Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 250

September 7, 2017: Fall 2017 Previews: Literary Conversations at BOLLI

[As the Fall semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your fall classes and plans in comments!]On two literary pairings for which I’m particularly excited in a new adult learning class.I wrote earlier this year about my unfolding connection to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis University (BOLLI). BOLLI does many things, including the kinds of lecture series for which I was able to talk about the Harlem Renaissance in July. But first and foremost, BOLLI is an adult learning program, one that offers Study Groups (a concept about which I wrote in that hyperlinked post) for senior learners on a wide variety of topics and themes. For my first such Study Group, which will run for ten Thursday mornings this fall, I decided to focus on Literary Conversations: Pairing Past and Present Ethnic American Writers. As that title suggests, we’ll read pieces by two writers at a time, one from the 19th or early 20thcentury, one from our own moment, each pair linked by a particular, if certainly broad, cultural or ethnic community (Asian Americans, Native Americans, Caribbean Americans, etc.). My main goals are simply to share these writers (many of whom, especially the earlier ones but also many of the contemporary folks, I believe to be largely unread) and to see what we can make of the pairings, what they might open up on topics like identity, community, history, and story.I am of course excited for all of my pairings (I’d better be!), but I wanted here to highlight two in particular. Most of our pairings will last only one week/class and focus on short readings or excerpts, but at the semester’s center will be two weeks with two African American historical novels: Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981). As even casual readers of this blog likely know, Chesnutt’s book is my favorite American novel, and I’ve taught it even more than I’ve blogged about it here. So while of course I’m very excited to share it with a new community (I’ll be shocked if any of the BOLLI folks have encountered Chesnutt’s novel previously), I’m even more thrilled for the chance to teach Bradley’s novel for the first time. I’ve loved Chaneysvillesince I first read it as a teenager, featured it prominently in my college senior thesis, and wrote about it in my latest book (alongside Marrow, natch). But, in part because it’s a long and extremely challenging novel and in part just because, I haven’t yet found an opportunity to teach it in a college class. To say that I can’t wait to talk about it (alongside Chesnutt’s book) with this group of BOLLI students would be not to come close to expressing how much I’m looking forward to these two weeks.The rest should be pretty great too, though, and one pairing that I think could lead to really interesting conversations links 19th century Mexican American novelist María Ampáro Ruiz de Burton to the contemporary Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros. Cisneros is relatively well known (perhaps the most well known of my featured writers), and so too, of course, is the 21st century Mexican American community. Whereas I think we hardly ever remember, much less read and discuss, 19th century Mexican American voices like Ruiz de Burton’s, which is one main reason why we generally don’t think about that community (or the Hispanic American one more generally) as extending back to our collective origin points (considering them instead, when we do at all, as a foreign alternative or adversary—Spanish explorers, Mexican foes in the Mexican American War). So I can’t help but think that reading Ruiz de Burton alongside Cisneros will open up new ways of thinking—not only about those forgotten histories, but also and just as importantly about Cisneros, 21st century Mexican American and American communities, our own moment and world. I can’t wait to find out, and of course will keep you posted!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?

September 6, 2017: Fall 2017 Previews: First-year Writing I

[As the Fall semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your fall classes and plans in comments!]On two of the many vital skills that first-year writing courses teach.There’s been a good deal of discussion of our first-year courses at Fitchburg State in the last couple years. Some of it has echoed and extended a familiar and long-standing refrain: that our students don’t know and don’t learn how to write sufficiently (in their first years and/or at any time before they graduate), and that we need to address this deficiency. Despite its familiarity, I believe that refrain can indeed lead to important discussions about where and how we teach writing across our college and curriculum. Whereas I have much less patience with what has become a second main thread of discussion: that at least some of our first-year writing courses should be shifted away from English Studies and toward faculty and departments across campus. I believe such arguments almost always betray a striking lack of awareness of what happens in first-year writing courses, and not just in terms of the teaching of writing (although yes). They also seem largely unaware of the many other things we work to teach in these courses, a set of interconnected skills that make first-year writing classes some of the most demanding and important to teach.For one thing, first-year writing courses are among the most consistent spaces where students learn and practice how to read at the college level. Partly that means the skills required to read tons of pages of difficult material efficiently yet effectively, and to take notes on or otherwise process and retain that material enough to work with it in class and assignments (and, ideally but certainly, learn it for long after the class has ended). But it also means reading a wide variety of genres and media—over the course of my Writing I semester, for example, students read, discuss, and analyze personal essays, short stories, song lyrics and poetry, multimedia and digital texts, and scholarly essays. Each of those genres and forms requires different approaches and skills, and I’ve designed my assignment sequence to help students practice working with each of them, while at the same time helping them develop such writing-specific skills as argumentation and thesis-building, the use and close analysis of evidence, and the incorporation and citation of sources. That’s a great deal to ask of any one class (or even a two-part sequence of classes like our Writing I and II courses), but it’s an unavoidable and vital aspect of first-year writing nonetheless.First-year writing courses are also something else, though: one of the few places where all first-year college students are introduced to what it means to be a college student. (FSU is currently developing a First-year Experience program and course that might take on some of this pararaph’s content, so watch this space for further discussion of all this!) There are many, many many, aspects and skills that comprise that complex lesson, so I’ll just highlight a few here: what materials to bring to class and how to make the best use of them; how to navigate phones and other technology in the classroom; the appropriate tone and style to use in emails to professors; and how to use and benefit from one-on-one conversations with faculty, whether in conferences or office hours. I believe too many college faculty (including myself, much of the time) forget just how much our students need to learn about all of these topics, perhaps because many of us (again, including myself) came from environments and privilege that had better prepared us for college life. But their success depends in significant part on whether and how they learn these so-called “soft skills,” and First-year Writing I remains (and will likely always remain) one of the key places where that learning begins.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?

September 5, 2017: Fall 2017 Previews: America in the Gilded Age—and Today

[As the Fall semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your fall classes and plans in comments!][Before I begin my third straight fall section of our Honors Lit Seminar, I couldn’t come up with a more salient frame than that with which I concluded my second section last December. So forgive the repeat, but I’m very excited to teach these and many other works in Trump’s America.]What three under-read Gilded Age literary works can help us analyze in 2017 America.1)      The Squatter and the Don (1885): Back in September 2016, when it was still possible to see Donald Trump as something of a joke, I wrote this piece for the Huffington Post on why Trump should read María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s historical novel. Now that the joke is entirely on us, it’d be that much more important for our president-elect, and all Americans, to read a novel that can help us engage with the longstanding histories, stories, and oppressions of Mexican American communities. That’s not just because Trump has promised so many policies that would target Mexican Americans and Mexico in various ways, but also and even more importantly because works like Ruiz de Burton’s remind us that America has always included such communities, such diversity, such multi-lingualism, such a cross-cultural mixture. Her book, that is, not only highlights some of our darker and more discriminatory (and sadly still all too salient) histories, but also helps us remember how vital all our communities have been to the nation’s greatness.2)      “An Experiment in Misery” and “An Experiment in Luxury” (1894): File this entry in the “lifelong learning” category, as I had never heard of, much less read, these two interconnected Stephen Crane short stories until I assigned Broadview’s edition of Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) in last year’s section of this course. While I still like Maggie for its raw and gritty realism, I think the two “Experiment” stories—in which an unnamed youth lives for a time first as a New York homeless man and then as part of the city’s uber-wealthy—are even more unique and compelling. For one thing, they engage with their respective communities with a great degree of empathy and humanity, allowing Crane to move beyond the types and stereotypes that often come along with our images and narratives of class at either extreme. Yet for another, “Luxury” does not let its rich characters off the hook—even taken on its own terms, the story allows the protagonist to understand how wealth can warp one’s social perspective; and in tandem with “Misery,” the lesson is even clearer and more vital.3)      “In the Land of the Free” (c. 1900): As I detailed in that post, Sui Sin Far’s short story offers an ironic and tragic window into Chinese American lives, histories, and settings in the Exclusion Act era; as we contemplate new exclusion acts of our own, we would do well to better remember that Gilded Age law and its effects. But like all great literary works, Far’s story isn’t limited to that particular context, and also has a great deal to tell us about the conflict between exclusionary and inclusive narratives of American identity. That’s a conflict I’m increasingly certain has defined our country from its origins, and one that has returned with a vengeance in this post-election moment of hateful rhetoric and bigoted violence. Even New York’s wonderful Tenement Museum has witnessed xenophobic outbursts, many directed at the museum’s images and stories of Chinese American arrivals. Whether we see our moment as a new Gilded Age or a period with unique conflicts all its own, there’s no doubt that we need to read Far’s story, and all these Gilded Age authors and works, to engage with where we find ourselves today.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?

September 4, 2017: Fall 2017 Previews: Mark Twain!

[As the Fall semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your fall classes and plans in comments!]On two goals for a Special Authors course I’m beyond excited to be teaching.For my third version of our departmental Special Authors course—after classes focused on Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois—I decided to go with perhaps the most well-known American author, Mark Twain (the pen name and persona of Sam Clemens). I’m particularly excited for this class for a couple of contextual reasons. For one thing, Twain has been one of my Dad’s lifelong subjects, and I can’t wait to use resources like his Mark Twain in His Times website and edited edition of Huck Finn as part of our classwork. For another thing, as I’ll discuss more in tomorrow’s post on my Gilded Age Honors Seminar, both the late 19th century period of Twain’s principal publishing career and many of his most common topics and themes across that career could not feel more timely and salient than they do in the fall of 2017. Which is to say, for both personal and political/public reasons this is likely to be one of the most complex and compelling classes I’ve had the chance to teach—and that’s a great way to keep things fresh as I start year thirteen at FSU.In constructing the syllabus and assignments for the course, I’ve tried to achieve a couple of goals. For one thing, I wanted to balance the rightly famous sides to Twain with genres and works of his that are less well known. For the former, the exact middle of the class schedule will be two weeks with Huck Finn (and the many resources my Dad has assembled in that Broadview edition), and around it we’ll also read excerpts from other famous novels like Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (among others). But we’ll both begin and end the semester with less well-known genres and texts, many of them contained in these two great Library of America collections: beginning with weeks on humorous and satirical sketches, local color, and travel writing; and ending with weeks on political writing, allegorical and philosophical texts, and the very complex works with which Twain concluded his career in the early 20th century. My hope is that this dual approach will both deepen our understanding of Twain’s claims to fame and broaden our take on his life and career overall.My other goal has to go with the student assignments across the semester. For the Du Bois class, I used three creative assignments, asking the students to write their own texts within a few key genres and then use them to help analyze how Du Bois worked within those forms. That creative assignment sequence went really well, and so I’m going to do the same this time around: having the students write a local color/travel sketch (whether humorous or serious) for Short Paper 1, rewrite a scene from one of our works of fiction from a different character’s perspective for Short Paper 2, and write a political or allegorical piece dealing with a current issue or topic for Short Paper 3. Our Special Authors class is a 4000-level literature seminar, meaning that it will largely be full of junior and senior English Majors, folks whose writing and voices are already well-honed and who should have lots to say as they navigate these creative assignments. As always, I’ll make sure to let you know how it all goes in the end of semester reflection series. And oh yeah, one more thing: if we don’t have a higher quota of laughs per class period than any prior course I’ve taught, I’ll eat my white suit!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?

September 2-3, 2017: August 2017 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]July 31: Troubled Children: The Menéndez Brothers: A Lizzie Borden-inspired series starts with two legacies to the sensational case beyond the televised trial.August 1: Troubled Children: The Turn of the Screw: The series continues with two cultural fears lurking beneath Henry James’ ghost story.August 2: Troubled Children: Dennis the Menace: Three telling contexts for a longstanding menace on the funny pages, as the series rolls on.August 3: Troubled Children: Horror Films: How three horror films about demonic children embody their respective eras.August 4: Troubled Children: Lizzie Borden: On the 125th anniversary of the murders, what we’ll never know about them and what they can help understand nevertheless.August 5-6: Inspiring Children: The series concludes with three reasons why my sons are not at all troubling children!August 7: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Guadalcanal: On the battle’s 75thanniversary, a Pacific-studying series kicks off with three texts to help us understand the lengthy campaign.August 8: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Midway and The Thin Red Line: The series continues with clear and telling differences between two star-studded epic films.August 9: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Model-making: What a childhood building models can help us understand about war, as the series rolls on.August 10: AmericanStudying the Pacific: U.S.S. Midway Museum: Two different and even opposed roles served as San Diego’s unique military museum.August 11: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Nagasaki: The series concludes with an all-too-timely piece on the dropping of the second nuclear bomb.August 12: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011: 34 favorite posts from my blog’s first year! August 13: Birthday Bests: 2011-2012: 35 favorites from year two!August 14: Birthday Bests: 2012-2013: 36 favorites from year three!August 15: Birthday Bests: 2013-2014: 37 favorites from year four! August 16: Birthday Bests: 2014-2015: 38 favorites from year five! August 17: Birthday Bests: 2015-2016: 39 favorites from year six! August 18-20: Birthday Bests: 2016-2017: And for my 40th (!) birthday, 40 favorite posts from the most recent, seventh year of AmericanStudies!August 21: Famous Virginians: Arthur Ashe: A Virginia series starts with three ways the state’s African American community contributed to the development of the legendary athlete.August 22: Famous Virginians: Willa Cather: The series continues with way it mattered when the famous author finally returned to Virginia.August 23: Famous Virginians: Ella Fitzgerald: Three songs that help trace the career of the First Lady of Song, as the series rocks on.August 24: Famous Virginians: George C. Scott: Three defining military roles for the legendary film and stage actor.August 25: Famous Virginians: S.R. Siddarth: The series concludes with a recent political moment that embodies the battle between exclusion and inclusion.August 26-27: #NoConfederateSyllabus: A special post highlighting the work Matthew Teutsch and I have done to start #NoConfederateSyllabus—your suggestions and additions needed and appreciated! August 28: American Labor: Melville and The Lowell Offering: A Labor Day series starts with two distinct but complementary ways to give voice to working women.August 29: American Labor: Life in the Iron Mills: The series continues with the striking novella that asks us to empathize with some of our worst labor conditions.August 30: American Labor: “The Tenth of January”: A short story that combines genres to become something much more, as the series rolls on.August 31: American Labor: The Haymarket Affair: 19th century European revolutions and a controversial moment in American labor history.September 1: American Labor: The Triangle Fire: The series concludes with legacies and memories of the tragic industrial accident.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

September 1, 2017: American Labor: The Triangle Fire

[In this week leading up to Labor Day, one of our most poorly understood national holidays, five posts AmericanStudying texts and moments related to work in America. For many many more, check out Erik Loomis’ ongoing This Day in Labor History series at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog!]On two well-established legacies of and one evolving question about a horrific industrial disaster.The March 25th, 1911 fire at New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory led to the deaths of 146 garment workers, some as young as fourteen years old, making it one of the most deadly and tragic industrial disasters in American history. A number of factors came together to make the fire as destructive as it was: the factory was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Greenwich Village Asch Building, and inadequate methods of communication meant that for at least those workers on the 9th floor news of the fire literally arrived at the same time that the fire itself did; the factory’s owners kept many of the doors to stairwells and exits locked in order to prevent both theft and unauthorized breaks, leading many workers to jump to their deaths from windows rather than wait to be killed in the fire; the building’s one exterior fire escape was in terrible shape and perhaps already broken, and collapsed during the fire, sending at least twenty workers to their deaths; and so on. Yet while the particular combination of such contexts and events produced the fire’s strikingly high number of fatalities, it’s entirely accurate to say that each of those individual factors was representative of trends across the nation’s industrial sector in the period (and for many decades prior), the recognition of which in the fire’s aftermath led to a number of important legacies and changes.Those legacies can be roughly divided into two main categories: workplace safety regulations and labor activism. The safety issues were investigated first by a New York State Committee on Public Safety (headed by Frances Perkins, the sociologist and activist who would go on to serve as FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman appointed to a presidential cabinet) and then by the newly created Factory Investigating Commission (chaired by State and future U.S. Senator Robert Wagner and future NY Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith). These two efforts produced nearly forty influential state laws and numerous other workplace safety recommendations and changes. At the same time, the labor movement responded to the fire with vigor and sustained activism; on April 2nd, just a week after the fire, socialist and feminist union leader Rose Schneiderman gave a speech at the city’s Metropolitan Opera House to members of the Women’s Trade Union League, arguing that “the only way [working people] can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.” In the subsequent months and years, it was the relatively new but rapidly expanding International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) that most directly took up that charge, fighting for factory and sweatshop workers around the country. Indeed, it’d be impossible to separate the legislative and legal advances from the presence and role of these labor activists, and it’s most accurate to say that the two forms of response to the fire went hand-in-hand.Those safety and labor responses and changes represent the most clear and enduring legacy of the Triangle fire. But as a public AmericanStudies scholar interested in our national collective memories, I would argue that the question of how to remember the fire is another important, and certainly still evolving, one. Many of those conversations were centered on, as were the initial efforts of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition(formed in 2008), the 2011 Centennial, a hugely prominent event that featured contributions and speechesfrom then-Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis among many other luminaries. Yet as important as such an individual moment for memory is, it’s vital to think about longer-term and more lasting ways to add histories like the Triangle fire into our national memories and narratives. The Coalition is working to build a permanent public art Triangle Fire Memorial in Lower Manhattan; those efforts remain in their early stages and I’m sure could benefit from any and all ideas and contributions, fellow AmericanStudiers. But as big of a fan as I am of public art memorials, I would also stress that 21st century collective memories are created at least as much in digital, multimedia, and educational spaces and communities. How to better include a horrific disaster like the Triangle fire in those kinds of collective conversations remains, both specifically and generally, an open and evolving question, I’d say.August Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?

August 31, 2017: American Labor: The Haymarket Affair

[In this week leading up to Labor Day, one of our most poorly understood national holidays, five posts AmericanStudying texts and moments related to work in America. For many many more, check out Erik Loomis’ ongoing This Day in Labor History series at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog!]On revolutions, large and small, and a controversial moment in labor history.
One of the more eye-opening classes I took in college focused on 19th century European history, and specifically on the spate of revolutions and radical shifts in government and authority that dominated much of the century (particularly if it’s defined to include the end of the 18th century and so the French Revolution) for many European nations. Prominent European historian Eric Hobsbawn designated the first half of the century The Age of Revolution, as per the title of the relevant volume in his seminal multi-volume historical series, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962). But even though 1848 did represent a culmination, with numerous nations undergoing revolutions of one kind or another, the decades afterward likewise included at least one more major upheaval (the Paris Commune of 1871) and a number of smaller but still significant revolts and shifts as well. There were lots of reasons why both the details of these historical events and the class that highlighted them were eye-opening for me, but I suppose the most salient is the contrast with the United States, which, despite the newness and definite fragility of its government and identity, underwent no comparable revolutions or changes in its government over the same period (the Civil War would seem to be an obvious exception, but I think it’s different in kind from any of the European revolutions in question, not least because the Confederacy didn’t want to turn Washington into a new form of government but rather just to break entirely from the existing one).
This isn’t going to be one of those posts where I try to entirely flip that vision of our history; I don’t think there are any unknown 19th century American revolutions waiting to be remembered and narrated (there is the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat, but I’m talking national revolutions). But I do think that using the lens of the European revolutions, particularly in their near-ubiquitous emphasis on issues of class and caste as a chief factor in both their causes and results, can provide a helpful way to analyze one of the most complex and, yes, revolutionary elements of American life in the second half of the 19th century: the labor movement, and specifically the profound challenges it offered to American identity and changes it eventually effected. For one thing, the labor movement—and the singular term is a misnomer, there were many different labor movements in the period, with each particular union and organization representing a distinct community and vision and set of goals; but in the interests of space, I’ll refer to it with the collective term—was perhaps the only 19th century American social movement that comprised in large part an extension of existing, outside (and mainly European) movements. That doesn’t mean that labor in America didn’t take on shapes and tones specific and unique to our national history and culture and identity, but it did mean that some of the particularly prominent labor-related events that took place here were instigated in part by—and so, potentially, blamed on—international forces and organizations.
Exemplifying both the international instigations and the potential blame was the Haymarket Affair of May 1886, a labor protest (in support of the eight hour workday, the institution of which many different labor organizations had worked to make standard beginning on May 1st of that year) that turned into one of the more violent and chaotic events in the post-Civil War era. The principal organizer of the May Day marches and subsequent strikes in Chicago was Albert Parsons, an anarchist and founder of the International Working People’s Association; when the May 4th rally in support of the striking workers was torn apart by violence, both in the form of a bomb thrown at police and in a subsequent exchange of gunfire, it was eight anarchist leaders (five of them German-born) who were arrested and charged with inciting the bombing. The trial itself was largely a sham, since the prosecution admitted that it could not link any of the eight directly to the bombing, but an effective one, with all eight defendants found guilty and seven given the death penalty (four were eventually executed and a fifth killed himself while awaiting execution). But more telling still were the many journalistic responses to the anarchists, the authors of which consistently sought not only to criticize the anarchists’ political perspectives and castigate the labor movement for its association with them, but also and just as overtly to define them as foreign, as an unwanted alien presence in America (and thus to define the trial as a necessary, if not necessarily legally sound, repelling of this invasion of violent foreign ideas).
The aftermath of Haymarket highlights, on the one hand, the absence of overt revolutions in America—this was perhaps the moment of most heightened visibility for political radicals in the period, and yet the anarchists did not overthrow and remake Chicago’s government (as did the Paris Communists for that brief period in 1870) or in any other explicit way shift the nation’s political identity. But on the other hand, the eight hour workday was indeed instituted, just as the era’s labor movements eventually succeeded in achieving virtually every other significant goal (from an end to child labor to the creation of the work week, from safety regulations to more fixed wages and contracts, among many other advances). So it’s perhaps more accurate to say that America’s 19th century revolutions were social and gradual rather than political and radical—that the true bombs, that is, didn’t blow up our nation so much as slowly but profoundly reshape it. Last labor post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?

August 30, 2017: American Labor: “The Tenth of January”

[In this week leading up to Labor Day, one of our most poorly understood national holidays, five posts AmericanStudying texts and moments related to work in America. For many many more, check out Erik Loomis’ ongoing This Day in Labor History series at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog!]On a short story that combines local color and sentimental fiction—and becomes much more.I’ve written two posts about one of my favorite 19th century authors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: this one on the overall arc and significance of her multi-faceted literary career; and this one on her best novel, the feminist, realist, and powerfully affecting The Story of Avis (1877). Throughout her career, Phelps wed sentimental writing (as in her spiritual Gates trilogy) to local color fiction (as in the New England regionalism of Avis), focusing consistently on the experiences of women within those different frames and settings; she also published a number of young adult and juvenile works, including the very popular Gypsy Brenton books (published when she was only in her early 20s). In the course of that long and successful career, she became one of the century’s best-selling novelists, inspired prominent subsequent writers like William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton, and deserves to be far better remembered and more widely read in our own era.Yet with all of that said, it’s quite possible that Phelps’ most interesting and important piece of writing was her first published work of fiction for adults: “The Tenth of January,” a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly’s March 1868 volume (when Phelps was only twenty-three years old). “Tenth” fictionalizes one of the worst industrial and workplace disasters in American history, the January 10th, 1860 collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. That famous and horrific historical event offered Phelps a perfect chance to combine her two most consistent literary genres in this debut short story, and she does so to great success—opening with an extended portrayal of this Massachusetts mill town and its unique culture and community (“it would be difficult to find Lawrence’s equal,” the narrator notes), and then gradually building a sentimental and highly emotional story about a particular young female worker (nearly all those killed in the collapse fit that description, with most of them recent immigrants), Del Ivory, whose tragic fate (along with those of many other characters, some only children) becomes intertwined with that of the mill.Those elements alone, in the hands of a master like Phelps, would be enough to create a compelling and moving story out of this striking historical material. But in the voice of her narrator, at once a detached observer and a fiery critic, Phelps adds another complex and vital layer to her story. Consider these back to back moments in the story’s introductory section. First the narrator concludes a descriptive paragraph on Lawrence with these angry lines, “Of these ten thousand [workers] two thirds are girls: voluntary captives, indeed; but what is the practical difference? It is an old story—that of going to jail for want of bread.” And then she transitions into the body of her story with this elegiac paragraph: “My story is written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I linger over it as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well: half sadly, half gladly—more gladly than sadly—but hushed.” This narrative voice is not unlike that of another Atlantic Monthly story from earlier in the decade, Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861)—but by wedding this engaging narrator and her multi-faceted literary genres to a real and horrific historical event, Phelps add yet another layer of power and pathos to this unique short story.Next labor post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?

August 29, 2017: American Labor: Life in the Iron Mills

[In this week leading up to Labor Day, one of our most poorly understood national holidays, five posts AmericanStudying texts and moments related to work in America. For many many more, check out Erik Loomis’ ongoing This Day in Labor History series at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog!]On the striking novella that asks us to empathize with some of our worst work conditions.
If I had to identify one factor that can almost instantly change our perspectives (individually and communally) on any issue or story—no matter how entrenched our existing beliefs might seem to be—I’d have to go with empathy. Not just sympathy, ‘cause while that’s nice it’s still somewhat distant, regarding what’s happening to someone else and feeling badly about it. But the moment when we can empathize with them, the second we start imagining ourselves in that identity and situation and set of experiences, that to me is the lever that can force some daylight between our biases and the genuine and complex details of what these others are dealing with, making it possible, at least potentially, for us to see and understand the latter without being blinded by the former. That’s why, whatever else he did or does with his career, I’ll always be very grateful to Everlast for his song “What It’s Like,” which articulates the necessity of and stakes in such empathetic connections, even to some of the most controversial figures among us (an alcoholic homeless man, a girl getting an abortion, and a gangbanger), with perfect clarity and power (it also includes, in its bridge, one of the truest lines in American music: “You know where it ends, yo it usually depends on where you start”).
One of the most striking requests for an audience’s empathy in all of American literature comes in the opening paragraphs of Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in the Iron-Mills (1861). The twenty-nine year old Davis was working as a reporter and occasional editor for her local newspaper, the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer, when Life appeared in the April 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and had published no works in any genre on a national level (her first novel, Margret Howth , would appear later in the year); so this incredibly dense and evocative work would have likely caught readers by surprise in any case. But the direct inclusion of those readers in that first sentence—“A cloudy day; do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?”—, and moreover the central role played by “you” in almost every sentence of the story’s first four paragraphs, represents a even more thoroughly surprising and immediately engaging element. And Davis asks her audience to do a great deal more than just envision a cloudy day; in the fourth paragraph’s culmination of this introductory section, she requests your empathy much more overtly and brazenly: “Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries; I want to make it a real thing to you.”
As the somewhat melodramatic language and tone there might suggest, the story that Davis proceeds to tell for us is certainly not without its sentimental and gothic extremes: from its heroine, a hunchbacked worker named Deborah who suffers from a lifelong unrequited love for the story’s hero, Hugh Wolfe; to Wolfe’s own conflicted identity as an iron worker who produces tragically beautiful works of art in his spare time and with spare materials; to the at times heavy-handed use of symbols, including a caged and soot-covered bird in the opening and the angel sculpture that represents both Wolfe’s masterpiece and, in the story’s main plot thread, his undoing and destruction. Yet of course one could argue quite successfully that such emotional and symbolic extremes represent purposeful choices on Davis’s part to help bring us in, to engage with her audience’s own emotions and ideas—and thus, paradoxically but crucially, that in these melodramatic elements, just as much as in the striking second-person opening, she is in fact working precisely to “make it a real thing” for us. And that argument could be made successfully because she most certainly succeeds in that goal: I’ve never been anywhere near a town of iron-works, and when I first read this story as a freshman in college had never even seen photographs of them, yet Davis’s text captures every sensory detail, every corner, of that setting and world with clarity and power; so much so that when we come back to the narrator’s voice and room in the final paragraphs, the circular structure reminds us of the first sentence’s question, and our answer now, wherever and whoever we may be, is “Yes.”As with anything, even the best of things, empathy has its limits, and that’s not at all a bad thing; not every identity is healthy for us to imagine ourselves into, and I certainly have no desire to empathize with (for example) a Jeffrey Dahmer. But when it comes to defining experiences and places and issues in American history, especially those that are far removed from most of our 21st-century lives—and the world of industrial labor in the 19thcentury, before such things as the weekend or work hours or child labor laws or safety regulations were even matters for debate, is most definitely one of them—there are few things that can be more productive and important than imagining ourselves into them. And that’s a lot easier with a guide like Davis. Next labor post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?

August 28, 2017: American Labor: Melville and The Lowell Offering

[In this week leading up to Labor Day, one of our most poorly understood national holidays, five posts AmericanStudying texts and moments related to work in America. For many many more, check out Erik Loomis’ ongoing This Day in Labor History series at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog!]On two distinct but complementary ways to give literary voice to working women.
One of the most unique and effective American short stories has to be Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”(originally published in Harper’s in 1855; Tartarus is a hellish underworld in Greek mythology). Melville’s story features two seemingly distinct and unconnected halves in which the unnamed first-person speaker visits, and describes at great length, the two titular communities: in the first half he attends a refined and luxurious dinner party in the London club of a group of wealthy and unmarried male lawyers; and in the second his business pursuits lead him to the hellish gorge that houses a paper mill and the community of pale and silent young women who work there. As my parallel summaries have probably already highlighted, the story’s overall structure, as well as a number of specific choices and phrases in each, brings these two disparate worlds together in very clear and provocative ways, forcing Melville’s readers to confront the realities of their new industrial age; such realities include not only the conditions and environments necessary to produce in bulk the items used by the London bachelors, but also the differences in class and gender and identity that accompany such distinct settings. It’s a great story, much more explicitly social than many of Melville’s works without sacrificing any of his stylistic strengths, and well worth a read.
In order to make his comparisons and contrasts work, though, Melville does have to render the mill’s working women overtly and fully silent; and while that makes for a compelling metaphor, it also elides one of the more interesting (if relatively brief) literary experiments in American history. In 1840, fifteen years before Melville published his story, Abel Charles Thomas, pastor of the First Univeralist (Unitarian) Church in Lowell, Massachusetts and a mentor to many of the young women who had come to work in Lowell’s textile mills, founded and began editing The Lowell Offering , a literary magazine consisting entirely of contributions (in a wide variety of genres) from mill workers. Although Thomas had a strong hand in the magazine’s first four issues (published between October 1840 and March 1841), not only as editor but in soliciting contributions from the improvement and reading circles that he organized and ran, by April 1841 it had begun to receive numerous unsolicited pieces (enough to require the monthly publication schedule that would continue from then on), and in 1842 Thomas turned over the editorship to two of the women themselves, Harriot Curtis and Harriet Farley; they served in that role until the magazine ceased publication in 1845 (not for lack of success, but for what Curtis and Farley called “reasons of a private nature … in which the public is not interested”), and Farley later collected some of the magazine’s best pieces in the book Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847).
There are lots of such great pieces waiting to be discovered, both in the complete issues from 1840-1841 that are collected at this online database and in these two Google books versions of the Offering; as is often the case with literary magazines, it helps to read them in context and in connection to one another, to look through an issue or two and see the interconnected identities of the magazine and the mills begin to emerge. But it’s worth noting that the first piece in the first (October 1840) issue, “History of a Hemlock Broom: Written by Itself,” exemplifies many of the magazine’s great strengths. The piece is witty and touching, with the broom (speaking through its “amanuensis” Hannah because it “cannot hold a pen”) guiding us through its tumultuous life, from its “first distinct recollections” as “the lowest branch” of a tree through its service to multiple masters and mistresses (but especially the aforementioned and supportive Hannah) in a house down the hill to its final retirement in the backyard, with a “full prospect of [its] former companions on the hill beyond.” But it also engages, subtly but clearly, with the kinds of broad and significant issues of work and identity, of the ways in which we define ourselves and how those definitions evolve in relation to our personal and professional roles and the settings and controlling forces that influence them, that would be at the heart of the Offering throughout its run.Life in the mills was indeed far from paradise, and the writers in the Offering didn’t hesitate to engage with the most dark and difficult sides to their world and experiences there. The fact that they did so through their impressive and eloquent voices makes their work, to my mind, less a contrast and more a complement to Melville’s story; together, these unique and rich American Renaissance texts can help reveal the new world of industrialization in all its complexity—and, for our 21st century world of sweatshops and high-end retailers, migrant labor and billions in bonuses, its ongoing relevance. Next labor post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other work-related texts or moments you’d share?