Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 213

December 15-16, 2018: Spring 2019 Preview

[The final papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must be the end of another semester. This week I’ve recapped some inspiring moments from my Fall 2018 semester, leading up to this preview of my Spring semester!]Four things I’m looking forward to in my Spring 2019 semester.1)      A New Class: Among more familiar favorites like my Ethnic American Literature course, this spring I’ll have the chance to teach a course I haven’t taught before: 20th Century African American Literature, the second half of the survey for which I taught the first half (19thCentury, duh) last spring. For this one, rather than the anthology/different short reading each day structure I used in 19thCentury, I’ll be centering the course around a core group of texts: The Marrow of Tradition, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Invisible Man, Mumbo Jumbo, Beloved, and The Underground Railroad. I’ll also try to work in shorter (especially poetic) readings alongside those main texts, though. I’d love any suggestions of any kind for this class, and will keep you updated of course!2)      NeMLA’s 50th: In late March I’ll be in DC for NeMLA’s 50thanniversary convention. I’ve written in this space a great deal about both that particular convention and my overall continued arc with this wonderful organization, and here will just add that a convention in Washington should allow (well, force) us to consider all the ways that a scholarly community and organization must engage with the political, social, cultural, national, and global worlds around us. The more voices that are part of such conversations the better, so let me know your thoughts and I will keep you updated of course!3)      NEASA at FSU: Other than as a brief mention in this Fall Preview post, I haven’t said much in this space about my second time around as New England ASA President. In many ways I see my role as to help bridge between the organization’s past and the youngest folks who will be taking over the leadership positions soon, but I do have one definite plan for my second presidency: hosting our (now) spring conference here at Fitchburg State. There’s a lot still to develop and coordinate, but I know it will be Saturday June 8th, and will focus on the broad topic of Representations. I’ll share the CFP in this space when it’s ready, as I’d love for you all to join us at NEASA 2019—so I’ll keep you updated of course!4)      Book book book: I’ve already shared the good news about my book contract a couple times in this space, so here I’ll just reiterate my #1 scholarly goal for 2019: to talk about the book and the battle over who is an American in as many spaces and conversations as possible. I’d love to hear any suggestions and ideas for places, spaces, communities, and conversations in which I could share the histories, stories, and ideas at the heart of We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is an American. Thanks in advance!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Semester reflections or Spring previews you’d share?

December 14, 2018: Fall Semester Recaps: Adult Learning Communities

[The final papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments from my Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]On takeaways from my continuing connections to three great adult learning programs.1)      Beacon Hill Seminars: This fall I connected for the first time with this adult learning program, and had the chance to lead a seminar on America in the Gilded Age. I can’t lie, perhaps the coolest part was getting to teach the class in the neighborhood’s historic William Prescott House! But as with every adult learning program for which I’ve taught, I was also and especially struck by the amazing breadth and depth of experiences and knowledge that the students brought. For example, we were talking about the history of immigration laws and their effects, and a student shared her family’s story of immigrating after the 1920s Quota Acts, and of having to move first to South America as a result of that more restrictive era. Each student in a class like this brought equally compelling such stories to the mix, and the result was another amazing adult learning experience for their professor.2)      ALFA: My latest Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) class is ongoing as I write this, and in any case I’ve written a great deal in this space over many years about how much ALFA means to me. So here I’ll note more generally the ways in which adult learning classes and programs force us to rethink how we teach and talk about familiar topics. In this case, the class topic, Voices of Resistance in American History, is very close to the focus of my forthcoming book, so much so that I thought about just giving them chapters of the book as readings. But then I realized that a class isn’t the same as a book, and that shared readings to discuss aren’t the same as my individual voice and writing; so I had to step back and think about ways to present some of the same histories and topics for this kind of audience and conversation, and to draw out their voices and ideas. It’s working well so far, and a good skill to keep practicing in any case!3)      BOLLI: After the initial connection to Brandeis’ adult learning program that I highlighted in that post, I had the chance to teach one class for them, and enjoyed it very much. Our respective schedules have made it difficult to find room for a second such class, but I’ve managed to keep the connection going by giving a couple of one-off lectures for them. This fall I gave such a talk on contemporary African American fiction, highlighting and contextualizing works by Tayari Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Paul Beatty, Imbolo Mbue, Attica Locke, and Colson Whitehead to discuss different threads and trends in both current American literature and the long tradition of African American lit. The talk forced me to both read and think about works outside of my regular range of classes, books that I greatly enjoyed but might not have had time or space in my schedule for without this prompting. One more reason to celebrate and continue my connection to these adult learning programs!Spring preview this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Semester reflections you’d share?

December 13, 2018: Fall Semester Recaps: Major American Authors

[The final papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments from my Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]On three complex, inspiring characters from my Major American Authors of the 20th Century class.1)      Carrie Meeber: I wrote about the contemporary relatability of the title character of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) in one of my earliest posts, and almost exactly eight years later (!) have continued to find that both she and the novel speak to 21st century students and readers very fully and powerfully. But this time I was also struck by my response to the novel’s ending, where Dreiser’s narrator criticizes Carrie for her pursuit of wealth and fame and the solitude and unhappiness it seems to have produced. Maybe, and certainly we all should think about what we most value, individually and societally; but maybe Dreiser’s narrator is also a bit limited in how he’s able to examine a young woman and her potential identities and futures. This time around, anyway, I found Carrie’s present location and future potential at the novel’s end to be, while unquestionably complex and not without their sadder sides, much more inspiring than does Dreiser’s narrator.2)      Albertine Johnson: I talked a bit about the first-person narrator of the first story in Louise Erdrich’s short story cycle Love Medicine (1984/1993) in this post on that story and book, but to be honest have never focused too much of my reading or teaching of the book on Albertine. After that story she largely disappears from the novel, appearing in one other, very dark and complex story toward the book’s end, “A Bridge.” Part of the reason is that Albertine no longer lives on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation with her family, having moved away to attend nursing school in a city (probably Fargo). This time around those details got me thinking about the ways that Albertine parallels Erdrich herself, including mixed-race parents (Albertine’s Dad is Swedish American and Erdrich’s German American), that education away from the reservation (Erdrich attended Dartmouth), and that complex insider-outsider relationship to the Chippewa community as a result. Which might mean that Albertine is more than just our first narrator—she is in some compelling ways our narrator and writer throughout the book.3)      Nath Lee: As I mentioned in my Preview post for this class, my difficult decision to remove Oscar Wao from the syllabus freed up a spot for our FSU Community Read book for the year, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014). Ng’s book is a mystery/thriller, and I’m not going to reveal any of its climactic revelations or scenes here. So I’ll just say that while those scenes focus on Lydia Lee, the teenager whose death (no spoilers there) drives the novel’s plot and its revelations alike, they also have a great deal to tell us about her older brother, Nath. I suppose I’ll spoil enough to say that Nath lives on beyond the novel’s ending, and thus represents questions of whether and how the next generation of this family and American story will endure into the future. Questions we should all be thinking a lot about these days, and ones that Ng’s book, like so many great American novels, helps us examine.Last recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Semester reflections you’d share?

December 12, 2018: Fall Semester Recaps: American Lit Online

[The final papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments from my Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]On the pedagogical challenges and inspirations of teaching online.Having completed my third all-online course, and my second online section of the American Literature II survey class, I can’t say that my overall perspective on online teaching has changed significantly. I still think there are fundamental elements of teaching, of classroom community and conversation, of the way our ideas and readings and voices can evolve in relationship to each other’s, that are quite simply absent from online teaching, and I’m not sure that there’s anything we can do to bring those elements into an online class. I’ve said for a long time that if the majority of my classes or my job overall were to move into an online setting, I would likely leave the profession for a different one, as a great deal of what I most enjoy and find most meaningful about the job would be eliminated in that case. That doesn’t seem to be an imminent possibility, but it’s certainly part of the long-term conversation, and one I think about every time I teach online.On the other hand, I should and do think also and more fully about short-term questions of how to make these particular classes more successful, and for this third one I think I did do a somewhat better job sharing my frames and contexts with the students in ways parallel to how I would do so for an in-person class. I’ve written elsewhere about treating literature survey classes as an “informed democracy,” one where I seek through various means to provide the information and contexts that can help frame conversations that will still be driven as fully as possible by student voices and perspectives. The negotiation of those different layers is distinct in an online class from an in-person one to be sure, but the fundamental questions remain the same, and as I move into my next online class (a second section of The Short Story in the Spring) I will continue to think about how to present such contexts and frames clearly and helpfully (and concisely!) and then encourage student voices and perspectives as the course’s center.Not surprisingly, the most inspiring part of this online course came directly from such student voices and perspectives. Due to both the nature of online classes overall and the location of this class within FSU’s Continuing Education (evening) program, many of the students in the class were non-traditional: older returning students, folks working full-time jobs, parents, and so on. These students brought their experiences and identities to every aspect of the class, from the weekly Discussion Board responses to the papers and more formal work. One paper particularly exemplifies both the personal and the analytical power of those student perspectives: a student wrote about the protagonist of Sui Sin Far’s story “In the Land of the Free” (1909) through her lens as a mother, and in so doing helped me see different sides to a text that I have taught and written about many, many times (as illustrated by that hyperlinked piece). To be honest, I’m not sure if I would have gotten this paper in an in-person class, and I know for a fact that this student would not have been able to take such a class with me. Which is a pretty inspiring reason to keep teaching online courses, I’d say!Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Semester reflections you’d share?

December 11, 2018: Fall Semester Recaps: Writing I

[The final papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments from my Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]On how deeply familiar texts can still sometimes evolve before our eyes.As I mentioned in my Fall Preview post on the class, I’ve been teaching First-Year Writing I since my first semester at FSU, and have used fundamentally the same syllabus throughout that time. Of course it has evolved in various ways, but the core readings in the first two units in particular—personal essaysand then short stories, both drawn from those respective Seagull Readers for that genre—have stayed remarkably static for these fourteen years. As I wrote in that preview post, I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinvention, not if something is working well as this class overall and these units and stories in particular continue to. But at the same time, it’s almost inevitable that readings I’ve taught in a dozen sections across thirteen years are going to start to feel a bit less fresh—not for the students, hopefully, for whom I hope they are generally new and compelling; but at least for the guy in the tie at the front of the room.But if we teachers stay open, keep reading and talking about these texts in that fresh way that they are hopefully working for the students, then I believe we can still find inspiration in them—and I had two specific examples of that phenomenon this semester. In the personal essays unit, our last reading is Maxine Hong Kingston’s “,” the opening chapter of her book The Woman Warrior (1976). Kingston’s dense and dark essay focuses a good deal on Chinese, Chinese American, and immigrant American identities, themselves topics that open up to many important 2018 issues and conversations. But this time around, in the era of #MeTooand Kavanaugh, I was struck in particular by how fully Kingston forces us to examine violence against women, across cultures and time periods and oceans. Her essay opens, “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’” But Kingston breaks that cycle of silence, sharing the story of her murdered aunt and of the hidden histories of misogynistic vitriol and violence that lie behind her aunt’s tragic life and death. Such stories desperately need telling and sharing, and Kingston’s essay took on even more significance for me in our current moment.I had a parallel experience during the short story unit, this time courtesy of a wonderful student paper (source of many of my inspirations over these couple decades of teaching). The first story we read in that unit is Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966), a tale of a teenage girl, a predatory man, and 1960s popular culture (the story is dedicated to Bob Dylan, for example). There are lots of ways to read Oates’s male antagonist, Arnold Friend, but this student paper deployed the contemporary phrase “toxic masculinity” to great effect in analyzing Friend and his attitudes toward the story’s protagonist, Connie. The paper did two important things at the same time: offered a new and compelling way to read this story, one that added to my couple dozen prior readings of it; and reminded us that such cultural and social concepts are not new (even if the phrases to describe them have evolved), and that we have illustrations for them in literary and historical works across American history. And of course, it also reminded me that no matter how many times I’ve read a text or taught a class, each section and semester brings new students whose perspectives and work can and will continue to shape my own. Few lessons are more inspiring than that!Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Semester reflections you’d share?

December 10, 2018: Fall Semester Recaps: American Lit II

[The final papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments from my Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]On one expected and two unexpected inspirations from my American lit survey class.Two of the six books at the heart of my American Lit II survey class are among my very favorite American novels (Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony ), and a third is very high on the list as well (Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake ), so I knew there would be plenty of inspiration in the course of our semester. And I wasn’t the slightest bit disappointed—I find each of those books more moving and more important each time I read them, and certainly doing so amidst the Trump era and the 2018 midterms and other contemporary contexts only amplified those effects and meanings. To be honest, I think much of the last few years (if not much of American history and identity overall) can be summed up entirely with two quotes from the first two of those novels: Chesnutt’s “our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of primal passions”; and Silko’s “The only thing is: it has never been easy.”Perhaps inspired by the particularly resonant lessons of those works and authors, I was also unexpectedly inspired to rethink my syllabus for the next time I teach this class. In particular, I need more multi-cultural and immigrant texts on the syllabus earlier than the late 20th/early 21st century unit; while my scholarly work has focused a great deal on such texts and histories from the 19th and early 20th centuries, my American Lit II syllabus hasn’t quite caught up. It won’t be easy to take any of my current authors and texts out, but that’s how it goes when you’re making a syllabus, and I need to make room for (for example) Abraham Cahan’s “A Sweatshop Romance” (1898) and Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” (1909). Right now the histories of both labor and immigration are largely absent from my late 19th century unit in this class, and while a literature survey is not the same as a history one, you can’t really engage with literature from that period either without those threads as part of the pattern. So I look forward to finding room for them on my next iteration of American Lit II!I don’t want to suggest that it is only particular works that can offer inspiration, however—and I was also struck this time around by the unexpected inspiration I found in one of the class’s most familiar texts, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby(1925). As I argued in that post, Fitzgerald’s book can and should be complemented by other 1920s works, and sometimes is over-emphasized as either a 1920s text or a representation of the American Dream. But besides its own aesthetic and storytelling pleasures, the novel still has a great deal to tell us about both its world and our own, and this time I was struck in particular by the character of Tom Buchanan. Tom feels very, very familiar: the spoiled son of a wealthy family who abuses and mistreats women, tries to bully and intimidate all those around him, buys into white supremacist conspiracy theories and xenophobia, and is quick to call out the criminal and unethical behavior in others that he’s so desperate to mask in his own life. He’s unquestionably the novel’s chief villain, and while he emerges victorious (as villains too often do), reading about such a character and perspective just might help us encounter and respond to the Trumps—I mean, Toms—in our own world.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Semester reflections you’d share?

December 7-9, 2018: Pearl Harbor Histories: Remembering Infamous Days

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ve remembered and AmericanStudied some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to this special post on how we remember such infamous days.]On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.”  We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). This 2016 Obama White House statement on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

December 6, 2018: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Varsity Victory Volunteers

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]On a post-Pearl Harbor group who embody the best of the war, Hawai’i, and America.I learned a great deal while researching and writing my next book, We the People: The Battle to Define Who is an American, from Columbus to Trump (forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield’s American Ways series in 2019!). I had a general sense of the exclusionary and inclusive histories I wanted to highlight in each chapter, having talked about most of them in a number of settings over the last couple years; but in the course of working on each chapter I discovered new histories related to those central threads, stories that surprised me yet also and especially exemplified my topics and themes. So it went with Chapter 7: Japanese Internment and Challenges: I knew that I wanted to focus in that chapter on Japanese American World War II soldiers as a central, inclusive challenge to the exclusionary histories and narratives of the internment policy and camps; but it was only when researching those respective World War II communities further that I learned about the amazing, inspiring, foundational story of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV).There were quite simply too many Japanese Americans in Hawai’i (and they were too integral to the community’s economy and society) for internment camps to be possible. But the island featured its own forms of World War II anti-Japanese discrimination to be sure, and it was out of one such discriminatory moment that the VVV was born. The day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, all of the island’s ROTC students were called up for active duty as the newly constituted Hawaii Territorial Guard (HTG). But when federal officials learned that Japanese American students were among those numbers, they dismissed those students from service, deeming them 4C (“enemy aliens”) and thus ineligible to serve. Frustrated by this treatment, many of the students met with Hung Wai Ching, a Chinese Hawaiian community leader who had become an ally to the group. On his advice they drafted a letter to the territory’s military governor, Delos Emmons, which read in part: “We joined the Guard voluntarily with the hope that this was one way to serve our country in her time of need. Needless to say, we were deeply disappointed when we were told that our services in the Guard were no longer needed. Hawaii is our home; the United States, our country. We know but one loyalty and that is to the Stars and Stripes. We wish to do our part as loyal Americans in every way possible and we hereby offer ourselves for whatever service you may see fit to use us.”Emmons accepted the VVV’s offer, and in February 1942 they were constituted as a labor battalion (attached to the 34th Combat Engineers) and assigned to Schofield Barracks. Over the next year they would contribute both their labor and their presence to the community there, becoming such an integral part of its operations and society that when Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy visited in December 1942 (escorted by none other than Hung Wai Ching), he was struck by the VVV in particular. Not at all coincidentally, in January 1943 the War Department reversed its policy and allowed Japanese Americans to serve in the armed forces; the VVV requested permission to disband so they could volunteer, and nearly all of the VVV members ended up in the 442ndRegimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit that would become the most decorated in American military history. I knew about the 442ndbefore I wrote the chapter and book, but I had never heard of the VVV—and I know of few stories that exemplify the best of American military, social, and cultural history more fully than does this post-Pearl Harbor, volunteer Japanese American student community.Special post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 5, 2018: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Tokyo Trials

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]On the complex question of whether a military attack is also a war crime.Although they are not as well-known as the concurrent Nuremberg Trials (perhaps because there wasn’t an excellent dramatic filmmade about them), the Tokyo War Crimes Trials comprised one of the most significant aftermaths of and responses to World War II in their own right. Convened in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), an organization established by General Douglas MacArthur in a January 1946 proclamation, the trials took place in the city between May 1946 and November 1948. Per MacArthur’s charter the IMTFE was tasked with bringing to trial Japanese officials and officers charged with war crimes and other “offenses which include crimes against peace”; under that aegis nine senior political leaders and eighteen military leaders were prosecuted, and all of them (other than two who passed away from natural causes during the course of the trials) were found guilty and sentenced to death or imprisonment.Many of the Tokyo trials’ focal war crimes fit that broad category straightforwardly enough: the rape of Nankingand similar mass atrocities; the beheading of prisoners of war and similar violations of international law; and so on. But a number of the accused were also charged with Class A war crimes (the category that focuses on “crimes against peace”) stemming from the Pearl Harbor attack: this group included Shigetaro Shimada, the Minister of the Navy who authorized the attack (and was convicted of a Class A war crime for it); and the attack’s mastermind, Chief of Naval General Staff Osarni Nagano(who died in prison during the trial). This paperby University of Virginia law student Jeffrey D. Fox makes the case for why the Pearl Harbor attack should indeed have been defined as a war crime by the IMTFE, and it’s a compelling case, starting with the lack of a war declaration or a self-defense justification for the attack, and including broader legal ideas in the era related to “waging aggressive war.” I’m no expert in wartime or international law, and so I’m willing to accept such arguments and this legal definition of Pearl Harbor as a Class A war crime.And yet (a favorite third-paragraph opener of mine, as longtime readers know well). I know that the August 9, 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place in the midst of a declared war, but in every other way (as I wrote in this 2015 piece for Talking Points Memo) that bombing seems to me more criminal than the Pearl Harbor attack. It targeted almost exclusively civilians, for one thing (soldiers comprised an estimated 3% of the city’s 1945 population). And it was extremely aggressive and likely unnecessary, for another thing (the Truman administration gave Japan only two days after the August 6th Hiroshima bombing to figure out what had happened and surrender, and the U.S. military was already rehearsing the Nagasaki bombing on the second day, meaning that there really was no time for Japan to take action before this second bombing). I’m not suggesting that Nagasaki fits the legal definition of a war crime, necessarily; just that such categories and their applications, as is always and inevitably the case with any law, are influenced in no small part by who is framing them and in what contexts. I’m also not excusing Pearl Harbor in any way—simply noting that the contrast between it and Nagasaki is not as clear-cut as the Tokyo trials would suggest.Last history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 4, 2018: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Conspiracy Theory

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]On the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory that doesn’t hold up but is illuminating nonetheless.I wrote an entire weeklong series on American conspiracy theories a few years back, but managed to avoid writing about one of the most prominent historical conspiracy theories: the theory that high-ranking U.S. government officials, up to and in some of the theories including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and let it happen (or even, in some of the most extreme theories, encouraged it) in order to push the United States into the European theatre of World War II through a so-called “back door.” Such theories go back at least as far as 1944, when John Flynn, a journalist and co-founder of the isolationist America First Committee, published a pamphlet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor (that’s the full text of the 1945 British edition, which seems unchanged other than a new “Publisher’s Preface”). A World War II naval officer, Rear Admiral Robert Theobald, wrote his own 1954 book, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Background of the Pearl Harbor Attack , developing the argument more fully. And in recent years, the most prominent of these conspiracy theorists has been World War II veteran and journalist Robert Stinnett, whose 1999 book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor lays out the theory at particularly elaborate length.I could pretend that I’ve done all the research myself to disprove those sources and theories, but in truth I’ve mainly relied on this excellent Wikipedia page, which takes the different theories one-by-one and takes them apart quite effectively. Highlighting any one tends to reveal just how easily and thoroughly they can be debunked, as illustrated by the argument that the absence of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers from Pearl Harbor indicates advance knowledge of the attack (and a desire to protect the carriers from it). For one thing, one of those carriers, the Enterprise, was on its way back to Pearl Harbor that morning (having delivered fighters to Wake and Midway Islands), and had been scheduled by arrive at 7am (about an hour before the attacks commenced) but was delayed by weather. And for another, even more important thing, at that time carriers were considered far less central to naval strategy and warfare than battleships; if the U.S. had wanted to protect key elements of its fleet, it would certainly have not had all 8 of its Pacific Fleet battleships in the harbor at the time. Certainly after the attack carriers became central to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific, but that represents both a strategic shift and a direct response to the attack’s destruction of the U.S. battleships and navy.So there really doesn’t seem to be much to the various layers to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories—but they have endured for more than 75 years, and I think there are a couple significant reasons why (besides our general societal and perhaps human fascination with conspiracy theories, about which I wrote many times in that aforementioned series). For one thing, few if any other military moments in American history have been as surprising and embarrassing for the U.S. forces, and thus in need of alternate explanations for the disaster; this was even more true in the 1940s, when the U.S. had not yet suffered what is considered its first defeat in an international military conflict, the Vietnam War (and that conflict has its own share of “The powers that be wouldn’t let us win” theories). And for another thing, Franklin D. Roosevelt has in my experience received about as much extreme and vehement hate as any American president not named Lincoln. Since Roosevelt was president during a war that should have united Americans, rather than one that directly divided us, that vitriolic opposition is a bit harder to understand; but I’ve encountered it time and again, and I believe it helps again why so many Americans can apparently continue to believe that FDR allowed a catastrophic attack on the United States to take place on his watch.Next history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?