Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 235

March 24-25, 2018: Black Panther Studying: Ryan Coogler’s Films

[Few pop culture texts have exploded into our collective consciousness more than Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied this film phenomenon, leading up to this special weekend post on Ryan Coogler’s three films to date!]On three striking choices that emblematize Coogler’s unique and vital American voice.1)      Fruitvale Station (2013): I wrote about Fruitvale’s real-life subject Oscar Grant in this post, and about showing the film in my First-year Writing II class here. But while Michael B. Jordan’s complex, flawed, compelling, and always human Oscar is of course the film’s center, to me Coogler’s most important choice is to make Grant’s girlfriend Sophina(played with just as much complex humanity by Melonie Diaz) a second focal character and perspective on the film’s events. Along with Tessa Thompson’s character Biancain Creed, Sophina reflects a filmmaker who, despite a clear focus on male protagonists, has always been deeply interested in creating strong female characters without whom these stories and films would quite simply not work. There’s a clear through-line from these characters to the many Black Panther female leads about whom I wrote in Thursday’s post.2)      Creed (2015): I’ll admit that I was a bit concerned when I first heard that Coogler’s follow-up to Fruitvale would be a film in the Rocky franchise, which to my mind is an example of a series that began with a thoughtful independent film and had devolved into profoundly mindless popcorn entertainments. But Coogler, co-screenwriter Aaron Covington, Michael B. Jordan, and Sylvester Stallone delivered a film that very satisfyingly checks off all the sports movie boxes while honoring the spirit and voice of that very first Rocky. By far my favorite aspect of Creed is its emphasis on family , and not just in the obvious way that making Jordan’s protagonist Adonis Johnson the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed would necessitate. Instead, without losing any of its sports movie thrills Creedmanages to ask hard questions about family, race, class, and community. There’s a clear through-line from that thematic richness in a blockbuster film to Coogler’s ability to bring the same depth to Black Panther. 3)      Black Panther (2018): All those through-lines have helped lead to Panther, and to the kinds of complex elements and choices about which I’ve written all week. So here I’ll highlight one other (SEMI-SPOILER-Y) choice that helps make Panther such a moving and multi-layered film: the many sequences in which key characters are ceremonially buried in order to visit the spirit world and their deceased fathers. Not only T’Challa but also Erik Killmonger gets the chance to make this ceremonial, spiritual, and deeply personal journey, and in each case the bravura sequences open up new sides to both these protagonists and their fathers, as well as to key themes and questions in the film. If there’s one thing that links all my points in this post, it’s Coogler’s ability to bring thematic and perspectival depth to multiple characters and threads within his films—and for that reason among many others I quite simply can’t wait for Creed 2 , the recently announced Black Panther sequel, and wherever else Coogler’s career takes him and us.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on the film or its contexts?

March 23, 2018: Black Panther Studying: Liberia, Garvey, and Wakanda

[Few pop culture texts have exploded into our collective consciousness more than Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into a handful of other contexts and connections!]On two historical American images of Africa and this contemporary cinematic one.First and foremost, I can’t pretend I have as much to say about American images of Africa as does Jelani Cobb, who says a great deal in the second hyperlinked piece in the bracketed intro above. But as I watched the film, and witnessed a breathtaking vision of an African nation imagined largely by Americans (director Ryan Coogler and his co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole), I couldn’t help but think of two prior American visions of the continent. For one thing, there was the early 19th century vision that led to the creation of Liberia, a country specifically imagined by the American Colonization Society (ACS) as an African space for former slaves. Whatever we make of the motivations behind that creation—and they seem to me to have been somewhat beneficent but largely racist (or at least unable to imagine a place for African Americans in America)—it reflects an image of Africa as both a past and future alternative to America, a space for Americans of color to reconnect with an ancestral homeland and in so doing create a new 19th century community.Nearly a century later, the Jamaican American leader and activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) imagined a strikingly similar role for Liberia and Africa. Garvey’s complex social movement, which originated in 1914 with his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and became known as the “Back to Africa” movement, likewise saw Liberia specifically (and the continent more broadly) as a space of both historical significance and future possibility for African American and African Caribbean communities alike. Unlike the white-led American Colonization Society, Garvey and his fellow UNIA leaders were themselves African American and African Caribbean, and they linked their vision of Africa to a proto-Black Pride perspective and movement. Yet at the same time, Garvey’s vision of Africa was nearly as imaginary as that of the ACS, based far more on experiences in Jamaica and the United States than on any specific engagement with African communities and nations. That doesn’t necessarily render his overall movement problematic (virtually all immigration stories begin with imagined visions of other nations, after all), but it does reflect an enduring role of Africa in the American consciousness.Coogler and Cole work hard in Black Panther to create an image of an African nation (and/or to build on those images already created in the comic, of course) as entirely separate and distinct from America (or anywhere else): Wakanda has literally been hidden from the rest of the world for the entirety of existence. But these historical American images of Africa still find echoes in their film, I would argue. For one thing, Erik Killmonger’s lifelong desire to return to Wakanda (literally his ancestral homeland and also the site of his imagined ideal future) is not at all unlike those of the ACS and (especially) Garvey, complete with an expression of global Black Pride that will be centered on this idealized African nation. And for another [SPOILERS FOLLOW], the film’s ultimate depiction of Wakanda’s global role—as an iconic African nation that can positively influence communities of color around the world (and not only communities of color, but it’s important that the first site is the Oakland neighborhood where Killmonger grew up)—still feels shaped by the kinds of idealized images of African collective identity imagined by those colonization and emigration movements. Wakanda is, and should be, many things, but to me there’s no doubt that one of them is another American image of Africa.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on the film or its contexts?

March 22, 2018: Black Panther Studying: Gender and Violence

[Few pop culture texts have exploded into our collective consciousness more than Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into a handful of other contexts and connections!]On two distinct and opposed associations of gender with violence, and what links them.A number of celebrations of Black Panther have noted that if features many more badass, butt-kicking, nuanced female heroes than did the year’s other most prominent superhero smash, Wonder Woman. I’m not a big fan of pitting films against each other in that way, as I’d always rather see texts and culture (like history) as additive, a chance to celebrate multiple worthy subjects rather than to see our commemoration as a zero-sum game. But leaving Wonder Woman aside, there’s no doubt that Black Panther features more prominent female heroes and leads than any other superhero film I’ve ever seen or heard of (and pretty much all other blockbuster films as well): not only the Dora Milaje, the army of legendary female warriors who protect T’Challa and Wakanda; but also T’Challa’s friend and love interest Nakia (a Wakandan spy and operative whom we meet rescuing a group of kidnapped African women and girls) and his sister Shuri (Wakanda’s director of technology and a worthy rival to James Bond’s Q as the film’s provider of amazing gadgets and great one-liners). In their own distinct but parallel ways, all of these women are at least as badass as T’Challa, and reflect a nation and universe where women can be butt-kicking superheroes with no asterisks or limitations.Interestingly enough, the film’s villain, Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger, represents a very distinct side to gender and violence. While Killmonger’s perspective and plan are at least somewhat sympathetic (as I discussed in Tuesday’s post), one of the traits that most clearly denotes the character as a supervillain is his tendency to threaten, abuse, and kill women (an analysis I first heard articulated by my friend Kathleen Morrissey). [SPOILERS FOLLOW] From his shocking and brutal (and seemingly unaffected) killing of his own girlfriend when she stands in the way of his objectives, to his mistreatment and abuse of numerous Wakandan women (many of them elders), to his willingness (fortunately thwarted) to kill the teenage Shuri in the film’s climactic battle, Killmonger quite simply directs the majority of his on-screen rage and violence toward female characters. In an era when we’ve finally begun to have the necessary and long overdue conversation about the relationship between domestic violence and mass shootings, the association of Killmonger’s violence with his treatment of women seems far from coincidental or random.These two sides to women and violence in Black Panthercould be seen as contradictory—that is, if women are just as badass as men (and consistently they are in the film, if they’re not indeed more so), then how can we also see them as victims of a man like Killmonger? But I would argue instead that these two threads are interconnected, linked by a shared and seemingly common sense but in fact striking (especially in an action blockbuster) idea: that female characters can contribute just as much to a film, have just as much to offer its plot, themes, and world, as do male ones. In recent weeks a chart made the viral rounds detailing the percentages of dialogue of male and female characters (who speak more than 100 words in a film) in the last couple decades of Best Picture Oscar winners; suffice it to say that even in the best cases the balance was significantly tilted toward male characters. I haven’t seen a breakdown for Black Panther, although I’m pretty sure it’s far more evenly distributed; but in any case, this is a blockbuster action film with more significant female than male characters, and one in which those female characters contribute to the plot, themes, and world on multiple crucial levels. Ideally I wouldn’t have to point out such a fact as noteworthy, and perhaps films like Black Panther will help us get to that point.Last Panther post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on the film or its contexts?

March 21, 2018: Black Panther Studying: Everett Ross

[Few pop culture texts have exploded into our collective consciousness more than Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into a handful of other contexts and connections!]On an unfortunate change to a longstanding character, and its important role nonetheless.As my friend and colleague Matthew Teutsch has detailed in a couple of thoughtful blog posts, the character of Everett Ross has been part of the Black Panther universe for a couple decades. Indeed, this Special Attachéfor the Office of the Chief of Protocol (a US State Department position) wasn’t just a central character during Christopher Priest’s 1998-2003 run with the comic; he served as Priest’s narrator and the audience’s primary perspectival lens on T’Challa, Wakanda, and their stories. That Ross was overtly described as “the emperor of useless white boys” only makes Priest’s use of him that much more complex and compelling, a provocative way to engage directly with white (and all) audience perceptions of both a black African superhero like T’Challa, who the protagonists of superhero comics typically are and aren’t, and the issue of race in comics overall.By the time he appeared in the film Black Panther, Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross had already been introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a role in Captain America: Civil War, and with one key change from his identity in the comic: he now works for the CIA. That change was perhaps necessary for Civil War, as a State Department functionary wouldn’t be in charge of a major counter-terrorism task force as the character needed to be in that film. But Marvel always thinks in terms of the big picture, setting up threads that will pay off many films down the road, and quite frankly making the one white good guy in Black Panther a representative of the CIA was a seriously problematic move. To put it bluntly, a major plot thread and theme in Black Panther is the relationship of the Wakandan nation and regime to the rest of the world; and to say that the CIA has a checkered history when it comes to America’s relationship to the international community, and particularly to regimes with whom we are not allied, would be to severely understate the case. While there’s no specific reason to believe that the film’s Ross is seeking to overthrow or undermine T’Challa’s regime, there are countless general reasons to think so; and in any case a knowledge of that history makes it almost impossible to see Ross (whom the film asks to contribute significantly to T’Challa’s final victories) as anything other than a potential threat to our hero.I don’t think that’s an intended effect of Coogler’s or the film’s, but I would also say that the change in Ross’s character is not entirely a bad thing. After all (SCENE SPOILERS HERE), in one of the film’s most surprising and funny moments, Wakandan tribal leader M’Baku (the mesmerizing Winston Duke) and his underlings repeatedly silence Ross as he attempts to offer his unhelpful perspective on a situation, barking over him until he stops talking. To see a white character silenced by a group of black characters in this manner would be striking in any film; to see a powerful US government representative silenced by African tribesmen, and in a moment and way where the audience is entirely positioned to sympathize with the tribesmen and laugh at the CIA agent’s humiliation, is quite simply stunning. The moment wouldn’t have nearly the same power if Ross were a low-level bureaucrat, or if we didn’t have that overall historical sense of the CIA’s role in relationship to such African and world communities. Moreover, I might even argue that Ross’s helpful contributions to the film’s climactic battle are at least partly set up by this moment; that is, that the powerful American official has to be laid low before he can truly recognize and act upon what Wakanda needs from him, rather than the other way around (as has so thoroughly been the case in world history). One more layer to a film that’s full of them!Next Panther post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on the film or its contexts?

March 20, 2018: Black Panther Studying: Erik Killmonger

[Few pop culture texts have exploded into our collective consciousness more than Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into a handful of other contexts and connections!]On the fascinating debate over and layers to the film’s most American character.To say that Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, the Black Panther villain played to complex perfection by Ryan Coogler’s longtime collaborator (and to this AmericanStudier forever The Wire’s lovable and tragic Wallace ) Michael B. Jordan, has inspired debate and controversy would be to severely understate the case. In my experience, comic book and film supervillains are hardly ever particularly sympathetic, and their plans even less so; that is, even if a supervillain has a backstory that makes us understand their rage or pain (such as Spiderman 2’s Doc Ock ), they tend to turn those emotions into plans for world destruction that are designed to produce audience opposition just as much as superheroic resistance. Yet with Killmonger it’s the exact opposite—while the character himself is pretty unlikable, his political perspective and plans are not only understandable and sympathetic, but for many progressives feel far more in line with racial and global realities than does the perspective of the film’s superhero protagonist T’Challa (at least for the majority of the story).It seems quite likely to me that at least some of that agreement stems from Killmonger’s status as the film’s most American character (rivaled only by CIA agent Everett Ross, on whom more tomorrow). Long before he became Killmonger, young Erik was an African-American kid growing up on the streets of Ryan Coogler’s own hometown, Oakland in the early 1990s. Although we only see a couple brief moments of that childhood, Coogler’s own prior films, among many other cultural sources (such as the aforementioned link of Jordan to the character of Wallace, a young man just as smart and charismatic as Erik Stevens) and historical contexts, give viewers—especially American viewers—plenty of ways to imagine and understand the broader contours of that setting and those experiences. I’m not suggesting that Erik necessarily or at least solely has to be defined in relationship to the American cultural archetype of a boy in the hood, but I’m not sure there’s any way that a culturally literature viewer could entirely separate him from that longstanding pop culture type and trope. And unless that viewer is a racist, such an association makes it almost inevitable that he or she will sympathize with Erik’s perspective and worldview.Yet that’s only the first of two ways in which Erik Stevens can be defined as particularly American, and the second significantly shifts the narrative and our sympathies. The nickname of Killmonger, as T’Challa and the audience eventually learn from CIA agent Ross, originated from Stevens’ extensive and especially brutal service in the Black Ops special forces, where, as he himself puts it, “I trained, I lied, I killed just to get here. I killed in America, Afghanistan, Iraq … I took life from my own brothers and sisters right here on this continent [Africa]!” This global record of killing might make clear Stevens’ propensity and even preference for violence (certainly his actions in the film reflect such a preference), but it also marks him as profoundly American. And not primarily in villainous ways—the current crop of TV shows about Seal Team Six and other special forces units are only the latest in a long line of cultural celebrations of this particular brand of American abroad. What those special forces do, however, most consistently and purposefully, is kill, in settings and ways that lay bare the limits of international law or human rights concerns when it comes to protecting American interests. Which means if Erik Stevens is an American villain, he’s one complicatedly connected to some of our most celebrated national heroes.Next Panther post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on the film or its contexts?

March 19, 2018: Black Panther Studying: The Original Comic

[Few pop culture texts have exploded into our collective consciousness more than Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into a handful of other contexts and connections!]On Black Powers, super- and political.In the July 1966 issue of Fantastic Four, legendary comics duo Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created their newest character, the Black Panther. Other black characters had appeared in various supporting roles in American comics, but the Panther—really a super-powered African prince named T’challa from the fictional nation of Wakanda—is generally considered the first mainstream black superhero. If so, Lee and Kirby, and their successors in writing and illustrating the character, have done that pioneering idea full credit, creating a character with as rich a backstory and mythos, home “world,” familial and romantic life, and powers and personality as any of his peers in the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Marvel Universe overall.From what I can tell it was coincidental that the Panther’s debut was followed three months later by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s October 1966 creation of the Black Panther Party(or at least there seem to be no explicit references to any connection between the two Panthers); both might have been responding to the well-known African American World War II tank battalion, among other potential origins for the name. But in any case the timing reflects the complexity of the American racial, social, cultural, and political world into which Lee and Kirby’s character arrived, both within the comic (as an African immigrant to the United States; or perhaps simply a visitor, as he often returns to his home country in the comics) and as a cultural presence. This was a character who was literally the most powerful individual within his African homeland, coming to a world in which the very concept of Black Power (also newly coined in 1966) was a revolutionary one.So when Stokely Carmichael led those SNCC marchers in the cry of “We want Black Power!,” would the release (just a month later) of the debut Black Panther story have satisfied them? Obviously a comic book superhero is not the equivalent of meaningful political or social change—but the Panther did represent a significant cultural shift, or at least an addition to the mainstream cultural landscape, and such cultural developments have their own value to be sure. Moreover, it’s possible to argue that such cultural shifts can produce social or political ones—as, for example, a generation of comic fans grows up rooting for a super-powered, socially responsible, Ku Klux Klan-fighting African prince, the concept of Black Power moves from an abstraction or a potential division to, ideally, a shared and obvious part of our world. Sounds pretty super-heroic to me.Next Panther post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on the film or its contexts?

March 12-18, 2018: Spring Break

AmericanStudier is taking the week off while I finish a few writing projects, grade a bunch, and try to find some sunshine in a global warming Massachusetts March (which has become the snowiest month of the year up here). I’ll be back with new posts beginning with a Black Panther series that starts Monday the 19th! See you then, and have a great week,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

March 10-11, 2018: Boston Massacre Studying: My Sons’ Thoughts

[On March 5th, 1770, the events that came to be known as the Boston Massacre took place on King Street. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts for that pivotal pre-Revolutionary moment, leading up to this special Guest Post from my sons based on their elementary school studies of the massacre.]As part of a Revolutionary era Social Studies unit in 5th grade (one for which I was fortunate enough to be able to come in each year to talk to their class about Revolutionary slaves in Massachusetts), each of my sons has spent a good bit of time studying the Boston Massacre and its contexts (my older son last year, my younger son this year). Since their picture has adorned this blog throughout its 7.5 years of existence, I thought it was long past time to add their voices into the mix a bit more fully!As you might expect with two young men so close in age (and many other ways), they had the same main answer when I asked what they’d want to focus on for a Guest Post on the Massacre: both are particularly interested in the many mistakes or misrepresentations in Paul Revere’s famous engraving “Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in Kings Street in Boston” (which itself was apparently a copy of an earlier work, as I discussed in yesterday’s post). When I asked for some specific examples, here’s the list they came up with together:“It looks like the Redcoats are being ordered to fire but they weren’t; Crispus Attucks was painted as white to make the Southern colonies care more about the casualties; Revere portrayed many fewer colonists than were really there; He included a dog with the colonists to make them more sympathetic; He put a butcher shop behind the Redcoats to suggest a connection of them to butchers; He portrayed the colonists as unarmed when really some had rocks or clubs or other makeshifts weapons; and he set the event during the day in order to make it more clear and visible.”We talked a bit more as well about propaganda, and about how it’s possible for a text like Revere’s both to represent certain histories and yet to depict them in constructed ways designed to achieve particular purposes. As usual, I learned at least as much from the boys as they did from me!Spring Break coming up and the next series starts Monday the 19th,BenPS. What do you think?

March 9, 2018: Boston Massacre Studying: Collective Memory Media

[On March 5th, 1770, the events that came to be known as the Boston Massacre took place on King Street. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that pivotal pre-Revolutionary moment, leading up to a special Guest Post from my sons based on their elementary school studies of the massacre.]On three media that have contributed to our collective memories of the Massacre.1)      Pamphlets: As you might expect from the era that gave us Tom Paine and the Declaration being distributed instantly to read aloud, rapid-fire political pamphlets became a weapon of choice for both sides in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath. The colonists had A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston and its sequel, Additional Observations to A Short Narrative , which gathered depositions from numerous witnesses (or at least alleged witnesses) to make the case against the British soldiers. Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson produced his own pamphlet, A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance in Boston , which used contrasting depositions gathered by Hutchinson’s agents to tell an alternative story. I don’t imagine that any of the texts in this pamphlet propaganda battle did much to sway supporters of the opposing perspective, but at the very least they provide a compelling set of contemporary accounts of the events in King Street and their collective interpretations.2)      Engravings: By far the most famous such propagandistic portrayal of the Massacre was a visual one, however. My weekend Guest Posters will have more to say about the propaganda behind the famous Paul Revere engraving, which is so mythically remembered that it turns out it wasn’t even initially created by Paul Revere—his was apparently a copy (famously published in the Boston Gazette) of an artistic rendering by the young artist Henry Pelham (John Singleton Copley’s half-brother). And as that last hyperlinked story indicates, there were at least a couple other contemporary engravings that entered the image competition around the same time, muddying the waters of artistic originality and collective copying yet further. For an event so dependent upon different and competing histories and collective memories, it’s only appropriate that the visual representations became a multi-vocal conflict in their own right, a battle to determine whose rendering became and remained the definitive portrayal. 3)      Memorials: Both the pamphlet and engraving battles unfolded in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath; precisely because of those and many other heated and contested histories and stories, it took far, far longer for any more permanent commemoration to be constructed. Indeed, it was not until 1888 that a memorial was erected on Boston Common, the same time that the Massacre’s five immediate casualties were reinterred beneath a new gravestone in the city’s historic Granary Burying Ground. Given that these two historic sites are now prominently located on the Freedom Trail and at the heart of tourist Boston, it would be easy for visitors to see them as longstanding commemorations, rather than the more recent additions (and thus reflections of the gradual collective embrace of the Boston Massacre participants) that they are. Which is as good a reminder as any both that memorials are themselves contested expressions of collective memory, and that we need to study and analyze them just as much as we might learn from them. Special Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

March 8, 2018: Boston Massacre Studying: Christopher Monk

[On March 5th, 1770, the events that came to be known as the Boston Massacre took place on King Street. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that pivotal pre-Revolutionary moment, leading up to a special Guest Post from my sons based on their elementary school studies of the massacre.]On the Massacre’s sixth casualty and the vagaries of historical memory.Nearly all accounts of the Boston Massacre list five colonists killed: three during the March 5thconflict itself (Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and James Caldwell); and two who died of wounds in the immediate aftermath (Samuel Maverick the next day, Patrick Carr two weeks later). Yet a sixth participant in the King Street protests, 17 year-old shipwright’s apprentice Christopher Monk, was gravely injured by the soldiers as well (he was shot in the side and the bullet passed through his body and exited above the other hip), and indeed could likewise be said to have been mortally wounded: Monk remained disabled for the next decade before succumbing to his wounds just over ten years later, on April 20th, 1780. Whether we include Monk among those killed at the Massacre or not (a possible equivalent would be soldiers wounded in battle who die years later and who in that case would not be described as being killed in action), clearly his life was permanently altered and eventually ended by the March 5th violence, making his name and story an important part of remembering the Boston Massacre’s individual and communal effects. For many years, Monk occupied precisely such a prominent position in the city’s collective memories of the Boston Massacre. Bostonians collected annual donations to support his medical needs and care, a level of public civic attention granted very few colonists (and very few Americans in the centuries since independence). He also became a fixture at the city’s annual commemorations of the Massacre, serving as both a visceral reminder of its violence and an inspiration for further proto-Revolutionary protest and resistance. While of course he had competition from Samuel Adams and the other Sons of Liberty, and eventually from Paul Revere and his nightriding cohort, I think it’s fair to say that in the years leading up to Lexington and Concord Christopher Monk was the most famous living Bostonian, and certainly the city’s most well-known individual icon of Revolutionary sentiments. Which, given the role that Boston played for all of the colonies in that period, would likewise put Monk on the short list of the most famous and noteworthy pre-Revolutionary Americans. I know of few other 1770s Bostonians whose deaths would receive extended notice in a publication like the Pennsylvania Journal & Weekly Advertiser, after all.Yet if Monk was one of Boston’s and America’s most famous individuals as of his 1780 death, over the subsequent couple centuries he has largely disappeared from our collective memories. Of course there are still accounts such as those to which I’ve hyperlinked throughout this post, but even many of those exist to make the case for Monk as a 6th casualty of the Massacre, since at this point he is not generally included in that conversation. Perhaps as a result of that specific exclusion, Monk’s name is not often associated with the Boston Massacre at all, and so the subsequent decade of disability, public care, and commemorative presence has seemingly vanished from our public historical conversations as well. That striking shift is an important reminder of the haphazard nature of what we do and don’t remember, and of how those often random trends can become self-fulfilling prophecies across centuries of education and commemoration. But as a proponent of an additive approach to collective memory, I think the most important takeaway is the need to continue learning about the past, so we can make sure that the Christopher Monks are added back into our future memories and narratives of historical moments such as the Boston Massacre.Last massacre studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?