Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 236

March 7, 2018: Boston Massacre Studying: John Adams

[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 a Founding Father’s frustrating role in the Massacre’s aftermath, and why it matters.The British soldiers who shot and killed Crispus Attucks and his compatriots on King Street were tried for murder (their leader, Captain Thomas Preston, individually; the eight others collectively) but acquitted of all charges, thanks in no small part to their lawyers, a 35 year-old Boston barrister named John Adams and his colleague Josiah Quincy. Much later in life Adams reflected on both the challenges yet what he saw as the paramount professional and historical importance of this legal assignment, writing, “The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.”Perhaps Adams was correct; but when I called his role in the Massacre’s aftermath frustrating, I was referring not to his role in defending the soldiers (and certainly not to his success in doing so, as I don’t believe any further death would have benefitted anyone), but to how he chose to make his case . Adams did so most especially by attacking Crispus Attucks and his peers, calling Attucks in his closing statement “a stout Mulatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify any person,” and then arguing, “This was the behaviour of Attucks; to whose mad behaviour, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night, is chiefly to be ascribed. And it is in this manner, this town has been often treated; a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprises, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together, and then there are not wanting, persons to ascribe all their doings to the good people of the town.” Adams could not have been clearer here about his separation of Attucks (and the Irish immigrant Carr), along with the “rabble of Negroes, etc.” to whom he linked them, from “the good people of the town,” his exclusion of these King Street protesters from the Bostonian and American identity for which he wanted to argue.That attitude is deeply problematic, and not just for how we understand Crispus Attucks and the other Boston Massacre protesters. In many ways, after all, John Adams would come to embody the Federalists, the group of Revolutionary leaders and Founding Fathers who emerged as one of the first political parties and were most fully responsible for the Constitution (it’s not a coincidence that the opposition movement to the Constitution came to be known as the Anti-Federalists). I know our historical understanding of the Constitution has come a long way from theses that it was drafted by a group of elitist white male property owners for their own personal benefit, and I’m not here to suggest that such simplistic narratives are adequate to the document and moment’s complexities. Yet just because an explanation isn’t comprehensive doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the equation—and in a period when the current dominant image of the Federalists is Hamilton’s depiction of that Federalist leader as a working-class hero and champion of the common people, it seems to me more important than ever that we remember the very different side of Federalists, and of the nation’s founding, captured by Adams’ closing statement in the Boston Massacre trials. Next massacre studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

March 6, 2018: Boston Massacre Studying: Crispus Attucks

[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 adding layers to collective memory, and what we do when we can’t know for sure.As I mentioned in last week’s post on Revolutionary slaves, my perspective on Crispus Attucks has significantly shifted over the last few years. As I imagine is the case for most American schoolchildren, today as for many decades (if not centuries, thanks in no small measure to the Paul Revere engraving about which more later in the week), I learned in some of my earliest social studies classes that one of the first casualties of the American Revolution was an African American man. While historians now believethat Attucks’ mother was the Natick (Wampanoag) Native American slave Nancy Attucks, and his father the African-born slave Prince Yonger, that doesn’t change the basic and important fact that this Boston Massacre protester and casualty was indeed an American of color. Remembering Attucks as such, and linking the story of the Boston Massacre to this compelling side to his identity, is thus a good example of a somewhat simplified but still accurate and productive form of longstanding collective memory, and a helpful reminder that mythic images of the past can at least occasionally gibe with complex historical realities.Yet as I also noted in last week’s post, the complex historical realities linked to Attucks include another that is generally not included in our collective memories (and certainly not in those taught to schoolchildren, at least not in my experience with either my own or my sons’ educations): he was a fugitive slave. Twenty years before the Boston Massacre, Attucks’ master William Brown, owner of a farm in Framingham, placed an ad in the Boston Gazette and Weekly Journal, seeking help capturing a runaway slave: “A Mulatto fellow, about 27 Years of Age, named Crispus, 6 feet 2 inches high, short cur'l hair, his knees nearer together than common.” Brown apparently never found Attucks, and perhaps by 1770 he had given up on the search; but perhaps not, and in any case every moment of Attucks’ subsequent life had to have been lived under the cloud of a possible return to slavery (if not far worse punishment). In the chapter on Revolutionary slaves in Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America, I make the case that we have to understand Attucks’ presence on King Street and defiance of the British in conjunction with this crucial and under-remembered part of his identity; I can imagine few circumstances that better highlight the fragile yet vital nature of freedom than the multi-decade experience of a fugitive slave.As for what Attucks did with those two decades of freedom between his October 1750 escape and the events of 1770, information seems to be partial and fragmented. Apparently he worked on a whaling ship for some of the early years, likely using the alias Michael Johnson; at some point he left that job to become a merchant sailor, and also seems to have worked as a ropemaker near Boston Harbor when he wasn’t aboard a ship. Perhaps we’ll learn more, although given the scanty nature of personal records for working-class Americans of the period, this might well be the most we’ll ever know about the twenty years between Attucks’ running away and his role in the Boston Massacre. That doesn’t necessarily change the facts that we do know, of course; but it does caution against extrapolating from those facts to imagine we can fully understand the 47 year-old man (if we take the age in Brown’s advertisement as accurate) who found himself clashing with British soldiers on King Street. Like so many historical figures, Attucks is and will likely remain a combination of compelling details, frustrating uncertainties, and an overarching story that reflects important histories while reminding us of the enduring gaps between the past itself and our collective memories of it.Next massacre studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

March 5, 2018: Boston Massacre Studying: Soldiers in the City

[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 two ways to contextualize the uneasy communal dynamic that precipitated the massacre.As I understand it, English soldiers had been stationed in Boston for only two years as of the 1770 Incident on King Street (as the British still refer to the Massacre). Beginning in 1768, the Crown and Royal Governor had brought such a standing military presence to the city and colony, seeking both support for increasingly unpopular taxes and policies and to quell the incipient rebellious activities in which Samuel Adams and his peers had begun to partake. Needless to say, the city’s inhabitants did not take well to this infusion of soldiers onto their streets, into their day to day lives, and into many of their public buildings and spaces (and even occasionally their homes, although as the hyperlinked article notes that took place less often than is sometimes suggested), and tensions remained consistently high throughout the period. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before those tensions exploded into something more overt and violent; in any case, explode they did in early March, 1770, with a confrontation between a handful of soldiers and a group of aggrieved Bostonians developing into a full-scale pitched conflict that left five Bostonians killed (three instantly when the soldiers began firing into the rioting crowd, and two more due to wounds). One way to contextualize and understand both those overall tensions and that moment of violent conflict is to consider the British soldiers as an occupying force. Of course as of 1770 they were part of the same overall nation and community as the Bostonians, but the same could technically be said of the American soldiers who occupied the Philippines in the early 20th century, and clearly many Filipinos felt that the US troops were an army of occupation nonetheless. Seen in that light, the events of the Boston Massacre could be described as a form of insurgency, of native resistance against such an army of occupation. Since much of the last century-plus of American history (or at least foreign policy) has involved insurgent campaigns against US occupying armies, from the Philippines to the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, Vietnam to Iraq, I can understand why it might be difficult for us to conceptualize our Revolutionary activists as themselves part of such an insurgency (or, to take it a step further and more controversially still, to see Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty as insurgent terrorists). But in many ways, the dynamic of occupation and insurgency seems to capture quite effectively the relationship between these intruding British soldiers and the Bostonians seeking to push back on their presence in their city and community.Yet at the same time, there are various ways in which that dynamic doesn’t line up as well with the complex historical realities of the situation, and perhaps the most overt has to do with the sizable contingent of Bostonians (and Americans) who were and would remain Loyalists to the Crown. It’s not just that we need to remember that not all Bostonians saw the British soldiers as a hostile presence, although certainly there was likely a spectrum of opinions that reflect the breadth of American perspectives on the ongoing relationship with England overall. Instead, the importance of remembering the Loyalist Bostonians is that doing so reminds us that the move toward the Revolution was far from inevitable, and thus that individual moments like the Boston Massacre were not necessarily steps toward a definite endpoint as much as chaotic and uncertain encounters between various American contingencies and communities. The lead-up to any historical event can seem in hindsight like a foregone conclusion, just as the Revolution’s eventual outcome can make the Loyalist cause seem doomed from the outset. But neither of those things were the slightest bit true in 1770, a moment instead when various American and English communities met together on the streets of a city that was still very much all of theirs.Next massacre studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

March 3-4, 2018: February 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]January 29: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Bad News Bears and Boys: A Super Bowl sports movie series starts with our obsession with lovable losers, and the problem with it.January 30: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Hoosiers and Rudy: The series continues with the appeal of underdog champions, and the untold sides to their stories.January 31: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Longest Yard(s): What the changes between an original and a remake can tell us about America, as the series rolls on.February 1: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook: The interesting results when an unconventional filmmaker works in a conventional genre.February 2: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Remember the Titans: The series concludes with the over-the-top scene that shouldn’t work, and why it somehow does.February 3-4: Crowd-sourced SportsMovieStudying: For Super Bowl weekend, crowd-sourced sports movie responses and nominations—be a good sport and add yours in comments, please!February 5: Famous Boy Scouts: Michael Jordan and Hank Aaron: A series for the Scouts’ birthday starts with comparisons and contrasts between two iconic athletes.February 6: Famous Boy Scouts: Neil Armstrong and George Takei: The series continues with two different, equally groundbreaking forms of extraterrestrial exploration.February 7: Famous Boy Scouts: John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart: Two Hollywood legacies and a film that purposefully complicates both, as the series rolls on.February 8: Famous Boy Scouts: William Boyce: On the Scouts’ 108thbirthday, their quasi-mythic origin story and some very real, complex subsequent histories.February 9: Famous Boy Scouts: Alfred Kinsey and Bill Gates: The series concludes with two Scouts who changed the world, and whether the organization has changed with it.February 10-11: The Scouts in Context: A colleague contextualizes the Scouts with an international organization in this special weekend post.February 12: Songs I Love: Dar Williams’ “After All”: A Valentine’s series on favorite songs starts with the difficult and crucial skill this song models.February 13: Songs I Love: Steve Earle’s “Taneytown”: The series continues with a favorite song that gets inside some of our darkest histories.February 14: Songs I Love: Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)”: For the holiday itself, two more reasons I have come to love my long-time favorite song.February 15: Songs I Love: Tori Amos’ “Me and a Gun”: A raw and stunning song about sexual assault and violence, as the series rolls on.February 16: Songs I Love: Macklemore’s “White Privilege 2”: The series concludes with rap, activism, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.February 17-18: Learning to Love Mariah Carey: A special weekend post on the lessons I take away from my evolving perspective on a music legend.February 19: Anti-Favorites: Columbus’s Letter: An anti-favorites series focused on exclusionary moments starts with the subtle exclusions in a letter full of them.February 20: Anti-Favorites: Jefferson’s Paragraph: The series continues with important historical contexts for a foundational text, and why it frustrates nonetheless.February 21: Anti-Favorites: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: The Treaty that displaced and excluded an entire American community, as the series rolls on.February 22: Anti-Favorites: The Geary Act: The extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act that went far and far more troublingly further.February 23: Anti-Favorites: Anti-Filipino Racism: The series concludes with three dark and destructive moments of 1930s discrimination.February 24-25: Crowd-sourced Anti-Favorites: My annual crowd-sourced airing of grievances—get it off your chest and add yours in comments, please!February 26: Inclusive Figures: Las Casas and de Vaca: A complementary inclusion series starts with two of the first truly inspiring American voices.February 27: Inclusive Figures: Revolutionary Slaves: The series continues with four figures who together embody the contribution African Americans made to Revolutionary America.February 28: Inclusive Figures: Ruiz de Burton: The Mexican American author who resisted and rewrote 19th century exclusions, as the series rolls on.March 1: Inclusive Figures: Yung Wing: The inclusive life and legacy of one of my all-time favorite Americans.March 2: Inclusive Figures: Carlos Bulosan: The series concludes with the author and book that introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

March 2, 2018: Inclusive Figures: Carlos Bulosan

[Last week I followed up my Valentine’s Day talk on Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America by highlighting exclusionary moments and histories. This week I’ll flip the script and highlight some of the inspiring inclusive figures on whom my book will likewise focus!]On an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.
One of my bigger pet peeves with the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).
Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial A Different Mirror,recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton , Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American migrant worker, novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, deeply moving, and critically patriotic novel America is in the Heart (1946).For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence the designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar )—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath . But despite that tone, Heart’s ultimate trajectory (like that of Steinbeck’s novel, which is why I have paired them in a chapter of my fourth book) is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful. That’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully, as a unique and potent literary model of inclusion and critical patriotism.February Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other inspiring figures you’d highlight?

March 1, 2018: Inclusive Figures: Yung Wing

[Last week I followed up my Valentine’s Day talk on Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America by highlighting exclusionary moments and histories. This week I’ll flip the script and highlight some of the inspiring inclusive figures on whom my book will likewise focus!]I’ve written about Yung Wing’s unique and representative, tragic and inspiring, illuminating and vital American life and story many many many times, in this space and other online ones and my third book. But I don’t know that I’ve summed up what his story and identity can help us understand about exclusion and inclusion any more succinctly than in this January 2017 HuffPost piece. Check it out and then come back here to share your thoughts, please!Last inclusive figures tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other inspiring figures you’d highlight?

February 28, 2018: Inclusive Figures: Ruiz de Burton

[Last week I followed up my Valentine’s Day talk on Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America by highlighting exclusionary moments and histories. This week I’ll flip the script and highlight some of the inspiring inclusive figures on whom my book will likewise focus!]As I wrote in this August 2017 post for the American Writers Museum blog, no single figure resisted and rewrote the exclusion of Mexican Americans in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo better than María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. For that reason, and for all that she still has to say to our 21st century conversations and debates, she’s an inclusive figure all Americans desperately need to read.Next inclusive figures tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other inspiring figures you’d highlight?

February 27, 2018: Inclusive Figures: Revolutionary Slaves

[Last week I followed up my Valentine’s Day talk on Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America by highlighting exclusionary moments and histories. This week I’ll flip the script and highlight some of the inspiring inclusive figures on whom my book will likewise focus!]On four figures who together embody the vital contributions African American slaves made to the American Revolutionary effort.1)      Crispus Attucks: I had just started to learn more about Attucks when I wrote that hyperlinked post, and will be the first to admit that I seriously downplayed there the fact that he was a fugitive slave, having run away from his Natick master ten years before his participation in the Boston Massacre (on which more as part of next week’s anniversary series). Perhaps I thought that fact was already well-known, but I don’t believe it is (certainly my sons have not learned it when they’ve studied the Boston Massacre and Attucks as part of their elementary school social studies units). And in any case, Attucks’ birth and childhood in slavery (as the son of an African father and Native American mother, both themselves slaves), as well as his subsequent escape from it and decade of life as a fugitive slave, seem to me to be crucial to understanding his role in one of the most significant pre-Revolution protests. 2)      Phillis Wheatley: On the other hand, I said most everything I’d want to say about Wheatley’s Revolutionary poems and arguments, and their close ties to her experiences of slavery, in that hyperlinked post!3)      Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker: And ditto my thoughts in that hyperlinked post on Freeman and Walker, and the way they and their allies put the Revolution’s ideas and documents to use to gain their freedom and forever change Massachusetts and America. I know of no single story that better models my vision of an inclusive America than does that one!Next inclusive figures tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other inspiring figures you’d highlight?

February 26, 2018: Inclusive Figures: Las Casas and de Vaca

[Last week I followed up my Valentine’s Day talk on Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America by highlighting exclusionary moments and histories. This week I’ll flip the script and highlight some of the inspiring inclusive figures on whom my book will likewise focus!]On two of the first truly inspiring American voices.
I get why we focus so many of our exploration-era narratives on the conquistador types. They were daring warrior-explorers who wore crazy hats and searched for lost cities of gold and fountains of youth (especial points of emphasis half a century ago) and killed and enslaved a ton of Native Americans in the process (especial points of emphasis these days). And certainly my somewhat in-depth engagement with the life and writings of their founding father, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself, Columbus, makes clear that they weren’t just one-dimensional cartoon villains by any stretch. But what a difference it would make to our national identity and narratives if the first years of European arrivals became the story first and foremost not of Christopher Columbus and his fellow explorer-conquistadors, but of the Spanish Priest (later Bishop) who befriended Columbus and even edited his journal: Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566).
Toward the end of his life, las Casas published The Destruction of the Indies (1552), an incredibly honest and scathing account of the treatment of Native Americans by Spanish explorers, colonists, politicians, soldiers, and commercial interests. He would spend his final decade and a half expounding on that topic at the Spanish Court, pleading for a more just and mutually beneficial Native policy. But those events were simply the culmination of half a century of impressive efforts and actions—beginning almost immediately after his 1502 initial arrival in Hispaniola, las Casas worked on behalf of the island’s and region’s natives on a variety of levels: certainly religious, attempting to convert them to Catholicism (not a particularly appealing thought from a 21stcentury perspective, but far more inclusive than most of the early arrivals’ perspectives); but also social and communal, proposing and working for a variety of experiments and initiatives intended to better integrate the European and Native communities and give proof to his steadfast beliefs that the two cultures could coexist peacefully and successfully.
My other favorite early European arrival is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish naval officer who was shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the 1530s, spent nearly a decade wandering across the continent and living with numerous Native tribes and nations, and developed a complex, hybrid new perspective and identity as a result; in my second book I identified de Vaca as one of the first Americans because of that hybridity and identity. But whereas de Vaca’s shifts were the result of extraordinary circumstances, las Casas simply observed what was happening in the Spanish New World, responded to it as a truly moral and good person should but so few of his peers did, and then, more impressively still, wrote and acted on that response, consistently and unceasingly, for the remainder of his life. His efforts did not, of course, counter-balance the horrors of genocide and enslavement and destruction, and no one person’s could; but they help us to see that America began not only with those horrors, but also with fundamentally good people seeking a more perfect union of the diverse cultures present here.If it’s way too easy to be a jingoistic patriot about America, it is, in some ways, also too easy to be purely cynical or pessimistic about what we’ve been and are. Resisting that second perspective partly means acknowledging and engaging with the complex humanity of even a Columbus. But it also, and more optimistically, means remembering and reclaiming the legacy of a las Casas, as evidence that even the most horrific and destructive moments in our history have contained their voices of hope as well. Next inclusive figures tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other inspiring figures you’d highlight?

February 24-25, 2018: Crowd-sourced Anti-Favorites

[One of my favorite crowd-sourced posts each year is the culmination of my week of post-Valentine’s anti-favorites. Here are the grievances aired by my fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, fellow gripers!]Kathleen Morrissey writes, “I’m griping with the ACLU atm. While the organization was involved in very noble policy and cultural movements, their insistence on being nonpartisan allows for some horrible things. For example, they were aligned with the NRA against the Obama administration’s rule (that individuals who collect Social Security for mental illness would be banned from owning firearms) simply because it was ‘unconstitutional.’ The ACLU’s fundamentalist devotion to the Constitution in equal parts makes it a problematic thing that only sometimes falls on the right side of history.”AnneMarie Donahue nominates, “Tonya MF-ing HARDING!!!! I love her, I hate her, I want to high five her (sometimes to the hand... sometimes to the face with a chair...) She's a phenomenal athlete. She's a black eye to my sport. She's a feminist icon. She's a laughing stock of women's sports. She's just everything! She's ALL THE THINGS. That movie was so.... pedestrian... to know her is to have all the feelz. … First women to do a triple triple combo in competition. … Youngest US athlete to podium at international level … Could land a quad loop in practice. …. Threw it all away. Because we had a society that 1. treated abuse like it was the victim's fault; 2. believed that in FS looks came first (no, they WERE actually part of your score sheet and still are); 3. wasn't set up to really invest in women's sports as actual athletics and not a ice show.”Other non-favorites:Rebekka Hollums nominates Henry James.On Twitter, Nervous Hooleelya writes, “Ugh, Moby Dick. # unpopularopinions # whogavemeaPhDinEnglish .” She adds, “Oooh, and A Separate Peace . Can I just push Finny myself? It would be much more satisfying.”Dan Schneider Tweets, “Attila the Hun- overrated killer; First Folio- overrated plays; David McCullough- overrated Adams.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d share?