Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 201

May 3, 2019: Rodney King in Context: The People vs. O.J. Simpson

[On April 29th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]On the problems and possibilities of shoehorning historical footage into historical fictions.Probably the most surprising thing for this AmericanStudier about the TV series The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016) was that the show’s heart and soul was David Schwimmer’s multi-layered and moving performance as Robert Kardashian. But a close second was the way that the show’s creators chose to open the first episode: with news footage from the Rodney King beating, trial, and riots. Of course this was another famous and divisive trial (and especially verdict) from the same city, just two years before the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murders and three years before the O.J. trial and verdict. And of course both historical events featured the Los Angeles police department in prominent and controversial (to put in mildly) ways. But at the same time, for a TV show focused so fully on offering fictional interpretations of a very particular set of historical figures and events, in a very specific time frame (from the first discovery of Simpson and Goldman’s bodies through to the immediate aftermath of the O.J. verdict), opening with distinct events from 2-3 years prior was far from an obvious or inevitable choice, and one that demands our attention and analyses.In at least some important ways, I would say that that choice reflects problems with historical fiction as a genre. I’ve written elsewhere in this space about director Oliver Stone’s controversial and somewhat underhanded choice to intersperse actual historical footage of and around the JFK assassination into his conspiracy theory-promoting historical fiction film JFK (1991), without in any way clarifying which footage is which. People separates its initial historical footage from the remainder of its fictional storytelling more clearly and fully, so I’m not suggesting that it blurs the lines between these media anywhere near as overtly as did Stone’s film. But nonetheless, opening a show based so closely on real figures with media footage from 1991 and 1992 does indeed intertwine more than just these two disparate historical moments and events; it seems to position its subsequent fictional representations as similarly authentic. Of course historical fiction is always subject to these kinds of questions, and the best historical fiction overtly forces us to think about the various ways in which “history” and “fiction” are not nearly as distinct as we like to believe. But to me there’s still something a bit sketchy about using 1991-2 footage to open a 2016 fictional show about 1994-5 events.Yet I do understand the reasons why the creators opened with this footage, and indeed would argue that whatever its limitations, doing so does offer an interesting lens on both the King and O.J. histories. The show’s overt focus is of course on O.J., and one of its central through-lines, one closely linked to both Courtney B. Vance’s Johnnie Cochran and Sterling K. Brown’s Christopher Darden (among other characters, but most especially those two), is an argument that issues of race, racial profiling, and police prejudice and brutality were among the most paramount in the developing narratives and debates around the O.J. trial. But at the same time, the show also focuses at length on themes of celebrity, of the idea of a televised trial and all of its effects, on how these late 20thcentury media stories could impact issues of race and justice among many others. And it’s worth considering whether and how those kinds of celebrity and media threads were likewise part of the Rodney King histories—of course King was not a celebrity like O.J. at the start of his unfolding public story, but to some degree he became one as the events unfolded; and in any case those events themselves were undoubtedly televised and covered in distinctly late 20thcentury ways. One more complex layer to the King story, and one that this fictional TV drama helps us consider.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

May 2, 2019: Rodney King in Context: Anna Deavere Smith’s Dramas

[On April 29th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]On two one-woman shows that are just as evocative on the page as on the stage.In this era of tablets and smartphones (which Word doesn’t identify as a spelling error, just to drive the point home), there’s no reason we have to limit our experience of literary works to written texts. You can watch a YouTube video clip just as easily from just about anywhere, and when it comes to theatrical performances, there’s a lot to be said for doing so, for getting at least a sense of their performative (that one Word underlines, but I’m going to keep it) qualities. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t first link to this opening part of Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror(1991) and this trailer for an adaptation of her Twilight: Los Angeles (1992).As the first clip’s introduction notes, Smith works in a very unique and compelling way: interviewing hundreds of people in response to a particular historical event (New York’s Crown Heights riot for Fires, the 1992 LA riots for Twilight), and then turning their words and voices into a crowd-sourced document that she performs herself in their various characters (although the above-linked Twilight adaptation uses multiple actors instead). Smith is as talented a performer as she is a writer, and so again there’s much to be said for watching and hearing her take on these voices and stories, as you can do (if you have an hour and some good wifi) with all four parts of the above-linked version of Fires.But if you’re attempting to engage these literary works without internet access or a high-tech 21stcentury device? Well, I was introduced to Smith through the published, textual version of Twilight, and I can say with certainty that she makes these voices and characters and communities come to life just as powerfully in that form. Indeed, there’s something to be said for the opportunity to hear them all in our own head, with no performance choices filtering them, distinguishing them from one another, perhaps rendering one or another sympathetic or annoying to our ears. Their subjects are the height of divisive and violent controversies, moments that pitted Americans against Americans in the worst ways—but the texts offer us the chance to hear all sides, and, as Walt put it, “filter them from your self.” Pretty good way to spend some quality reading time if you ask me.Last King context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 1, 2019: Rodney King in Context: Korean American Businesses

[On April 29th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]On an ethnic and communal space that became complicatedly part of the King riots.At the 2018 New England American Studies Association conference at UMass Lowell, one of the best papers I heard was on the subject of 1980s Korean grocery stores as a potent American Studies myth and symbol. Babson College Professor Paul Schmitz balanced specific details from the histories and stories of that cultural and communal space with broader analyses of the narratives and images associated with it, convincingly arguing that both the Korean grocers and their families and external media and social forces worked to shape this space and role into a complex but inspiring symbol of community, success, and the American Dream. There are many layers to those histories and realities, those images and their meanings, those different sides to this American space; but one particularly complex side is that for various social and economic reasons these Korean grocery stores are often located in (or at least in close proximity to) neighborhoods that feature sizeable African American, Latino, or other minority communities.As that hyperlinked New York Times article from 1990 illustrates, those geographic details had become a significant story (not only in cities like New York and Los Angeles, but nationally) in the years immediately preceding the Rodney King verdict and riots, and would become a focal point of the riots themselves. As this 25thanniversary CNN story notes, roughly half of the $1 billion in property damage inflicted in the course of the riots was sustained by Korean businesses, as the riots spilled over from predominantly African American neighborhoods into the adjacent area known as Koreatown. Images of Korean business owners and their friends and families patrolling the neighborhood’s streets and rooftops with weapons became fraught and frightening symbols of the riots and the war-like conditions they produced throughout much of Central LA. As the CNN story reflects, these horrors affected the LA (and national) Korean American community in multiple tragic ways: not only creating deep and enduring divisions with the city’s African American community; but also, thanks to the near-complete lack of law enforcement response to the unfolding horrors, leading Korean Americans to a recognition of their status as second-class citizens in the eyes of the city’s power structures.Those shifts in perspective and community have continued to unfold in the quarter-century since the riots, and likely will remain complex and evolving in the years to come. But what does better remembering these histories contribute to our perspective on the riots themselves? For one thing, they remind us that the fault lines in American history and community are never as simple as the white supremacist/Americans of color divisions I highlighted through yesterday’s LAPD histories and controversies; while it would be delightful if all Americans of color (or of course all Americans period) consistently operated in solidarity, life is never that one-sided or straightforward. And for another thing, they remind us of one of the most frustrating limits of exclusionary or white supremacist visions of American identity: that those visions not only exclude so many different foundational and longstanding communities, but make it impossible to do justice to the complex histories and stories of all those communities, individually and in relationship to one another. Which is to say, even when American history is at its darkest (and things got very dark during the King riots), it still and crucially reflects the truly inclusive and diverse community that has always defined us. Next King context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

April 30, 2019: Rodney King in Context: The LAPD

[On April 29th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]On two mid-20thcentury riots that collectively anticipated the Rodney King story.On Christmas Eve, 1951, a pair of Los Angeles policemen got into an extended altercation with seven young men (five of them Mexican American) at the Showboat Bar, a conflict that by Christmas morning had turned into violent arrests of and subsequent police brutality directed at the seven men. The LAPD initially attempted to sweep that police violence, which came to be known as Bloody Christmas, under the rug, but significant pressure from the city’s Mexican American community forced an internal investigation that resulted in a record number of indictments, suspensions, and other punishments for police officers. The incident, fictionalized in the James Ellroy novel L.A. Confidential(1990) and the 1997 film of the same name, reflected a police department that seemingly felt empowered to exercise extreme brutality against private citizens, particularly those from minority communities. Thanks to pressure from local communities the officers and department did not get away with that brutality in this case, but such incidents made clear that the relationship between these elements of Los Angeles society was a fraught and fragile one at best.Such mid-century tensions in the city were not limited to any particular communities, however, as illustrated by another violent event: the June 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. This complex historical event originated in part out of a pair of specific World War II trends: the striking number of servicemen stationed in Los Angeles, most of them from other parts of the country; and the narrative that zoot suits, a popular form of apparel for young people (especially from minority communities such as Mexican, Filipino, and African Americans), represented a waste of precious wartime fabric. Certainly exclusionary bigotry and prejudice also played into the riots, however, which featured sailors and other servicemen attacking groups of young men and attempting to strip them of their zoot suits. While the police were not the direct sources of violence in this case, their principal roles across the six days of rioting seem to have been aiding and abetting the white supremacist rioters, both by refusing to stop or arrest them and by instead arresting more than 500 Mexican Americans on charges such as “rioting” and “vagrancy.” Which is to say, while the Zoot Suit Riots reflected particular WWII-era communal tensions, they certainly anticipated the forms of police profiling and brutality that would come to the fore less than a decade later in the Bloody Christmas incident.Half a century later, the Rodney King incident and riots reflected and extended both sides of these histories: police brutality that targeted minority citizens in particular; and related but even more overarching communal tensions that exploded into days of destructive violence. Among the many ways in which better remembering the earlier histories might affect and shift our sense of the more recent ones, I would highlight this in particular (about which I’ve written elsewhereas well): far too often, if not indeed all of the time, when we refer to an event with the phrase “race riot” in our media or collective conversations we mean a riot featuring Americans of color. Yet while of course each of these historical riots did include such communities, they were driven, as so many of our historical riots have been, by both white mobs and white supremacist ideologies and systems. And those systems often include law enforcement and other official institutions in leading roles, not only in helping define the riots in very particular and exclusionary ways, but even in providing the impetus for the conflicts in the first phrase. The more we remember events like Bloody Christmas and the Zoot Suit Riots, the more equipped we are to recognize when and how those histories repeat themselves, as was the case with the Rodney King beating and riots to be sure.Next King context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

April 29, 2019: Rodney King in Context: Rodney King

[On April 29th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots” itself.]On two striking details that can help us push beyond a frequently stereotyped figure.The frustrating process through which African American victims of police brutality or white supremacist violence are demonized in the media in order to minimize their mistreatment (up to and including murder) has become far too common, if not indeed inevitable, in response to such incidents in the 21st century. And of course such trends had been a central element of the lynching epidemic throughout its century of historic horrors as well. But in some ways Rodney King occupied a pivotal place in that unfolding history—one of the first such demonized victims of the media age, extending those historic trends into the late 20th century period of cable news and constant coverage and so on. And from the first moments after the video of King’s 1991 beatingby four LAPD officers emerged, he was linked to and demonized through a series of exaggerated, stereotypical images: his criminal record, his history of drinking, his resistance to the police, his seemingly simplistic statements, even the fact that he was driving a Hyundai. Each of those images had some initial grounding in elements of King’s background or identity, but each was again exaggerated into a caricature that made it easier to minimize or dismiss the unnecessary violence King endured.Challenging that trend requires multiple forms of response, but in the case of a victim like King who fortunately was not killed in the course of his incident, one important such response is to highlight other nuanced details from across the course of his life. One inspiring such detail for King is that not long before his untimely 2012 death (on which more in a moment), he published an autobiography that also extended his famous comments during the 1992 riots. Co-authored by Lawrence Spagnola, King’s The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption (2012) links his personal experiences and story (before, during, and after the famous early 1990s histories) to broader arguments for unity and peace, ideas and themes that echo his easily mocked but also thoughtful question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” At the very least, anyone who makes fun of King’s perspective or voice based on those snippets of video should be required to read this extended articulation of them, to engage with the layers to the man and his identity rather than such soundbytes and the stereotypical narratives into which they far too often play.Unfortunately, King passed away just two months after his book was published, and the circumstances of his death add another compelling detail to our understanding of his life and identity. On Father’s Day King’s fiancé found him drowned at the bottom of his swimming pool, in a striking echo of his father’s death: King’s father Ronald King had drowned in his bathtub on Father’s Day, 1984, 28 years to the day before King’s death. Like Ronald, Rodney had struggled with alcoholism throughout his adult life, and a combination of alcohol and drugs in his system had likely precipitated heart problems that led to his death. But it also strikes me as unlikely that the precise date was a coincidence, particularly given that Rodney’s death emulated his father’s on Father’s Day; that is, whether Rodney’s death was in any overt way a suicide, it seems clearly related to the personal and psychological legacies of his father’s death as well as his own struggles. And in any case, this tragic final stage in King’s life clearly reveals a far more complex story and man than any of the stereotypical images and narratives allow for, making plain the need to push far beyond those caricatures in search of the real Rodney King.Next King context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

April 27-28, 2019: April 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]April 1: 80s Comedies: Airplane: An April Fool’s series kicks off with what makes a successful parody, and what makes a truly great one.April 2: 80s Comedies: Ghostbusters: The series continues with two ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.April 3: 80s Comedies: Back to the Future: What the time travel comedy gets wrong and what it gets rights, as the series laughs on.April 4: 80s Comedies: Home Alone: The interesting, American layers underneath one of our silliest holiday comedies.April 5: 80s Comedies: Working Girl: The series concludes with the inspiring and frustrating female characters of a socially thoughtful dramedy.April 6-7: Crowd-sourced 80s Comedies: My latest crowd-sourced post, featuring the responses and nominations of fellow ComedyStudiers—add yours in comments, please!April 8: StatueStudying: The Statue of Liberty: A StatueStudying series kicks off with gaps in our memories of an iconic American statue.April 9: StatueStudying: Saddam: The series continues with an anniversary post on the value of recognizing US hypocrisies and the need to get beyond them.April 10: StatueStudying: The Shaw Memorial: A historically, culturally, and symbolically crucial statue and monument, as the series rolls on.April 11: StatueStudying: Christ of the Ozarks: A few illuminating contexts for a ginormous Christian statue.April 12: StatueStudying: The Spirit of Detroit and the Cleveland War Memorial Fountain: The inspiring messages and missing histories of two linked Midwestern statues.April 13-14: StatueStudying: Charlottesville Statues and Memorials: The series concludes with two distinct spaces in which Cville seeks to remember, and one hope moving forward.April 15: Patriots’ Day: My annual Patriots’ Day post, on Martin’s Game of Thrones and the easy and hard forms of patriotism. April 16: Patriots’ Day Texts: “This Land”: A series on critically patriotic texts kicks off with three layers to Gary Clark Jr.’s raw and compelling song and video.April 17: Patriots’ Day Texts: “Let America Be America Again”: The series continues with how Langston Hughes’s fiery poems helps us challenge a superficially patriotic slogan.April 18: Patriots’ Day Texts: “The Land of the Free”: Two critically patriotic texts that together produce one of our best recent cultural works, as the series rolls on.April 19: Patriots’ Day Texts: The Rise of David Levinsky: The series concludes with a fascinating text that explores, extols, and explodes the rags to riches narrative.April 20-21: Patriots’ Day Texts: We the People: A special weekend update on my forthcoming book!April 22: Earth Day Studying: Animated Activisms: An Earth Day series kicks off with three examples of the link between animation and the environment.April 23: Earth Day Studying: Climate Change Voices: The series continues with how a few inspiring historical voices would suggest we respond to our current crisis.April 24: Earth Day Studying: Henry David Thoreau: Three ways to honor Thoreau and celebrate Earth Day, as the series rolls on.April 25: Earth Day Studying: Edward Abbey: How the author and environmentalist reflects three distinct and even contrasting forms of activism. April 26: Earth Day Studying: Contemporary Works: The series concludes with three recent books that carry environmental writing into the 21st century.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 26, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Contemporary Works

[The 49thannual Earth Day is April 22nd, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of environmental stories and histories. Share yours in comments to help us celebrate this wonderful and all too often underappreciated home of ours!]On three recent books that carry the legacy of environmental writing into the 21stcentury.1)      Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet (2016): Edited by Julie Dunlap and Susan A. Cohen, this wonderful collection gathers together a wide variety of writers (twenty-two in total, as well as an introduction by the great Bill McKibben) and genres to consider what environmental writing and activism are and can be in this bleak historical moment. I excerpted a few pieces from it for my Spring 2017 adult learning class on contemporary issues and they were very well-received, but I would really argue that the book works best when read as a whole, putting these individual voices in conversation and community to exemplify the subtitle’s generational cohort as fully as possible. 2)      Breaking into the Backcountry (2010): I’ve highlighted my FSU colleague Steve Edwards in a number of posts over the years, and in terms of his evolving writing career have been particularly inspired by his recent pieces on both parentingand reading. But Steve’s first book, the magisterial Breaking into the Backcountry, is likewise great and indeed represents a worthy heir to works like Desert Solitaire by yesterday’s subject Edward Abbey. As I said about Abbey’s 1968 book, a 2010 project on the importance and inspiration of spending nearly a year in solitude in nature might seem a bit too divorced from the social and communal issues facing us collectively these days. But like Desert Solitaire and Walden and so many other great works, Steve’s thoughtful and moving book proves that the opposite is true: that we need such books and writing now more than ever.3)      Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (2016): We also need books that can bridge those only superficial gaps between (for example) nature and society, individual experience and collective history, and I know of few works (recent or otherwise) that do so more potently than Lauret Savoy’s Trace. Savoy, a geologist and Professor of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, links those scientific and scholarly pursuits to both her own and America’s multi-racial heritage and identity, and the result is a book that truly exemplifies interdisciplinary engagements with some of our most complex and shared collective spaces and themes. Trace seems to me to be a key reflection of the future of environmental writing (and a key part of the future of American Studies to boot), and an illustration, like all three of these books, that that future is in very good hands.April 2019 Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?

April 25, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Edward Abbey

[The 49thannual Earth Day is April 22nd, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of environmental stories and histories. Share yours in comments to help us celebrate this wonderful and all too often underappreciated home of ours!]On three distinct and even contrasting ways to contribute to environmental activism.Edward Abbey is perhaps best known for his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which depicts a group of heroic anarchists and environmental terrorists using every means at their disposal (including, if not especially, criminal ones) to fight for the environment against corporate and governmental forces. Abbey’s book directly inspired the eco-terrorist (or eco-revolutionary, depending on who you ask) organization Earth First!, which was founded in 1980 and the members of which frequently referred to (and still to this day call) their acts of eco-sabotage as “monkeywrenching.” While Abbey did not become an official member of Earth First!, he did both write for them and take direct action with them on occasion, and thus seems to have been more than fine with his fictional ideas being turned into radical activism in this way. As with other radical leftist groups such as the Weathermen, it’s important to try to maintain a sense of the line between inspiring activism and destructive terrorism; but it’s also important not to let any one perspective, and certainly not a corporate or authoritative one, be the sole arbiter of that spectrum. And to read Abbey’s book is to recognize the complexity of such issues when it comes to environmental extremism.Abbey published more than twenty books in his three-plus decade long writing career, however, and thus engaged with environmental issues in far more varied ways than that one most famous novel would indicate. For example, his first non-fiction book, 1968’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, presents a far more individual and reflective form of environmental advocacy and activism. An autobiographical account of Abbey’s time spent living alone in Southeastern Utah’s spectacular Arches National Park (he lived there from 1956-1957 as a backcountry park ranger), Desert Solitaire is in many ways a 20th century Walden, equal parts memoir and personal reflection, environmental and scientific journal, and social and philosophical commentary. As did Thoreau, Abbey offers his personal experiences and perspective as a model for his readers and all of us, suggesting the intense and important value of this kind of isolated immersion in the natural world. At the height of 1960s social and political debates, such a book and project might seem like a retreat or at least a separation from those shared concerns, but I believe Desert Solitaire is better seen as a complement to them, an argument for how and why environmental activism should be part of that broader spectrum of social change (if a form that perhaps does at times require more individual and, yes, solitary pursuits).As that year in Arches National Park reflects, Abbey also worked for a number of years, particularly in the early part of his writing career, as a park ranger. He did so not only there but at many other parks and sites in the late 1950s and 1960s: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument(in Arizona near the Mexican border); the Evergladesin Florida; and Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California among others. These efforts partly embodied Desert Solitaire’s ethos of individuals immersing themselves in natural worlds, of the advice Abbey gave in a September 1976 speech to environmental activists: “It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here.” But I would argue that working as a park ranger also represents a contribution to communal experiences of nature and the environment as well as a form of fighting for the land that differs from eco-terrorism. That is, I think Abbey’s service as a ranger represents a third form of environmental activism, one that recognizes that we’re all in it together and seeks to defend the environment in more positive ways. There’s a place for all these forms in our conversations and efforts, but as a devotee of our National Park system, I’m especially inspired by this third form.Last Earth Day post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?

April 24, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Henry David Thoreau

[The 49thannual Earth Day is April 22nd, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of environmental stories and histories. Share yours in comments to help us celebrate this wonderful and all too often underappreciated home of ours!]On three distinct but interconnected ways to commemorate one of our most foundational and enduring environmental voices.1)      Read Faith in a Seed: I’ve made the case many times in this space for broadening our Thoreau canon beyond the most established texts, and one of the most important ways to do so would entail reading Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings . Collected by the wonderful Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean from various works left unfinished at Thoreau’s death (including The Dispersion of Seeds ), Faith in a Seed offers a vision of Thoreau the naturalist and scientist that goes well beyond any of the other works I’ve previously highlighted in this space (or, indeed, any of the works published in his lifetime). Yet Faithalso reflects how much Thoreau’s perspective, ideas, and writing had evolved in the course of his two decades as a published writer—an evolution that highlights the tragedy of his far too youthful passing but also offers a vital challenge to any attempt to define Thoreau only through Walden or any one text or project. For all those reasons, I can’t imagine a more apt Earth Day week read than Faith in a Seed. 2)      Visit Walden Pond: Thanks to the efforts of Don Henley(yes, that Don Henley) and many others in the Walden Woods Project, the woods and pond have been largely preserved as they were in Thoreau’s era. As I wrote in this post about six years ago, however, even the changes, which have made the pond more accessible to modern visitors, seem to me to be in the spirit of Thoreau’s project and book. The site now features a newly renovated and still evolving Visitor Center, one which in its numerous green elements and initiatives as well as in its exhibits both presents and honors Thoreau’s legacy and vision. Moreover, I can testify from personal experience that simply sitting on the beach at Walden—or, as highlighted in this blog post by a favorite nature writer of mine, walking through the woods as a train passes by—allows you to feel a genuine and moving kinship with both Thoreau and the many millions of others who have spent meaningful time in these spaces. You won’t spend a summer or fall or winter day more happily, and certainly won’t better commemorate Earth Day, than by visiting Walden Pond.3)      Walk with Others: Maybe you lived thousands of miles away from Walden, though. And maybe you’re not able to get your hands on a copy of Faith in a Seed. Well, I’m here to tell you that you can commemorate Earth Day in a deeply appropriate Thoreau-inspired way wherever you are, and with nothing other than your own two feet and (ideally) a companion or two. I don’t know of any American author or figure who more consistently or convincingly made the case for walking than Thoreau, a fact illustrated by the wonderful children’s book character who bears his name. It might seem that solitude was an important part of those walks, and certainly Thoreau wasn’t averse to such solo treks. But as “A Walk to Wachusett” reflects, Thoreau was always more than happy to share his walks, and indeed wrote about such companionship as a vital part of the experience. Having walked around Walden Pond (and many many other places, some familiar to one or all of us, some new to all) with my parents, with my sons, and with other good friends, I can say that here I entirely agree with the sometimes iconoclastic but always interesting and important environmental writer.Next Earth Day post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?

April 23, 2019: Earth Day Studying: Climate Change Voices

[The 49thannual Earth Day is April 22nd, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of environmental stories and histories. Share yours in comments to help us celebrate this wonderful and all too often underappreciated home of ours!]On how a few important and inspiring historical AmericanStudiers would suggest we respond to the most long-term yet most pressing world crisis.“Simplify, simplify.” Those words and that message are at the heart of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)—of Chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”; and of the purpose and message of Thoreau’s time at the pond and book about the experience. It’s true that Thoreau wasn’t nearly as alone in his cabin as his book sometimes suggests—that he went to town and received visitors from there, that he depended on some help from his parents, that he was social as well as solitary during his Transcendental sojourn. But far from making Thoreau or the book hypocritical, as has sometimes been suggested, those facts make him and it more human and genuine and inspiring—represent his lived experience and demonstrate his attempt to wed that experience to ideals of simplicity and reconnection with the natural world. If we’re going to change the way we live in this 21st century moment, Thoreau would argue, it’s going to have to start with simplifying and reconnecting for sure.“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” So pioneering naturalist, conservationist, and author John Muir once noted in his journals (collected in this wonderful 1938 book, John of the Mountains). Muir is often described as a founding father of the National Park movement—or at least as sharing that honor with Teddy Roosevelt, since Muir died before the National Park Service was created—and there’s a good deal of truth to that designation. But even truer would be the recognition that for Muir, there’s no meaningful individual life, no communal American identity, and perhaps no world period that doesn’t include engagement with, respect for, and preservation of our natural spaces. Preserving, appreciating, and venturing into the wilderness isn’t, by itself, nearly enough to reverse or even impact climate change, of course. But the more we move into the wilderness in our individual lives—and the more we allow it to move into all of our perspectives—the more, Muir would argue, we can connect to the most universal and crucial human questions.“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.” So wrote environmental activist, scientist, and author Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), one of the 20th century’s and America’s most prescient and salient works. Carson’s specific attention to the dangers of pesticides, and similar environmental hazards, had in her era and have continued to have significant, lasting, and very beneficial effects. But when it comes to her most overarching message, her concerns over the path of progress and where it is taking us, we have been far less able to hear and respond. Doing so won’t be easy, not only because of inertia and momentum, but also because progress and development most certainly have their own positive and beneficial impacts on the world and those who live in it. But at the very least, Carson would insist, we must examine every aspect of our world, and recognize that in a significant number of cases we will have to move away from easy or attractive ideas (see: fracking) in order to travel on the harder but more sustainable road.Next Earth Day post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Earth Day stories or histories you’d highlight?