Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 217

October 22, 2018: Video Game Studying: Grand Theft Auto

[On October 21st, 1997, DMA Design and Tarantula Studios released Grand Theft Auto , the controversial first game in what would become one of the most popular (and even more controversial) video game series of all time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy GTA and four other seminal video games. Share your thoughts on these and any and all other games for a crowd-sourced weekend post that requires no quarters or tokens to play!]Forgive me for focusing this post less on GTA itself and more on broader gaming topics. But that seemed like a good way to begin this week’s series, and plus I’ve never played any of the GTA games (and welcome comments from those who have). So to wit, here are three aspects of video games that a focus on GTA can help us discuss:1)      Their Effects: The elephant in the room when it comes to GTA, and really all violent video games for that matter, is the question of their potential effects on (especially) impressionable young players. From what I can tell, the first GTA featured mostly just cartoonish car violence; it was with the series’ fifth game in particular that the stakes were significantly raised, with players for example having the ability to rob and kill prostitutes after sleeping with them (and, it seems, being rewarded by the game for choosing to do so). I don’t believe that any form of art (which games on, on which more in a moment) can or should be directly correlated with any particular effects on their audiences; it’s nowhere near that simple. But at the same time, it’s worth noting that unlike most other art forms, video games ask their audiences to make many of the choices themselves, and it would be disengenous to suggest that choosing to kill a woman is the same as watching a character do so in a film (for example). So while I don’t believe a game like GTA makes its players more violent, it does at times ask them to act violently in troubling ways that are worth recognizing and critiquing.2)      They’re Art: Perhaps it’s now widely accepted that video games are an art form; certainly disciplines like Fitchburg State’s new and groundbreaking Game Design Major have that idea as a key starting point. But I’m not sure that the communal conversations about games tend to incorporate that definition, as it seems to me that they are still often seen more as a combination of toys (and thus more appropriate for children than any other age bracket) and distractions(and thus taken less seriously than other cultural forms and media). Obviously any definition of art is open to interpretation and argument, so I can’t claim with absolute authority that video games are an art form (although I believe very strongly that they are). But I will say that narratives which treat games more dismissively lead directly to less thoughtful and helpful engagements with questions like the ones I raised in point one, to perceptions of games as (for example) simply delivery systems for violence rather than an art form featuring artistic subgenres that include violence as a key element (just as actionand horror films do, to name two other such art forms). 3)      They’re Flexible: If we do see video games as an art form (as I do), what differentiates them from most other such forms (other than Choose Your Own Adventure books, I suppose!) is that they are interactive, depending on the choices of their audience members (who of course are far more than just audience members) for how their stories and thus their art are ultimately created. I know that’s a well-known point, but I have a specific and surprising GTA anecdote related to it. When my sons were relatively young, a babysitter took them to his house and let them play one of the GTA games on his gaming system. I was initially horrified when they told me this, but then they described their game play at length, which involved all sorts of driving craziness and silliness (driving into swimming pools, trying to drive off bridges onto moving trains, etc.) and relatedly only self-directed violence (seeing what would happen if they climbed to the top of a tall crane and jumped off, for example). Not exactly the highest form of art, perhaps, but far different from a game focused on killing others. In this case, at least, the game’s flexibility had allowed my sons to make it their own in a silly but also, I would argue, very significant way. Next game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

October 20-21, 2018: Akeia Benard's Guest Post on the New Bedford Whaling Museum

[On October 18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick was published in London (under its initial title, The Whale). So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to this special weekend Guest Post from a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]
 I’ll admit, I never read Moby Dick until I started working at the museum a little over a year ago.  Before coming to the museum as the Curator of Social History, I was an anthropology professor who knew nothing about whales and whaling.  As with learning a language, total immersion works.  I examine every bit of whaling and seafaring history and fiction I can get my hands on. I’ve learned the basics of whale biology and, of course, I became (and am becoming) increasingly enamored with the social history of whalers and a culture built on the whaling industry.  At the time the Old Dartmouth Historical Society (now the New Bedford Whaling Museum) was established in 1903 the industry of whaling and the narrative of whaling history were on the decline.  Petroleum had been discovered as an alternative to whale oil, whale populations were being depleted, and fewer and fewer working class white men wanted to engage in the dirty and dangerous work of whaling.  New Bedford, the whaling capital of the world and its wealthy whaling families steadily switched to cotton production as their major source of income.  During and briefly after this decline, stories of whaling became somewhat folkloric and fantastic, and devoid of the danger and brutality of the hunt.  The history and global importance of whaling and Old Dartmouth risked being forgotten altogether.  This very much troubled some of the descendants of old whaling stock in New Bedford and they established the Old Dartmouth Historical Society  “to create and foster an interest in the history of Old Dartmouth” (now the City of New Bedford, Acushnet, Dartmouth, Fairhaven and Westport, MA).  That history was whaling.   Currently, the New Bedford Whaling Museum houses all things related to the history of whaling.  When you enter the main level, large whale skeletons greet you as they hang from the ceiling (one of them still dripping whale oil after decades!).  The exhibits include a discussion of subsistence and indigenous whaling among groups like the Inupiat who still engage in the hunt (last November, I gave students from Barrow, Alaska, an Inupiat village a tour of the museum and they recognized family members in some of our historic photographs from the late 19th century!). We have a half-size model of the whaling vessel Lagoda, the largest ship model in existence, and in that same room, you can travel up to the balcony which takes you on a whaling voyage around the world—from New Bedford to the Azores and Cabo Verde—two locations with their own whaling traditions and from which whaling captains took on crew.  Many from the Azores and Cabo Verde stayed in New Bedford and established communities, making the Lusophone community the largest immigrant community in the area.  You then travel around Cape Horne and into the Pacific.  As noted in Moby Dick, by the mid-19th century, the Pacific became a necessary whale-hunting region.  Whaling voyages now averaged 46 months!  A recent exhibit of Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington’s The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World captured such a voyage on a 1,275 foot painting (taller than the Empire State Building!).  One of the ports of call on the painting is Nuku Hiva, the setting for Melville’s Typee.  Although the exhibit is no longer up, The Grand Panorama is currently visible digitally alongside the Lagoda.  In the same room, you can see all of the tools of the trade—from lances and harpoons to try pots and strainers.   You can also see the products of the trade throughout the museum, such as whale oil (not a pleasant smell—be forewarned!), beautiful pieces of scrimshaw carved during all of those long, boring days at sea waiting to encounter a whale, and strips of baleen (“fun” fact…baleen was sometimes used to beat people—now the phrase “whaling on someone” should make more sense…).  And, of course, we have the art of Yankee whaling.  There are many more exhibits—some collaterally related to whaling but important to Old Dartmouth History nonetheless—Thou Shalt Knot (an exhibit on Clifford Ashely and knots), Energy and Enterprise which captures the development of industry after whaling, and Captain Paul Cuffe—much more than a whaler, but whaling is part of the Paul Cuffe story.  We also have The East Unlocks its Gates—the story of Yankee trade in Asia during and after whaling and our Manjiro exhibit, which focuses on Manjiro Nakahama who was stranded and rescued by a whaling captain from Old Dartmouth and who was instrumental in the story of the opening of Japan.   Since this blog celebrates Herman Melville, it’s worth noting our biggest event of the year—The Moby Dick Marathon.  The first weekend of January is dedicated to the novel and includes a 25-hour reading of Moby Dick in its entirety in which participants sign up to read sections of the book.  It includes an event where visitors can try to “Stump the [Melville] Scholars,” a dinner, Moby Dick related artwork, and chats and book signings.  It also includes a children’s mini-marathon and a 4-hour Portuguese mini-marathon, during which an abridged version of the novel is read in Portuguese.  Please join us for the marathon—it’s an amazing event from start to finish! Currently, the museum is undergoing a transformation of sorts.  In addition to the narrative of whaling we’ve also begun to increasingly focus on whales themselves—their biology, conservation, and vulnerabilities.  Early next year, we will be expanding an exhibit entitled “Whales Today” that focuses on the vulnerabilities of whales during the heyday of whaling that made them susceptible to hunters and how those same vulnerabilities threaten whale populations today.  Commercial whaling, subsistence whaling, activism, and conservation are very much a part of the narrative of whaling and whales today. On a personal note, in my time at the museum I’ve come to understand the global importance of New Bedford and the whaling industry and its relationship to my own family.  I knew my great-grandfather had come to the United States through New Bedford from Cabo Verde in the 1920s—but he somehow ended up in Newport, RI.  New Bedford was always a peripheral (if even remembered) part of my family’s history.  Growing up I had always heard he came over “on a banana boat,” which was a generic term my grandmother’s and mother’s generations used to talk about the journey from Cabo Verde to the U.S, but also a term other kids used to tease us because we were the children of immigrants.  Because Yankee whaling had all but disappeared by that date, I assumed he came over on a packet ship—a repurposed whaling vessel that functioned to carry goods and people back and forth from New Bedford to Cabo Verde.  After being at the museum for four months, I traveled to Cabo Verde for the first time (I was actually the first person in my family to return since my great-grandfather arrived in the U.S.) to assist the government in establishing a whaling museum on the island of São Nicolau.  When I returned, my great aunt (grandmother’s sister) was asking about my trip and also asked if I could try to find the name of the ship her father came in on because she never knew.  She told me all he ever said about it was that “the only reason we [Cape Verdeans] were allowed to stay in America is our ship was destroyed so we couldn’t go home.  Everyone scattered and found work here.” After a little bit of searching, I found his name on the register for the bark Wanderer, which ran aground off Cuttyhunk in 1924.  This event is often cited as the “official end of Yankee whaling.” Because it was such a famous event—I also found his picture—a picture I had seen a hundred times at that point, but never knew it was my own ancestor until my aunt looked at it and said, smiling, “That one, on the right, that’s my father.”  Since that discovery, I’ve come to think of my work at the New Bedford Whaling Museum as the descendant of a whaling family coming full circle.  Akeia A.F. Benard, PhD Curator of Social HistoryNew Bedford Whaling Museum18 Johnny Cake Hill RoadNew Bedford, MA 02740abenard@whalingmuseum.org508-717-6853
[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other whaling contexts or connections (or great museums) you’d highlight?]

October 19, 2018: Whaling Histories: Contemporary Whaling and Greenpeace

[On October 18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick was published in London (under its initial title, The Whale). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to a special weekend post on a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]On an ongoing issue, an activist response, and why I’m writing about them here.This first paragraph is one of those moments on the blog where I could pretend like I knew much of anything about the day’s topics prior to researching this post, but I’d be lying. I vaguely remembered something about a recent debate over whether commercial whaling should be allowed after a long moratorium (turns out the moratorium began in 1986 and the debate took place at the 2010 meeting of the International Whaling Commission), and had a general sense that Japanese whalers had been practicing commercial whaling even when they weren’t supposed to. But holy moly is the issue still much more widespread and prevalent than that in the 21st century, from the fact that whaling of various types and for various prey has apparently never stopped to the fact that numerous countries (such as Iceland and Norway in addition to Japan) have advocated for a return to commercial whaling, among other surprising (to me at least) and salient details. Again, I could pretend I know all this because I drink and I know things, but in truth I learned much of what I now know from this excellent Wikipedia page on contemporary whaling.What I did have a better sense of, but which has been confirmed and amplified by my research, is the dangerous and inspiring work that Greenpeace (among other organizations, but with Greenpeace at the forefront) has done to challenge contemporary whalers. Greenpeace came into existence with an act of nonviolent protest at sea (using a chartered fishing boat to protest US nuclear testing on Alaska’s Amchitka Island), and it was not long thereafter that the organization began using the same form of activism to oppose commercial whaling. Those courageous efforts certainly played a role in the move toward the 1986 ban, but I would argue that it was the organization’s overall Save the Whales campaign which truly raised public and popular awareness of the issue (it was even the center of a Star Trek movie!) to the point where support for such a ban became a driving force. Moreover, just as not all commercial whaling has stopped since the ban, and just as those various countries are arguing for a return to legal commercial whaling today, so too has Greenpeace continued to fight the good fight into the 21st century. Indeed, the anti-whaling campaign is one of the most sustained and successful environmental activist movements of the last half-century, and a model for all those who seek to use every means and method to protect our planet from ourselves.Those inspirations for activism against injustice in all forms represent one big reason why I wanted to dedicate my last post in a series on American whaling histories to these more international and contemporary sides to the issue. But another reason is one for which we have reminders all around us all the time these days: that the past is never past, that echoes and extensions of our histories (including, if not most especially, our darkest and most destructive histories) are central and influential and inescapable parts of our world. Which is to say, of course 21st century whaling isn’t the same as the industry’s 17th or 19th century histories, no more than any part of the present is ever identical to the past. But nonetheless these prior and ongoing histories are on a spectrum, are interwoven threads within the same patterns—and those very complex patterns can be best understood if we examine and work to understand all of the threads, historical just as much as (if not more so, as they are less immediate and thus take more effort to understand) contemporary. As the story of whaling continues to unfold around us, it’s vital that we remember and engage with the very American histories of that industry and world as well.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other whaling contexts or connections you’d highlight?

October 18, 2018: Whaling Histories: Moby-Dick

[On October 18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick was published in London (under its initial title, The Whale). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to a special weekend post on a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]On why we can’t skip those frustrating whale info sections in Melville’s ginormous novel.It’s a good thing I’m writing this post, as I believe having a daily AmericanStudies blog for nearly eight (8!) years and not writing about Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is grounds for immediate revocation of one’s AmericanStudier status. I’ve written about Melville quite a bit in this space, including a post on the entirely (and not entirely wrongly) forgotten short story “I and My Chimney” (1855) for crying out loud, but had never found my way to writing about Melville’s masterpiece (I came the closest in this post on the novel’s inspirations during a fortuitous Western Massachusetts thunderstorm). And if I’m being totally honest, I have to admit that it’s not just that Moby has never quite lined up with any of my weekly series (that’s true, but I only started doing weekly series about a year and a half into those eight years); it’s also that I kinda get where this memethat made the rounds earlier this year is coming from. Melville really doesn’t seem to have been able to resist including any whale facts—all whale facts—all the whale facts there are—more whale facts than any human should ever know—in his doorstopper of a novel.So yeah, Moby-Dick is chock-full of whale facts, and I totally get the temptation to skim or even skip those sections of the novel (as an esteemed colleague of mine and one of the most talented writers I know has admitted to doing) in order to get to and through the rest. But we shouldn’t do so, for both literary and historical reasons. On a literary level, it’s precisely the combinations of styles and forms, of genres, of text and context, of center and periphery, that makes Melville’s novel such an experimental and ground-breaking work, in the legacy of a book like Washington Irving’s A History of New York (1809) and as a step along way toward late 19th century classics like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884) and modern classics like John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. (1938) and postwar ones like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and postmodern ones like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and post-postmodern ones like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves(2000). Which is to say, you can create a compelling account of the development of the American novel—and American literature as a whole—that locates such multi-genre experimental works at its center, but you can’t do so if you don’t engage with every part of them, even (perhaps especially) the frustrating ones that defy not only our definitions of fiction but our understanding of why they’re in the text at all.But even if you’re not an AmericanLiteratureStudier, there are likewise important historical reasons not to skip Melville’s whale-tastic sections. For one thing, if my first few posts of this series have in any way convinced you that whaling was a central part of the development of New England (and thus in broader ways America) across the first few post-contact centuries, then I’d say there’s a great deal of value in reading one of the works (in any genre) that most fully capture that industry and world. And for another, Melville’s book actually offers a striking engagement with the thorny questions I posed in yesterday’s post—that is, while of course his titular white whale is a bit of an anomaly or singularity, he’s also a potent (and quite forceful and successful) rejoinder to any assumption that humans have an assumed right to hunt and kill whales. But we can’t possibly understand Moby’s relationship to the broader community of whales and culture of whaling if we don’t read the sections of Melville’s novel that describe those worlds at, yes, such great length. Which is to say, funny memes and understandable frustrations notwithstanding, maybe Melville knew exactly what he was doing when he included all those whale facts in his ginormous, messy, vital whaling and American masterpiece.Last whaling post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other whaling contexts or connections you’d highlight?

October 17, 2018: Whaling Histories: Writing about Whaling in 2018

[On October 18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick was published in London (under its initial title, The Whale). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to a special weekend post on a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]On the perils and necessities of highlighting disgraced histories.The week’s series is far from over, of course, but since for the final two posts I’m going to focus on first a literary (Melville’s novel) and then a contemporary (Japanese whalers and Greenpeace activism) subject respectively, I wanted today to take up a historical question that I raised briefly in Monday’s post but really colors this entire series and topic. I wrote there, about Lewis Temple’s new harpoon, that “‘Temple’s toggle’ is a fraught invention, one that principally made it easier to kill and consume large numbers of innocent creatures (a point worth considering throughout the week’s posts, to be sure). But you can’t tell the story of America without the story of whaling, and you can’t tell that story without Temple’s invention forming a key chapter.” I certainly still believe that the first clause in that last sentence is accurate and important; but at the same time you could advance a reasonable critique that in my first two posts for the week I have largely set aside the violence and horrors of whaling, in a way that I would not if (for example) I were writing posts about the histories of lynching, Native American genocide, or other such human-centered horrors. (I should add that, for what it’s worth, I will focus my final post of the week very fully on the violence and horrors of whaling.)Again, that would be a reasonable critique, and I don’t really have a great response. There’s no doubt that animal rights and animal studies have not been main threads of my work here on this blog (or anywhere else in my career, although I have gone vegetarian over the last year for reasons both health-related and ethical), and thus that when I’ve written about histories or stories that involve violence or cruelty toward animals (such as the Southwestern and local color humor tales I highlighted in this post), I haven’t foregrounded or perhaps even addressed at all those issues in the same way I would with violence and cruelty toward humans. I hope it’s clear that I don’t in any way support or endorse such animal cruelty, not only in extreme and now generally disgraced situations such as whaling (on which more in a moment) but even in more socially acceptable ones such as hunting or the meat industry. But nonetheless, I know I haven’t highlighted those issues much in this space, and I promise that if and when they are relevant to topics, I’ll work to include and engage with them more fully (as I hope this post is doing for this week’s topic).But at the same time, I think there’s at least one more significant point to be made when it comes to writing about a topic like whaling in 2018. There is now widespread consensus that whaling is a disgraced and deplorable practice that should be outlawed (although it is still part of our world, as I’ll discuss in Friday’s post). But for the vast majority of the decades and centuries when whaling was at the heart of American industry and (at least in New England) society, that perspective—and really any sustained consideration of the whales’ rights and status—was almost entirely absent from the conversation. To my mind (and please as always correct me if you have a different take!), that is, whaling did not generally engender in its own eras the kinds of debates and critiques that human horrors such as slavery and Native American genocide did, which would mean that to write back into those prior eras our own modern (and quite correct) critiques would in that way impose upon history a quite distinct 20th and 21stcentury perspective. Perhaps we can and should do just that—but I would argue that we must also seek to understand the perspectives and narratives present in historical moments and communities, not out of any necessary agreement but instead out of the vital project of recovering and learning from them.Next whaling post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other whaling contexts or connections you’d highlight?

October 16, 2018: Whaling Histories: Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard

[On October 18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick was published in London (under its initial title, The Whale). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to a special weekend post on a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]On how the divergent whaling histories of two neighboring islands led to distinct subsequent and ongoing identities.The Massachusetts islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are less than 25 miles apart as the crow flies (although the typical ferry route is apparently more like 70 miles), but when it comes to the history of the whaling industry, the two are much farther apart. As I highlighted in yesterday’s post, for more than a century Nantucket was the center of the New England and American whaling industry, a focus which might well have been precipated by a single event: per island historian Obed Macy and his 1835 book The History of Nantucket,sometime in the mid-17th century a “scragg whale” (likely a gray whale in modern parlance) entered Nantucket harbor and was killed by the early English settlers; Macy and others trace the island’s dominance of the whaling industry from that singular (and quite random) starting point. While Martha’s Vineyard certainly hosted whaling ships of its own, the industry came to prominence significantly later on the island than it did on Nantucket, and was thus always competing with other sizeable fishing trades like that in swordfish. (For a very thorough history of Martha’s Vineyard, see my paternal grandfather Arthur Railton’s magisterial and highly readable 2006 book The History of Martha’s Vineyard .)Whatever the particular factors that led to Nantucket’s dominance in the whaling industry (not just over its island neighbor but over the rest of the world, at least until the rise of New Bedford that I charted yesterday), by 1851 Melville could write in Moby-Dick’s Nantucket-set Chapter 14, “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.” That divergence had already by that time produced one striking American historical distinction between the two islands: Nantucket voted to remain neutral at the start of the American Revolution, thanks in large part to its need for shipping access and protection for its whalers; while Martha’s Vineyard joined the rest of Massachusetts in rebelling against the English. But it was in the late 19th century, as the whaling industry began its gradual but irreversible decline (again as I traced in yesterday’s post), that the divergence between the two islands truly began to resonate. Nantucket had by that time also experienced a couple of significant natural events that hastened whaling’s decline there: the July 1846 “Great Fire” that forced many inhabitants to leave the island; and the increasing silting of Nantucket harbor, which made it more and more difficult for large whaling ships to enter (compared to the deep harbor of New Bedford in particular).When, for both those local and much broader reasons, whaling declined in Nantucket, the island’s dependence on the trade meant it did not have much else to offer residents; most of them left (the island’s population was about 4000 by 1887), and the island remained largely unpopulated and isolated until the mid-20th century. In part because of its more diverse commercial identity, Martha’s Vineyard was able during the same period to shift much more quickly and dramatically, becoming throughout the late 19th century host to a number of resort communities and summer residences. While Nantucket has over the last half-century developed its own such summer and wealthy populations, I would argue that the Vineyard remains far more of a summer resort community; one reason why two of the last four presidents have made it a vacation site of choice, after all. And if so, then the two islands’ divergent, and at least somewhat random, histories with the whaling industry continue to echo significantly down into our 21stcentury moment.Next whaling post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other whaling contexts or connections you’d highlight?

October 15, 2018: Whaling Histories: New Bedford

[On October 18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick was published in London (under its initial title, The Whale). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to a special weekend post on a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]On three telling stages in the history of “The Whaling City.”New Bedford, Massachusetts might be known as “The Whaling City,” but the association of that vital American industry with the southeast MA city was from an inevitability. Much of the first century or so of American whaling was closely tied to the island of Nantucket (one of the subjects of tomorrow’s post), but a single 1765 event began to shift that center of gravity. It was that year that Joseph Rotch, an English immigrant who had become one of the most established and successful names in the Nantucket whaling trade, purchased 10 acres of land in New Bedford and began to move his business there (although his son and grandson continued to run operations out of Nantucket as well). For many years businesses in Boston, Newport, and Providence had monopolized the refining and use of whale oil (as Nantucket did not have the resources to do so), but Rotch’s move allowed him to build such refineries in New Bedford, linking the various sides of the whaling trade in a striking and significant new way. Long before Henry Ford and his ilk, Rotch’s vertical integration of an industry fundamentally changed American history.The late 18thcentury “Great Age of Sail” was very good to New Bedford, but it was in the mid-19th century that the next striking innovation pushed the city into an even more prominent place in both the whaling industry and the American landscape. In 1848, ex-slave turned New Bedford blacksmith and abolitionist Lewis Temple (now there’s a premise for a film if I ever heard one, although many details of Temple’s life, including whether he escaped or was freed from slavery, remain unknown) invented “Temple’s toggle,” a new form of harpoon based in part on Eskimo designs but adapted to use a wooden shear pin to brace the spear’s toggling head. Temple’s harpoon would become the gold standard for the industry within a few years, and cemented New Bedford’s place at the center of the whaling trade. Not unlike Eli Whitney’s cotton gin—but with an extra layer of irony given Temple’s own race and personal history—“Temple’s toggle” is a fraught invention, one that principally made it easier to kill and consume large numbers of innocent creatures (a point worth considering throughout the week’s post, to be sure). But you can’t tell the story of America without the story of whaling, and you can’t tell that story without Temple’s invention forming a key chapter.In many ways that chapter was the industury’s and New Bedford’s high-water mark, however. As early as 1849 many seamen (and ships) left the area to move west as part of the California gold rush, but it was 1859 that really signaled the beginning of the end for the whaling industry. It was in that year that petroleum, which had only recently begun to be refined anywhere in the world, was discovered by Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania; soon this alternative form of oil would begin to eclipse whale oil around the nation (and world). A subsequent tragedy, the Whaling Disaster of 1871 in which 22 New Bedford whaling ships (among 33 total ships) were abandoned and crushed by arctic ice off the northern coast of Alaska, contributed to the industry’s gradual demise. Yet gradual is indeed the word: America’s largest whaling company, New Bedford’s own J. & W.R. Wing Company, did not send out its last ship until 1914; and the last successful whaling expedition out of the city took place in 1925 when the John R. Manta sailed from New Bedford harbor. Perhaps the end of the industry (and all the shifts that precipitated in New Bedford) was more inevitable than its origins; but like all historical changes, that shift took place slowly and haphazardly, one more complex history captured in New Bedford.Next whaling post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other whaling contexts or connections you’d highlight?

October 13-14, 2018: American Gay Studies: Pop Culture Representations

[October 11thmarks the 30th annual National Coming Out Day, an important occasion in the unfolding story of gay rights in America. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of figures and stories from the history of gay rights, leading up to this special weekend post on gay identities in American popular culture!]On three iconic late 1990s pop culture texts that in different ways continue to echo into our 21stcentury moment.1)      Ellen: In April 1997, Ellen was just another successful Seinfeld-inspired sitcom in its fourth season, featuring a talented young stand-up comedian (Ellen DeGeneres) surrounded by a group of kooky but lovable friends (the show was called These Friends of Mine for the first season). But in that month, both the show’s main character and Ellen herself came out as gay (to Oprah Winfrey in both cases), and the landscape of television was changed forever (DeGeneres was the first openly lesbian actress playing an openly lesbian character on TV). Despite backlash, the show remained on the air for another season, although ABC’s parent company Disney did significantly dial back its promotion which likely contributed to the show’s 1998 cancellation. But Ellen was not absent from TV for long (she starred in another short-lived sitcom in 2001 and in 2003 launched her hugely popular and ongoing talk show), and indeed for two decades has been one of the most consistently prominent and beloved gay cultural icons. I don’t know that any single figure has moved gay identities into the American pop cultural and social mainstream more than DeGeneres, and that started with her show’s 1997 coming out episode.2)      Will and Grace: Just over a year after that pivotal Ellen episode aired, NBC debuted the first major network sitcom to include gay protagonists from the outset, Will and Grace. In the course of its eight-season run, Will and Gracewould become one of the early 21st century’s most popular and acclaimed shows: from 2001 to 2005 it was the highest-rated sitcom among adults 18-49; and it received 16 Primetime Emmys among 83 nominations, to cite two ways to measure such success. But I would argue that the show’s most striking feature was its relative lack of controversy—again, less than 18 months earlier Ellen’s coming out episode had garnered a great deal of backlash and criticism from conservative circles; whereas with Will and Grace such criticism, while present, was negligible and didn’t seem to affect the show’s promotion or popularity in the slightest. And that trend only continued when the show returned for a 2017-18 9thseason (with early renewal for 10th and 11th ones), as the return has been popular but seemingly without much affect on the cultural zeitgeist. If so, that’s a reflection of how much the show helped changed the conversation around pop culture representations of gay Americans.3)      Boys Don’t Cry: 1998 also saw the release on an award-winning documentary, The Brandon Teena Story , which detailed the tragic life and brutal 1993 rape and murder of a transgender young man in Nebraska. Filmmaker Kimberly Peirce (herself a prominent gay artist) had been working on a screenplay about Teena since reading a 1994 Village Voice piece about him, and the documentary spurred her to make that story into a feature film, 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. Starring Hilary Swank as Brandon, ChloëSevingy as his girlfriend Lana Tisdel, and Peter Sarsgaard as his eventual killer John Lotter, the film offers a sometimes melodramatic and romanticized but mostly gritty and realistic depiction of Teena’s life, love, and death. I’ll admit that when I saw the film in theaters I had never heard the term transgender and would never have known to apply it to Teena; in that way, the film itself can be seen as having helped move us toward more communal conversation about this American community. Yet as this 2016 student protest of the film illustrates, and as the recent controversy over Scarlett Johansson’s plan to play transgender man Dante Gill drives home, that conversation has changed significantly since the late 1990s. Cultural representations such as Ellen’s and Will and Grace might still resonante, but we’re not in nearly the same place as we were two decades ago, and that’s a fraught but vital fact.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other representations of gay identities or stories you’d highlight?

October 12, 2018: American Gay Studies: Mark Doty

[October 11thmarks the 30th annual National Coming Out Day, an important occasion in the unfolding story of gay rights in America. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of figures and stories from the history of gay rights, leading up to a special weekend post on gay identities in American popular culture!]On three genres through which a preeminent contemporary writer considers art, sexuality, and identity.1)      Poetry: I wrote about two of Mark Doty’s poems, “Faith” (1995) and “Turtle, Swan” (1989), in this long-ago post on Plath, Doty, and the confessional. As I argued there, Doty’s poems, like Plath’s, consistently blend seemingly overt autobiographical moments and themes with dense and ambiguous imagery, offering us glimpses into identity but doing so through a clearly poetic and symbolic lens. As a result, Doty’s poems both have a great deal to tell us about topics like gay identity and the AIDS epidemic and yet resist being read in any overt or straightforward way as social activism or political polemic about those issues. While I’m more familiar with such earlier works of Doty’s than with his subsequent decades of continued and acclaimed poetic production (he won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry, among many other awards), I have little doubt that his more recent works likewise engage identity questions with the slant perspective that all of the best poetry can provide.2)      Memoir: Each of Doty’s three memoirs— Heaven’s Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007)—represents a distinct version of how this complex genre can engage with identity questions. Firebirdis the most conventional autobiographical work, tracing Doty’s early years (mainly between ages 6 and 16) and dealing in particular with his gradual realization of his sexuality. Heaven’s deals in depth with one particular, crucial period and subject, Doty’s multi-layered thoughts after he learns in 1989 that his partner Wally Roberts has HIV. And Dog Years focuses on two longtime canine companions and how they helped Doty cope with his partner’s experiences with that terrible illness, along with many other life challenges and stages. Taken together, these three acclaimed texts form a compelling overall and evolving autobiography, one powerfully linked to issues of sexuality and AIDS but far from solely defined by them.3)      Essay: Doty’s two book-length essays— Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001) and The Art of Description (2010)—are seemingly quite distinct from any of these other works. Both concern objects and perception: Still Life through a focus on 17th century Dutch painters; and Description through Doty’s own decades of experiences attempting to “render experience through language.” While these books are different from Doty’s others, both in genre and in focus, they thus also offer a lens on understanding his lifelong writing project, and for that matter the work of all writers. “It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see,” Doty begins The Art of Description; any of us who write for a living know that doing so is anything but simple, but it’s also a vital part of literature and culture, and across his many decades, genres, and works Mark Doty has consistently managed to bridge the gap and say things that illuminate his and our worlds very powerfully.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?

October 11, 2018: American Gay Studies: Harvey Milk

[October 11thmarks the 30th annual National Coming Out Day, an important occasion in the unfolding story of gay rights in America. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of figures and stories from the history of gay rights, leading up to a special weekend post on gay identities in American popular culture!]On a key detail that complicates the story of a gay rights leader’s tragic murder, and how the overarching history holds in any case.In November 1977, Harvey Milk, running his third campaign for public office in San Francisco, was elected to a seat as City Supervisor, becoming the first openly gay elected official in California history (and one of the first in American history as well). Milk’s rise paralleled in many ways the emergence of a vibrant and vocal gay and bisexual community in San Francisco’s Castro Street district (an area that came to be known as The Castro), and so as so often this individual leader’s story also helps us understand collective and communal histories and experiences. Yet at the same time, we can’t and shouldn’t discount the impressive individual ambition and courage it took for Milk to run for elected office as an openly gay man in the 1970s. That compelling individual story, along with a charismatic personality and a strong voice, are what made Milk such an iconic figure, and why cultural texts such as Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film Milk (starring Sean Penn) continue to engage with this unique and important American figure and story.That story ended tragically only 10 months after Milk’s inauguration (30 years ago today) to the Board of Supervisors, with his November 1978 murder by former city supervisor Dan White. Given Milk’s iconic and ground-breaking identity, it would be quite easy, if not inevitable, to imagine that Milk was assassinated due to his identity as a gay man—and indeed, that had always been my assumption about the murder and its motivations. But in looking into Milk for this post, I learned that (at least as far as I can tell, and as always corrections or additions in comments are very welcome!) the murder was something quite different: White had stepped aside from the Board in order to pursue opportunities in business, and when they failed and he attempted to return to the Board, he was denied the ability to do so (on procedural grounds) by Mayor George Moscone; White then snuck a gun into City Hall and killed first Moscone and then Milk, whom he apparently saw as having collaborated with Moscone to keep him off the Board (and maintain a slim progressive majority in the process). Which is to say, the Moscone and Milk assassinations seem to be best explained by a combination of a disgruntled former coworker and political conflicts, none of which lessen the tragedy or horror but both of which are distinct from Milk’s sexual identity and iconic status.If that is indeed the case with Milk’s murder (and again, please offer any additional or alternative perspectives in comments, since I’m still learning about this topic as I always am here), then it’s important that we remember those details, so as not to misrepresent what took place in this particular historical moment (nor to shoehorn it falsely into a narrative about Milk’s groundbreaking work and life). But at the same time, it’s also important that we not use this tragic end to Milk’s life to read back into or circumscribe that life and career more broadly—that would be true even if he had been killed because of his sexuality, but it’s even more the case if the killing was unrelated to that part of his identity. That is, Milk’s charismatic and groundbreaking voice, his ambition and courage, and the true significance of his electoral victory and year of office-holding are the central elements of an iconic and important American life and story, and remain key focal points on which our collective memories of the man and his moment should focus. Remembering with accuracy and nuance are important goals, but remembering our inspirational and ground-breaking figures and histories are just as crucial, for the early gay rights movement as for every part of American history. Last story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?