s view. The events outside the view of the camera can make the imagination run wild with supposition which is sometimes creepier than what is going on in the actual shot. The 1999 movie that put Found Footage on the map was The Blair Witch Project. I did not find it nearly as unsettling as [REC]; however, there is something to be said about the dangers that lurk in the outreaches of unexplored forests. The movie let the audience feel the fear that the characters felt. No one could figure out if there was something out in the woods or if the campers were just feeding off of each other’s fears. The Blair Witch Project, just like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, marketed itself as based on real events. Many wondered if the video footage from the movie was real. One of the stars, Michael Williams said his family got condolence letters when missing posters, used to advertise the movie, were released. After the success of The Blair Witch Project, many other Found Footage films have been made. These continue to make big bucks for Hollywood. One movie worth mentioning, that I have not seen, is Paranormal Activity . The critics did not like it, however, on a starting budget of $15,000, the movie grossed $193 million worldwide. Paramount went on to make three sequels which garnered the same results. Found Footage movies are still very popular to this day. 
Final thoughts: True Crime Podcasts A form of horror that is bone chilling and fairly new on the scene are True Crime podcasts. Podcasts began to root themselves in the mid 2000’s but have recently taken center stage. True Crime podcasts are the new water cooler topic for many. True crime stories about murder, missing loved ones, killing children, and so much more are scary because they are based on real crimes. Many of the podcasters research their work using a plethora of hair-raising evidence and shocking interviews. A good podcaster can tell a story that creates the same feelings as a good horror movie. My favorite true crime series, To Live and Die in L.A ., still haunts me even though it has been months since I have finished the podcast. The host, Neil Strauss, takes the listeners through real time events and as he gets new information, his reactions are sometimes devastating. You quickly learn that he is invested in the families, and occasionally feels sorry for the killer. Listeners get closure in the last episode when it is finally revealed who killed 21-year-old Adea Shabani. Strauss’ investigative methods and empathy remind me of Detective David Miller in the movie Se7en. It is a roller coaster ride for Strauss, and he takes his audience on the ride with him. I still think about this case, which I firmly believe is the goal of any good true crime podcaster. Many of them hope that the attention brought to unsolved cases will help families get some sort of closure. The stories can be gory and disturbing while the ones that make you sick to your stomach are the stories involving children. True crime podcast listeners quickly learn that these stories hit close to home. Some of my favorite true crime podcasts are Crime Junkies, True Crime Garage, Up and Vanished, and Cold. True Crime could be considered unconventional horror; however, when the feelings of shock, abhorrence, and terror are the same feelings you would get watching a good scary movie, could True Crime eventually be a sister to the horror genre?
Horror will continue to be a huge market for Hollywood, and I could not be more excited about the future of the genre. The Witch, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and Heredity seem to be where horror is headed. These movies have fared well at the box office. The writers leave the endings up to the imagination of the viewer and this approach has resulted in mixed reviews from the critics. History has shown when there is a slump in the market, someone comes along to begin anew, and thus reinvigorates the horror genre. Maybe these new intellectual horror movies will be the wave of the future.
Further Reading:
For a comprehensive history of the horror genre through the decades: Horror Film HistoryFor a list of the scariest horror movies: Reader’s Digest Scariest MoviesList of popular true crime podcasts: 35 Best True Crime[My Halloween series starts Monday,BenPS. Thoughts on and responses to Ariella’s post?]

October 25, 2019: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Harriet Martineau and Harriet Taylor Mill

[On October 23-24, 1850, the first national Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, MA; it followed the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but was the first to bill itself as national, and it featured more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848 numbers). So for the convention’s anniversary, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy a handful of representative such attendees!]On two English activists who reveal the convention’s Transatlantic influences and legacies.One of the challenges in researching and writing about the 19th century’s women’s rights and suffrage movements is teasing out the similarities, differences, and relationships between the American and English such movements. While I pride myself on being aware of as many contexts as possible, this blog is called AmericanStudies for a reason—working to understand, analyze, and narrate American histories and stories is much more than a lifetime’s task, and I’ll never pretend to be an expert in any other nation or culture’s histories and stories. Moreover, my belief in the fundamentally cross-cultural and transnational side to American identities and communities doesn’t mean that any one of us scholars can engage every aspect of those interconnections—instead, it means that we can and must engage with scholars whose expertise lies in those other national and cultural contexts, to put our voices and analyses in conversation with theirs. One excellent example of such analyses on the Transatlantic histories of women’s rights movements is Patricia Greenwood Harrison’s Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900-1914 (2000), and this post is no way a substitute for such extended further readings.Yet individual moments can illustrate such broader and more multi-layered histories and contexts, and two striking such moments in the aftermath of the 1850 Worcester convention do just that for the Transatlantic women’s rights movement. Convention organizer and president (and subject of Monday’s post) Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis sent a copy of the convention proceedings to her friend Harriet Martineau, the pioneering English social scientist and reformer who had traveled the US during an extended 1830s visit and remained close to many activists she met there (she also authored her 1837 book Society in America, a text that offers an important counterpoint to Alexis de Tocqueville’s more famous Democracy in America [1835], just after returning from those travels). In an August 1851 letter back to Davis, Martineau both thanked her and reflected on the women’s rights influences in both directions, writing, “I hope you are aware of the interest excited in this country by that Convention, the strongest proof of which is the appearance of an article on the subject in the Westminster Review…I am not without hope that this article will materially strengthen your hands, and I am sure it can not but cheer your hearts.”The convention’s influence on the English women’s rights movement was even more overt and significant still. After details of the convention were published in the New York Tribune for Europe newspaper in early 1851, a group of activists in Sheffield formed the Sheffield Women’s Political Association, considered the first women’s suffrage organization in the UK; they would present the first suffrage petition to the House of Lords later that year. And Harriet Taylor(Mill), the English philosopher and women’s rights activist, was inspired by those same convention reports to write (with her partner and new husband John Stuart Mill) her ground-breaking book “ The Enfranchisement of Women ” (1851), which begins with an extended analysis of the movement and cause in the US before broadening to arguments in support of women’s rights and suffrage everywhere. The English women’s rights movement had many origins and contexts, and again I am far from an expert in it or them. But the 1850 Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester provided one striking influence, as reflected by the voices and work of these two prominent English writers and activists.Special Halloween week Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?

October 24, 2019: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: The Men

[On October 23-24, 1850, the first national Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, MA; it followed the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but was the first to bill itself as national, and it featured more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848 numbers). So for the convention’s anniversary, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy a handful of representative such attendees!]On remembering, but not over-emphasizing, the men at a women’s rights convention.As was the case at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and as I would wager a guess would be the case for most of the era’s other women’s rights conventions as well, the list of attendees and speakers for the 1850 Worcester convention features a number of male activists, including three of America’s most prominent abolitionist leaders (that’s the first web result for “American abolitionist leaders” I clicked on, and its header is portraits of the three): Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. Other male speakers in 1850 included another famous (if now less well-known) abolitionist leader, Stephen Symonds Foster (whose wife, the Worcester-born women’s rights and abolitionist activist Abby Kelley, gave one of the convention’s standout speeches), as well as the radical Unitarian minister and author William Ellery Channing. Phillips in particular was a founding member of the National Women’s Rights Central Committee (along with his friend and frequent collaborator Lucy Stone), and in that role helped organize and direct nearly all of the 1850s women’s rights conventions around the country, including Worcester’s.There are at least a couple significant reasons to better remember these male participants in the 1850 convention. For one thing, it can be all too easy to see women’s rights as a “woman’s issue,” and thus the women’s rights movement as solely the province of female activists or voices. Yet in truth, as with any civil rights issue, the struggle for women’s rights affects and implicates every one of us, and many progressive male figures have (at every stage of the women’s rights movement) recognized and responded to those connections. Moreover, to take a step back from such individual (if representative) figures, the history of 19thcentury social movements in America is one of deep interconnections—just as these women’s rights and abolitionist leaders (female and male) were often the same figures and always in conversation, so too do those interconnections extend to the temperance movement, to prison reform, to progressive theories of education, and to many other social issues and arenas. Each movement deserves its own collective memories to be sure, but the broader story is unquestionably one of interconnection and shared communities.Those individual and collective interconnections, cross-pollinating influences of identity and history, are all important and at times under-narrated parts of the story of American social movements, and remembering the men at the 1850 Worcester convention offers a clear way to frame them. But at the same time, as I wrote in the final paragraph of yesterday’s Sojourner Truth post, individual figures and stories comprise vital elements to our collective memories. And the simple fact is that for much of American history, we’ve featured male figures and stories much more consistently and centrally in our collective memories than female ones. So the very last thing we would want to do (and I believe the opposite of their own purpose) is to focus the story of the 1850 convention on male participants like Wendell Phillips. Remember that they were there (literally and figuratively), absolutely; but let them take a supporting role in our collective memories of the event and the movement, with the leading roles given to all-too forgotten figures like the subjects of Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis and Sarah H. Earle. Last 1850 attendee tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?

October 23, 2019: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Sojourner Truth

[On October 23-24, 1850, the first national Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, MA; it followed the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but was the first to bill itself as national, and it featured more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848 numbers). So for the convention’s anniversary, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy a handful of representative such attendees!] On the benefits and limitations of remembering a striking individual’s communal contexts.In this post on Sojourner Truth, I highlighted how the emphasis in our collective memories on her 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech (along with being likely inaccurate when it comes to her voice, as historian and Truth biographer Nell Irvin Painter has demonstrated at great and convincing length) has led us to under-remember many other aspects and stages of Truth’s long and multi-part life and activist career. But even if we focus on that speech itself (and separate from those important questions of dialect and representation), I would argue that the general depiction of it is a moment of intensely individual expression, while the truth is quite the opposite: Truth delivered the speech as part of a highly communal event, the May 29th, 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Organized by one of Ohio’s most prominent activists, Frances Dana Gage, as the culmination of a year of efforts to get women’s suffrage onto the agenda of the 1850-51 Ohio Constitutional Convention, the Akron convention was one of many such events in the era that featured Truth as one of the speakers—and another was the 1850 Worcester convention, where Truth’s speech on enslaved women led to a resolution expressing solidarity with “the trampled women of the plantation.”So how might it change our narratives or collective memories of Truth to remember these convention contexts for much of her early oratory and activism? To my mind, one central shift wouldn’t be specifically about Truth at all, but rather a reminder that too many of our historical narratives emphasize individual actors at the expense of precisely such communal contexts (far more often those individuals are privileged white men like those in my hyperlinked piece, of course, but the principal remains the same). Certainly that pattern holds when it comes to the two activist movements to which Truth’s convention speeches connect—both the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement are often remembered through the lens of individual activists, often in direct relationship to their potent voices and memorable speeches. Yet at even the most basic level, those speeches needed occasions and settings in order to exist, and for 19th century social movements those settings were very often collective gatherings like these conventions. Other than Seneca Falls, few if any of those conventions occupy a place in our collective memories, which likewise makes that 1848 event seem more singular and unique, rather than both an illustration of a vital trend and a launching point for even more national and influential such gatherings.There’s another, equally salient way to think about these questions of emphasis, however. If I had to boil down my professional goals, in this space and everywhere else, to a single central purpose, I would say “expanding our collective memories,” helping us better remember the histories and stories that truly define our national identity and community. I generally believe in an additive approach to that goal, meaning that it’s not about replacing one memory or emphasis, but rather making sure that less-remembered ones become part of the narrative as well. Yet time and again, my experiences with audiences—especially those in both classrooms and talks/lectures—make clear the power of individual figures and their identities and stories as (at the very least) ways in to expanding our collective memories. To that end, every chapter in my new book We the People features such impressive individuals, figures who certainly embody broader histories yet who offer us the chance to remember and be inspired by such striking stories. I know of few individual Americans more impressive and inspirational than Sojourner Truth, and while I believe it’s important to consider the communal contexts for her activist illustrated by conventions like Worcester’s, that in no way means we shouldn’t remember and celebrate her individual life and legacy.Next 1850 attendee tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?

October 22, 2019: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Sarah H. Earle

[On October 23-24, 1850, the first national Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, MA; it followed the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but was the first to bill itself as national, and it featured more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848 numbers). So for the convention’s anniversary, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy a handful of representative such attendees!] On the convention convener who extends the themes of yesterday’s post and adds other, vital contexts into the mix.Day one of the 1850 convention was called to order by local reformer and activist Sarah Hussey Earle. Like convention president Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, whose opening address directly followed Earle’s brief remarks, Earle had been an abolitionist activist for decades by the time of the 1850 convention. Born on Nantucket, Sarah moved to Worcester in 1821 at the age of 22, when she married John Milton Earle, longtime publisher and editor of the city’s Massachusetts Spy newspaper . Over the next three decades she would found the Worcester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle and the Worcester City Anti-Slavery Society, coordinate a number of anti-slavery fairs in the city, and along with her husband help provide a home and family for two young African American women, Catherine and Cynthia Gardner. Earle not only reinforces the deep interconnections between the abolitionist and women’s rights movements about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, but makes clear that the choice of Worcester to host the first national Women’s Rights Convention was likewise entirely linked to the city’s prominent rolein the fight against slavery.Earle’s links to both Davis and the women’s rights movement extended well beyond the 1850 convention, to an aspect of Davis’s richly multi-layered life and activism that I wasn’t able to mention in yesterday’s post: her pioneering feminist magazine The Una. Founded by Davis in 1853 in her new hometown of Providence (she had married the in 1849), The Una was one of the first women’s rights journals in existence, and the first periodical in America to be owned, published, edited, and written entirely by women. Earle was one of its earliest supporters and financial backers, and would remain closely tied to the magazine through its crucial early years (in late 1855 Boston publisher S.C. Hewitt took over publication, and new associate editor Caroline Healey Dall shifted the magazine’s focus to more of a literary journal). As with abolitionism, Transcendentalism, and every other significant social and reform movement of the era, the women’s movement would depend on periodicals to advance its ideas and voices, and through The Una Earle lent her support to a vital first step in that process.Another key side to Earle’s life and work in the years after the 1850 convention (up until her tragically early death in 1858) reflects the more local, Massachusetts-centered elements to the nascent women’s rights movement. Annual conventions continued to be held in the state, and Earle was elected president for the 1854 New England Women’s Rights Convention in Boston. But she also brought the fight for women’s rights directly to the Massachusetts State Legislature through her leadership in assembling and presenting a couple of petitions to that body: an 1851 petition in support of women’s suffrage; and an 1855 oneadvocating for removing the word “males” from the Massachusetts Constitution. These efforts, like Earle’s deep ties to Worcester, reflect not just the way in which the fight for women’s rights proceeded in individual communities and states, but also the vital role of such local and regional communities in advancing the voices and cause of reform. As much as the 1850 convention was indeed the first national such gathering, it nonetheless featured those more local elements as well, as exemplified by the inspiring activist who called the convention to order.Next 1850 attendee tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?

October 21, 2019: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis

[On October 23-24, 1850, the first national Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, MA; it followed the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but was the first to bill itself as national, and it featured more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848 numbers). So for the convention’s anniversary, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy a handful of representative such attendees!] On the convention organizer and president who embodies the multi-layered nature of reform.On October 23rd, 1850, the President-elect for the National Women’s Rights Convention, named in the convention transcriptas Paulina W. Davis, rose to deliver the event’s opening Address. Davis, who would spend her influential life between upstate New York and Providence, Rhode Island, had helped choose Worcester as the convention site and organize the event, and so she knew the promotional materials well and felt free to dispense quickly with specifics about the convention’s program and work. Instead, she offered “some general reflections upon the attitude and relations of our movement to our times and circumstances, and upon the proper spirit and method of promoting it.” She did so in part by following up the 1848 convention and its “declaration of rights,” which she sought to complement with arguments for “the adjustment of [the] work to those conditions of the times which [the reformer] seeks to influence.” But this was not a retreat into practicality by any stretch: “the reformation which we purpose,” Davis argued, “in its utmost scope, is radical and universal.” The path would not be easy; as she concluded her remarks: “In principle these truths are not doubtful, and it is therefore not impossible to put them in practice, but they need great clearness in system and steadiness of direction to get them allowance and adoption in the actual life of the world.”By 1850, Davis would have been well-versed in the necessary combination of ideals and practicality, principles and work, at the heart of any long-term, radical activist effort. She and her first husband, New York merchant Francis Wright, had been active in the abolitionist movement since the early 1830s: they resigned their church in opposition to its pro-slavery stance, served on the New York Anti-Slavery Society’s Executive Committee, and organized an anti-slavery convention in their home city of Utica in 1835 (which as that story details was met with a rioting white supremacist mob). Although Francis Wright died in 1845, Davis would continue those activist efforts throughout her life, and she thus illustrates (as do many of the other attendees at the 1850 convention, as some of my later posts in the week’s series will highlight) the deep interconnections between the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. I’ve written for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column about the racial discrimination and segregation that was all too central to the women’s suffrage movement, but it’s worth being clear that other activists like Davis brought those causes together—and since she was a key member of Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association, Davis brought that perspective to the national movement to be sure.Another important aspect of Davis’s life and work, one situated between that abolitionist work and the 1850 convention, reflects just how broadly the tendrils of such activist efforts could extend. During her marriage to Wright, Davis began studying health and medicine, and after his death she dedicated herself to those studies, moving to New York City and giving a series of lectures to women on anatomy and physiology. She then embarked on a speaking tour, continuing to highlight those medical disciplines but also urging women to study medicine and become practicing doctors. In one of my earliest posts in this space, I highlighted the interesting literary and cultural phenomenon of “woman doctor” novels and characters from the early 1880s, an era when that professional opportunity and role was becoming prominent. But Davis’s efforts from forty years earlier highlight both the long development of that trend and, most importantly, the ways in which it was anything but coincidental or accidental—in which, instead, activist voices helped push such professional changes and reforms alongside social and cultural ones. One more reason to better remember the 1850 National Women’s Rights Convention’s organizer and president!Next 1850 attendee tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?

October 14-20, 2019: Present and Future Book Talks for We the People

This week I travel to Philadelphia to give a Distinguished Alumnus book talk at my PhD alma mater, the Temple University English Department. I’m in the midst of a busy Fall of book talks, with a few recently completed, many more in the next few weeks, and a few already on the schedule (available in full at that hyperlink) for the Spring semester as well. So I wanted to take advantage of this week’s travel to leave a post up for the week, both highlighting those talks (I’d love to see you at any of them!) and asking for nominations, suggestions, or connections for any other talks (and/or online spaces where I could share the book). Thanks in advance, and hope to see you down (and on) the road!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. You know what to do! Feel free to leave a comment here or to email me if you prefer!

October 12-13, 2019: 21st Century Domestic Terrorism

[October 8thmarks the 50thanniversary of the Weather Underground’s Days of Rage protests in Chicago. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied the Weathermen and other domestic terrorists—a fraught but important term, I know—leading up to this weekend post on 21st century events.]Honestly, I’m not sure I can what I would most want to say about contemporary domestic terrorists any more clearly than I did in a few paragraphs from the Intro to my most recent book. So here they are:
“Virtually every day over the last few years has offered clear illustrations of how much our own moment likewise features such battles between exclusionary and inclusive definitions of America. I return to contemporary America at length in Chapter 8 and the Conclusion, so here will briefly highlight just one telling and tragic example: the May 26th, 2017 fatal stabbing on a Portland, Oregon commuter train of two men (and brutal assault on a third) by a white supremacist terrorist, Jeremy Christian, who had been harassing two teenage girls (one Muslim and one African American) with racial and religious hate speech. That harassment was driven by an exclusionary perspective on American identity, as when (per the girls and other witnesses) Christian ordered the two girls to “get out of his country.” In his first court appearance, four days after the stabbings, Christian likewise evoked an exclusionary definition of America to defend his actions, shouting, “Get out if you don’t like free speech. You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.” Further media investigations have revealed that Christian has a long history of participating in white supremacist rallies and organizations, and that both his harassment of the girls and his attack on the three men thus exemplify an extreme and violent but unfortunately not at all unique expression of the resurgent white supremacist, exclusionary narrative of America that has accompanied and followed the 2016 presidential election.
The victims of Christian’s exclusionary terrorism embody alternative, inclusive visions of American community on a number of important levels. There’s Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, one of the two men killed by Christian for coming to the defense of the teenagers, whose final words were, “I want everyone on the train to know that I love them.” There’s Micah Fletcher, the surviving stabbing victim, who explained his own defense of the girls by noting, “If you live here, move here, or if you want to call this city home, it is your home. And we must protect each other like that is the truth, no matter what the consequences. The Muslim community, especially in Portland, needs to understand that there are a lot of us that are not going to stand by and let anybody … scare you into thinking you can't be a part of this town, this city, this community, or this country.” And of course there are the two girls themselves, 16 year old Destinee Mangum (an African American) and her 17 year old Muslim friend (who as of this writing has remained anonymous but whose hijab was the specific target of Christian’s initial attacks), whose identities and presences themselves counter Christian’s exclusionary definition of America and remind us of the longstanding and still evolving racial and religious diversity at the heart of the inclusive definition.
On the day I finished this manuscript, America suffered another tragic, violent, and overtly exclusionary attack: the October 27th, 2018 murder of 11 congregants (and wounding of many more, including four police officers) at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue by Robert Bowers, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic domestic terrorist. In social media posts Bowers linked his planned actions to a profoundly exclusionary conspiracy theory advanced by President Trump: that Jewish Americans such as George Soros are paying immigrants such as the refugees making their way to the United States in the so-called “migrant caravan.” Bowers also referred to immigrants as “invaders” and focused much of his social media hate on one of America’s oldest inclusive civic organizations, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS, founded in New York City in 1881). Like HIAS, Bowers’s victims embodied the ideals of an inclusive American community, including a 97-year old Holocaust survivor.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or contemporary aspects of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?