Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 188

October 1, 2019: Recent Reads: The Nickel Boys

[Busy with a bunch of book talks at the moment—on which more in a few weeks—so a series of brief posts highlighting great new books I’ve read this year. Add your own recent reads, whether new books or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]Colson Whitehead has long been a favorite contemporary author of mine, and his The Underground Railroad remains one of the best and most unique historical novels I’ve ever read (and it taught very well too). To a degree his follow-up, The Nickel Boys (2019), is a more conventional novel than Underground, perhaps because the constantly genre-shifting Whitehead has settled this time on a more traditional genre (a bildungsroman, set at a boarding school no less). But conventional doesn’t necessarily mean less compelling (indeed, conventions endure in part because they continue to compel us), and Nickel is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read in years. So much so, in fact, that in many cases I had to stop between chapters, so potently were Whitehead’s words and images, characters and settings, events and reflections affecting me. This isn’t a book I’d feature on my annual Beach Reads list—but it’s also not a book any American can afford to miss.Next recent read tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this book? Other recent reads you’d share?

September 30, 2019: Recent Reads: The Overstory

[Busy with a bunch of book talks at the moment—on which more in a few weeks—so a series of brief posts highlighting great new books I’ve read this year. Add your own recent reads, whether new books or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]I’ve written before in this space about my general preference for ambitious, messy, sprawling epics over tightly controlled, perfectly constructed gems. I certainly appreciate and often enjoy the latter, but would say that many of my favorite books fall into the former category. And this year has held true to form, as one of my favorite recent reads, Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), is an ambitious, messy, sprawling epic if ever there was one. Powers’s epic narrates the stories of nearly a dozen main characters and their families across multiple centuries of American history, all through a unifying narrative structure that adds one more hugely ambitious element to the mix: the lives and perspectives (to a degree—this isn’t epic fantasy) of trees. In so doing he also crafts one of the great environmental novels, as well as an impassioned example of climate change literature (or cli-fi, as it’s sometimes called). If that sounds like too much, well, we might have different literary tastes; but if it sounds appealing, I promise you won’t find a more inventive and compelling read.Next recent read tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this book? Other recent reads you’d share?

September 28-29, 2019: September 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]September 2: Academic Labor: Adjunctification: In place of my usual semester previews I featured a series on academic labor, starting with the disastrous & dehumanizing central higher ed trend.September 3: Academic Labor: My Union: The series continues with formal and informal ways that my faculty union represents the best of 21C academic labor.September 4: Academic Labor: Scholarly Organizations as Advocates: How an international and a regional academic organization can take part in labor conversations, as the series continues.September 5: Academic Labor: SSN and the Promise and Cherish Acts: Two vital pieces of proposed legislation in Massachusetts, and how academics can get more involved in supporting them.September 6: Academic Labor: Further Reading: The series concludes with a handful of pieces and voices to keep the academic labor conversations going.September 7-8: Academic Labor: Hire Jeff Renye!: A special weekend tribute to my friend and colleague who represents the frustrations and the possibilities of adjunct faculty.September 9: Slave Rebellions: The Stono Rebellion: On the 280thanniversary of a largely forgotten slave revolt, a series on such rebellions begins with two historical lessons from that event.September 10: Slave Rebellions: Gabriel’s Rebellion: The series continues with how a thwarted 1800 revolt both echoes and diverges from familiar historical tropes.September 11: Slave Rebellions: Denmark Vesey: Three compelling details about the leader of a thwarted 1822 South Carolina rebellion, as the series rolls on.September 12: Slave Rebellions: Nat Turner: A challenge and a benefit to remembering the rebel leader as a Virginia and American hero.September 13: Slave Rebellions: Henry Highland Garnet’s Address: The series concludes with the contextual and contemporary significance of a controversial speech.September 14-15: Representing Slave Rebellions: Anticipating the forthcoming film Harriet, a weekend post on five cultural representations of slave revolts.September 16: Constitution Week: The Articles of Confederation: A Constitution Day series kicks off with what was drastically different in the nation’s first founding documents, and what wasn’t.September 17: Constitution Week: The Anti-Federalists: The series continues with three equally salient ways to frame the Constitution’s opposition.September 18: Constitution Week: The Bill of Rights: The history, significance, and limits of the Constitution’s first evolution, as the series rolls on.September 19: Constitution Week: Gordon Barker’s Vital Book: A great scholarly work that helps us understand a vital Constitutional and Early Republic question.September 20: Constitution Week: Birthright Citizenship: The series concludes with how a post-Civil War debate reveals complex, crucial realities of both the Constitution and public scholarship. September 21-22: Constitution Week: 21st Century Threats: A special weekend post on current threats to the Constitution that has become even more relevant in the subsequent week!September 23: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: Huck Finn and The Giver: A Banned Books Week series begins with the distinction between banned and challenged books, and why it matters.September 24: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: The Chocolate War and A Separate Peace: The series continues with two iconic, frequently banned YA novels that fractured my innocence alongside that of their characters.September 25: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: The Satanic Verses: When banning becomes censorship and the best way to respond to it, as the series reads on.September 26: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: Heather Has Two Mommies: The children’s book that reveals how cultural representations both challenge prejudice and welcome diverse audiences.September 27: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: 2018’s Most Challenged Books: The series concludes with three takeaways from the ALA’s annual list of the most challenged books.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

September 27, 2019: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: 2018’s Most Challenged Books

[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had a deeply nerdy sweatshirt that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]On three takeaways from the American Library Association’s annual list.1)      Anti-LGBTQ prejudice, still: A great deal has changed in the 30 years since the publication of and controversies over yesterday’s focal book, Heather Has Two Mommies; but, well, the more things change, etc. Four of 2018’s eleven most challenged books are on the list largely (if not solely) due to their inclusion of LGBTQIA+ content (the evolving acronym certainly reflects some of those social changes), making clear that the groups and perspectives that objected to Newman’s children’s book remain powerful forces in the debates over classroom, school, and library collections. But that number also reflects the exponential and continued growth of children’s and YA portrayals of these identities since 1989, a trend which I have to imagine (with a great deal of satisfaction) frustrates those bigots to no end.2)      Satire/humor, still: Although their situations were of course very different, two of the other banned books I highlighted this week, Huck Finn and The Satanic Verses, could both accurately be described as humorous/satirical works. Two of 2018’s most challenged books fall squarely into that category as well: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo , a satirical, political children’s book co-created by TV humorist John Oliver; and Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants YA series . As that last hyperlinked post indicates, I’m not quite as big a fan of Pilkey’s books as are my sons, and I suppose I get why their negative portrayals of school might have led to some of those challenges. But at the same time, what an absolutely tone-deaf way to respond to depictions of school as overly serious, allergic to humor, and opposed to creativity!3)      A 2018 snapshot: I imagine this would be the case with each’s year list, but it’s striking how much the 2018 list reflects many of the core issues facing not just young people (although yes) but all Americans in this era. The #1 book, Alex Gino’s George (2015), features a transgender protagonist and many related themes of gender and sexual identities; the #4, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), focuses on a police shooting of an African American young man; and the #6, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (2007), depicts social media conflicts, online bullying, sexual assault, and teen suicide, among other issues. Both the books themselves and the efforts to challenge them reflect a society and culture dealing with and divided by these issues, which of course is just one more excellent reason to read these (and all) banned books.September Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Banned books you’d highlight?

September 26, 2019: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: Heather Has Two Mommies

[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had a deeply nerdy sweatshirt that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]On how cultural representations threaten prejudice, and why their importance goes beyond that effect.About a year ago in this space, I concluded a series on “American Gay Studies” by examining a trio of ground-breaking late 1990s pop cultural texts that portrayed LGBTQ Americans in significant roles (really as their protagonists in each case). It wasn’t a coincidence that those texts were all from that same late 90s moment, as that was really the first time when mainstream American popular culture began consistently and centrally representing such American identities (a newness evidenced by the controversy and backlash faced by the first of that trio, the sitcom Ellen, and its creator and star). But of course there had long been individual such cultural representations, and thus also social controversies and challenges to those representations from anti-gay voices and forces. Offering a prominent example of both trends, from about a decade before that trio of late 90s texts, is Lesléa Newman’s ground-breaking children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies (1989). The story of Heather is simple enough (as is generally the case with books for younger children, of course): the title character, whose parents are lesbian couple Jane and Kate, is part of a playgroup where family units are being discussed; at first she is upset that her family differs from those of her peers, but she learns from the group caretaker Molly that all families are special and worth celebrating. Yet that simple premise was met with a firestorm of backlash from anti-gay parents and interest groups, not all of which went as far as the Fayetteville (NC) group that paid for a series of anti-library newspaper ads but most of which sought to have the book banned from both school and public libraries. Those campaigns relied on the usual combination of religious objections (I’m very tempted to put “religious” in quotes there) and more blatantly bigoted ones (the Fayetteville ads compared homosexuality to “prostitution, bestiality, and incest,” natch). But to my mind, what they consistently reveal is the simple and crucial fact that to represent identities in cultural works is precisely to threaten stereotypes and prejudice directed at those identities, since such bigoted narratives and perspectives depend entirely on visions of those identities as unfamiliar, threatening “others,” rather than simply people in our communities and societies. That aspect of Heather alone would be more than enough to make it an important text, to this day and even more so in its late 1980s moment. But I would argue that there’s another audience for a book like Heather, one that reveals an even more important effect of representation. As I discussed in this post on the first African American Disney princess (Tiana from 2009’s The Princess and the Frog), it’s difficult to overstate the value of children seeing themselves represented in pop culture works. That’s true for all children, but it’s particularly significant when it comes to children whose identities, families, communities are too often marginalized in pop culture and/or society at large. In the late 1980s (and in too many ways still to this day, but certainly then), both LGBTQ children and children who were part of LGBTQ family units certainly comprised an example of such marginalized and under-represented identities. No one children’s book could reverse that trend entirely, of course—but one children’s book could make a difference, and Newman’s ground-breaking and important Heather Has Two Mommies did just that.Last banned books tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Banned books you’d highlight?

September 25, 2019: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: The Satanic Verses

[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had a deeply nerdy sweatshirt that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]When banning becomes censorship, and the best ways to respond to the latter.The examples of both banning and challenging that I’ve discussed in my posts so far (and those I’ll discuss in the remaining couple of posts in the series) have generally involved classrooms, schools, and/or libraries. Since those are among the most common places where we as a society encounter books, of course, the questions of what to read (or not read) there or what to include (or not include) in a collection are certainly vital ones, with significant consequences for whether and how readers (young and old alike) encounter a particular book and author. That’s particularly true for readers who can’t afford or aren’t as likely to buy a book, since schools and libraries offer the only consistently available free alternatives to such purchases. But I think it’s nonetheless important to distinguish between those forms of banning and challenging, frustrating and destructive as they might be, and what we would call censorship, since those forms don’t involve either stopping a work from being published or keeping it out of the hands of readers entirely. Those latter forms of more aggressive censorship are significantly rarer, but the word certainly seems to apply to how a number of Islamic and Arabic societies and nations responded to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie’s acclaimed and controversial novel, which combined biographical and historical details surrounding the life of Muhammad with magical realism and satire, was outright banned from sales in many of those nations, as well as in India (where it was defined as hate speech toward a religious group). The attacks on the novel and its author famously and horrifically went far further still, with Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a call for Rushdie’s death that led to multiple assassination attempts and, tragically, the murder of the novel’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi (among other violent incidents). Yet even if those extreme and awful events had not transpired, the bans on the novel’s publication and sales in these societies would certainly constitute censorship at its worst, the denial of the book to millions (or perhaps, in India’s case, billions) of potential readers and communities. Obviously the most straightforward way to resist such censorship is to work to challenge and reverse the bans, which as far as I can tell remain in place in many of those nations (including India). On a more individual level, both reading and (when one can) purchasing such censored books is an important way not just to challenge the concept of censorship, but also to support the author (whether financially or otherwise). But I would also argue—perhaps obviously, but also genuinely—that engagements with the histories and stories of banned books, such as those I’m offering in this week’s series, comprise another important way to resist literary censorship in all its forms. As is so often the case, the more we engage these histories and stories, the clearer it becomes that they have been consistently wrong—not just in moral or ethical terms (although yes), but also in their fundamental misreadings of texts and misunderstandings of their effects on audiences. Indeed, the history of literary censorship—as illustrated most potently by Nazi Germany’s book burnings—reveals that it is precisely such censorship, not books, which has the potential to destroy societies.Next banned book tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Banned books you’d highlight?

September 24, 2019: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: The Chocolate War and A Separate Peace

[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had a deeply nerdy sweatshirt that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]On two iconic, frequently banned or challenged YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of their characters.The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naiveté to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it through childhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life at some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I say that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross country teammates during his freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) in 8th grade.I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s about 30 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I read Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for crying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own age were killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the accidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia [1977], traumatic as that was for this young reader).Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue) mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II toward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not at length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, after all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which young men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adult novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far more intimately than might otherwise have been the case. One of many arguments for teaching, or at least for not banning, these YA novels.Next banned book tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Banned books you’d highlight?

September 23, 2019: AmericanStudy a Banned Book: Huck Finn and The Giver

[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had a deeply nerdy sweatshirt that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]
On why the concept of “banned books” isn’t quite as obviously wrong as we might think.
You’re not likely to find a more lifelong opponent of banning books, and I do mean lifelong—as I noted above, one of my favorite sweatshirts in high school (what can I say, I was an uber-nerd) read “Celebrate Freedom, Read a Banned Book” and then listed a group of works that have been banned at one time or another. So it wasn’t easy for me to write the teaser sentence above, believe me. But the truth is that in our conversations about banning and censorship we tend to conflate a couple pretty different actions: attempting to remove books from schools and/or libraries (a practice that I thoroughly oppose); and advocating that we not teach books in particular classes, for certain grade levels, and so on. The latter, which is generally known instead as “challenging” those books, is certainly complicated and often problematic, but is not the same as banning the book from those institutions.
For a case in point, we could go to the ur-source for such conversations: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Within a year of its 1885 American publication the novel was banned by the Concord Public Library, the first of many such bannings. But even if we agree with the premise that the CPL and other banning institutions were mistaken (and I do), it doesn’t necessarily follow that Huckis (for example) perfectly fine to teach in middle or high school English classrooms (both places where it has been taught with some frequency). On that question I tend to agree with my Dad, Stephen Railton, who has argued that the book’s defenders have short-changed genuine questions about its language and racial depictions, particularly when it comes to the challenges of presenting them to younger readers. Which is to say, challenges of Huck in the classroom not only aren’t the same as banning or censorship—they also have, at least, a leg to stand on.
And then there’s the case of Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993). Lowry’s award-winning novel is one of the most acclaimed young adult books of the last few decades, and so it stands to reason that it would be a good choice to teach in middle school classrooms. But while the novel does not include unintentionally problematic or objectional material like Twain’s book, it does create an incredibly complex and dark dystopian world, one in which characters, situations, and themes are far more sophisticated and troubling than in many other young adult works. There’s something—a great deal, in fact—to be said for teaching precisely such complex works, provided there is sufficient time and space for the teacher and students to discuss and analyze and engage with those complexities. But there’s also something to be said for parents and organizations worrying that, in the absence of those resources, Lowry’s novel will affect students more negatively than positively. I don’t agree with the challenges that Lowry’s novel has received, but I understand them—and they shouldn’t all be dismissed as simple censorship.Next banned book tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Banned books you’d highlight?

September 21-22, 2019: Constitution Week: 21st Century Threats

[September 17th is Constitution Day, so to celebrate this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts for that foundational American document. Leading up to this special weekend post on threats to the Constitution in 2019!]On three distinct types of contemporary threats to our founding documents and ideals.1)      Evolution: No, not the frustratingly-still-controversial scientific theory, but rather the Constitution’s status as a living document about which I’ve written in most of the week’s posts. That status, which began immediately with the Bill of Rights and has been part of our government, laws, and civic society ever since, means that every aspect of the Constitution can and should be examined, debated, and potentially (if not at all lightly or quickly) changed in every era. Which also means that some challenges that might appear to be threats to Constitutional rights should be better understand as part of that natural and necessary process of evolution. I would put the continuing debates about the 2nd Amendment in that category—as much as I personally hate guns, I recognize that the “right to bear arms” is a phrase in that foundational document; but how to read that amendment (in full), and how to apply it to both modern technologies and 21st century society, are questions that we can and should continue debating. 2)      Emoluments: Many aspects of the Constitution are far more straightforward and unambiguous than the 2nd Amendment, however, and in that category I would put both the Foreign and Domestic emoluments clauses in Articles I and II. So seriously have these prohibitions on presidents profiting from the office or having conflicts of interest been taken over the years that (to cite one famous example) Jimmy Carter sold his modest peanut farm before taking office in 1977. And yet each and every day of the last three years, Donald Trump and his family and friends have profited immeasurably from such emoluments—as I write this in early September, Vice President Pence and his entourage are staying at a Trump hotel in Ireland, hours away from their meetings in that country; and just a couple weeks ago Trump discussed hosting next year’s G7 meetings at another Trump resort in Florida. Those are only two of the countless ways that this president threatens this core Constitutional concept and limitation.3)      Essential: There are very serious potential consequences to those emoluments threats, particularly when it comes to foreign influences on, I dunno, small matters like election security. But I believe an even more essential element of our Constitutional rights and shared civic society is under threat in 2019: the promise of the Constitution’s opening phrase, “We the people.” As I argue in that hyperlinked book, and as this week’s posts have I hope made clear, both the Constitution itself and much of American history have failed to live up to our expressed national ideals. But the ideals remain, from that founding moment down to our present one, and at their core is a vision of a government, to quote one of our best presidents, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” To name just two examples from the couple of weeks before this writing, however, our federal government has both expressed an interest in doing away with birthright citizenship and submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing that employers should be able to fire employees due to their sexual orientation. The fundamental vision of both our laws and our people are under constant threat in 2019, threats that require from all of us both historical engagement and contemporary resistance.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

September 20, 2019: Constitution Week: Birthright Citizenship

[September 17th is Constitution Day, so to celebrate this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that foundational American document. Leading up to a special weekend post on threats to the Constitution in 2019!]On how a post-Civil War debate reveals complex, crucial realities of public scholarship. As I’ll discuss a bit more in that weekend post, one of the many threats currently posed to the Constitution by the Trump Administration is the repeated challenge—at least in Trump’s statements and Tweets, but those have basically become the principal mechanism of policy-making in Motherfucking 2019 America (its new official name)—to the 14thAmendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. In response, I’ve seen a number of journalists, pundits, and public scholars make the case that this threatened change represents yet another example of Trump seeking to undermine and destroy fundamental American norms and values, another step in his remaking of America into a nation and community that would be unrecognizable to not only the Founders, but just about every subsequent generation of Americans. Obviously (I imagine) I agree with that overall narrative and argument, but when it comes to birthright citizenship specifically, there’s a problem: that concept was deeply contested and fragile, both in the era of its creation (nearly 100 years after the Constitution was written) and for many decades thereafter.As historian Martha Jones traces in her magisterial book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), the concept of birthright citizenship was present pre-Civil War, but often discussed through its overt denial to enslaved African Americans (as reaffirmed in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision ). After the war and abolition, a central goal of Reconstruction was to extend such rights to African Americans, and the 14th Amendment represented a vital first step, one complemented and cemented by the Naturalization Act of 1870. Yet the latter law only extended birthright citizenship, and indeed the possibility of gaining citizenship at all, to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” and that phrasing was entirely purposeful: although Senator Charles Sumner had argued for extending citizenship to Asian Americans, Congress rejected that argument; similarly, Native Americans likewise remained ineligible for citizenship until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Chinese Americans and their allies would continue fighting for birthright citizenship, a battle that culminated successfully in the Supreme Court’s 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision. But “fighting” and “battle” are key words in that sentence—just as it had been pre-Civil War, birthright citizenship remained a contested and evolving concept throughout the late 19th century and well into the 20th.This is one of the many difficulties of producing public scholarship in an age when simplistic, stupid mythologies and garbage rule so much of our discourse. To note that birthright citizenship is not just a Constitutional given—that it was only added to the Constitution 150 years ago, and in a manner that still overtly denied it as a right to many Americans—might seem to grant legitimacy to Trump’s attempts to challenge and undermine it in the 21st century. Those historical facts are accurate, and so must be highlighted whatever the effects. But I would also argue precisely the opposite about acknowledging and engaging these histories of birthright citizenship (as I did in this We’re History piece): that doing so helps us understand just how fragile the concept has been and remains, just how hard the forces of inclusion have fought to extend it to all Americans, and why we must work just as hard in 2019 to maintain and even extend those hard-fought rights. That’s the true spirit of the Constitution and its evolution, as I hope this whole week has made clear.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?