Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 206

March 6, 2019: Remembering the Alamo: Lone Star

[On March 6th, 1836 the Alamo, a San Antonio fort and part of the newly independent Texan Republic, fell to Mexican forces. That battle became a rallying cry for the remainder of the war between Texas and Mexico, and so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the ways the Alamo has been remembered. Leading up to a special weekend post on Tejano culture and legacies!][FYI: Spoilers for Lone Star (1996) in what follows, especially the last paragraph!]On two exchanges in my favorite film that capture the complexities of collective memory.I believe I’ve written more about my favorite filmmaker, John Sayles, in this space than any other single artist, including an entire October 2013 series AmericanStudying different Sayles films. Yet despite that consistent presence on the blog, I believe I’ve only focused on my favorite Sayles film, and favorite American film period, Lone Star (1996) for about half of one post (if one of my very first on this blog, natch). That’s pretty ironic, as I could easily spend an entire week’s series (an entire month? All of 2019???) focusing on different individual moments from Lone Star and the many histories and themes to which they connect. I’ll spare you all that for the moment, though, and focus instead on the film’s most consistent theme: the fraught and contested border between the U.S. and Mexico. Lone Star’s fictional South Texas town is named Frontera (a clear nod to Gloria Anzaldúa), located directly on the border within fictional Rio county; and as usual when Sayles journeys to a particular place to create a story and film about that setting, he delves deeply and potently into the histories and contexts that inform that world.Two specific dialogue exchanges/scenes focused on the Alamo illustrate a couple of the many lenses that Sayles and his film provide on the particular theme of collective memories of the battle and the border. Very early in the film we see one of the film’s principal protagonists, high school history teacher Pilar Cruz (the wonderful, tragically lost Elizabeth Peña), debating her school’s new, multi-cultural curriculum with a multi-ethnic, angry group of parents. Pilar is defending her goal of presenting different perspectives on history, and an enraged Anglo father responds, “I’m sure they’ve got their own version of the Alamo on the other side, but we’re not on the other side!” But Pilar responds calmly that “there’s no reason to get so upset,” noting that their ultimate goal has simply been to highlight a key aspect of life for all those kids growing up in a town like Frontera, past and present: “Cultures coming together, in positive and negative ways.” For the Anglo father, Frontera and Texas are “American,” by which he clearly means Anglo/English-speaking like himself; the Mexican perspective is “the other side.” But what Pilar knows well, from personal experience as well as historical knowledge, is that Frontera’s America (and, by extension, all of America) is both Mexican and Anglo American, English- and Spanish-speaking, and thus that multiple versions of the Alamo are part of this one place and its heritage, legacy, and community.In the film’s final scene (again, SPOILERS in this paragraph, although I won’t spoil all the details as the film is a mystery on multiple levels), Pilar communicates a different perspective in conversation with one of the film’s other main protagonists, Chris Cooper’s Sheriff Sam Deeds. Pilar and Sam are former high school sweethearts pulled apart by complex family and cultural dynamics and now just beginning to reconnect, and in this scene are debating whether and how they can truly start once more. Pilar makes the case to a doubting Sam that they can indeed “start fresh,” and in the film’s amazing final lines, argues, “All that other stuff? All that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.” That might seem like a striking reversal from both her earlier perspective and her job as a history teacher, and indeed from the film’s overall emphasis on the importance (if certainly also the difficulty) of better remembering histories both personal/familial and communal/cultural. But I would argue—and I know Sayles would too, as I had the chance to talk about this scene with him when I met him briefly in Philadelphia at an independent film festival—that what Pilar wants to forget is not the actual past but the mythic one constructed too often in collective memories and symbolized so succinctly by the phrase “Remember the Alamo.” Forgetting the Alamo, that is, might just help us remember better, a complex and crucial final message fitting for this wonderful film.Next Alamo memory tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

March 5, 2019: Remembering the Alamo: A Mexican Memoir

[On March 6th, 1836 the Alamo, a San Antonio fort and part of the newly independent Texan Republic, fell to Mexican forces. That battle became a rallying cry for the remainder of the war between Texas and Mexico, and so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the ways the Alamo has been remembered. Leading up to a special weekend post on Tejano culture and legacies!]On a couple takeaways from a controversial but apparently authentic memoir.In 1955, Mexican journalist and historian Jesús Sanchez Garza self-published La Rebellion de Texas: Manuscrito Inedito [Unpublished] de 1836 por un Oficial de Santa Anna. Garza’s book comprised the first published edition of the purported Texas Rebellion diary of JoséEnrique de la Peña, a Mexican colonel and amateur historian who had served with Santa Anna’s forces at the Battle of the Alamo (among other military engagements); Garza framed the 100-page diary with another 150 pages of introduction and supporting materials. The book didn’t garner much scholarly attention at the time, but in 1975 Texas A&M University Press published an English translation, With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution . Although there was a good deal of initial skepticism about the diary’s authenticity, subsequent work by both historian James Crisp and a team of researchers led by Dr. David Gracy has confirmed that the diary is in fact a legitimate primary source; the manuscript is now held at the University of Texas-Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History.A great deal of the controversy over Peña’s diary stemmed from one particular detail, a historical twist that is also one of the book’s most compelling takeaways. It had long been assumed that Davy Crockett died fighting at the Alamo, as did most of the Texas Republic combatants there. But according to Peña, Crockett was taken captive by Santa Anna’s forces after the battle, held for a short time, and then executed ignominiously. Even in his own lifetime Crockett had become a larger-than-life, mythological American figure; by the late 20th century, thanks largely to the 1950s Disney TV show but also to John Wayne’s performancein the 1960 film, his legend had only grown. Peña’s far less glamorous version of Crockett’s death seemed to many suspicious historians like an attempt by Garza to capitalize on the Crockett legend, contributing to doubts over the book’s authenticity. But it’s possible to argue something quite different—that in fact it was the scholarly doubts which reveal the enduring and troubling power of the Crockett legend. After all, Peña’s story of Crockett’s death is simply an accurate reflection of the realities of war, and its brutal and destructive effects for those who participate in it; that might not gel with the Disney ballad version of Crockett, but it locates him within the histories to which he was undoubtedly connected.Moreover, focusing on the small section of Peña’s diary devoted to Crockett only replicates our American tendency to think of the Alamo solely in terms of the Anglo combatants and the Texas Republic. Whereas the most ground-breaking and impressive side to Peña’s book is precisely that offers a Mexican perspective on the battle, the war between Mexico and the Texas Republic, and that whole contested and crucial era in North American and border history. For example, Peña’s role as an aide to Colonel Francisco Duque of the Mexican army’s Toluca Battalion meant that he saw extensive action on the front lines during the siege of the Alamo, as that famously heroic battalion led one of the chief columns of assault on the besieged fort. On a very different note, Peña took part in the Mexican army’s chaotic retreat to Matamoros after Santa Anna was captured at the Battle of San Jacinto; that retreat was so infamous that its commanding officer, General Vicente Filisola, was charged with cowardice for ordering it, and Peña published an anonymous newspaper article (signed “An Admirer of Texas”!) critiquing Filisola and the army’s conduct in the war’s closing stages. These and many other details open up very different sides to the Texan war of independence, and reveal the historical importance of this long-lost, controversial, and compelling Mexican memoir.Next Alamo memory tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

March 4, 2019: Remembering the Alamo: The Two Films

[On March 6th, 1836 the Alamo, a San Antonio fort and part of the newly independent Texan Republic, fell to Mexican forces. That battle became a rallying cry for the remainder of the war between Texas and Mexico, and so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the ways the Alamo has been remembered. Leading up to a special weekend post on Tejano culture and legacies!]On what separates the 1960 and 2004 films, and a telling shared detail.The 1960 film The Alamo was almost literally a lifelong pet project for one of the world’s biggest movie stars. John Wayne had been hoping to make a historical film about the 1836 battle since at least 1945, and had been working with both a screenwriter (his friend James Edward Grant) and a famous research assistant (director John Ford’s son Pat) on the project. Battles over the proposed $3 million budget led to Wayne leaving Republic Pictures, forming his own production company (Batjac), and eventually signing with United Artists in 1956 with an express goal of finally making his Alamo film. Make it he did, but only by promising to direct as well as star in it as Davy Crockett (by this time he was hoping for the smaller role of Sam Houston, which went instead to guest star Richard Boone) and investing more than $1.5 million of his own money. The production was famously troubled—John Ford showed up and tried to force his way into the director’s chair; Wayne sent him to shoot second unit sequences that were mostly unused in the final cut—and Wayne never recouped his personal investment, although it broke even sufficiently for UA to come out okay.2004’s The Alamo began in a much more conventional Hollywood way, as a carefully planned studio brainchild. Imagine Entertainment came up with the idea of making a 21st century film version of the battle, with Imagine partners Ron Howard as director and Brian Grazer as producer. Imagine teamed up with Disney to get the film financed, and so of course there were various cross-studio debates and challenges, including Howard getting replaced by John Lee Hancock as director (Howard stayed on as a producer alongside Grazer) and various casting shifts (Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockettremained a constant throughout). But this more studio-centered process did result in a vastly different from the 1960 version, not only in terms of a smoother and more trouble-free production but also and more importantly in terms of an impressively revisionist final product. The film includes the stories and perspectives of a number of Mexican soldiers (not only Santa Anna, who is more or less the only Mexican presence in the 1960 version), humanizes figures like Crockett and Jim Bowie, and generally captures historical complexities in a way the epic 1960 film never intended to. I’m sure an adaptation of John Sayles’ rejected script would have been more revisionist still, but for Hollywood historical films, the 2004 Alamoain’t half bad.Unfortunately, and perhaps not unrelatedly, the film’s box office take was all bad: it made just over $25 million worldwide, against a budget of $107 million, and is considered one of the biggest box office bombs in history. In some ways, as that hyperlinked article argues, the revisionism itself might have kept certain jingoistic audiences away; but at the same time, Wayne’s uber-jingoistic film was far from a box office juggernaut itself, and again lost Wayne his personal investment. And I would say a telling linked detail indicates a similarly misguided emphasis between these two distinct films: the 1960 film’s Alamo setwas among the largest ever constructed at that point (and remained a tourist attraction until just last year), using 14 miles of newly built roads, 12,000 gallons of water a day, and 5000 acres of horse corrals (among other extremes); and the 2004 film’s Alamo set claimed the title of the largest set ever built in North America, clocking 51 acres of new construction (all unfortunately lost in a fire later that year). Perhaps it was necessary in each case to devote such extreme attention to the set, but I would argue that this emphasis reflects a shared and false sense that it is the fort, the place, on which this story focuses. Place matters a great deal to history to be sure, never more so than border histories—but it is the setting for the stories that take place there, and perhaps both these films lost sight of that ultimate emphasis in their literally spectacular productions. Next Alamo memory tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

March 2-3, 2019: February 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]February 4: The Philippine American War: Spanish American War Origins: On the anniversary of its opening shots, how the Philippine American War reframes our memories of the war it extended.February 5: The Philippine American War: Emilio Aguinaldo: The series continues with three telling 1890s stages in the career of the revolutionary leader.February 6: The Philippine American War: Mark Twain and Imperialism: A couple ways to contextualize a complex and important essay, as the series rolls on.February 7: The Philippine American War: War or Insurrection?: Why what might seem to be a semantic distinction in how we refer to the conflict is anything but.February 8: The Philippine American War: Filipino Americans: A few inspiring examples of wartime and post-war Filipino American identities and stories.February 9-10: The Philippine American War: Legacies: The series concludes with some significant ways the war has echoed down through subsequent histories.February 11: Movies I Love: Thunderheart: A Valentine’s week series kicks off with three of the many reasons I love Michael Apted’s 1992 mystery thriller.February 12: Movies I Love: Glory: The series continues with three of the many moving, challenging, vital moments in the 1989 historical drama.February 13: Movies I Love: Chinatown: A classic film noir mystery that’s also pitch-perfect historical fiction, as the series screens on.February 14: Movies I Love: Memento: The dark, cynical, and unquestionably human final words of a contemporary American classic.February 15: Movies I Love: The Opposite of Sex and You Can Count on Me: The series concludes with two wonderful recent films that challenge and enrich our images of family.February 16-17: Joe Moser’s Guest Post on Steve McQueen and 12 Years a Slave: A special weekend Guest Post from my friend, colleague, and favorite contemporary FilmStudier.February 18: Film Non-Favorites: Scorcese: The annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series kicks off with the distinctly American problem with the acclaimed filmmaker.February 19: Film Non-Favorites: The Big Short and Vice: The series continues with the value and limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.February 20: Film Non-Favorites: The Coen Brothers: Three alternative films that contrast with more acclaimed Coen Brothers works, as the series grumbles on.February 21: Film Non-Favorites: The Shining: Why I greatly prefer the ending and tone of King’s novel to Kubrick’s film.February 22: Film Non-Favorites: Prequel Trilogies: The series concludes with two fundamental flaws of prequels revealed by the Star Wars and Hobbit trilogies.February 23-24: Crowd-sourced Non-Favorites: One of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year, a collective airing of grievances—add yours in comments, please!February 25: The Salem Witch Trials: Causes: For the Witch Trials’ anniversary, a series kicks off with three stages in how we’ve tried to explain a seemingly inexplicable historical horror.February 26: The Salem Witch Trials: Tituba: The series continues with a couple significant histories that the mysterious figure helps us better remember.February 27: The Salem Witch Trials: Giles and Martha Corey: The danger and necessity of looking closer at our historical heroes, as the series rolls on.February 28: The Salem Witch Trials: The Mathers: Three generations of a family that embodies the first century of Puritan New England.March 1: The Salem Witch Trials: Collective Memories: The series and month conclude with two distinct but perhaps interconnected ways to remember Salem and the Witch Trials.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

March 1, 2019: The Salem Witch Trials: Collective Memories

[On March 1st, 1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in what would become the Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]On two very different but not disconnected ways to remember the Salem Witch Trials.As this week’s posts have illustrated, the Salem Witch Trials comprise one of America’s lowest points, a moment when the kinds of discrimination, hatred, and over-zealous self-righteousness that can characterize any human community (especially a self-defined “city on a hill”) congealed into a period of frenzy and terror which left a score of innocent people dead. The question of how 21st century Americans reconnect with that extreme period, with indeed whether it’s even possible for us to recognize and analyze the kinds of individual and communal attitudes and perspectives that can lead to such madness, is to my mind a profoundly important one, not only for our understandings of American history but also for our ability to analyze our own identities and communities. Few questions are more serious and significant.So of course the primary way Salem has chosen to remember the Witch Trials is deeply, deeply silly. The so-called “witch city” has entirely embraced that designation, from semi-highbrow institutions like the Salem Witch Museum to thoroughly lowbrow ones like the numerous occult shops and t-shirt vendors and the like. For the entire month of October the city becomes America’s unofficial but undisputed Halloween headquarters. One of its prominent squares even features a statue of Bewitched’s Samantha (donated by the cable network TV Land, in honor of the two-part Bewitched special episode set in Salem that helped turn the city into the tourist attraction it now is), for crying out loud. For AmericanStudiers like this one, the city’s embrace of the occult can seem irritatingly trivial at best, and downright offensive to the victims and memories of the Trials at worst. Yet it’s also possible to argue that the Witch City moniker has brought much more attention and tourism to Salem than would otherwise be the case—and, this argument might proceed, once that awareness and those visitors are present, it’s entirely possible for them to gain additional and more complex perspectives on the city’s history.Without doubt, at least to my mind, the city’s best opportunity for such shifts and strengthenings of perspectives lies in the Witch Trials Memorial. As I wrote in this post, I think the Memorial represents the very best of what public art can be and do; and like all such public art, it depends on your presence to achieve those effects (so nothing I write here, nor even the photo at the first link in this paragraph, can do it justice). Moreover, unlike another complex and powerful work that seeks to remember the Trials, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1952), the Memorial does not in any way link the Trials to 20th or 21stcentury events, nor make any other concessions to a contemporary audience; instead, its great success lies in its ability to transport its visitors into a combination of emotions (holiness and horror, peace and pain, calm and chaos, injustice and inspiration) that capture both the heart of the Trials and their continued presence and effects in our collective consciousness. But of course it can’t achieve that success if folks don’t visit it—and maybe the Witch City narratives, silly as they can seem, can bring a lot more such visitors to the Memorial.February Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

February 28, 2019: The Salem Witch Trials: The Mathers

[On March 1st, 1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in what would become the Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]On the three generations that embody the first Anglo American century.For much of 1633, and again in 1634, London clergyman Richard Mather was suspended for failing to conform to the Anglican Church’s strict regulations for preachers. Wearying of that climate of orthodoxy, and encouraged by colleagues already in the New World (including John Cotton), Mather and his young family took ship for Massachusetts in June 1635. Once there, Mather became an impassioned advocate for New World Puritanism in its debates with the European branch, as in his tract Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed . Four of his six sons followed Mather into the ministry, establishing his name as one of the colony’s most powerful clerical—which is to say also political and social—forces and legacies.The youngest of those sons, Increase Mather, certainly illustrated the potency of that expanding family legacy, not only in his own ecclesiastical efforts, but also and more tellingly in his multiple other roles: as a president of Harvard College, a recipient of the new world’s first honorary doctorate, an advocate for reinstating the Massachusetts Charter in opposition to the Dominion of New England, a son-in-law of John Cotton, and a contemporary historian of King Philip’s War, among others. If that war indicated one way in which Richard’s idealized Massachusetts was crumbling by the end of the 17thcentury, Increase was also and more centrally connected to a second such fissure: the Salem Witch Trials. By that time one of the region’s most prominent and powerful figures, Increase had the ability to stop the trials if any individual did; but despite doubts, about which he did write publicly, he mostly sided with his fellow powerful ministers and judges.I’ve written elsewhere about the two sides of Increase’s son Cotton Mather: his own failure to publicly oppose the Witch Trials and indeed his book that seemed to support the need for them, despite even stronger private reservations than Increase’s; and yet his impressive and influential advocacy for smallpox inoculation. It’s fair to say, then, that this third-generation Mather minister, named after both of his influential grandfathers, exemplified both the worst and best of the family’s legacies: the kinds of hierarchical power structures that could close ranks around the Witch Trial judges; and yet the kinds of innovative and bold efforts that led the Puritans to Massachusetts in the first place, and helped create the new world and nation of which they were such a significant part. Last Witch Trials context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

February 27, 2019: The Salem Witch Trials: Giles and Martha Corey

[On March 1st, 1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in what would become the Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]On the danger of looking too closely at our historical heroes, and a potential middle ground.One of the first Salem Witch Trials figures about whom I learned was Giles Corey, an elderly man and the only one of the 20 executed “witches” who died by “pressing”rather than hanging. As both those hyperlinked articles note, the 80 year-old Corey refused to enter a plea of either guilty or innocent before the court, maintaining his silence throughout the fatal pressing (which was apparently employed in an attempt to draw such a plea out of him one way or the other); indeed, the story wentthat the only words he spoke as more and more rocks were piled upon him were “More weight.” To a young AmericanStudier (and I learned about Corey for the first time at some point in high school, so it was indeed quite early in my AmericanStudies career and perspective), that was one of the most badass and inspiring historical moments I had ever encountered (also a horrific one, to be sure, but nonetheless a badass and inspiring response to such horrors), and Corey became one of my historical heroes as a result. And then I learned more. Most relevantly, I learned that before Corey was accused of witchcraft, his third wife Martha was—and that, as that hyperlinked article traces at length, Giles not only refused to corroborate Martha’s story in a way that might help her avoid conviction, but in fact testified against her at her trial, more or less assuring that she would be found guilty. I understand full well that marriages can be unhappy and far from the romantic ideal, and I also understand motivations of self-preservation and survival, especially in times like the witch trials era—but at best (and I do mean at best), Giles’s actions toward Martha utterly destroy any image of him as courageous or heroic. Moreover, further investigation into Giles revealed that he had beaten to death one of his farmhands, Jacob Goodale, some fifteen years earlier, in 1675; he was found guilty of the murder but punished with only a fine. Clearly this was a man with a history of violence and ugliness, and one whose mistreatment of his third wife (and while he did not himself accuse her of witchcraft, I can think of no kinder word than mistreatment for his behavior once she was accused) was simply a final brutal act in an undignified life.But it wasn’t his final act overall, of course. That was refusing to play by the witch trials’ court’s rigged rules, refusing to give in to their barbaric torture, dying on his own stubborn terms rather than their nonsensical and awful ones. Those actions could be linked to his violence toward others, I suppose, but they’re also certainly a form of personal bravery in the face of violence. Is it possible to highlight and even celebrate that final act, while also remembering that Giles Corey participated actively in systems of communal violence and patriarchal oppression at their most extreme? That’s not unlike the questions I asked about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s end-of-life transformations in a footnote to this post, and there I called those shifts “far too little and too late.” Corey didn’t reach the depths of bigotry, brutality, and pure badness that Forrest did, but in a more personal and small way he seems to have been much the same type of man. But he was also a victim of the Witch Trials, and a victim whose final acts of stubborn bravery do help illuminate the true depravity of that period. So I believe it is worth remembering and even celebrating those final acts, but only in a much more accurate context than those with which I initially remembered and celebrated Giles Corey.Next Witch Trials context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

February 26, 2019: The Salem Witch Trials: Tituba

[On March 1st, 1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in what would become the Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]On a couple significant histories to which the mysterious Witch Trials figure helps us connect.As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, one of the three Salem women initially accused of witchcraft—alongside two older Puritan women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne—was Tituba, an enslaved woman owned by John Parris (father of one of the initial accusers, Elizabeth). Tituba had been brought to the town from Barbados some years prior, and by 1692 was married to an enslaved Native American man known as John Indian. As the first hyperlinked article above argues, much of Tituba’s life story remains unknown and mysterious, and as a result has often been represented inaccurately; for example, she has frequently if not consistently been depicted in cultural images and texts (including recent TV shows such as Salem and American Horror Story: Coven as well as books like Ann Petry’s 1956 Tituba of Salem Villageand Maryse Condé’s 1986 I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem) as African American, but most historians now believe she was the descendent of native peoples in the Caribbean rather than African arrivals. In any case, she played a central role in the unfolding Witch Trials, and can help remind us a couple important historical contexts for them.For one thing, I think it’s worth repeating and dwelling on one of my concluding points in yesterday’s post: that late 17th century Salem (and Massachusetts and New England more broadly) was a slaveholding community. When we include non-Anglo communities in our collective narratives of the Puritans at all, it’s almost always to recognize Native American cultures outside of Puritan New England—too often still as helpful neighbors, sometimes as the victims of genocidal violence, but almost always as an external presence in any case. Of course those cultures are worth remembering (much more on their own terms than in relationship to the Puritans), but in terms of American histories it’s at least as important to recognize that by the end of the 17thcentury Puritan New England itself was potently (if complicatedly) multi-cultural, featuring both Native American and African American slaves among other presences. As the case of Tituba reveals, it can be very difficult to trace the individual stories and histories of those 17th century enslaved peoples (and she’s one of the most well-known bya  long shot)—but the broader communal point, the presence of these peoples and all their resulting contributions to Puritan New England, nonetheless holds and is a vital one. To quote Mechal Sobel’s book, we have a long way to go in considering the world they made together.On a more individual note, the story of Tituba’s role in the Salem Witch Trials also reminds us of a community we tend to minimize in our collective memories of the trials: the hundreds of accused witches who were imprisoned. It’s of course natural that memories have tended to focus on the 20 accused witches who were executed in the course of the trials, but many imprisoned victims likewise died, often in painfully ironic circumstances; exemplifying those ironies is the case of Lydia Dustin (or Dastin), who was imprisoned in April 1692, found not guilty in January 1693, but could not pay her jail fees and thus remained in prison where she died in March 1693. While most imprisoned people did not die in jail (including Tituba, who was released sometime in late 1692 after more than half a year in prison), all of their lives—and the lives of their families, loved ones, and communities—were inexorably changed by their time in prison, and remembering them thus helps us understand the true scope and effects of the witch trials far more fully and accurately. One more reason to remember the mysterious, telling life of Tituba.Next Witch Trials context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

February 25, 2019: The Salem Witch Trials: Causes

[On March 1st, 1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in what would become the Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]On three (of the many) stages to how we’ve tried to explain a seemingly inexplicable event.1)      Youthful (female) hysteria: Those initial accusations of Good, Osborne, and Tituba were leveled by two young cousins, Abigail Williams (age 11) and Elizabeth Parris (9). In January and February of 1692 they began to suffer various mysterious ailments, and when pressed for explanations eventually accused the three women—all to one degree or another outsiders—of bewitching them. While community members of every age, gender, and station would eventually level witchcraft accusations before the Trials ended, it was these young women who most directly set the events in motion, and other young women would continue to level similar accusations over subsequent months. So explanations that have focused on hysterical young girls are not without historical contexts—but nonetheless play into broader social and cultural narratives of female hysteria that are, at best, reductive and problematic (and frankly far too often contribute to witch hunts and the like). 2)      Wheat: For that reason among others, historians began to search for other explanations for the frenzy and horrors in Salem. In the 1970s, an enterprising college student (and future behavioral psychologist) named Linnda Caporeal discovered one promising possibility: ergot poisoning (or ergotism). As that second hyperlinked article notes, the ergot fungus affects rye grain, and could easily have contaminated Salem’s grain during the winter of 1691-1692; LSD is a derivative of ergot, and so ergot poisoning has many of the same physical and psychological symptoms as that hallucinogenic drug. Given that no one (not in their own era and not in the centuries since) had ever been able to diagnose the ailment that undoubtedly was affecting those young girls (and eventually many other community members) in early 1692, and given that a dry summer would likely eliminate the ergot and thus lead to an amelioration of those symptoms, Caporeal’s explanation for what was happening to Salemites remains a convincing one.3)      Fear of others: But while ergotism might well explain what the residents were suffering from, I don’t know that it goes very far toward explaining why so many Salemites chose to accuse one another of witchcraft; even the concept of hallucinations wouldn’t mean they necessarily all hallucinated this particular cause, after all. If we don’t want to return to youthful female hysteria or fantasies or cliquish antagonisms (and I really don’t), we still need to explain why so many affected residents became accusers. And for this AmericanStudier, one likely factor would have to be the fear of those different from the Anglo settlers. As Tituba (on whom more tomorrow) indicates, by the late 17th century Salem (like every New England community) included slaves, who comprised one clear group of “others” to English Puritans. Nearby Native Americans of course comprised another (and witchcraft was often associated with the forests and the natives, as Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter reminds us). Moreover, Salem was a very small community, and its residents likely felt the fragility of their town and lives on a relatively constant basis. Which is to say, unique as they were in many ways, the Salem Witch Trials might also be an early moment in the battle between exclusion and inclusion in American history.Next Witch Trials context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

February 23-24, 2019: Crowd-sourced Non-Favorites

[For my annual Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominees of fellow Non-FavoriteStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]In response to Monday’s Scorcese post, Rob LeBlancwrites, “This is an interesting critique, and one that has a lot of merit to it, but I have managed to view that movie [Goodfellas] as the moralizing tale that he wanted it to be, when I've been in the right mood. It is very hard to view a protagonist who gives the voiceover as a willing cog in a wheel of corruption when he constantly argues that he has been harassed or mistreated, but I think the voiceover could be viewed as the most pathetic time yet in Henry's efforts at pulling himself into a glamorized, criminal American image that he talks about in the opening portion.”Nancy Caronia responds, “Yeah, I find Goodfellas a tale that suggests you can be a criminal, but your ending can be no good. All three main characters are either dead physically or spiritually. Henry Hill is like Stephen Burroughs—the tale he weaves is an attempt to make himself look like the victim, but he only comes across as the biggest ass. I think he understood your critique and that’s why he made Casino—a movie I find hard to watch because there is no glimmer of hope in any of the characters at all. No romance, no life, just crooks who will die alone in a hole somewhere. Teaching a film class focused on Italian Americans in film. My students were freaked out by The Godfather—too violent (ironic considering our state is about to legalize campus carry). We will see how they do with Goodfellas.”Andrew DaSilva adds, “What about Silence or Street Scenes which are so very different than his usual crime sort of movie?”Ian Murray writes, “My least favorite movie, that other people seem to like, is The Wolf of Wall Street. I was disgusted within the first ten minutes and that's all I needed to know about the Wolf.” He adds, “I'm glad I didn't go to the theater, it would have been the second film I walked out of. The other was Van Helsing, which I didn't have high hopes for to begin with. As it is, I have never made it all the way through Wolf and I don't plan on revisiting it.” And he also adds, “I don't care for Natural Born Killers , either.”Mark Lawton responds to Thursday’s Shiningpost, writing, “It’s also no secret that King famously HATED the film adaptation by Kubrick. I’ve seen the film several times and too feel like I am missing something. Ben, did you happen to check out King’s sequel, Doctor Sleep ? (Also coming soon to a theater near you). Of course, to understand that book, you would have to forget everything about Kubrick’s ending.”Other non-favorite nominees:Tim McCaffrey writes, “Time travel ruins everything,” adding “It is an incredibly common and, I think, lazy plot device. Even [SPOILER] in the new Lego Movie - like, why does the Lego Movie need time travel?”AnneMarie Donahue nominates “ Girl Defined … bleck.”Padmini Sukumaran writes, “I ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY hate the 2006 film, Apocalypto ! The main character is a complete insult to the classification of a ‘hero.’ Rather, he is the textbook definition of a Narcissistic Sociopath!” And Diego Ubiera agrees with the nomination of Gibson's film.Marty Olliffshares, “ To Kill a Mockingbird . My problem isn't the book, the movie, or Harper Lee, but the fawning fan base who drip saccharine as they gush and swoon. Thus does TKAM (when you can refer to it by initials, things have gone too far) suck all the air out of the room for AL literature.”On Twitter, One Love nominates, “ The Catcher in the Rye . The whiny entitled man child.”R.J. Reibel writes, “The film version of A Wrinkle in Time was so so bad when compared to the book.”Jeff Renye goes with The Interview .Maria DiFrancesco nominates American Psycho .Kate Smith shares, “ La La Land . Tear my eyes out. Then again, I've never slept so well on a plane as I did when I decided to watch that movie, so maybe it's a love/hate thing.”

Jacquie Carter-Holbrooks writes, "Although I like Geoffrey Rush very much, I really disliked the film version of The Book Thief . I’m not sure anyone could have played the Papa / Hans character adequately."

Jonathan Silverman nominates Forrest Gump .  And to end on a more positive note, Olivia Lucierwrites, “Clark Gable III was found unresponsive in his room this past weekend. How about a tribute to the great Clark Gable and his films!” Hopefully soon, as this blog will always focus more on favorites than non-favorites, I promise!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to these nominees or other non-favorites you’d share?