Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 218

October 10, 2018: American Gay Studies: The Society for Human Rights

[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!]Three contexts for the brief and frustrating yet important and inspiring history of America’s first gay rights organization.1)      Germany: The Society’s founder, Henry Gerber, immigrated to Chicago from Germany in 1913 at the age of 21; he enlisted in the US army during WWI and ended up back in Germany, working as a printer for the Allied Army of Occupation between 1920 and 1923. While there he connected to the work of German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Bund für Menschenrechte (Association for Human Rights), a pioneering organization (linked to Hirschfeld’s work with a group known as the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) dedicated to both supporting gay communities and advocating for sexuality as a shared aspect of human identity. When Gerber returned to the US and became a postal worker in Chicago, he decided to create his own such organization, filing an application for a charter for a non-profit Society for Human Rights in December 1924. While the first world war is often described as a moment of new international (even global) conflict, and of the ruptures that contributed to the rise of Modernism (among other effects), Gerber’s German influences (like his immigration story) illustrate the era’s and America’s concurrent possibilities for international connections and collaborations.2)      Comstock: As you might expect, Gerber and the Society met with immediate and innumerable challenges. One of the most significant, and certainly the most ironic given Gerber’s day job as a postal service worker, was the Comstock Act(1873), which crimilinalized sending materials deemed “obscene” or “immoral” through the mail. Given that all gay-oriented publications (even those with no overt erotic elements) were deemed obscene until the Supreme Court’s decision in One, Inc. v. Olesen (1958), the Society was not able to communicate via mail at all without violating the law; for example, while Gerber founded and edited two issues of a newsletter, Friendship and Freedom , he likely did not mail it to any members, and no extant copies of it are known to have survived. Such social and legal challenges proved insurmountable, as in 1925 Gerber and other founding members were arrested; Gerber would be tried in court three times before the charges against him were dismissed, and in the process he lost all his personal papers, all remaining issues of Friendship and Freedom, and all of his personal savings as well. While the Society served as an influence and inspiration for later gay rights organizations, its own history was tragically short-lived and circumscribed.3)      John T. Graves: That frustratingly quick end in no way minimizes the Society’s significance, of course, nor the many layers to its community and histories. One of the most compelling to this AmericanStudier is that of John T. Graves, an African American preacher in Chicago who signed the Society’s inauguration papers (along with his partner, a railroad worker named Ralph Ellsworth Booher) and served as the Society’s first and only President. That’s about all of the information that I’ve been able to learn about Graves as of this writing, but even those few tidbits present so many complicated and compelling layers: the intersection of race and religion with this early gay rights organization and movement. As I detailed in this post, Bayard Rustin is often seen as one of the first figures to bring those different American communities and histories together; but four decades earlier, John Graves apparently did so as well. Just one more reason to better remember and engage with the frustrating but fascinating history of the Society for Human Rights. Next story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?

October 9, 2018: American Gay Studies: Boston Marriages

[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 prominent historical examples of a complex, ambiguous, homosocial interpersonal relationship.1)      Alice James and Katherine Loring: The term “Boston marriage” is thought to have originated in reference to Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886), which depicts such a long-term co-habitating relationship between two women (although James never uses the phrase “Boston marriage” to describe that situation). James based that depiction in large part on the relationship between his youngest sister Alice and her long-term companion Katherine Peabody Loring, a prominent educator and progressive reformer. In a famous 1879 letter describing Loring to her friend Sara Darwin, Alice James reflected how such relationships could still rely upon, yet also complicate and blur, lines of gender and sexuality: “I wish you could know Katharine Loring [...] she is a most wonderful being. She has all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine virtues. There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving runaway horses and educating all the women in North America.”2)      Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields: Neither Alice James nor Katherine Loring ever married, which reflects one way in which such a Boston marriage could develop. The long-term relationship between the wonderful regionalist author Sarah Orne Jewett and the poet and social reformer Annie Adams Fields began in a very different way: Jewett became very close to Fields and her husband, Atlantic Monthly editor James Thomas Fields ; when James passed away unexpectedly at the age of 63 in 1881, Jewett (then 32) and Annie Fields (then 47) moved in together and co-habited for the remaining few decades of Jewett’s life (she was injured in a carriage accident in 1902 and died of a stroke in 1909), traveling extensively and making their home into a center of late 19th century literary and cultural life. Without pretending to be able to remark on the intimate or romantic feelings of any of the subjects of today’s post (or pretty much any of my other non-autobiographical posts!), I would say that Jewett and Fields’ relationship could be described at least in part as a professional partnership, in addition to the personal motivations and meanings it undoubtedly also featured.3)      Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Ellis Coman: Boston marriages became so common in the late 19thcentury among the faculty of Wellesley College that they were also referred to as Wellesley marriages; historian Lillian Faderman, the preeminent scholar of women’s homosocial relationships (and lesbian histories more broadly), has documented that among 53 women faculty at Wellesley toward the end of the century, only one was married to a man. One the more famous such Wellesley marriages was the one between Katharine Lee Bates (a poetry professor who composed the words to “America the Beautiful,” first as the 1895 poem “Pikes Peak” which was then set to Samuel A. Ward’s music as “America” in 1910) and Katharine Ellis Coman (an economics professor whose 1905 The Industrial History of the United States is considered the first such book-length account). I’m not sure there’s ever been a more influential AmericanStudies power couple than Bates and Coman, one more reason to better remember these complex and crucial relationships. Next story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?

October 8, 2018: American Gay Studies: Walt Whitman

[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 vexing but important questions of sexuality, textuality, and identity.Critics, biographers, and literary scholars have been trying to figure out the question of Walt Whitman’s sexuality since the poet’s own lifetime. In a review of Leaves of Grass shortly after the book’s initial 1855 publication, critic Rufus Griswoldaccused Whitman of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.” More sympathetically, the late 19th century English poet and critic John Addington Symonds, a lifelong advocate for gay rights, corresponded with Whitman for many years in an attempt to pry out the poet’s sexuality, asking in 1890 this hesitant but loaded question of Whitman: “In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men?” Although Whitman denied that he did so, since his 1892 death numerous biographers have identified possible male romantic partners and love interests, from unknown figures such as Washington, DC streetcar conductor Peter Doyle and teenage Camden neighbor Bill Duckett to one of the 19th century’s most famous gay men, Oscar Wilde. It seems clear that Whitman had at least romantic attraction to or feelings for these and other men, although much of his biography remains ambiguous to be sure.Textuality isn’t the same as biography, however. It can be easy to equate the two when it comes to poetry, particularly the kinds of personal, autobiographical, or even confessional poetry that Whitman helped inaugurate in American literature (and about which I wrote in this post on Sylvia Plath and a prominent late 20th and early 21stcentury confessional gay poet, Mark Doty). But even though Whitman introduces himself directly in “Song of Myself,” the first poem in Leaves of Grass—writing in the poem’s first section, “I, now thirty-seven years old,” and then in the 24th section describing “Walt Whitman” directly and at length—that’s still a poetic persona within a literary text, not the actual person wielding the pen. It’s the perspective and voice of that poetic persona, and more exactly that persona’s expressions of sexual and romantic attraction to men within certain Leaves of Grass poems—particularly the cluster of texts that first appeared in the book’s 1860 edition and have come to be known as the “Calamus” poems—to which critics like Griswold and Symonds were responding. Which is to say, identifying homoerotic themes in Leaves of Grass isn’t identical to tracing gay relationships in Walt Whitman’s life, although of course the two efforts are not unrelated.I would also argue that the stakes or effects of those two efforts are somewhat distinct, and in each case significant. Of course Whitman’s sexuality was an integral part of his identity (as it is of all of ours), and so learning more about it in his biography can help us better understand this hugely influential American writer and figure. So too can such efforts help us consider what it meant to be gay, bisexual, or in any way not the heterosexual norm in 19thcentury America, and thus why (for example) Whitman might have felt the need to deny any homosexuality so fully in his 1890 response to Symonds. Whereas working to understand homoerotic imagery and themes in Whitman’s poems, while of course those elements can be connected to identities and histories outside of the text, can help us consider the distinct questions of representation, of how cultural works engage with issues of sex and sexuality, of the particular formal choices authors make in creating those engagements, of how such representations might impact audiences (from individual readers to collective and communal readership), and so on. Taken together, all of these efforts and effects help us better understand not just one important poet and his works, but some of the many layers to sexuality and identity in 19th century America.Next story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?

October 6-7, 2018: National Historical Parks

[On October 1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to this special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historical Parks.]On one particularly impressive thing each at three of America’s many wonderful National Historical Parks.1)      Appomattox Court House: I’ve visited Appomattox with my sons on each of our last few Virginia trips, and each time I was struck by the same thing: the incredibly impressive short informational film at the visitors center. That might be a strange thing to highlight at a site surrounded by such history, but at the same time the informational film is a key part of any historic site visit and experience. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better one than Appomattox’s: in just a few minutes it manages to feature not only the specific military and diplomatic contexts of the Civil War’s closing moments, but also broader histories of the build-up to the war, the war overall, and (most importantly and impressively) the aftermaths of peace and abolition for African Americans and the nation as a whole. If you’re ever in the Lynchburg, Virginia area, I recommend Appomattox Court House National Historical Park for that wonderful film alone (and a lot more, but the film by itself is enough to get you there)!2)      Lowell: I’ve been to the Lowell Mills National Historical Park a handful of times, each of the last two with my sons’ respective 5th grade class field trips. That has given me a unique appreciation for how the site teaches its histories and stories to elementary school kids, and I have nothing but great things to say about those educators and their tours and programs. But on those two visits, just as on my prior ones, I was most struck by one particular exhibit: Mill Girls & Immigrants, an exhibit that makes perfect use of one of the mill’s early 19th century boardinghouses. There’s a lot of great stuff in that exhibit, but it features perhaps my favorite single museum space: a recreated boardinghouse bedroom where, at the press of a button, the voices of a group of mill workers (quoting from actual letters and journals) emerge from different corners of the bedroom, overlapping and fading and reemerging in a combination of individual identities and communal experience. I can’t possibly do it justice, so if you’re ever in Lowell, be sure to visit the second floor of that Mill Girls & Immigrants exhibit and see and hear it for yourself!3)      Minute Man: My sons’ other big 5th grade field trips were to Concord’s Minute Man National Historical Park, but I didn’t get to tag along on those. I’ve been to Minute Man a few times, however, and have each time been particularly struck by one core element of the park. While the park features a visitors center and a number of individual sites, its main attraction is the long winding path on which visitors can follow the trail of the colonial Minute Men and the British Redcoats on that historic April 1775 day. While the highway is visible from certain spots along the path, from many others it’s not; and overall the path, the surrounding historic buildings, and even I believe the woods and other natural landmarks have largely been preserved as they were in 1775. The effect reflects the best kind of immersive experience that these National Historical Parks can create, a sense that we have truly entered into a historic world and are experiencing a partial but powerful version of that place and time. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other National Historic Parks or National Parks you’d highlight?

October 5, 2018: National Park Studying: Acadia

[On October 1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]On a few telling moments in the strikingly French history of the Maine National Park.French explorer Samuel de Champlain named Maine’s Mount Desert Island when he sailed past it on his second voyage to the Americas, in September 1604; Champlain noted that “the tops of [the island’s mountains] are bare of trees, because there is nothing there but rocks,” and so Mount Desert it was. Nine years later, in 1613, the Jesuit priest Father Pierre Biard and forty settlers established the first French missionary colony on the island, in the area of Southwest Harbor; but later that same year, the English Captain Samuel Argall sailed north from Jamestown and destroyed the settlement, taking two priests back to Jamestown as prisoners. As that last hyperlinked article illustrates, the early 17th century was full of such back and forth conflicts between the French and English up and down the Eastern seaboard, and the earliest history of what would become Acadia was defined largely by those shifting European American winds (while the region’s Wabanaki people were of course an established part of that history as well and remained a vital part of it through each evolution).The island changed hands between the two nations at least a few more times over the next century and a half, but a late 18th century moment reflects a very different international relationship as of the period of the American Revolution. Mount Desert Island had been under the control of the English Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Sir Francis Bernard, since 1760, and in 1780 the newly independent state of Massachusetts granted the western half of the island to (or, I suppose, kept it in the possession of) Bernard’s son John. But the eastern half was granted instead to Marie Therese de Gregoire, a Frenchwoman and granddaughter of the French explorer and island’s 17th century titleholder Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Both John Bernard and Marie de Gregoire were of course the descendants of elite families, reflecting a continuation of landed gentry roles even in Revolutionary and post-Revolution America. But at the same time, this joint US and French ownership of the island was from what I can tell a first in its history, and illustrates both France’s vital role in the American Revolution and the ongoing relationship between the two nations (one that, of course, would be severely tested before the end of the 18th century).When much of Mount Desert Island was first preserved by the federal government in the early 20th century, the two initial such efforts overtly honored these Franco-American histories. In July 1916 President Woodrow Wilson established Sieur de Monts National Monument, naming it after an early French explorer and compatriot of Champlain’s (Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons). Three years later, when the area was upgraded to full National Park status, it was named Lafayette National Park in honor of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. Even Acadia, the name given to the park instead in 1929, is a tribute to the French legacy in the area, as Acadia was a French colony in northeastern North America that included Maine. But Sieur de Monts and Lafayette more directly highlight and embody those Franco-American figures and stories, and better remembering them as part of the establishment and development of Acadia National Park helps us keep those contested, conflicted, crucial Maine and American histories in our collective memories. Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

October 4, 2018: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde

[On October 1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]On two distinct but complementary effects to a foundational AmericanStudier moment.When I was in 7thgrade, my family and I took a trip out West to visit a number of Southwestern National Parks. We saw Zion, Bryce, Four Corners, and the Grand Motherfucking Canyon (pardon my French, but I’m pretty sure that’s the full official name), and even checked out a bit of Las Vegas when we flew in and out of the city. But there’s no doubt at all that it was Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park that most affected this 12 year old AmericanStudier. There were lots of spaces and moments in Mesa Verde that hit me, but by far the most moving was a post-sunset encounter with a coyote as we explored an aboveground (ie, not a cliff dwelling) Pueblo ruin in the park. Probably didn’t hurt that I had been reading a bunch of Tony Hillerman mysteries on the trip, as the moment felt right out of such evocative Southwestern thrillers (although luckily we didn’t stumble upon a dead body or awaken an ancient curse or the like). But I would say that the moment affected me, and indeed was foundational for my lifelong AmericanStudying, in a couple key ways that go well beyond Leaphorn & Chee mysteries and that also reflect essential elements to a site like Mesa Verde.For one thing, the moment made crystal clear something that a know-it-all 12 year old (or 41 year old…) can sometimes have difficulties remembering: just how much I didn’t and don’t know. As I wrote in that same blog post on Hillerman, Mesa Verde has long been defined by a couple central mysteries of its own: the question of why the Anasazi people abandoned their cliff dwellings, and what happened to them after they left. It appears that some significant recent progress has been made in answering those questions, which of course is part of the historical and cultural process as well. But in truth, the mystery of Mesa Verde is just a more extreme version of a fundamental but all too easily forgotten fact about all historical knowledge—there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we’ll ever know, and most of the things we do know we only kinda know (to get all Rumsfeldian on ya). And that’s never more true than when it comes to the simple but crucial question of what it meant, or really what it felt like, to live in these historical periods and places. I love the interpretations of the past at places like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, but that’s all they are, interpretations; we’ll never really know what life was like for those folks in those worlds, and I felt that divide, acutely and potently, as I stood atop that darkened Mesa Verde ruin. But at the same time, I felt something else, something I’d call not contradictory so much as complementary: I wanted to bridge that divide. I wanted to learn as much as I could about periods and places and peoples, really all of ‘em but most especially all those that felt most distinct from me and mine. I wanted to read about them and talk about them and, perhaps most of all, write about them, help create stories that could, not exactly bring them back to life of course, but make them a part of our own moment and world as fully as those unavoidable gaps would allow. I don’t think that was the first time I felt that desire so acutely (I’m sure I did on my Camp Virginia trips, for example), but it was one of the strongest such moments, and it has stuck with me to be sure. I’ve visited and been inspired by a lot of cultural and historic sites in the decades since, including a number of federal National Historic Parks, and will write about some of my favorites in that latter category in the weekend post. But Mesa Verde remains striking and perhaps singular in that regard, a place and moment with which I was confronted with especial force with both the challenges and the call of all that I’ve tried to spend my career doing. So, y’know, it’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way!Last Park tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

October 3, 2018: National Park Studying: Everglades

[On October 1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]On the very American story of the woman who helped save the Everglades.In 2018, the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas has likely and tragically become synonymous with the Parkland, Florida mass shooting in February at the high school named for her. But while of course we can and should continue remembering the Douglas High shooting (and celebrating the amazing group of Parkland students who have turned that tragedy into an occasion for activism), Marjory Stoneman Douglas deserves separate and full commemoration as well. In a 108-year life that spanned nearly all of the 20th century (she was born in April 1890 and passed away in May 1998), Marjory Stoneman experienced a number of striking and very telling moments, including many by the time she turned 25: from watching her mother, concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen, get committed to a mental hospital in Providence for being “high-strung” to attending Wellesley College and helping form its first suffrage club; from a brief marriage to charming con artist Kenneth Douglas (who was already married at the time and subsequently attempted to defraud Marjory’s father) to a groundbreaking 1915 divorce and move to Miami (then a small town of less than 5000) to rejoin her father and join the staff of his decade-old newspaper The Miami Herald.For the next few decades, Douglas (she continued to go by her married name for the rest of her life) made quite a name for herself as a South Florida (and national) journalist and literary figure. (After serving in both the navy and the Red Cross during World War I.) Besides her work for the Herald, which included long stints as Book Review Editor and Assistant Editor, she also worked extensively as a freelance and creative writer; she published forty stories in the Saturday Evening Post, for example, and also wrote a number of one-act plays for the Miami Theater as well as the foreword to the WPA’s 1941 guide to Miami. Around that same time, however, Douglas became involved with the cause that would define her second half-century of life, and all of America, very fully. The publisher Farrar & Rinehartapproached her to write a book on the Miami River for their new Rivers of America series; as she began her research Douglas found herself unimpressed by the river but profoundly moved by the Everglades, and convinced F&R to let her research and write a book on them instead. She spent five years researching and writing, working closely with geologist Garald Parker, and the result was The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a monumental achievement that sold out its initial printing in a month and remains one of the most significant and influential works of American naturalism.River of Grass was just the beginning, however (and not even that, as Douglas had been fighting for local environmental causes for decades by that time). Over the next half-century, Douglas would more than earn her nickname “Grande Dame of Everglades,” waging continual war to protect and preserve the wetlands from developers, politicians, corporations, sport hunters and fishermen, and just about every other adversary one could imagine. Douglas titled the last chapter of River of Grass “The Eleventh Hour ,” warning that the region was on the brink of destruction; but in December of that same year Everglades National Park was dedicated, and thanks to those federal protections and Douglas’s lifelong efforts, the area instead has become the largest tropical wilderness in the US and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi. No individual can achieve such milestones single-handedly, of course; but at the same time, American history reminds us time and again of the power a determined and impressive individual can have to help shape the future. Marjory Stoneman Douglas most definitely did so for the Everglades and South Florida—and having had the good fortune to visit the Glades a few times as a kid (my maternal grandparents had retired to South Florida), I can testify that she helped preserve a truly unique and amazing American space.Next Park tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

October 2, 2018: National Park Studying: Blackstone River Valley

[On October 1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]On two interesting comparisons for one of our newest National Parks.Earlier this month, as a small part of a very large Congressional bill (the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015), the longstanding Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor was upgraded, becoming (after a decade of efforts and activism) the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. As that second linked article suggests, the change is far more than semantic—gaining National Park status brings with it a great deal of development and support, linking the area to the National Park Service and turning it into much more of a organized and coherent entity than had been possible in the prior incarnation. The self-proclaimed (American) “Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,” an area running along the potent Blackstone River from Worcester all the way to Providence, Rhode Island (making it one of the few National Parks to span multiple states), will now be presented and interpreted in all its historical and social significance for generations to come.The new park’s multi-state span is one of a few things that differentiate it from most of its fellow National Parks, but I would still highlight a couple of comparisons that can shed light on what and how this park might achieve its goals most effectively. Salem, Massachusetts is home to a wonderful park, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Featuring a dozen buildings, multiple wharfs, a reconstructed tall ship, and a number of other elements, the Salem Maritime park does an excellent job interpreting multiple centuries and stages of work, community, and life in the city and region. The Derby Wharf sectionalone includes all those centuries and stages in its different buildings and placards. Compared, for example, to battlefield national parks such as Gettysburg or Yorktown, which focus on a few days’ worth of historical events and issues, the Blackstone River Valley Park will have to cover more than a century of industrial and social history and culture, and the Salem Maritime National Historic Site provides an excellent model for doing so successfully.On the other hand, Salem Maritime occupies an area of a few square miles; the Blackstone River Valley Park will cover (as has the Heritage Corridor) a distance of some forty-five miles, to say nothing of how far it extends on both sides of the river. For a comparison with that element, I would turn to one of the national parks around which I grew up: Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. The Skyline Drive, a winding, scenic road atop the Blue Ridge Mountains, travels more than 100 miles, and yet is all part of the same unified national park identity and interpretation, with its many distinct stops and areas comprising their own unique identities yet tied together consistently and coherently. While Shenandoah and Skyline focus much more on natural rather than historical or cultural subjects, this large yet linked and coherent park community offers a rich and successful model for how a park as spacious and far-reaching as Blackstone River Valley can move through its many different places and communities yet maintain that overarching sense identity and history. I’ll be interested to see how Blackstone River Valley takes its next steps!Next Park tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

October 1, 2018: National Park Studying: Yosemite

[On October 1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]On six figures who help narrate the unfolding history of an early National Park.1)      Chief Tenaya and Lafayette Bunnell: The first European Americans that we know for sure entered California’s Yosemite Valley were a battalion of US Army soldiers led by Major James Savage; the so-called Mariposa Battalion were chasing Ahwahneechee Chief Tenaya and his forces as part of 1851 military efforts to destroy the area’s Native American communities. That’s a pretty bleak starting point for a US relationship to Yosemite, but it didn’t go entirely unchallenged—traveling with the battalion was Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, and the physician would go on to interview Tenaya at length, learn the region’s name and history from him, and eventually author the book Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 which Led to that Event(1880). Bunnell of course was wrong to call it a “discovery,” a choice that reflected and reinforced a Eurocentric view of the region to be sure. But his book helped make more Americans aware of this beautiful and important space, and was a crucial step toward conservation.2)      John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson: As with virtually all of the late 19th century’s conservation efforts, the push to preserve Yosemite was led by the Scottish-born naturalist, scientist, and activist John Muir. Muir became enamored of Yosemite at a young age, writing frequently about the region’s wonders and even helping develop (in his first published work!) the controversial (and now widely accepted) theory that they had been created by alpine glaciers. But Muir alone could not persuade the federal government to help conserve Yosemite, and thankfully he had help from other prominent Americans who shared his views. Chief among them was Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the era’s most famed literary figures (he edited Century Magazine among many other roles); Johnson camped in Yosemite with Muir in 1889 and went on to help him successfully lobby Congress to pass the October 1, 1890 Act that created Yosemite National Park. Their partnership exemplifies the best of the nascent Progressive Era and of how allies from different communities can help advance causes of environmental justice.3)      Ansel Franklin Hall and Rosalie Edge: National Park status ensures a certain level of conservation and protection, but of course doesn’t necessarily guarantee enough travel and support to keep a park thriving beyond that starting point. One of the most important figures in the park’s early years, Park Naturalist (and later the National Park Service’s first Chief Naturalist) Ansel Franklin Hall, was crucial in moving the parkin those directions: he founded the Yosemite Museum (which featured Native American craftspeople and interpreters), developed numerous interpretive programs, and edited the 1921 Handbook of Yosemite National Park. Complementing Hall’s efforts from inside the park were those of external advocates like Rosalie Edge, creator and head of the National Audobon Society’s Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC); in 1937, Edge lobbied Congress to purchase 8000 acres of forest on the park’s edge that were scheduled to be logged, making them part of the park’s expanding identity instead. Thanks to Hall, Edge, and their peers, Yosemite not only endured but expanded and thrived throughout the 20th century, and remains a vital American space and destination into the 21st.Next Park tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

September 30, 2018: September 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]September 3: Fall 2018 Previews: Writing I: My annual Fall previews series kicks off with the value of stability in my first-year writing course, and the need for change nonetheless.September 4: Fall 2018 Previews: American Lit II: The series continues with the perils and pleasures of returning to an old friend after a few years apart.September 5: Fall 2018 Previews: American Lit II Online: What I can’t change about teaching a lit survey online, and what I hope to, as the series rolls on.September 6: Fall 2018 Previews: Major American Authors of the 20th Century: The difficult decision to replace a long-time favorite text, and the opportunity it has opened up.September 7: Fall 2018 Previews: Voices of Resistance for ALFA: The series concludes with couple of voices I know I’ll be featuring in my next adult learning class, and a request for nominations!September 8-9: Other Fall 2018 Updates: Other good things happening and coming in Fall 2018, including a new blog everyone should check out!September 10: MassacreStudying: Lattimer: On the anniversary of a forgotten labor massacre, a massacre series kicks off with one pessimistic and one optimistic takeaway.September 11: MassacreStudying: Mystic: The series continues with three texts that help us remember one of early America’s darkest moments.September 12: MassacreStudying: Wounded Knee: Three distinct attempts to raise national awareness of a horrific event, as the series continues.September 13: MassacreStudying: Reconstruction Massacres: Three under-remembered Reconstruction-era massacres that contributed to the period’s failures.September 14: MassacreStudying: My Lai: The series concludes with cultural engagements with one of our more recent and troubling dark histories.September 15-16: 21st Century Massacres and Hate Crimes: A special post on how the legacies of historic massacres continue in two of our darkest contemporary trends.September 17: Mass Protest Studying: Occupy Wall Street: On OWS’ anniversary, a mass protests series starts with frustrating and inspiring legacies of the movement.September 18: Mass Protest Studying: The Whiskey Rebellion: The series continues with two distinct ways to AmericanStudy one of our first domestic crises.September 19: Mass Protest Studying: The NYC Draft Riots: A popular historical film that gets a Civil War mass protest exactly wrong, as the series rolls on.September 20: Mass Protest Studying: The Bonus Army: The veterans movement that ended in both tragedy and lasting success.September 21: Mass Protest Studying: The Armies of the Night: The series concludes with the literary classic that both narrates and challenges mass protests.September 22-23: Mass Protest Studying: The Boston March for Science: A special post on a recent, very telling example of 21st century mass protest.September 24-26: NeMLA Panels You Should Submit To!: Today’s the deadline for submitting abstracts for NeMLA’s 50th anniversary convention in DC in March—so hie thee hence!September 27-29: Tina Powell’s Guest Post: My latest Guest Post, Professor Tina Powell on reading and teaching refugee literatures and stories.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!