Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 242

December 15, 2017: Fall 2017 Reflections: Intro to Speech

[As another semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]On not intervening in political discussions, and why perhaps I should have.For most of the semester, my third time teaching an Intro to Speech class for Fitchburg State’s Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA) program went as smoothly and happily as the prior two sections had. I love the chance to work with fellow teachers, and the vocational educators in the MAVA program are a particularly fun and interesting group with whom to connect. Both their short persuasive speeches and long informative ones have taught me quite a bit about a wide range of professional, personal, and social topics, and in general I have found these classes to offer a refreshing change of pace from other aspects of my teaching and work. That was all true this semester too, but there was one two part-moment that felt less refreshing and more challenging and frustrating: one of the teachers gave a rather strident persuasive short speech on why all students should be required to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in schools; and after that class many of her peers not only rousingly endorsed the sentiments, but assumed that I felt precisely the same.Obviously (for any long-time readers of this blog, at least) I did not share those sentiments, as my older son has been kneeling during the Pledge for more than a year now and his brother has begun doing so as well this year. So part of my unhappy response to this moment was of course personal, as it felt like both my sons’ actions and my own perspective as their father were being wrongly categorized and criticized. I also took significant issue with many of the core assumptions behind the teacher’s persuasive speech, which consistently and unequivocally defined standing for the Pledge as patriotic and exemplary, and any other action in that setting as thoughtless and ignorant at best, unpatriotic at worst. That’s most definitely not how I see the boys’ protests, of course, and as I wrote in this post not at all how I’d frame either the origins, history, or contemporary meanings of the Pledge. At the very least, the teacher’s assumptions about the Pledge and Pledge protests, like her peers’ assumptions about my own perspective and agreement, needed it seemed to me a good deal of further thought and conversation.I didn’t offer those thoughts to the class, though. I knew it would be wrong to do so on the spot (as that would overtly antagonize the speaker), and neither did I want to do so while giving overall feedback on the speeches in a subsequent class (as my response wouldn’t have been about the assignment’s expectations or my areas for feedback). I thought about sharing my take further down the road, but decided that doing so would be unnecessarily politicizing in a class not at all focused on such conversations or themes (and doing so in no small measure because of aggrieved feelings as a parent, which is never a good motivation for classroom choices). I think that probably was the right decision, and one that was supported by a significant majority of my teacher friends when I conducted an informal straw poll on the Book of the Face. But when I have second thoughts about my choice, they boil down to two questions: isn’t my goal of adding to our collective memories one that should hold true in any setting (the teacher’s speech included an absence of information about the Pledge’s actual, complex historyand evolution)?; and similarly, if I’m working to reclaim the concept of patriotism from the most simplified or celebratory visions, wouldn’t this have been a perfect occasion to highlight the critical patriotism I’m advocating? Can’t say I have definite answers, but these are the kinds of questions that arise when we teach in the age of Trump.Spring preview post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Fall reflections you’d share?

December 14, 2017: Fall 2017 Reflections: Adult Learning Classes

[As another semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]On three benefits for life in Trump’s America from my semester’s three adult learning courses.1)      Historical Knowledge: My first class for Assumption College’s Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE) program was at once the most historically focused and yet the most overtly connected to our own moment of the three courses I’m highlighting here. That is, I believe that the course’s central focus on Expanding Our Collective Memories, on presenting five particular histories that we need to better remember, had a lot to offer our 21stcentury conversations and narratives. To cite one example, for the first class I highlighted a series of forgotten Revolutionary era histories, from early feminist authorsand activists to African American slave writers and figures to the period’s Moroccan Muslim American community in Charleston. These figures, texts, and histories are of course well worth remembering for their own sake, but they also and crucially shift our sense of the Revolution and America’s founding, reminding us that such cultures and communities have been integral and vital parts of our national identity and community since its origin points.2)      Cultural Contexts: My first class for Brandeis University’s BOLLI program was much more literary in emphasis, focusing on creative works by pairs of American authors from shared or similar cultural backgrounds (one more historical and one current). But each and every one of those authors and pairs of course had something meaningful to offer for 21st century American conversations and culture, and I would highlight in particular the two novels on which our middle three weeks of discussion focused: Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981). I wrote in my preview post about my excitement at teaching that pairing (as well as Bradley’s novel at all) for the first time, and the class and conversations didn’t disappoint. We stayed closely focused on both of those wonderful novels for much of our time, of course, but we nonetheless also linked them to a wide and deep variety of contemporary issues, from police brutality and the anthem protests to the resurgence of white supremacy and debates over American identity (among many others). I’ve long believed that Chesnutt’s book should be required reading for all Americans, and after this experience I might just have to add Bradley’s into the mix as well.3)      Communal Conversations: My I’ve-lost-track-of-what-number class for Fitchburg State’s ALFA program had no central theme or question; we just read and discussed ten great short stories from the Best American Short Stories 2016 anthology. As a result, while a few of the stories connected to one or another specific issue in Trump’s America, most did not do so in any particular way, and most of our conversations thus focused on the stories themselves as well as various contexts far beyond 2017. And yet I would nonetheless argue that these conversations offered a vital experience for living in and surviving the age of Trump: the chance to be part of and share thoughts and ideas with a community of interesting, engaged, intelligent, empathetic fellow Americans and humans. The horrors of our current moment can feel not only crushing but isolating, as of course can various features of our social media and technological worlds. So I’m not sure there’s anything we can do more consistently and crucially to combat those effects than to find and treasure such communities. Every adult learning class I’ve ever taught has offered one for me, which is why I keep coming back to these wonderful programs.Last reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall reflections you’d share?

December 13, 2017: Fall 2017 Reflections: First-year Writing I

[As another semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]On how a culminating assignment can help us engage with the world around us.In the semester preview post for my First-year Writing I class, I focused on the many non-writing-specific skills that writing courses like this one also have to include and teach. As I mentioned there, Fitchburg State University is moving toward the creation of First Year Experience courses (likely to be piloted this coming academic year, and one of which I’m likely to teach so watch this space for more), a kind of complementary introductory class that might well allow some of those skills to shift out of the First-year Writing series. If so, that could help create more space for us to focus on the variety of writing skills and assignments that not only are the official center of these first-year writing courses, but also and even more importantly have their own vital contributions to make to our students’ identities and lives, well beyond their time on campus. In this post I wanted to focus on the potential benefits of one such assignment in my own Writing I class, a complex culminating paper in which I ask students to combine the two dominant modes of writing—personal and analytical—through which we have moved in the course of the semester.For this Paper 5 assignment, I ask the students to pick a broad topic for which they both have personal connections/experiences and can imagine analytical questions and lenses. Some of the many wonderful topics that students chose this time around included eating disorders and body image, experiences and issues of veterans reintegrating into society, the cultural role and complexities of video games as an artistic genre, and challenges and opportunities related to nursing in a multicultural society. For the paper I ask the students to create roughly 4-5 paragraphs each for more personal and more analytical sides (with one or more outside sources helping provide the evidence for the analytical paragraphs in particular), and to then create a paper structure that moves back and forth between these two forms of writing. They also give their one oral presentation of the semester on their topic and work in progress, to practice those skills as well as get feedback from both me and a peer on their developing paper. And along the way we read and discuss two particularly prominent and illuminating examples of this complex genre of writing, Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision” and Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire,” to help model its form and elements. There’s a lot that I value and love about this culminating assignment, which I’ve been using since my first time teaching Writing I at FSU back in Fall 2005 (!). But here I want to highlight briefly three applications of it to the lifelong goal of engaged citizenship in 21st century America. First, the assignment asks students to consider their personal stakes in broad topics, and indeed to treat those personal connections as just as worth attention and investigation as more formal analytical questions; as this space no doubt reflects, I think we can’t fully discuss any topic without such personal reflection and engagement. Second, the assignment requires at least a bit of research before the students can create the analytical paragraphs, reflecting the importance of specific detail and knowledge for such analysis of issues; from our current president on down, all Americans could use more research time before they opine in any and all debates and conversations. And third, both the oral presentation and the paper itself require the students to communicate both the personal and analytical lenses to outside audiences, and thus to think about how they can add their own perspective and their evolving knowledge into such broader conversations and communities. Am I saying all Americans should write a version of my Writing I Paper 5? Well…Next reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall reflections you’d share?

December 12, 2017: Fall 2017 Reflections: Mark Twain Seminar

[As another semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]On reading and thinking about a long-past author as a contemporary commentator.I’m pretty sure I hadn’t thought at all yet about the syllabus or specifics for my Major Author: Mark Twain senior seminar when I gave last March’s talk at the Twain House on the topic of “Twain as Public Intellectual.” (Perhaps that’s a bit more inside baseball than you’d like if you’re a non-higher ed reader, but it’s a general truth, if not indeed a fact universally acknowledged, that as of March 3rd we don’t often have any real sense of our Fall classes, beyond their basic existence.) I’d even go further, and say that when I put in my idea to focus this third iteration of mine for the course (after ones on Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois) on Twain, I did so much more because of the breadth and diversity of his career and works than because of any particular thought about contemporary connections he might offer. I knew that toward the end of his career Twain wrote a number of pieces that engaged very fully with his contemporary society(in ways that would also resonate with our own), but generally saw that as one of many stages in that long and multi-faceted career.Well, I was wrong—or at least severely understating the case—on two distinct but interconnected levels. For one thing, I discovered in one of those late-career texts, 1905’s “As Regards Patriotism” (that’s not the whole piece, which also includes some engagement with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines that had pushed Twain so fully into the political realm, but it gives you a good sense of it at least), perhaps the most relevant historical source for our contemporary debates over the NFL anthem protests that I’ve yet encountered. And for another, even more unexpected thing, I likewise discovered a very early-career piece of Twain’s, 1866’s “What Have the Police Been Doing?,” that resonates quite closely and stunningly with the current debates over police brutality that are so intimately linked to those anthem protests and many other contemporary conversations. Which is to say, across the whole arc of his long career Twain not only engaged with aspects of his contemporary society, but did so in ways that also offer specific and important contexts and lessons for ongoing issues and debates in 21st century America.That last clause is a tricky one, though. The latest of these Twain pieces were written well more than 100 years ago, and the police piece more than 150. Obviously the whole of my public scholarly career is dedicated to the idea that learning about the past can and should affect us in the present in a variety of ways, but is it really possible—or desirable—to see particular pieces from 100 to 150 years ago as direct and relevant commentaries on our contemporary moment and society? Shouldn’t we instead take both them and their historical and social contexts on their own terms, complex as they already were? I would agree that that’s a primary move, and hope and believe that we began and dwelled in that specific analytical space for many of our class conversations. But it’s not either-or, and we also consistently (in our shared work and in individual student responses and papers) linked both specific pieces like the ones above and overarching aspects of Twain’s writing and genres, career and perspective, society and contexts, to debates, issues, cultural works, and ideas in 2017. Speaking for myself, I learned a great deal about both Twain and us through those contemporary links, and wish that many more Americans had the chance to read these pieces and consider what Twain can tell and offer us.Next reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall reflections you’d share?

December 11, 2017: Fall 2017 Reflections: America in the Gilded Age

[As another semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]On the limits and possibilities of unspoken contemporary contexts for a historical course.Prior to this semester, I had last taught my Honors Literature Seminar on America in the Gilded Age one year ago, in the Fall 2016 semester. That fact alone should probably be sufficient to explain why I ended that previous course with a blog post thinking about texts from the class syllabus that have a great deal to offer us in 21st century America. I believe it was literally impossible for any civically engaged professor (or American, or person) not to make those kinds of connections in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, and I’ll freely admit that I likewise brought them into my Honors Seminar classroom more fully than I otherwise would have. For example, when we read Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901) as the central text in a final unit on race and culture in the Gilded Age, just a couple weeks after the election, how could I not ask us to engage as well with the resurgence of white supremacist voices, forces, and violence in late 2016? I hope and believe that we kept our central focus on our Gilded Age texts and topics, but there’s no doubt that we made those contemporary contexts and connections more visible and more a part of our discussions than had been the case the first time I taught the course (in Fall 2015).For this third iteration of the class (and perhaps the final one, as I’m not scheduled to teach it for at least the next couple academic years), those contemporary contexts and connections remained far more consistently unspoken. That is, I don’t think they were absent by any means—I don’t know that it would ever be possible to talk about such topics as Mexican American histories and communities, women’s rights and activisms, class and wealth inequalities, racism and white supremacy, and many others without echoes and resonances with our own moment and society—but neither did we talk about them much (other than in a few instances where students nicely brought up particular contemporary links). And because we didn’t do so, I think it would be fair (and important) to say that we couldn’t engage with them with the kind of collective discussion and analysis that would be necessary to turn such historical connections into truly meaningful ways to help understand our moment and world. That wasn’t and isn’t the point of this class, so I was and am okay with it; but it’s nonetheless a limit produced by leaving unspoken contexts largely at that level.At the same time, I’m a big believer in education as part of a long game of contributing to and strengthening collective memories and conversations (I’ve also described public scholarly writing as a public parallel to such educational efforts), and one of the main ways education (at least in Humanities fields like mine) can achieve those goals is by highlighting texts and stories, contexts and histories that are not only worth knowing for their own sakes, but are also meaningful to our moment and its debates and issues, identities and communities, society and culture. Which is to say, the fact that there were clear contemporary contexts for our Gilded Age texts and topics itself directly contributes to such educational goals, whether we overtly discuss those contexts or not. Indeed, I might argue that not discussing them overtly at first allows the texts and topics to become part of our voices and ideas on their own initial terms, and that then (at least in the ideal version of this process) we all could continue thinking as we move forward about whether and how we can connect those various conversations to aspects of our own moment. That is, now more than ever, here amidst the Age of Trump, knowledge and understanding themselves as radical contributions to the resistance.Next reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall reflections you’d share?

December 9-10, 2017: Reconstruction Figures: P.B.S. Pinchback

[December 9thmarks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S. Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to this special post on Pinchback himself!]On three interesting and meaningful stages in an American life that went far beyond a symbolic but very brief gubernatorial career.1)      Civil War service: Pinchback (1837-1921) was born a free man to a white slaveowner and a former slave African American mother, and raised for the first years of his life on his father’s Mississippi plantation, already a striking story of race, slavery, and identity in antebellum America. Educated for a time at the newly formed Gilmore High School in Cincinnati, he and his family moved to Ohio permanently after his father’s death in 1848; but he would return to the South during the Civil War in an equally striking role. He braved a Confederate blockade to reach Union-occupied New Orleans, helping there to raise one of the first regiments of African American volunteers to fight for the Union Army (and earning a captain’s commission, making him one of the war’s few African American commissioned officers). Well before the full and more formal creation of the U.S. Colored Troops highlighted by cultural works such as the film Glory, Pinchback’s early recruiting efforts illustrate the role that individual African American leaders (such as Pinchback and Martin Delany) played in pushing the federal government and the nation toward the idea and reality of such African American soldiers and service. 2)      New Orleans activisms: In the war’s immediate aftermath, Pinchback and his young family (he married Emily Hawthorne in 1860 and their four children were born by 1868) attempted to settle in Alabama, but found the post-war racism and violence there insufferable. They moved back to New Orleans, where Pinchback embarked on the multiple stages of his Reconstruction political career: attending the ; being elected state senator in 1868; succeeding to the role of lieutenant governor in 1871; and to the governorship in late 1872. While his most overt political roles ended with Reconstruction’s close, he continued to influence New Orleans, Southern, and American society in activist ways: helping found Southern University, the city’s first historically black public college, in 1880 (it moved to Baton Rouge in 1914); and joining the 1890s Comité des Citoyens (Citizens’ Committee) that helped challenge the city’s segregated transportation system and bring Homer Plessy’s case to the Supreme Court. As so often in its history, New Orleans was both unique in and representative of late 19th century American life, and Pinchback was an integral part of that unfolding story.3)      Harlem Renaissance legacy: In all those and many other ways, Pinchback left a lasting legacy on his city, state, region, and nation. But he also had another, particularly interesting cultural legacy, as the maternal grandfather of Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer (1894-1967). One of Pinchback’s daughters, Nina, married Louisiana planter Nathan Toomer; Nathan abandoned his wife and infant son in 1895, and they returned to live with Pinchback in his Washington, DC home. Pinchback pressured his daughter to change his grandson’s name from Nathan to Eugene (later shortened to Jean), and influenced the young man in other ways as well, including his attendance at the all-black Garnet Elementary School. Like most of his Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, Jean Toomer had a complex and conflicted relationship to both the American and African American pasts; but he also turned those histories and stories into powerful literary works, most especially his poetic, narrative, and groundbreaking book Cane (1923). Just one more layer to Pinchback’s influential and important American life.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?

December 8, 2017: Reconstruction Figures: Yung Wing?

[December 9thmarks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S. Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to a special post on Pinchback himself!]On whether and how to remember the pioneering educator as a Reconstruction figure.If Yung Wing isn’t the American historical figure about whom I’ve written the most in my career to date—in this space, in numerouspublic scholarlypieces elsewhere, and in a chapter of my third book, among other places—he’s definitely on the short list. As a result, I’ve considered him through a pretty wide variety of lenses, including Chinese and Asian American histories, the histories of immigration, immigration law, and diversity in America, how we can better remember a historic site and story like those of Hartford’s Chinese Educational Mission, and the concept of critical patriotism. But even though that Chinese Educational Mission opened in 1872—and even though, as I wrote earlier in the week, the Reconstruction period as a whole focused a good deal on education and its interconnections with cultural and social progress—I’ve never before thought at length about whether that crucial part of Yung’s life and career could or should be linked to Reconstruction in any meaningful way. My initial instinct, on multiple levels, is to say that it shouldn’t be. Just because an event happens at a particular time doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s related to others from the same time, or even to overarching histories and narratives in that period. More specifically, Reconstruction’s overarching histories focused on the myriad aftermaths of both the Civil War and slavery; while Chinese Americans did fight in the Civil War, including a pair of slave-owning conjoined twins who fought for the Confederacy, I would nonetheless argue that the war did not change Chinese American communities and histories in any specific or promiment way (no more than it did the entirety of the nation, at least). To put it another way, Reconstruction’s efforts and questions were closely intertwined with a particular cultural community, African Americans; linking the period to Chinese Americans would seem perilously close to assuming that all Americans of color are necessarily parallel to one another. Moreover, one of the era’s most significant national laws, the Naturalization Act of 1870 (an extension of the 14th Amendment’s concept of “birthright citizenship”), overtly excluded Asian Americans from its purview, an explicit attempt to highlight the law’s more narrow application to African Americans (especially those born into slavery).The complex histories comprised by that last sentence can also be read another way, however. It’s entirely possible to see the Reconstruction period as centrally defined by debates and battles over who has full membership in an American community, along with concurrent questions such as how to move particular communities toward such equality. Those debates and questions were certainly particularly salient and fraught when it came to African Americans, but similar tensions and challenges could also be present for other communities, including former Confederates but also other cultural groups such as Asian Americans. Moreover, if education was one of the most consistently advocated paths to African American equality and progress, then Yung’s Chinese Educational Mission might well be seen as a concurrent Reconstruction-era effort to create an educational institution that could help another cultural community become more fully and equally part of America. And moreover moreover, the opposition to the CEM that became part of the move toward the Chinese Exclusion Act could thus be read as parallel to the (nationwide) resurgence of white supremacy that contributed so mightily to the failure of Reconstruction. All of which is to say, broadening our vision of Reconstruction to include Yung and the CEM doesn’t have to mean forgetting or minimizing any other histories, and could even help us understand another layer to them.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?

December 7, 2017: Reconstruction Figures: Andrew Johnson

[December 9thmarks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S. Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to a special post on Pinchback himself!]On three telling stages in the life and career of one of our worst presidents.Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches young adult novels first became bestsellers with 1868’s Ragged Dick , Fame and Fortune , and Struggling Upward , but I don’t think so. In many ways, these works can be seen as Reconstruction texts—their protagonists tend to begin their stories at the lowest possible point, after all, and struggle to work their way toward a more stable, successful, and even ideal future. Seen in that light, Andrew Johnsonwas a perfect president for the start of the Reconstruction era, as his life to that point seemed to mirror an Alger story. Born into abject poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father died when Andrew was only three years old, he began his professional life as a tailor’s apprentice before running away to Tennessee, entering politics at the most local level, and working his way up to Governor and then Senator. And it was his bold and impressive choice at one crucial turning point, his decision to side with the Union when Tennessee seceded (he was the only Senator not to give up his seat when his state seceded), that cemented his national status and led to his appointment as Military Governor of Tennessee and then his nomination as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election.As I wrote in that hyperlinked piece on 1864, however, “impressive” is one of the least likely words that historians would apply to Johnson’s term as president, which began when Lincoln was assassinated only a month into his second term. It’s not just that Johnson was an overt white supremacist—he had never tried to hide that perspective, which of course he shared with many of his fellow Southerners and Americans. Nor is it that he advocated for a different form of Reconstruction (Presidential, as it came to be known) than Congressional Republicans—policy disagrements are part of governance and the separation of powers, and Johnson did seek to uphold the Constitution as he understood it. Instead, what truly defines the awfulness of Johnson’s presidency was how far out of his way he went to oppose even the most basic rights for freed slaves and African Americans, a stance exemplified by his veto of the 1866 bill that would have renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson’s concludes that veto by arguing that in taking this action he is “presenting [the] just claims” of the eleven states that are “not, at this time, represented by either branch of Congress”—yet of course, the veto served only the claims of the white supremacists within those states. The question of whether Johnson deserved to be impeached for actions such as his veto (and other similar stances taken in opposition to Reconstruction) is a thorny one, but I have no qualms in saying he deserves our condemnation for it, and all that it illustrates about his presidency.Johnson survived the impeachment trial (by one Senate vote), and continued his destructive policies for the remainder of his presidential term (although he did also support the proclamation that nationalized the 8-hour workday, evidence that even the worst presidencies are not without their complexities). Yet his life and career did not end with Ulysses Grant’s 1868 election to the presidency, and two 1870s moments reflect how both sides of Johnson’s American story continued into his later life. In 1873, Johnson both nearly died of cholera and lost $73,000 in the national Panic, but recovered from both of these traumas to successfully run for the Senate once more in 1875, becoming the only past president to serve in the Senate and adding one more rags-to-riches moment to his legacy. Yet in his brief stint as a Senator (the seat was only open for one special session), Johnson’s only significant contribution was a speech attacking President Grant for using federal troops as part of Reconstruction in Louisiana; “How far off is military despotism?,” Johnson warned, one final mythologized and destructive critique of Reconstruction from the man who did as much to undermine it as any American.Last figure tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?

December 6, 2017: Reconstruction Figures: Albion Tourgée

[December 9thmarks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S. Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to a special post on Pinchback himself!]On two very distinct yet still interconnected ways to remember a unique and seminal 19thcentury figure.First, two suggestions for further reading (briefly right now and then at greater length) on Albion Tourgée. I wrote about him as part of this 2012 post on my public scholarly inspirations and goals, and would certainly continue to emphasize those current and communal reasons to remember and celebrate his amazing life and work. And my graduate school mentor and friend Carolyn Karcher has published one of the best scholarly and biographical books on Tourgée to date, A Refugee from His Race: Albion Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2016). I can’t pretend to do the same justice to Tourgée in a blog post that Karcher did in her wonderful book, so after a Reading Rainbow-inspired encomium to “read the book!,” I’ll focus here on one of the conundrums sometimes presented by true Renaissance people like Tourgée: how we can remember not only the distinct and divergent sides to his life and career, but also the moments and stories within those threads that might seem blatantly contradictory.At the risk of being reductive (a risk I face with every blog post of course; I hope it always goes without saying that there’s more to say, and that I’d love to hear further such things in comments), I would boil one of Tourgée’s seeming contradictions down to two seminal texts. One is Tourgée’s second novel, A Fool’s Errand; by One of the Fools (1879), an autobiographical, satirical depiction of Reconstruction’s tragedies and failures that spares no one—most of all not its titular author, narrator, and protagonist—from its bitter, caustic critiques. The second is the nuanced and stirring petition he filed to the Supreme Court on behalf of his client Homer Plessy; Tourgée, who studied law and served as a judge for six years in Reconstruction North Carolina, worked pro bono as Plessy’s lawyer in the case that became Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It’s not just that these two texts are diametrically opposed in tone, although they certainly are that. It’s also that Fool’s depicts Tourgée’s Reconstruction-era legal work and activism as an integral (if not indeed the most central) part of his foolishness, as a quixotic crusade for justice and equality through and under the law with which the Fool seems thoroughly disenchanted and disabused by the novel’s end. Yet there we find Tourgée in front of the Supreme Court in 1896, arguing and advocating for Homer Plessy’s equality under the law.Of course a single novel does not an entire career and identity make, and of course an individual’s perspective can also evolve over time. Yet I would argue that seeing these two texts and moments as contradictory still has value, as it can help us appreciate how that seeming contradiction can instead become an exemplary part of Tourgée’s inspiring legacy. For one thing, Tourgée clearly found a way to move past the personal and professional frustrations he experienced as a Reconstruction judge and toward an enduring belief in the power and possibility of the law. At the same time, he just as clearly didn’t want to elide or forget those frustrations and failures, nor did he exempt his own limitations and mistakes from a full accounting of them. Indeed, Fool’s represents—among many other things—a testament to the importance of writing, both in engaging with histories (even, if not especially, unpleasant ones) and in connecting them to audiences as we move forward into our shared future. If there’s one main through-line across Tourgée’s multi-part and inspiring career, it’s precisely the role that writing can play in confronting our worst and advocating for our best. Next figure tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?

December 5, 2017: Reconstruction Figures: The Fisk Jubilee Singers

[December 9thmarks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S. Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to a special post on Pinchback himself!]On two of the many vital legacies of a cultural and historical artistic project.While the kinds of post-slavery and –war debates and questions I discussed in yesterday’s post were of course central threads to Reconstruction, the period was also intensely focused on the future, and more exactly on how to help African Americans become a full part of this new American community within that future (or, for far too many Reconstruction actors, how to stop them from doing so). Chief among the progressive responses to that question was an emphasis on education, one that took place in every community and at every level but that included the founding of a number of new African American colleges and universities. One of the earliest such post-war institutions was Fisk University, founded in Memphis as the Fisk Free Colored School just six months after the war’s end by members of the American Missionary Association. By 1871, thanks to the vicissitudes of Reconstruction among other factors, Fisk was struggling to stay afloat financially, and its treasurer and music director, George White, decided to found a choral group that could tour to raise funds and awareness for the university’s community and efforts.That group embarked on its first national (and eventually international) tour on October 6th, 1871, the beginning of a more than 18-month period of performances. Early in the tour—faced with one of their many encounters with racism and hostility, this time in Columbus, Ohio—White and the performers decided to name themselves the Jubilee Singers, a tribute to the spiritual and cultural vision of a “year of jubilee” after emancipation. By the end of the tour, the Jubilee Singers had more than lived up to that name, achieving a series of stunning triumphs that included performances at the Boston World’s Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival, at the White House for President Ulysses Grant, and (when the tour was extended to an overseas leg in 1873) for England’s Queen Victoria. In an era when nearly all of the representations of African Americans onstage were performed by whites in blackface—whether in overtly racist minstrel shows or in slightly more nuanced productions such as Tom Shows—it’s difficult to overstate the importance of this group of talented African American performers taking and commanding the stage, offering an alternative to those constructed representations and giving voice to their own identities, stories and histories, and communities in the process. That’s one legacy of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and it continues to this day.The Fisk Jubilee Singers also connected, overtly, immediately, and importantly, to the aforementioned questions of historical memory, however. They did so first and foremost through their choice of repertoire, which in its initial iterationfocused almost entirely on African American slave spirituals (what W.E.B. Du Bois would later call, in his beautiful, multi-part engagement with the genre in The Souls of Black Folk , “sorrow songs”). I believe it’s not at all inaccurate to say that by arranging and performing their versions of these songs, the Jubilee Singers helped keep them alive, indeed helped turn them into a foundational and ongoing genreof American music that could endure into future generations and would influence every subsequent such genre. In so doing, I would argue that they provided one middle ground answer to the debate between Crummell and Douglass I highlighted yesterday—a way to carry forward communal memories and voices of slavery without dwelling in the most horrific and traumatic elements, to build on that historical legacy but at the same time to take potent and inspiring ownership of it for new purposes and goals. That’s a model of the best of Reconstruction, and precisely the kind of story and history we need to remember if we’re to move beyond the most limited and mythologized collective memories of the period.Next figure tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?