Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 223

August 11-12, 2018: Segregated Cville

I’ll write a multi-part series on the one-year anniversary of the August 2017 Charlottesville rally once we’re back from our trip there. But for the anniversary itself, I wanted to share one of the pieces of writing I’m proudest of from the last year: my piece for the Activist History Review entitled “Segregated Cville.” Beginning with another personal and communal swimming pool history, this piece seeks to understand both the past and the present for an American community like Charlottesville, and through them to imagine a way forward into a future for all of us.Special birthday series starts Monday,BenPS. Thoughts on that piece? I’d love to hear them!

August 10, 2018: Swimming Pool Studying: Canobie Lake Park

[Ahead of my annual trip to Charlottesville with my sons, a trip that always features a good deal of swimming pool action, a series on pools and swimming in American history and culture. Leading up to a special weekend post highlighting one of my favorite pieces I’ve had the chance to write in the last year!]Like two other sites about which I’ve written in this space, Newton (MA)’s Norumbega Park and yesterday’s subject, Charlottesville (VA)’s Fry’s Spring Beach Club, New Hampshire’s Canobie Lake Park began (after its 1904 opening) as an early 20th century trolley park. Designed as escapes (or at least respites) from the period’s increasingly crowded and modernizing urban spaces, a logical complement to the Progressive Era’s City Beautiful movement and its emphases on the need for the pastoral in that developing world, these trolley parks often focused on green and flowering spaces, and Canobie in this first stage of life was no different. For its first few decades, the park was best known for its elaborate botanical gardens and promenades, with visitors often arriving in their Sunday best and with the park’s featured attractions (such as canoeing and picnic areas) fitting nicely into that pastoral landscape and relaxed ambience. That wasn’t the only kind of theme park in this early 20th century moment, of course, but it seems to have been the most common version.By the mid-20thcentury, however, Canobie had taken on a significantly more up-tempo identity. That included the 1936 introduction of the first roller coaster, the Yankee Cannonball(please don’t watch that video if you have issues with motion sickness), a wooden beast that endures to this day (this AmericanStudier and his sons rode it last summer!). But it also included a new emphasis on popular entertainment of the musical variety—between the 1930s and 1950s the Canobie Lake Ballroombecame a Big Band era destination, with performances by Duke Ellington, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and many other prominent acts and artists. The rise to dominance of the automobile and the development of the suburbs had made the escapist quality of trolley parks much less unique or necessary, and so theme parks had to evolve alongside those innovations, becoming less a pastoral alternative to the city and more a combination of high-powered entertainments for which there wasn’t room in any one city space (and which, at least in the case of the musical performances, were unlikely to be found in the suburbs).By 1957, a number of catastrophes (including a fire and a hurricane) had almost destroyed the park, and the Big Band era was likewise coming to a close. When new owners purchased Canobie and reopened it in 1958, they did so as part of a new era, that of Disneylandand Palisades Park and Pacific Ocean Park, among the many other amusement parks (most of which have long since closed) that were booming in the late 50s. These many theme parks provided both inspiration and competition for a newly revitalized park like Canobie, requiring the park to constantly add new and more elaborate roller coasters and attractions (such as an extensive water park section), as well as specialized entertainments like the Halloween screamfest. Again, the majority of late 20th century theme parks have not survived into the 21st century; but those that have, like Canobie, have grown ever bigger in their efforts to remain a destination. It’s hard to say whether there will be another stage in Canobie’s evolution, but if the enjoyment of my AmericanStudier sons is any indication, there’s certainly still a place for theme parks in the American future.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

August 9, 2018: Swimming Pool Studying: Fry’s Spring

[Ahead of my annual trip to Charlottesville with my sons, a trip that always features a good deal of swimming pool action, a series on pools and swimming in American history and culture. Leading up to a special weekend post highlighting one of my favorite pieces I’ve had the chance to write in the last year!]On four exemplary stages of one of Charlottesville’s most enduring sites.Fry’s Spring earned its name through one of the area’s early 19th century blue-bloods. James Francis Fry, grandson of Joshua Fry (one of the two men who patented Albemarle County in the mid-18thcentury), received 300 acres of land in the area from his father-in-law, the equally prominent local Nelson Barksdale, in 1839. Fry built the estate Azalea Hall on the site but also discovered a nearby spring, which he christened Fry’s Spring and which by mid-century had become well-known throughout the region. This was the era in which President Buchanan maintained a “Summer White House” at Pennsylvania’s Bedford Springs, and Fry’s Spring offered those further south their own such escape.By the end of the century, the spring had changed hands and become part of a far more elaborate resort community, one connected to the nearby Jefferson Park Hotel. This was the height of the Gilded Age, an era defined both by conspicuous consumption and by the rise of marketing and advertising to appeal to those wealthiest Americans, and the Hotel offered it all: access to waters advertised as “the third most powerful of their kind in the world”; an on-site menagerie known as Wonderland; and two different train lines (a small “dummy-line” and a larger steam locomotive) to bring visitors to the site. Resorts and spas were no longer simply for first families and presidents—they were part of a network of sites linked to the upper stratum of Gilded Age America, such as Newport’s mansions, Lenox’s Ventfort Hall, and many others.The Hotel burned down in 1910 (with salvaged wood being used to construct nearby homes, including one in which a certain AmericanStudier grew up!), and the land was sold to a trolley company that focused on adding to the Wonderland amusements. Among other ways in which Wonderland was developed in this era, the company added the city’s first moving picture shows. This was the period in which this new form of entertainment was sweeping the nation, but to my mind the movies signaled more than just a new technology—they represented, along with the rise of professional sports and the popularity of places like Coney Island, Revere Beach, and other so-called “trolley parks,” a democratization of leisure, a broadening of sites like Fry’s Spring to include more than Virginia blue bloods or the nation’s upper classes.The next stage of that democratization of leisure and of Fry’s Spring began soon thereafter, and has continued into this AmericanStudier’s life and the 21stcentury. Local businessman J. Russell Dettor bought the site in 1920 and built a swimming pool, which he opened in 1921 as Fry’s Spring Beach Club. The century since has seen plenty more history and evolution, including those related to segregation that I detailed in this post, but they’ve all been connected to the Beach Club. The Beach Club where I kept the beach ball up and swam laps and played tennis throughout my youth, and where each August I take my boys for the next stage of their own Charlottesville histories and stories. Their lips get a lot bluer than their blood, and the only water they try is heavily chlorinated, but the story of Fry’s Spring continues into the 21st century nonetheless.Last pool tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

August 8, 2018: Swimming Pool Studying: Cheever’s Swimmer

[Ahead of my annual trip to Charlottesville with my sons, a trip that always features a good deal of swimming pool action, a series on pools and swimming in American history and culture. Leading up to a special weekend post highlighting one of my favorite pieces I’ve had the chance to write in the last year!]On the pitch-perfect story from one of our true American greats.There’s only so much room in our collective consciousness, and within that space there’s similarly only so much room for creative writing—which is to say, I understand that not every deserving author is going to be remembered. And I certainly get why John Cheever has largely vanished from our collective memories—like his contemporary John Updike (who similarly is less well-known than he was a few decades ago, although the shift has not been as dramatic in Updike’s case), Cheever tended to write stories about middle to upper-middle class men and families, characters whose identities and communities don’t seem quite multi-cultural enough, nor their problems significant enough, for our 21st century moment. There would be various ways to push back on those ideas, to argue that our literary canon can and should contain Cheever and Jhumpa Lahiri, and as many other voices as possible. But the simplest and most vital argument might be this: like Lahiri, Cheever was quite simply a master of the short story; there’s no experience quite like reading a perfect short story, and Cheever produced at least a few works that make it into that exclusive category. One of his very best also happens to fit this week’s series perfectly; it’s called “The Swimmer” (1964), and it’s about … no, enough from me. Just read it at that link, and lose yourself in the deceptively shallow waters of Cheever’s funny yet tragic, satirical yet sympathetic tale.You know what? There’s not only so much room in our collective consciousness, not in this 21st century world of digital archives and virtual classrooms and ever-expanding conversations. If we can work to remember any great writing, we can work to remember all of it—and Cheever and his story are a pretty good place to start.Next pool tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

August 7, 2018: Swimming Pool Studying: Weissmuller and Phelps

[Ahead of my annual trip to Charlottesville with my sons, a trip that always features a good deal of swimming pool action, a series on pools and swimming in American history and culture. Leading up to a special weekend post highlighting one of my favorite pieces I’ve had the chance to write in the last year!]On the two Olympians whose divergent narratives reveal a great deal about their respective eras.America has had its share of Olympic stars, but I don’t know that any have been more successful, or more famous, than Johnny Weissmuller and Michael Phelps. Weissmuller won five swimming golds, a bronze in water polo, and numerous other medals at the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics (along with 52 US National Championships during the decade); he then went on to an epic Hollywood career over the next twenty-five years, starring in a dozen Tarzan films and thirteen in the Jungle Jim series (which also became a short-lived TV show). Phelps is the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, winning 22 total medals across the 2004, 2008, and 2012 Summer games, and his 8 golds in 2008 were also an all-time individual record; he has since started his own charitable foundation and begun to work as an advocate for swimming and health initiatives, amassing nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers in the process.That last clause already highlights just how distinct fame and celebrity have become in the nearly 90 years between Weissmuller and Phelps’ Olympic triumphs—not only because our 21st century stars (in sports as in every other arena) are expected (if not indeed required) to interact with the public quite consistently and thoroughly, but also because the lives of those stars are just as consistently and thoroughly scrutinized by that public (through its media middlemen). As a result, Phelps’ missteps and problems—a party where he apparently smoked pot, an arrest for DUI, various romantic misadventures—have been chronicled and dissected time and again; Weissmuller, on the other hand, was married five times between 1931 and 1963 (the years during which he was at the height of his film success) but received far less public scrutiny or critique for those personal details.The causes of this shift are obvious enough—the proliferating mass media and 24-hour news cycle, the rise of the internet and social media, changing journalistic ethics and agendas. But it’s also possible to argue that Weissmuller and Phelps illustrate an under-noticed effect of this shift in public attention. Phelps’ life and work are far from over, but it’s difficult at best to imagine him going on to a thirty-year acting career, or staying in the public eye in any capacity for that long; or, more exactly, it’s difficult to imagine anyone wanting to do so, given all that such celebrity requires and entails. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of yesterday’s text, famously wrote that “There are no second acts in American lives”—Weissmuller certainly proved him wrong (although Fitzgerald was, in fairness, referring principally to the possibility of a second act revival after a first act collapse); but perhaps such second acts will indeed prove far harder to achieve in our 21st century moment.Next pool tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

August 6, 2018: Swimming Pool Studying: Gatsby’s Pool

[Ahead of my annual trip to Charlottesville with my sons, a trip that always features a good deal of swimming pool action, a series on pools and swimming in American history and culture. Leading up to a special weekend post highlighting one of my favorite pieces I’ve had the chance to write in the last year!]On the tragic dip that’s as difficult to pin down as the man taking it.Jay Gatsby spends his final moments relaxing in his home’s luxurious swimming pool. As Nick Carraway is about to leave his neighbor for what turns out to be the last time, Gatsby’s gardener arrives to drain the pool; fall is arriving and he’s worried that “leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.” But Gatsby asks him to hold off for one more day, noting to Nick, “you know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer.” And so it is during Gatsby’s first and only dip in his own swimming pool, lying on “a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer,” that the grieving George Wilson arrives, an “ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” Wilson is armed and crazed, seeking vengeance for the death of his wife Myrtle, and kills both Gatsby and himself.It’s a striking and evocative image and moment, as so many of Fitzgerald’s are. And like so many others in the novel, it seems clearly symbolic—but of what, exactly? The imminent shift in seasons feels significant—Gatsby is a novel of summer, and here the season has ended but Gatsby is not willing to let it go, not least because he has not yet had a chance to enjoy it. Or perhaps the pool is simply a microcosm of Gatsby’s palatial home—the height of luxury and excess, of the Roaring 20s and their decadent atmosphere, but offering those thrills less for its actual owner (who barely makes use of it as anything other than a host for visitors) and more for all those guests who come to bathe in its excesses. Or maybe it’s just the final irony in a novel full of them—Gatsby finally takes a moment to relax, for what feels like the first time in years, and looks what it gets him.All of those interpretations hold water (sorry), but I would also note a historical context that it’s easy for us 21st century readers to forget: like so many of the novel’s crucial social and technological features (cars, Hollywood films, recorded music), an in-ground swimming pool in the early 1920s represented a striking innovation. The first such pools in America had been open for less than two decades, and were generally public or communal spaces; it was not until more than two decades later, after World War II, that they would become part of the typical imagery of the ideal American home. So as with every aspect of Gatsby’s success, here too he would seem to have been ahead of the curve, helping to embody the American Dream—as well as its dark and violent undersides—as it would continue to develop for the rest of the American Century, and into our own.Next pool tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

August 4-5, 2018: Kathleen Morrissey’s Guest Post: The Bubbles and Borders that Limit Our Immigration Debates

[Formerly one of the shining stars of the Fitchburg State English Studies program, Kathleen Morrissey has moved into the next stages of her career very impressively: professing at multiple universities in Massachusetts, publishing on 18thcentury travel writing and fiction, and, as evidenced by this great Guest Post, entering into our public conversations about politics and social justice, veganism and animal rights, health and fitness, music and pop culture, and much more. I’m very excited to share the thoughts of this rapidly rising star in my latest Guest Post!]
The Bubbles and Borders that Limit Our Immigration Debates
I had a polite conversation in the kitchen at a child’s birthday party. The people in the room were trying to avoid the screaming match in the living room between some of the parents. The topic of discussion was the polemical question: what do we think about immigration?
I covered up the noise with small talk and chips. However, as a professor of composition and rhetoric, I detected a trend in their arguments anyway: they screamed about closing the borders, pointed to specific cases of MS-13 crime, and demanded sources other than “Fake News” CNN. The phrase, “Where are your sources?”, echoed throughout the house.   
The heated debate just called attention to an impossible border between the sides. The unsolicited argument was only effective at making the other party guests feel voiceless. Their respective media bubbles filtered out opposing views and fed narratives rather than facts, making discussion futile. It was as if the party was a microcosm of the country. Before we can even talk about the literal border that delineates the country, we need to address the rhetorical borders we uphold in our perspectives that prevent any meaningful communication. 
The evidentiary threshold for facts that challenge a person’s narrative is set impossibly high.  People will only lower the bar for news that suits them. Fact checking is useless because “Fake News” is now an acceptable charge. Therefore, it is important to not debate about the facts; it is about what facts matter.You have to discern the rhetorical dishonesties instead. For example, TIME magazine’s famous cover , “Welcome to America,” became a potent symbol for the ongoing immigration issue of family separation at the border. TIME recently clarified that the young girl on the cover was in fact not carried away from her mother by U.S. Border patrol agents, but stood by the message conveyed in the iconic image. On the other hand, conservative sites ran with this image as “Fake News.”
For TIME and those who agree, the particulars of the image are not as important as the larger idea it symbolizes. The photograph serves as a stand-in that succinctly captures the despair that many families have and will experience over something as nominal as documentation status. For conservatives, the fact that matters is that the photo is staged and therefore not literally true; the girl is a prop to convey something that she is not a part of. 
In a world of “Fake News,” the conversation cannot be a flurry of facts from each side. It needs to focus on the unspoken assumptions behind the use of the facts. While what conservative sites say may be factual, it is a disturbing method of diverting attention away from the message of the cover. The cover is only a topic of discussion because the particulars of family can be used to dismiss the entire issue. It isn’t enough that the photo was staged. Sites highlight that the mother left her other children, broke the law, and wasn’t fleeing crisis. She not only is a bad example of separation; she is emblematic of everything the right fears about immigrants. In this view, she is a criminal seeking a backdoor into a better lifestyle, willing to sacrifice her family. No individual will ever fit a perfect model of immigration, so the focus will always be on a person’s shortcomings to preserve the status quo. 
Returning to the debate, I listened to people zoom in on crimes of MS-13 to bloom out to opinions about thousands of immigrants. This is a typical composition/division fallacy; make a true claim about one part and characterize the whole. Right wing pundits say “undocumented immigrant” and “violent gang member” in the same breath, dangerously eliding the two. It is a limitation of empathy to extend focus on the victims of MS-13 and to strictly imagine all of the immigrants as criminals. 
Beneath the gestures to gang violence in defense of border control lies a cold calculation: the lives affected by MS-13 simply matter more than the countless lives affected by the stringent immigration policies. The obsession around the transgressions at an imaginary border is actually an egregious transgression in itself. Their selection of certain facts occludes the larger humanitarian crisis inflamed by the immigration policy. Thus, the way we approach arguments with people entrenched in different media bubbles should be focused on the rhetorical borders we construct. That way, we can productively talk about the assumptions that guide the narratives against the basic rights and humanity of undocumented immigrants. 
[Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. What do you think?]

August 4-5, 2018: Virginia Historic Sites

[On July 30th, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that rebellion and other 17th century histories, leading up to this special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]As you might expect from a Cville-born-and-raised AmericanStudier, I’ve written a lot about Virginia sites over this blog’s 7.75 years! Here’s a list (in no particular order) of many of those posts, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of them or any other sites (Virginia or beyond) you’d share!Staunton’s Frontier Culture MuseumColonial WilliamsburgTJ’s Monticello(and an app on slavery there)The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy CenterFairfax Court HouseJamestownLynchburgLexingtonThree beautiful lakesNewport NewsThe University of Virginia’s African American CemeteryThe Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art MuseumAnd, natch, a weeklong series of posts on Cville itselfNext series starts Monday,BenPS. Other historic sites, in Virginia or elsewhere, that you’d highlight?

August 3, 2018: 17th Century Histories: Brothers Among Nations

[On July 30th, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories, leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]On a different and more inspiring vision of the arrival era.
If you’ve been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I first advanced in this space in my December 5, 2011 post (and have returned to in many others since) might be “So what?” I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in the “Whatwouldchange” seriesof posts (written the week that the book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like “All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods.
When it comes to the arrival and contact period, for example, for a long time our national narratives of the first European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedyand Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many proteststhat met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s “discovery” for those cultures.
There’s certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt’s Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660 . Van Zandt’s book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17th and 18th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21st century lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?

August 2, 2018: 17th Century Histories: New Amsterdam

[On July 30th, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories, leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]On two ways the Dutch colonial city helps us rethink early American histories.For forty years, New Amsterdam was the capital of the Dutch New Netherland colony in the Americas. After English explorer Henry Hudson (sailing at the time for the Dutch, who knew him as Hendrick Hudson) explored the area in 1609, a series of subsequent voyages and endeavors culminated in the May 1624 arrival of the ship New Netherland, carrying Dutch West India Company operative Cornelius Jacobsen Mey and thirty Dutch families who disembarked on Manhattan Island and established the first European settlement there (one subsequently legitimized by Peter Minuit’s famous or infamous 1626 purchase of the island from the Lenape Native American tribe for 60 Dutch guilders). The city would grow exponentially over the next few decades, and would remain the political capital of New Netherland until it was abruptly and illegally taken by the English in August 1664, an event that precipated the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667) which culminated with the Treaty of Breda and the official handover of the city to the English and its renaming as New York (after the Duke of York, brother of the English King Charles II).Those histories are crucial to better remembering the specifics of New York’s origins and evolution, a fact that one of the region’s first “historians,” Washington Irving’s alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker, knew well. But there are also broader effects to adding New Amsterdam to our national collective memories. For one thing, as I have argued in many different arenas including my second and third books, America’s origin points—however and wherever we locate them—are far more multicultural, multinational, and multilingual than many of our longstanding national narratives have posited. Even if there were no particularly tangible post-transition remnants of the Dutch in New York (which is not the case, on which more in a moment), there are of course precious few such remnants of any 17th century community or culture, and that has never stopped us (and should never stop us) from remembering communities like the Plimoth Plantation Puritans or Jamestown English colony as foundational parts of that early American landscape. While the stakes of shifting such collective memories of foundational American communities are particularly high when it comes to originating and longstanding Hispanic American ones like St. Augustine or San Diego, we should likewise consider the Dutch in New Amsterdam (along with the French in the Midwest, the Russians in Alaska, and many others) as part of that originating post-contact landscape.Yet it’s also far from the case that the Dutch disappeared from the city as or after it became New York (no more than Mexicans did from San Diego’s Old Town after the 1850 US annexation of California, to cite one parallel example). I think there’s some collective knowledge of details like Wall Street’s Dutch origins, and thus of linguistic and memorial legacies of the city’s first European settlers into its post-transition identity. The same was true of many of the city’s physical spaces, such as Jan Van Bonnel’s East River saw mill that remained in operation after the transition before being purchased and turned into a leather mill a decade later by English settlers George Elphinstone and Abraham Shotwell. But I would argue that the most significant enduring presence—if also a far more difficult one to pin down—was of the people themselves; I find it very hard to believe that all of those by-then multigenerational Dutch settlers and families simply vacated the city after the transition (Van Bonnel certainly did not), and believe it much more likely that at least some (if not most) remained and became part of the evolving city of New York. Which is to say, a city like New Orleans is famous for how many different languages have always been spoken on its streets, but to my mind that’s a central part of the origin story of nearly all American cities, with New Amsterdam/New York prominent among them.Last 17thcentury history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?