Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 252

August 14, 2017: Birthday Bests: 2012-2013

[On August 15th, this AmericanStudier turns the big 4-0. So this week I’ll be sharing posts of birthday favorites for each of the blog’s prior years, leading up to a new birthday best list for 2016-2017. You couldn’t give me a better present than to say hi and tell me a bit about what brings you to the blog, what you’ve found or enjoyed here, your own AmericanStudies thoughts, or anything else!]For my 36th birthday I highlighted 36 of my favorite posts from the blog’s third year:  1)      Bad Memories, Part Four: As part of a series on how we could better remember our darkest histories, I considered memoir, photography, and fiction of the Japanese Internment.
2)      Crowd-Sourcing Bad Memories: Perhaps my favorite of the crowd-sourced posts to date, as many fellow AmericanStudiers weighed in on the week’s theme.
3)      Books That Shaped AmericanStudier, Childhood: I began a series on books that have hugely impacted me with one of my first favorites, the Hardy Boys series.
4)      Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Gardner Museum-inspired series began with a post on Gardner herself, one of my favorite Americans.
5)      John Singer Sargent: Posts on Gardner and Sargent go together as perfectly as, well, Gardner and Sargent did!6)      Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Any post that allows me to write more about the greatest American sculptor, and one of the most inspiring Americans period, is well worth sharing again.
7-11) The five posts in this series on American hope remain perhaps my most definitive statements of the complexities, contexts, and crucial importance of this elusive emotion.
12) Up in the Air, Part Five: Summer camps, childhood memories, and nostalgia—one of my more universal and, I believe, broadly relevant posts.
13) Ezra Jack Keats: This post, in a series on children’s books, expressed the importance of this pioneering author—and was linked to by the Keats Foundation!
14-18) Another series in which I need to highlight all five posts—this has been the longest and hardest year of my life, and writing these posts on how Americans have responded to adversity helped me get through it.
19) American Spooking, Part 3: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Grant Wood, and American Horror Story help me think about whether America can have homegrown horror, and where we might find it.
20) Extra Thanks: A Thanksgiving series concludes with a few reflections on one of my most unexpected and inspiring moments of the year.
21) American Winter, Part Four: The very different but equally American perspectives at the heart of two winter classics.
22) AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Four: On the limitations and lessons of a childhood spent building models.
23) Lincoln, Culture, and History: Some of my thoughts on Steven Spielberg’s popular and important historical film (with this additional post after I saw it!).
24) Making My List (Again), Part Five: A series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves ends with the educational experience I wish all children could have.
25) AmericanStudying Our Biggest Issues: Climate Change: As I’ve shifted more fully to an emphasis on public scholarship, I’ve worked hard to find ways to connect my subjects to contemporary concerns—and this post exemplifies that goal.
26) American Homes, Part Four: The American narratives inside (perhaps deep inside) one of our silliest films.
27) Remembering Wheatley and Washington: A Black History Month series on conversations begins with the time the poet met the (future) president.
28) I Love Three Pages in Ceremony: I’ve always wanted to write about my single favorite moment in American fiction. Here I did!
29) Popular Fiction: Christian Novels: It’s always fun to write (and so learn) about subjects I myself know too little about, and this post definitely qualifies.
30) Supreme Contexts: Santa Clara County and Revision: Few Supreme Court decisions are as relevant to our contemporary moment, and thus worth remembering, as this one.
31) Spring in America: Children’s Stories: Two pioneering children’s classics that captures two opposing sides to a new season.
32) Baseball in America: The Black Sox: This whole baseball series was fun to research and write, so I’ll just highlight one of its posts (yes, the one that includes John Sayles!).
33) Comic Book Heroes: Wonder Woman: Ditto for this comic book series, but this post was the one for which I learned the most and had my eyes opened most completely.
34) Roopika Risam’s Guest Post: I could include any and all guest posts in this list—but Roopika’s was certainly a wonderful addition to the blog.
35) American Swims: Cheever’s Swimmer: Part of the fun of this blog is sharing American texts that I think we should all read, and Cheever’s short story is a great example.36) Book Release Reflections, Part Four: I have to end the list with one of the things I’m most     excited about in the year to come (and I now have at least 20 talks definitely coming up!).Next list tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do!

August 13, 2017: Birthday Bests: 2011-2012

[On August 15th, this AmericanStudier turns the big 4-0. So this week I’ll be sharing posts of birthday favorites for each of the blog’s prior years, leading up to a new birthday best list for 2016-2017. You couldn’t give me a better present than to say hi and tell me a bit about what brings you to the blog, what you’ve found or enjoyed here, your own AmericanStudies thoughts, or anything else!]35 of my favorite posts from my blog’s second year!August 16: Me Too: In which I follow up the birthday favorites by highlighting five posts that make clear just how much I too continue to learn about America.August 23: Virginia, Cradle of American Studies: The first post in what I believe was my first series (now of course the blog’s central format), on a few of Virginia’s American Studies connections.September 1: First Questions: A back to school post, highlighting both the role that teaching plays in my American Studying and my (continued!) desire for your input on my topics here.September 2: Not Tortured Enough: On torture, American ideals and realities, and how contemporary politics and overarching American questions intersect.September 12: The Neverending Story: Perhaps the most vital American Studies response I can imagine to September 11th and its decade-long aftermath.October 6: Native Voices: Linking the NEASA conference at Plimoth Plantation, the hardest part of my dissertation and first book, and a key American question.
October 11: Remembering an Iconoclastic Genius: One of my most important jobs here, I think, is to help us better remember important (and often inspiring) people and histories and stories that we’ve forgotten; Derreck Bell is one such person.
October 19: The Importance of Reading Ernest: Making the case for an under-read American great, and remembering to keep my literary interests present in this space at the same time.
November 7: Moments That Remain 1: The fall’s NEASA conference was one of the best weekends of my life, and it was very exciting to be able to bring a bit of it to the blog.
November 14: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 1: Of the few different ways I’ve tried to grapple with the Penn State scandal in this space, I think this series, using student voices and ideas to remember the best of what college should be, is my favorite.
November 28: Bond, Racist Bond?: It’s not easy to analyze something we love—but I tried that here, with one of my favorite films in my favorite series.
December 5: Defining Diversity: Transitioning from a topical post (one responding to other American commentators) to the continued development of my own ideas about American culture and identity.
December 12: Cross-Culture 1: It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: And then extending those ideas to one of the many different media, genres, and disciplines that American Studies helps us analyze.
December 19: Making My List 1: Memory Days: The Memory Days have become a separate and ongoing project and page here, but this is where they began.
December 29: Year in Review 4: School for Scandal: Another stab at Penn State—not searching for answers so much as highlighting some of the key American Studies questions.
January 4: Gaga for American Studies: What American Studies can help us see in and say about Lady Gaga. Enough said.
January 21: American Studies for Lifelong Learning: A series that helped me plan the spring semester, connect my teaching to this blog, and, in this case, move me toward both a new experience and what would turn out to be my third book.
January 23: Mexican American Studies: I’m maybe most proud of this series out of all that I’ve done in this space this year, and this is where it started.
February 2: The Three Acts of John Rocker: Trying to do complex justice to a figure and story that are both close to my heart (or at least the Atlanta Braves are) and easily over-simplified.
February 16: Remembering Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Another far-too forgotten figure, and a post inspired by an idea from a friend (which was the origin for the now-frequent crowd-sourced posts).
February 24: Detroit Connections: I think it’s fair to say that I hadn’t thought about this topic at all prior to coming up with the series and writing the post. That’s part of what a blog allows us to do, and while the results have to speak for themselves, I love the opportunity.
March 6: Celebrating Zitkala-Sa: The whole Women’s History series was a lot of fun, but any time I get the chance to recommend this unique and amazing author, I take it.
March 21: Balboa Park: Family vacations will never be the same, now that they’re part of my American Studying and blogging too. That’s fine by me.
March 27: Race and Danny Chen: Like the prior day’s subject, Trayvon Martin, Chen is a tragically killed American whose story we should all know and with which we have to engage.
April 4: Melville’s Confidence Man: A good reminder that both literature and laughter have their place on the blog too.
April 19: How Would a Patriot Act? Part Three: This post on the amazing and inspiring Yung Wing helped me continue developing book three.
April 26: Great American Stories, Part Four: One of the very best American short stories, by one of my very favorite authors.
May 10: Maurice Sendak: Sometimes I feel locked into a week’s series, but Sendak’s death reminded me that sometimes I need to shift gears and write about a topical and important subject.
May 29: Remembering Pat Tillman: I hope I did justice to the complexities and ambiguities in this American life and death; this remains by far my most-read post on the Open Salon version of this blog, so it seems like it struck a chord with folks.
June 2-3: Remembering or Commemorating War: Michael Kammen, Kurt Vonnegut and Clint Eastwood, and big American questions—if that’s not American Studying, what is?
June 12: Playing with America, Part 2: But this is American Studying too—analyzing some of the cultural and historical causes behind the hula hoop fad.
June 16-17: Crowd-sourced Post on Material Culture: My first crowd-sourced post, now one of my favorite aspects of the blog. Add your thoughts for this week’s!
July 6: Newton’s Histories, Part 5: To come full circle to the August 16thpost, Jonathan Walker reminds me of how much I still have to learn about American history and culture.July 27: Jennings on the Long Haul: And the inspiring life and career of Frances Jennings reminds me of why continuing to learn, study, analyze, teach, and write about America is so important and so rewarding.Next list tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do!

August 12, 2017: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011

[On August 15th, this AmericanStudier turns the big 4-0. So this week I’ll be sharing posts of birthday favorites for each of the blog’s prior years, leading up to a new birthday best list for 2016-2017. You couldn’t give me a better present than to say hi and tell me a bit about what brings you to the blog, what you’ve found or enjoyed here, your own AmericanStudies thoughts, or anything else!]
In honor of this AmericanStudier’s 34th birthday in 2011, here (from oldest to most recent) were 34 of my favorite posts from the blog’s first year:
1)      The Wilmington Massacre and The Marrow of Tradition: My first full post, but also my first stab at two of this blog’s central purposes: narrating largely forgotten histories; and recommending texts we should all read.
2)      Pine Ridge, the American Indian Movement, and Apted’s Films: Ditto to those purposes, but also a post in which I interwove history, politics, identity, and different media in, I hope, a pretty exemplary American Studies way.
3)      The Shaw Memorial: I’ll freely admit that my first handful of posts were also just dedicated to texts and figures and moments and histories that I love—but the Memorial, like Chesnutt’s novel and Thunderheart in those first two links, is also a deeply inspiring work of American art.
4)      The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Most Amazing Baseball Game Ever: Probably my favorite post to date, maybe because it tells my favorite American story.
5)      Ely Parker: The post in which I came up with my idea for Ben’s American Hall of Inspiration; I know many of my posts can be pretty depressing, but hopefully the Hall can be a way for me to keep coming back to Americans whose stories and legacies are anything but.
6)      My Colleague Ian Williams’ Work with Incarcerated Americans: The first post where I made clear that we don’t need to look into our national history to find truly inspiring Americans and efforts. 
7)      Rush Limbaugh’s Thanksgiving Nonsense: My first request, and the first post to engage directly with the kinds of false American histories being advanced by the contemporary right.
8)      The Pledge of Allegiance: Another central purpose for this blog is to complicate, and at times directly challenge and seek to change, some of our most accepted national and historical narratives. This is one of the most important such challenges.
9)      Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Rap: If you’re going to be an AmericanStudier, you have to be willing to analyze even those media and genres on which you’re far from an expert, and hopefully find interesting and valuable things to say in the process. 
10)   Chinatown and the History of LA: At the same time, the best AmericanStudiers likewise have to be able to analyze their very favorite things (like this 1974 film, for me), and find ways to link them to broader American narratives and histories.
11)   The Statue of Liberty: Our national narratives about Lady Liberty are at least as ingrained as those about the Pledge of Allegiance—and just about as inaccurate.
12)   Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and Parenting: Maybe the first post in which I really admitted my personal and intimate stakes in the topics I’m discussing here, and another of those texts everybody should read to boot.
13)   Dorothea Dix and Mental Health Reform: When it comes to a number of the people on whom I’ve focused here, I didn’t know nearly enough myself at the start of my research—making the posts as valuable for me as I could hope them to be for any other reader. This is one of those.
14)   Ben Franklin and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments: As with many dominant narratives, those Americans who argue most loudy in favor of limiting immigration usually do so in large part through false, or at best greatly oversimplified and partial, versions of our past.  
15)   Divorce in American History: Some of our narratives about the past and present seem so obvious as to be beyond dispute: such as the idea that divorce has become more common and more accepted in our contemporary society. Maybe, but as with every topic I’ve discussed here, the reality is a good bit more complicated.
16)   My Mom’s Guest Post on Margaret Wise Brown: The first of the many great guest posts I’ve been fortunate enough to feature here; I won’t link to the others, as you can and should find them by clicking the “Guest Posts” category on the right. And please—whether I’ve asked you specifically or not—feel free to contribute your own guest post down the road!
17)   JFK, Tucson, and the Rhetoric and Reality of Political Violence: The first post in which I deviated from my planned schedule to respond directly to a current event—something I’ve incorporated very fully into this blog in the months since.
18)   Tribute Post to Professor Alan Heimert: I’d say the same about the tribute posts that I did for the guest posts—both that they exemplify how fortunate I’ve been (in this case in the many amazing people and influences I’ve known) and that you should read them all (at the “Tribute Posts” category on the right). 
19)   Martin Luther King: How do we remember the real, hugely complicated, and to my mind even more inspiring man, rather than the mythic ideal we’ve created of him? A pretty key AmericanStudies question, one worth asking of every truly inspiring American.
20)   Angel Island and Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free”: Immigration has been, I believe, my first frequent theme here, perhaps because, as this post illustrates, it can connect us so fully to so many of the darkest, richest, most powerful and significant national places and events, texts and histories.
21)   Dresden and Slaughterhouse Five: One of the events we Americans have worked most hard to forget, and one of the novels that most beautifully and compelling argues for the need to remember and retell every story.
22)   Valentine’s Day Lessons: Maybe my least analytical post, and also one of my favorites. It ain’t all academic, y’know.
23)   Tori Amos, Lara Logan, and Stories of Rape: One of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard helps me respond to one of the year’s most horrific stories.
24)   Peter Gomes and Faith: A tribute to one of the most inspiring Americans I’ve ever met, and some thoughts on the particularly complicated and important American theme he embodies for me.
25)   The Treaty of Tripoli and the Founders on Church and State: Sometimes our historical narratives are a lot more complicated than we think. And sometimes they’re just a lot simpler. Sorry, David Barton and Glenn Beck, but there’s literally no doubt of what the Founders felt about the separation of church and state the idea of America as a “Christian nation.”
26)   Newt Gingrich, Definitions of America, and Why We’re Here: The first of many posts (such as all those included in the “Book Posts” category on the right) in which I bring the ideas at the heart of my second book into my responses to AmericanStudies narratives and myths.
27)   Du Bois, Affirmative Action, and Obama: Donald Trump quickly and thoroughly revealed himself to be a racist jackass, but the core reasons for much of the opposition to affirmative action are both more widespread and more worth responding to than Trump’s buffoonery. 
28)   Illegal Immigrants, Our Current Deportation Policies, and Empathy: What does deportation really mean and entail, who is affected, and at what human cost? 
29)   Tribute to My Grandfather Art Railton: The saddest Railton event of the year leads me to reflect on the many inspiring qualities of my grandfather’s life, identity, and especially perspective.
30)   My Clearest Immigration Post: Cutting through some of the complexities and stating things as plainly as possible, in response to Sarah Palin’s historical falsehoods. Repeated and renamed with even more force here. 
31)   Paul Revere, Longfellow, and Wikipedia: Another Sarah Palin-inspired post, this time on her revisions to the Paul Revere story and the question of what is “common knowledge” and what purposes it serves in our communal conversations.
32)   “Us vs. them” narratives, Muslim Americans, and Illegal Immigrants: The first of a couple posts to consider these particularly frustrating and divisive national narratives. The second, which also followed up my Norwegian terrorism response (linked below), is here. 
33)   Abraham Cahan: The many impressive genres and writings of this turn of the century Jewish American, and why AmericanStudiers should work to push down boundaries between disciplines as much as possible.34)   Terrorism, Norway, and Rhetoric: One of the latest and most important iterations of my using a current event to drive some American analyses—and likewise an illustration of just how fully interconnected international and American events and histories are.Next list tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do!

August 11, 2017: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Nagasaki

[August 7thmarks the 75thanniversary of the start of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major Allied offensive against Japan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, starting with that 1942 battle.]For the final post in this series, and two days after the 72nd anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, I wanted to share this August 2015 Talking Points Memo piece of mine on that bombing. I’d love any and all comments and responses, of course.Special birthday series starts this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

August 10, 2017: AmericanStudying the Pacific: U.S.S. Midway Museum

[August 7thmarks the 75thanniversary of the start of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major Allied offensive against Japan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, starting with that 1942 battle.]Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego’s unique historic site.Floating in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. When we visited the city and museum five years ago, my boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and featuring detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.There’s another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for “close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.Last PacificStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

August 9, 2017: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Model-making

[August 7thmarks the 75thanniversary of the start of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major Allied offensive against Japan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, starting with that 1942 battle.]On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision, patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses, their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions, of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications, military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July (1976).I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives (and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead; and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective worth modeling, I’d say.Next PacificStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

August 8, 2017: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Midway and The Thin Red Line

[August 7thmarks the 75thanniversary of the start of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major Allied offensive against Japan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, starting with that 1942 battle.]On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded World War II films.Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Line includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see: long, long shots of waving grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footage was still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they experience those events; whereas in Line individual characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be quickly shown before we get back to the characters.To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual works—it would be silly to claim that Midwaycould be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important way or another; and some of Line’s key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind aboutits star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.Next PacificStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

August 7, 2017: AmericanStudying the Pacific: Guadalcanal

[August 7thmarks the 75thanniversary of the start of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major Allied offensive against Japan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, starting with that 1942 battle.]On three texts that can help us AmericanStudy a lengthy, pivotal military campaign.1)      Kawaguchi’s quote: “Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history. It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.” So stated Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, commander of the first Japanese infantry brigade to attempt to retake the island after the Allied occupation. The back and forth battle for control of Guadalcanal, its strategically crucial Henderson (air)Field, and other neighboring Solomon Islands would stretch from August 1942 through February 1943, with any number of moments and conflicts that could have provided turning points in an alternative history of not only this campaign but the war’s (and world’s) future more broadly. Yet ultimately the result was the result—and as the Pacific Theater’s first truly substantive battle, that result fundamentally shifted the balance of power in the region and the war. Although of course the war would go on for two and a half more long and highly contested years, Kawaguchi’s quote helps us understand just how much the die was cast at Guadalcanal.2)      Guadalcanal Diary (1943): In a strikingly new development in war journalism, International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis accompanied the Allied forces for months in the early stages of the battle, documenting both everyday experiences and the campaign’s biggest moments. The resulting book was published in January 1943, before the campaign had even concluded, and respresented a more immediate and grounded portrayal of war than any prior American text. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more factually or historically accurate—the book is a personal memoir, as its title suggests, and so the same uncertainties of memory and truth that accompany any personal narrative apply—but the rawness and honesty of its perspective and details offers a kind of experiential accuracy nonetheless. This is what the campaign felt like, to a man who lived it and the men with whom he shared it. In November a Hollywood film adaptation of the book would be released, and it too felt more personal than most of the war’s big-budget blockbusters; but there’s no beating the book for that raw representation of wartime experiences.3)      The Thin Red Line (1962): James Jones’s fourth novel was based, as were a number of his novels before and after (including his most famous, From Here to Eternity [1951]), on his experiences in World War II’s Pacific Theater; Thin in particular focuses on three battles from the Guadalcanal campaign. Although Terence Malick’s controversial 1998 film adaptation of the novel certainly amplifies these qualities, the book too is far more detached and (at times) dreamlike than Tregaskis’ journalistic text. It balances those aspects, however, with some of the most gritty and realistic depictions of violence in any World War II novel, leading military historian John Keegan to call it (in his 1983 book The Face of Battle) one of the two best literary portrayals of the war. In its naturalistic depiction of a battle and war that are far bigger than any of their individual participants, Jones’s book also compares favorably to such classics as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). This is a vital war novel for perhaps the Pacific Theater’s most vital battle.Next PacificStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

August 5-6, 2017: Inspiring Children

[August 4thmarks the 125thanniversary of the day that Lizzie Borden may or may not have taken an axe and given her mother forty whacks and her father forty-one (more on that crucial ambiguity in Friday’s post). So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five histories or stories of deeply troubled children, leading up to this special weekend post on two children who are anything but!]The picture of my sons that headlines this blog was already a bit outdated when I began blogging in November 2010, and is really really outdated nearly seven years later. They’re rising 6th and 5th graders now, 11 and 10 years old, and day in and day out the most inspiring presences in my life. Here are three reasons why, one for each of them and then one that’s shared:1)      Pledge Protest: One of my posts in that first month of blogging focused on a preschool Pledge of Allegiance, so it’s only appropriate that I come back around to the Pledge in a very different context. Throughout his time in 5th grade this past year, my older son took a knee during his class’s recital of the Pledge; the idea, entirely his own, was to honor and extend Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protest. Thanks in part to Bruce’s amazing “American Skin (41 Shots),” a shared favorite song of ours, I’ve talked to the boys about police shootings and race in America for many years now; but there’s talking and then there’s listening, understanding, and developing one’s own perspective and voice. My son’s Pledge protest reflects just how fully he’s done all of the latter, and become his own amazing young man as a result (among many other influences of course).2)      Peer Pressure: My younger son is far more naturally social than his brother, and every year thus far has become fast and serious friends with at least one classmate. His 4th grade year was no different, as he and this friend bonded over basketball (my son became a die-hard Celtics fan thanks to this friend and the amazing play of Isaiah Thomas) and many other shared interests. But I’m particularly proud of an influence my son had on this friend—his friend was much less of a fan of schoolwork and homework than my son, and over the course of the year my son encouraged his buddy to get his homework done; much more importantly, he partnered with him on multiple class projects, and I could see (and heard from his parents) how much his friend became energized and enthused by this positive peer pressure. Once again, none of this came from me or his mom or anyone else, but rather from my son’s own perspective and personality and desire to help his friend succeed. It was and is a beautiful thing to witness.3)      Bookworms: Six months back, I wrote a post on Kate Milford’s wonderful supernatural historical novel The Boneshaker (2010). Little did I know then that that might be one of the last books that I would read aloud to the boys, as they’ve moved very fully into obsessive reading on their own, aided greatly by two wonderful series by British YA author Anthony Horowitz: the Alex Rider spy novels and the Power of Five/Gatekeepers supernatural thrillers. The fifth and final Power of Five novel, Oblivion (2012), clocked in at a cool 600 pages (more than 100 pages longer than the longest book we had read together, Wildwood ), and the boys each read it quickly and happily. The boys love playing sports, playing games on their iPads or on video game systems, biking to their friends’ houses to “ding dong ditch” them (yes, that’s still a thing, if fortunately without the flaming bag of poop), and plenty more of what might be considered stereotypical boy pursuits or interests. But if anyone ever says that kids these days aren’t reading, aren’t getting engrossed in good old fashioned hard-copy page-turners, I encourage you to send them to this post for an inspiring rejoinder.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Any children (young or old) you want to shout-out? Now’s your chance!

August 4, 2017: Troubled Children: Lizzie Borden

[August 4thmarks the 125thanniversary of the day that Lizzie Borden may or may not have taken an axe and given her (step)mother forty whacks and her father forty-one (more on that crucial ambiguity in Friday’s post). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories or stories of deeply troubled children, leading up to a special weekend post on two children who are anything but!]On what we’ll never know about the famous crime, and what it can help us understand nonetheless.Barring some miraculous recovery of new historical evidence, the simple truth of the matter is that we will never know for sure whether Lizzie Borden killed her stepmother Abby Gray Borden and father Andrew Jackson Borden in their Fall River (Massachusetts) home on the morning of August 4th, 1892. Despite being the first to discover and report their murders, Lizzie was the police’s prime suspect in the crime and was indicted by a grand jury in December 1892; yet after a 15-day trial in New Bedford in June 1893, she was acquitted on all charges. The Commonwealth never charged anyone else with the crime, and so despite a range of subsequent theories Lizzie remained the prime suspect for the rest of her life (which she chose to live out in Fall River, despite significant ostracism from that community). She has been likewise portrayed as the killer in numerous popular culture texts, such as the famous nursery rhyme, a 2014 Lifetime movie starring Christina Ricci as Lizzie, and (apparently) the upcoming theatrical film Lizzie starring Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie (and featuring Kristen Stewart as the family’s maid Bridget Sullivan, with whom Sevigny’s Lizzie is having a lesbian affair in a melodramatic version of one of the many theories about the crime).While its fundamental mystery will likely remain forever uncertain, however, there are some aspects of the Lizzie Borden case that are quite clear. For one thing, the immediate and ongoing public and nationwide fascination with the crime should put to rest any ideas that Americans have become more morbid or driven by sensationalism in recent years. Indeed, one of the first blockbuster stories in the 19th century’s newspaper boom was the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, a New York City prostitute whose accused killer (19 year old Richard Robinson) was also acquitted but remained a prime suspect. In truth, as I argued in Monday’s post on the Menéndez brothers, it is simply the technology and media that have changed over the years, rather than the morbid fascination; the small number of daily newspapers in 1836 gave way to the tabloid, yellow journalism of Borden’s 1892 era, and then to the Court TV coverage of the Menéndez case a century later (with many stages in between, of course). Each of these cases has particular contexts all its own, but I’m not sure that those contexts matter much for the public fascination—as long as we’ve got a grisly killing and the heated trial of a controversial accused murderer, we can’t seem to read or watch enough about the case. Perhaps that’s something in America’s violent nature, or perhaps it’s just human nature; but Lizzie reminds us of it in any case.A second, less well known aspect of Lizzie Borden’s case interconnects with that public fascination, and has its own echoes down into our present moment. In the aftermath of her acquittal, Lizzie and her sister Emma became wealthy celebrities; using their inheritance from their father’s and stepmother’s estates, the sisters moved into a large house in Fall River’s elite “Hill” district. Lizzie named the house, which featured live-in maids, a housekeeper, and a coachman, Maplecroft, and the sisters hosted parties there for local elites and celebrities such as the silent film actress Nance O’Neil. All of that was of course entirely within Lizzie and Emma’s rights, but it nonetheless foreshadows the many subsequent American figures who became famous and even wealthy due to crimes (accused or convicted). This too seems an inescapable part or at least direct effect, of the American fascination with true crime: alleged but acquitted famous murderers like Lizzie are unlikely to ever have a normal life again, but quite likely to achieve a new level of prominence as a result of their controversial fame. The nursery rhyme and films might all portray Lizzie as the killer, that is, but they also have reflected (and helped extend) her celebrity status. Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?