Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 243

December 4, 2017: Reconstruction Figures: Alexander Crummell and Frederick Douglass

[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 the impromptu debate, between two of the most impressive Americans, that exemplifies one of Reconstruction’s (and America’s) most complex and crucial questions.One of my most frequently revisited topics, at least as far back as this 2012 blog series and at length in my most recent book, has been the challenges and yet the importance of remembering our darkest American histories. As I wrote in that blog series’ third post, no national histories are darker nor more important for us to better remember than those of slavery; that’s why, whatever its flaws or limitations, I’m generally on board with Quentin Tarantino’s project in his controversial revisionist historical film Django Unchained. Yet in arguing for the importance of such memories, I can and should recognize the fact that it’s significantly easier for me to say that than it is for African Americans, for those whose own darkest histories and heritages are directly tied to these national horrors. For that community, it’s fair to ask whether remembering the histories of slavery is as important as trying to move beyond them and into a more positive future; and indeed, in the decades after emancipation and the Civil War many prominent African American voices argued precisely for, if not forgetting slavery, at least not focusing on keeping its memories alive.Perhaps the leader of that movement was Alexander Crummell, the priest, philosopher, professor, and political activist whose impressive 19thcentury life and career spanned abolitionism, black nationalism and the development of the Liberian state, and many other causes. In the years after the Civil War, Crummell came to feel that only by moving beyond the memories of slavery could African Americans achieve success and equality; he developed that theme with particularly clarity in “The Need for New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era,” his 1885 commencement address at Storer College, the newly founded freedmen’s college in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In the audience was none other than Frederick Douglass, a trustee of the college and one of the few men who could equal Crummell’s longstanding prominence in the African American community, and Douglass apparently objected vocally to Crummell’s arguments. Unfortunately no specific transcript of Douglass’s comments exists, but throughout this era Douglass certainly argued the opposite of Crummell’s critique of “fanatical anxieties upon the subject of slavery”; for Douglass, instead, that dark history “could be traced [in American identity] like that of a wounded man through a crowd by the blood,” and so must be followed and engaged with.If we approach this debate from a scholarly perspective, as I did when I used the exchange to open a chapter of my first book, it seems clear enough that Douglass was right, that it’s vital to remember even—perhaps especially—our darkest histories. But for those African American college graduates in the audience, just as for all African Americans in and after the Reconstruction era—and, in less immediate but still present ways, for all their descendents—the question was and remains far from simply academic. Obviously there is value, practical as well as philosophical, in remembering the worst parts of our pasts, for individuals, for communities, and for the nation. But as Crummell noted, to dwell upon such memories can make it significantly more difficult to live in the present and move into an even stronger future. So the key, perhaps, is to remember without getting lost, to engage without giving in to the most limiting or damaging effects. Easier said than done, of course—but both Crummell and Douglass, and many other inspiring and influential voices, give us models for such work.Next figure tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?

December 2-3, 2017: November 2017 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]November 6: Veterans Days: The Bonus Army: A Veterans Day series kicks off with the radical veterans movement that ended in both tragedy and success.November 7: Veterans Days: Miyoko Hikiji: The series continues with the book and author that can help bring our conversations about veterans into the 21stcentury.November 8: Veterans Days: The Harrisburg Veterans Parade: One of the terrible, and then one of the great, American moments, as the series rolls on.November 9: Veterans Days: Veterans’ Organizations: The distinct and even contradictory reasons why veterans’ organizations are formed.November 10: Veterans Days: The Best Years of Our Lives: The series concludes with the film and performance that capture the spectrum and significance of veterans’ experiences.November 11-12: Crowd-sourced Veterans Days: A wonderful crowd-sourced collections of Veterans Day texts and stories.November 13: AthleteStudying: Pudge Heffelfinger: On the 125th anniversary of his signing as the first professional football player, Pudge kicks off an AthleteStudying series.November 14: AthleteStudying: Ruth and Gehrig: The series continues with the iconic teammates who represents two contrasting narratives of American identity.November 15: AthleteStudying: Curt Flood: Three documents that together tell the story of the athlete who changed professional sports forever, as the series rolls on.November 16: AthleteStudying: The Williams Sisters: Two factors that have entirely changed my perspective on the tennis superstars.November 17: AthleteStudying: Women’s Soccer Stories: The series concludes with two individual and one collective way to AmericanStudy our recent crop of soccer stars.November 18-19: Curry, LeBron, and Sports in the Age of Trump: A special post on two NBA stars and professional athletes in the age of Trump.November 20-26: Collegial Thanksgivings: A Thanksgiving week special post, highlighting five inspiring women with whom I’m very thankful to work!November 27: 80s AlbumStudying: Brothers in Arms and War: For Thriller’s 35thanniversary, an 80s AlbumStudying series starts with Dire Straits’ classic and images of war.November 28: 80s AlbumStudying: Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Protest Rap: The series continues with two seminal rap albums and protest music.November 29: 80s AlbumStudying: Building the Perfect Beast and Political Pop: Three different ways a pop album can offer political commentary, as the series rocks on.November 30: 80s AlbumStudying: Thriller and Dualities: On its 35th anniversary, three factors that helped make Thrillerso influential and iconic.December 1: 80s AlbumStudying: Born in the U.S.A. and Patriotism: The series concludes with two ways to argue for the critical patriotic possibilities of a misunderstood album.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Lemme know!

December 1, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Born in the U.S.A. and Patriotism

[November 30thmarks the 35thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]On two ways to argue for the patriotic possibilities of an easily misunderstood song and album.In one of my first-year blog posts (back in those silly mid-2011 days before I used hyperlinks, dear reader), I used an article by music journalist Ben Schwartz on the battles over Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (the song) to think about questions of audience readings and misreadings, of whether and how an artist’s choices can contribute to them, and of why I’d still make the case for “Born” as representing some of the best and most thoughtful (rather than most bombastic or simplified) visions of American identity and community. Many of those same questions and lenses can be applied to the Born in the U.S.A. album as a whole, of course, which consistently weds arena and bar rock sounds to dark and painful lyrics and situations. No fewer than three of the album’s songs end with main characters under arrest or in prison, and yet two of them (“Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”) are also among the album’s most upbeat-sounding rockers. As I argued in that post, I believe audiences should be and are capable of looking beyond sound and music to hear and engage with songs on lyrical and thematic levels as well—but I also called “Born” a split-personality song there, and the same can definitely be said about the album as a whole.The most overt way to read “Born” as uber-patriotic is, as I also wrote in that post, likewise both a misreading and a further emphasis on sound over lyrics (the first line of both the song and album is “Born down in a dead man’s town,” after all). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, and important, ways to think of both song and album as patriotic nonetheless. In recent years Springsteen has consistently describedone of his central and lifelong artisitic goals as charting “the distance between American reality and the American Dream,” and the album’s opening and closing songs (“Born” and “My Hometown”) chart particular aspects of that distance with clarity and force. Like another easily misunderstood song of Springsteen’s, “We Take Care of Our Own” (the lead single from and first song on 2012’s Wrecking Ball), “Born” creates an especially clear representation of that distance between ideal and reality in the back and forth between its patriotic chorus and its far more dark and critical verses (although the same could be said of “My Hometown,” with a chorus that recognizes the value of a foundational place even while the verses chart that place’s decline and limits). I’ve written a lot in recent years, including in my most recent book, about the concept of critical patriotism, and both this overall idea of distance and the specific representations of it in these songs and their structural shifts exemplify critical patriotism.There’s another, even more overarching way to think about Born in the U.S.A. as a patriotic album, however. The album’s most optimistic song is its exact midpoint, “No Surrender,” an anthemic tribute to Springsteen’s lifelong musical companion Steve Van Zandt and to the power of rock and roll (“We learned more from a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school”). But what if we read that central song as a mission statement for the album itself? That is, to put it in first-year writing terms, what if “No Surrender” is the album’s thesis, “Born in the U.S.A.” and “My Hometown” are its introduction and conclusion, and the remaining songs are the evidence paragraphs? In that case, even if the songs are consistently darker in their themes and images, the acts of creating and performing them, of assembling them into an album, of sending that album out into the world, of touring to share it with audiences, and so on are all optimistic recognitions and extensions of the power and importance of rock and roll, and of the role it can play in helping America move toward a better future. Perhaps that future comprises the “romantic dreams” that the speaker of “No Surrender” still has in his head, dreams that animate—if not without challenge and complexity—the critical patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.November Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 30, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Thriller and Dualities

[November 30thmarks the 35thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums (as well as albums period). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]On three ways that Michael Jackson’s seminal album combined both ends of a spectrum to achieve maximum audience engagement and success.1)      Old and New: By 1982 Jackson himself was a music industry veteran at the age of 24, having begun recording with the Jackson 5 in 1964 (at the age of 6!) and having launched a solo career as early as 1971 with the single “Got to Be There” (part of his debut solo album the following year). For Thriller he enlisted a number of other even more seasoned entertainers and artists, from Paul McCartney (whose duet with Michael, “The Girl is Mine,” was the album’s first single) to horror legend Vincent Price (whose narration in “Thriller”remains one of the most distinctive and signature moments in all of pop music). Yet at the same time, singles like “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” (among others) offered a strikingly new sound, one that built on disco and dance but also connected to some of the earliest strains of hip hop and rap. To put it succinctly, Thrillerboth reminded audiences of nostalgic favorites and pushed them toward new musical horizons, and that combination comprised a significant element in its mega-success.2)      Aural and Visual: All those aspects of the album’s sound—or rather its combination of sounds, often within individual songs but certainly across the nine total tracks (seven of which were released as singles, with all reaching the Billboard Top 10)—helped make it an irresistible mega-hit. But Jackson was also tuned in as early as any artist to the new possibilities offered by MTV (just over a year old at the time) and music videos, and used the form to striking success with a number of Thriller’s biggest hits. And he did so in a trio of interestingly distinct ways: the story video for “Beat It”mirrors the song’s lyrics quite closely; the epic mini-movie for “Thriller”likewise does so at times, but also extends and expands the song into an entirely new form; while the video for “Billie Jean” becomes something wholly different, focusing on Jackson’s dancing skills in a captivating performance largely unrelated to the song. Taken together, those three videos epitomize most everything that the genre could include, and pushed the album even further into the stratosphere. 3)      Safe and Risky: One of the dangers of historical topics—which are, of course, the majority of topics I feature in this space—is that they can seem inevitable and obvious in retrospect; that, to coin a phrase, hindsight is 20-20. Which is to say, given the album’s record-breaking sales and success, all of Jackson’s choices on Thrillercan seem geared toward such achievements, and thus perhaps safe or mainstream. But for every such choice (like, say, a lead-single duet with one of the most acclaimed songwriters and pop musicians of all time), there are others that were unquestionably risky in their moment (using a rock and roll guitaristin the middle of a pop/dance song? Featuring a solid minute of Vincent Price speaking and laughing evilly in another song, and then making a 14-minute movie that also features an extended zombie dance sequence?). That the latter choices now feel inevitable or safe isn’t just an effect of time, of course—it’s also a testament to how well they succeeded, to the rewards that came from those risks (and I think it’s telling that the riskier choices and songs have endured far more fully than that duet with McCartney). If future artists could learn anything from Jackson’s towering success, I’d say that duality is a particularly strong lesson to take away.Last AlbumStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 29, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Building the Perfect Beast and Political Pop

[November 30thmarks the 35thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]On three different ways a classic pop album can also offer political statements.At nearly the exact midpoint of Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast (1984), sixth and seventh out of the album’s eleven total tracks, are two songs that offer overt political and social critiques of 1980s America. Track six is the title song (seemingly not available on YouTube, sorry!), an epic, semi-allegorical commentary (not dissimilar to “Hotel California”) on the gap between America’s ideals and where the nation seems to have arrived in the mid-1980s. And track seven is “All She Wants to Do is Dance,” an irresistible dance track (duh) that doubles as a scathing depiction of ugly Americans (both individual and foreign-policy-related) behaving badly in Central America. Like the title track of Henley’s next album, The End of the Innocence (1989; also not on YouTube!), these are well-crafted pop songs that at the same time offer particularly overt and important criticisms of both the Reagan Administration specifically and American society and culture in the decade more broadly, and by themselves would be more than enough to make Building the Perfect Beast a strikingly political pop album.They’re not by themselves, though, and Buildingfeatures other, more subtle and perhaps more interesting political pop songs as well. One follows directly after “Dance” on the cassette and CD versions (although interestingly not on the LP, perhaps because it was recorded a bit later than the rest of the album): “A Month of Sundays” (also not on YouTube—Henley might be committed to keeping his music off the site), a quiet ballad narrated in the first-person by an aging farmer. Released a year before John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow” (1985), Henley’s song is thus more ground-breaking than it might seem, and at least has to be paired with Mellencamp’s song (and whole Scarecrow album) as part of these mid-1980s cultural engagements with farming communities and lives (a trend that would also produce 1985’s first Farm Aid concert, which featured both Henley and Mellencamp among many other artists). And I would argue that Henley’s first-person speaker is created with a bit more intimacy and subtlety than Mellencamp’s in “Scarecrow,” particularly in the song’s mysterious and moving closing lines: “And I sit here on the backporch in the twilight/And I hear the crickets hum/And I sit and watch the lighting in the distance/But the showers never come/And I sit here listen to the wind blow/And I sit here and rub my hands/And I sit here and listen to the clock strike/And I wonder when I'll see my companion again.”The album’s other political pop songs don’t really seem political at all, but offer important social commentaries nonetheless. I wrote about one of them in this June 2016 post: the wonderful opening song “The Boys of Summer,” and its multi-layered and even contradictory visions of nostalgia’s dangers and appeals. “Boys” has a corollary in “The Sunset Grill,” a song that frames the album’s conclusion and offers an even more complicated image of the relationship between the past and the present in 1980s America. On the one hand, “Sunset” uses a semi-mythic (or at least idealized) vision of the past to critique the present, with lines like “These days a man makes you something/And you never see his face.” But at the same time, the song ends with playful lines that both imagine a possible future and embrace the flawed but wonderful present: “Maybe we’ll leave come springtime/Meanwhile, have another beer/What would we do without all these jerks anyway?/Besides, all our friends are here.” That closing, especially when coupled with the next and final song “Land of the Living” (chorus: “I wanna stay in the land of the living/I wanna stay here with you”), offers an optimistic counterpoint and coda to some of the album’s darker or more critical visions—and that’s a pretty important political purpose for pop music as well!Next AlbumStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 28, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Public Enemy, N.W.A, and Protest Rap

[November 30thmarks the 35thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]On the two protest albums that probably changed rap—and definitely changed America.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on rap—not that I would claim to be an expert on most of the topics about which I write here (John Sayles and Bruce Springsteen, maybe, but not most of them), but I am particularly less-well-informed when it comes to the multi-decade history and evolution of rap. When someone who grew up on the genre, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, writes about it, it quickly becomes clear to me how many of the artists who were influential to him are barely (if at all) familiar to me, and how uniquely unqualified I thus would be to judge which artists or records have been the most significant in rap history. But on the other hand, one of the genres with which I’m most familiar is American political and protest music—the more my Springsteen tastes started to include his most explicitly political albums and songs (like most of The Ghost of Tom Joad , an album that I hated on first listen and have come to love), the more I both delved back into artists like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Tom Waits and came to appreciate contemporary ones like Rage Against the Machine and Ani DiFranco. And so I feel entirely qualified to assert that Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back(1988) is one of the greatest political and protest albums in American history.
Although I was too young to recognize it at the time, 1988 seems to have been the single most important year in rap’s transition from an underground, fully counter-culture genre to a dominant force in popular music—the Beastie Boys had started the shift a year or two earlier, but ’88 saw the release of both Public Enemy’s album (their second, but the first had been Def Jam Records’ worst-selling album of all time, so it was this second that really broke them) and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. While there are certainly points of connection and overlap between the two albums, their central voices and styles are hugely distinct, and can perhaps be captured in their two best-selling singles (which I use side by side in my Intro to American Studies course on the 1980s): N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” an intentionally extreme, vulgar, and violent response to police brutality and profiling; and Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype,” a sophisticated and media-savvy response to critics’ and mainstream musical outlets’ stereotyping of the group. I think there is most definitely a place and role for both songs in our understanding of (among other things) South Central Los Angeles, life for young African American men, and race in the 1980s, but it is unquestionably easier to fixate on the extremes in N.W.A. and thus miss the serious and social questions behind them; whereas Public Enemy’s song, like their entire album, forces us to engage seriously and meaningfully with its central themes and perspectives.
Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. The real genius of Nation of Millions, what puts it in the same conversation with works like “This Land is Your Land,” “The Hurricane,” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” is that it weds tremendous popular appeal with cutting political critiques and radical messages; it’s got a beat and you can dance to it, but while you’re doing so your perspective and understanding of American identities and communities, present and past, are being significantly impacted and (at least for someone not a product of inner-city Los Angeles; or, to put it more exactly, at least for me) significantly altered. Political protest music doesn’t have to feel pedantic (I’m looking at you, Neil Young’s “Southern Man”) or explicitly divisive (ditto, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”); it can instead unite its listeners across any and all categories and identities, bringing audiences together and to their feet and then hitting them in their collective consciousness. In the final verse of “Don’t Believe the Hype,” Chuck D raps that he and the group will “rock the hard jams, treat it like a seminar/Teach the bourgeoisie, and rock the boulevard,” and that’s exactly the balance that the whole album achieves. If working with college students day in and day out for the last decade and a half has taught me anything, it’s how centrally important music is to their lives and identities and perspectives; pop culture in general has a big influence, of course, but while I have some students for whom that means movies and some for whom it’s TV, some who are all about various websites and some who read a ton of science fiction (to cite only four of the many pursuits and obsessions I encounter), I would say that music is hugely significant for pretty much every one of them. And that makes it especially important than American Studies scholarship pay particular attention to an album like Nation of Millions, a best-selling work of popular music that managed to engage, with sophistication and humor and intelligence, with some of our nation’s most pressing and complex questions. Next AlbumStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 27, 2017: 80s AlbumStudying: Brothers in Arms and War

[November 30thmarks the 35thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]A (slightly revised) repeat post that sadly rings just as true today as it did six and a half years ago when I originally published it.On my drive in to Fitchburg State this morning I was listening to Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms (1984), one of the greatest rock albums of the 1980s (or any other time) but also a very interestingly divided one. The songs (and in the first case also the music video) that made the album a huge hit and have continued to have a significant ongoing presence in our musical consciousness, a list that would definitely include “Money for Nothing” and “Walk of Life” and probably “So Far Away” as well, are drawn pretty much entirely from the album’s first half (well, the first 5 of its 9 total songs). The album’s final four songs, in contrast, form more of an extended vignette, set in what feels like a warring African nation (although the exact setting could be Central America, Southeast Asia, or a number of other regions), featuring strong and complex first-person voices narrating their stories of war and community and poverty and much else.
All four of those songs are really rich and interesting, but certainly the fourth and final one, the album’s title track “Brothers in Arms,” is the most beautiful and powerful. The beauty, particularly of the lead guitar work but also of the epic music in general, both contrasts and yet ultimately complements the song’s story and themes: the speaker is another soldier and one who, by the song’s end, is dying, never to return to the home which he has left for his wartime service with his comrades; yet his perspective and emphasis in the final verse shift the meaning of the title community in hugely significant ways: “Now the sun’s gone to hell / And the moon’s riding high / Let me bid you farewell / Every man has to die / But it’s written in the starlight / And every line on your palm / We’re fools to make war / On our brothers in arms.” This culminating image of the warring factions as a house divided, as fraternally bonded despite these foolish yet very fatal conflicts, might seem clichéd, but in context—both within what the song has built to and within this four-song vignette as a whole—the moment feels anything but; it feels, instead, like an idealized but deeply moving and in fact fundamentally true vision of a human community and family that is far more unified than our actions and beliefs tend to reflect.
So where does this all fit into an analysis or understanding of our current [ED: as of March 2011, but feel free to extrapolate to Syria or wherever else you choose] military actions in Libya, the contemporary and historical context against which I was listening to these songs this morning? Far from simply, that’s for sure. On the one hand, as I wrote in this post on the Dresden firebombing and Slaughterhouse-Five, any and all wars become much more difficult to support and even wage if we view the civilians (and soldiers) of the opposing nation(s) as even fully and comparably human, much less our brothers and sisters. But on the other hand, a foreign policy driven by humanitarian concerns becomes, it seems to me, vitally necessary with precisely that same shift in perspective—it was, after all, the Libyan government that had begun making very brutal war on members of its own national and human family, and for one of the world’s most powerful militaries to stand by and allow such human crises and brutalities to unfold (whether in Libya, in the Ivory Coast, in Darfur, or wherever else) does not sit well with any vision of an international human family.I don’t have any answers to such questions, and indeed I don’t know that there are any good answers (a recognition of which would go a long way toward silencing the vocal and to my mind oversimplifying critiques of the Obama administration from a variety of political perspectives). But certainly any AmericanStudier’s perspective has to admit that far too often we Americans have failed to view even our fellow citizens—much less others around the world—as our brothers and sisters; and that the times when we have been at our best have often been precisely those moments when we have been able to see and respond to such connections, at home and abroad. Next AlbumStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?

November 20-26, 2017: Collegial Thanksgivings

[I don’t need to tell you all how long this last year has been. But there have been plenty of inspirations among the horrors, and many have come from badass and impressive women. So for this special Thanksgiving week post, I wanted to highlight five such women alongside whom I’m fortunate enough to work. I’d love to see the people and things for which you’re thankful in comments! Thanks!]1)      Aruna Krishnamurthy: I’ve called Aruna an English Studies colleague and friend since I came to Fitchburg State in 2005, but over the past sixth months she’s taken on an incredibly challenging and vitally important new role, as the President of the FSU Chapterof our faculty union (the Massachusetts State College Association). We’re currently working without a contract (in the state known as “work to rule”), making our situation even more precarious than is that of any public and higher ed employees across the nation in 2017. That situation continues to play out, but I can’t imagine a more dedicated representative and activist, impassioned and eloquent spokesperson, and inspiring leader than Aruna has already been in her role as Chapter President. I’m very thankful she’s stepped up for this key role at this crucial time.2)      Katharine Covino-Poutasse: Katy’s a newer FSU English Studies colleague and friend, and one whom I’ve already found inspiring in many ways over our two and a half years working together. But it’s been since I moved offices and ended up Katy’s next-door neighbor that I’ve gotten the chance to see, again and again, one of her most impressive qualities: her exemplary mentorship of any and all students with whom she has the chance to work (ie, not just advisees or English Secondary Education students, but also each and every student she teaches). Katy’s about as busy as she could be with teaching and scholarship and professional organizations and family and much else, yet her office and perspective are a clear and potent resource for any student who has the good fortune to encounter them. I can’t imagine an office neighbor who more fully challenges me than Katy does to be a better mentor and campus community member, and I’m very thankful for that daily challenge and inspiration.3)      Lisa Gim: I’m not sure if I ever wrote about it in this space, but a few years back I ran for department chair, losing a close election to my colleague and friend Lisa. And man alive am I glad I did, as Lisa has been a wonderful and wonderfully effective chair throughout her time in the role (which fortunately has another year and a half to go). It’s been an incredibly challenging time for English Studies and FSU, and this fall more and more challenges have been added to the mix, including the aforementioned labor situation, a heavy push toward online education, an entirely new FSU administration, and much more. There’s no one way that any department, nor any institution, can navigate such challenges successfully—but having leaders who can help guide us in thoughtful yet impassioned ways, responding to our voices and needs (and those of our students) but offering a shaping vision, is key if we’re going to find and sustain such success. Lisa’s been precisely such a leader as chair, and I’m thankful both for all that work and for the model she’s provided for how to perform this difficult role at its best.4)      Diane Lucas: If Lisa’s one half of that FSU English Studies leadership team, however, Diane, our department administrator, is her vital other half. One of the largely unspoken but entirely understood realities of higher education is that departments succeed and fail largely as a result of whether they’re fortunate enough to have administrators who can combine knowledge and experience with dedication, kindness, and an ability to kick ass and take names when the occasion arises. I’ve had the good fortune to know such adminstrators at many institutions, but I’ve never met anyone who fits the bill better than Diane. Our department is big enough that it really needs two administrators, and for many years we had a great second one as well, Jean Varchol. But since Jean retired a couple years back, Diane’s been shouldering that dual load solo, which is far from ideal but makes the amazing job she’s done and continues to do that much more impressive and inspiring. To say that I’m thankful for Diane is to understate the case quite significantly. 5)      Cecelia Cancellaro: I’ll end this giving of thanks on a more personal (while still professional) note. Over the last year I’ve begun to work with Cecelia, a wonderful literary agent and founder of Word Literary Services. Our work together is very much in progress, and I hope to have great news to report on that front in the new year (if not before). But whatever the results for my next project and career, I can already say that Cecelia is a model for this complex role, both in what she has added to my writing and thoughts, and in her colleagiality and support at every stage of the process. I’m very thankful to have connected with her and to be working alongside her as I move into the next stages of my public scholarly goals.Happy Thanksgiving Next series starts Monday the 27th,BenPS. Thanks you’d share? I’m thankful for you all too!

November 18-19, 2017: Curry, LeBron, and Sports in the Age of Trump

[November 12thmarked the 125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional football player, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Pudge and other groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to this weekend post on Trump and sports!]On two NBA superstars and the evolving intersection of sports and politics.As the NFL national anthem protests and their various responses have continued to unfold throughout this fall, one of the critiques I’ve seen raised most frequently is that these athletes are unnecessarily bringing politics into the sports world. On the one hand, as I hope pretty much all of the posts under my Sports tag here at the blog make clear (as do all of the great posts at the Sport in American History blog), that critique misses the ways that sports have always been connected to—indeed, interconnected with—politics, society, culture, and everything else in our nation and world. In that sense, Kaepernick and his peers have simply forced us to examine those interconnections, a process that clearly frustrates and angers many of our fellow Americans. Yet at the same time, while such ties between sports and politics have thus always been part of our culture, there seems to me to be no question that the overt and prominent interconnections between these realms have become more frequent and more pronounced in this evolving age of Trump. And the recent cases of two of—perhaps the two—biggest basketball superstars in the world exemplify this striking and complex trend.Steph Curry’s purposeful engagement with Trump and the political realm is on the surface by far the more surprising of these two situations. As he has over the last few seasons become one of the NBA’s most prominent and popular stars—and the leader of a team that has dominated the league like few others over that period—Curry has done so in the mold of a young Magic Johnson: charismatic and charming, seemingly just as popular with opposing fanbases as with his own, an irresistible ambassador (along with his just-as-likable young family) for the league and sport. So for a player in that mold to take the step of expressing uncertainty about whether he would attend a White House ceremony celebrating his team’s championship—to, that is, not just intervene in a political conversation, but express a direct criticism of a political leader, risking alienating some portion of his fanbase among other potential effects—was a striking moment, even before Trump did his usual thing and escalated the situation on Twitter. While of course I agree with Curry’s perspective and stand, it’s also important just to note the significance of the moment itself, as a reflection of this new era in American sports and society.One of the figures who responded most directly to Trump’s Twitter attack on Curry was LeBron James, whose Tweet in response to Trump remains one of the more incendiary (and popular) social media messages (in any context) offered by an athlete to date. On the one hand, LeBron’s response seems less surprising than Curry’s words, both because of LeBron’s history of activism and because he’s already such a polarizing (and frequently hated-upon) figure that he had a good deal less to lose in that sense that did Curry. Yet if we take a step back and compare LeBron to the basketball great with whom he is most often linked (including by himself), Michael Jordan, I would still argue that this moment is a striking and significant one. Jordan was far from likable, and indeed happy to be hated as much as loved; but he also steadfastly recused himself from the political realm, both for brand/endorsement reasons and (it seemed) because of how laser-focused he was on athletic success and dominance. LeBron has often seemed just as laser-focused throughout his hugely successful career to date, and of course has garnered quite a few endorsements of his own along the way. So for him to take on Trump so directly likewise reflects this new world of sports and society in which we find ourselves.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this complex topic, or other athletes you’d highlight?

November 17, 2017: AthleteStudying: Women’s Soccer Stories

[November 12thmarked the 125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional football player, William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]Two individual and one collective way to AmericanStudy our recent crop of soccer superstars.1)      Megan Rapinoe: For complicated reasons related to narratives and images of masculinity and femininity, among many other things too extended and nuanced to delve into in a sentence or two, women’s sports have consistently featured openly gay athletes and connections to the LGBTQ community in a way that men’s sports have only recently (and still hesitantly) begun to. In relation to that longstanding and ongoing trend, the 2012 coming out of US Women’s Soccer star forward Megan Rapinoe was an important but representative event, one in a series of such pivotal LGBT women’s sports moments. But this past September, Rapinoe became part of the news for a different and more singular reason: she knelt during the national anthem before a match for her team the Seattle Reign, connecting to and honoring (as she did even more fully in her postgame comments) Colin Kaepernick’s ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protest. In many ways Rapinoe’s personal sexuality and her political solidarity with Kaepernick seem radically distinct, but I would argue the case differently: that, as Rapinoe herself noted in her comments, the two are connected through experiences of oppression and resistance, and through the complicated but crucial intersections of identity and sports.2)      Hope Solo: Solo is one of Rapinoe’s teammates on the Seattle Reign, as well as perhaps the most talented goalkeeper in women’s soccer history (she’s certainly in the conversation). But on the personal and identity side, Solo’s story is far darker and less inspiring than Rapinoe’s. There are, for example, her multiple arrests and ongoing charges for domestic violence, complicated family situations and dynamics that I won’t pretend to have all figured out but that certainly seem to have involved aggressive and hostile behavior from Solo toward numerous figures (not limited to those family members). And along those latter lines, there are Solo’s controversial and troubling comments after a 2016 Olympic match against Sweden, comments that led to a six-month suspension from the US Women’s National Team. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that the problems of either aggression in general or (especially) domestic violence in particular are parallel (much less identical) in women’s sports to what they are in men’s—but at the same time, Solo’s cases and story make clear that such problems are a significant part of the sports world on every level, and working to understand and address them for women as well as men can only help us engage with these social and political issues more fully as a result.3)      The Pay Gap: As important and inspiring as individual activisms like Rapinoe’s can be, I’m even more inspired by collective action, and this past March the US Women’s National Team took precisely such collective action in response to a substantial gap in what US Soccer pays its male and female athletes. Such gendered pay gaps have been part of our sports debates for many years, dating back at least to similar (and eventually effective) protests raised by women’s tennis players over the prizes awarded by tournaments such as Wimbledon. But the US WNT players moved the needle on the debate significantly, not only by making it a more collective action (rather than those prior, more individual protests) but also and especially by filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for redress. Too often, we dismiss sports as purely entertainment or distraction—while in reality (as I hope all of my Sports posts here have illustrated) sports can not only mirror and extend, but even influence and change, broader conversations and issues in our society and culture. As we continue to debate the gendered wage gap in 2017 America, the USWNT have once again proven that vital role for sports.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?