Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 280

September 14, 2016: MusicalStudying: West Side Story

[September 12thmarked the 150th anniversary of the first performance of The Black Crook , generally considered the first stage musical (although opinions vary). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy both Crook and other exemplary stage musicals—and will ask you to share your solos and choruses for a crowd-pleasing weekend post that’s sure to garner a standing O!]On the musical’s surprising history, and its limits and strengths as a cultural text.If the original 1947 plan developed by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents had come to fruition, this post might make more sense as part of a series on Holocaust history or Jewish American identities. Robbins’ original concept, as fleshed out in collaboration with those two artists, was for a musical he called East Side Story, a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet that would focus on the forbidden love between a Jewish immigrant girl (a Holocaust survivor) and an Irish Catholic boy in New York’s Lower East Side, as well as the parallel communal conflict between the Jewish “Emeralds” and the Catholic “Jets.” Robbins’ completed a first draft, but the project didn’t go further—until nearly ten years later, when other work brought the three men back together. By that time re-emerging Chicano American communities (such as those in New York’s “Spanish Harlem”) had become more prominent in national media, and when Laurents revised the prior book for the version that became West Side Story (1957) he made the heroine Puerto Rican. The rest, of course, is musical theater history.The fact that the heroine’s cultural and ethnic identity shifted so dramatically, relatively late in the creative process, might suggest that the specifics of her heritage were not crucial to the musical. Indeed, I would argue that in many ways Maria could have remained Jewish in the final version without much else changing (the Holocaust history would of course have been a significant addition, and one that would have to be handled in ways that would certainly change the musical’s tone). There is one place in the show that does focus very overtly on Puerto Rican identity, however: the song “America,” and the debate it features between Anita (who prefers the US to Puerto Rica) and Maria (who favors the latter). Partly because Anita has a far more significant role in the musical (as the girlfriend of Maria’s brother and the Sharks’ leader Bernardo) than Maria, and partly because she consistently gets the last word in the song’s call-and-response form (ie, the closing exchange, “Everyone there will give big cheer!”/”Everyone there will have moved here!”), the song largely endorses Anita’s perspective on the island. And it’s a pretty negative perspective, one that opens with “Puerto Rico … you ugly island” and continues with lines like “Island of tropic diseases” or “And the babies crying/And the bullets flying.” Not the most inspiring pop culture portrayal of this American community.Yet the song also includes, in a chorus voiced by the entire group of girls rather than either individual speaker, an image of precisely that Americanness: “Immigrant goes to America/Many hellos in America/Nobody knows in America/Puerto Rico’s in America!” Seen in that light, the choice to make Maria Puerto Rican is a far more significant one: an acknowledgement of this New York and American community, one as much a part of the nation’s fabric as those of European American heritage exemplified by Maria’s lover Tony (Anton); if not, indeed, more so, since coming from Puerto Rico to the United States does not constitute an international act of immigration like those undertaken by Tony’s ancestors. And along those same lines, both the musical and film versions of West Side Story brought prominent Puerto Rican actresses into mainstream popular culture: Chita Rivera, who played Anita in the original Broadway version and went on to a long, groundbreaking careerin musical theater; and Rita Moreno, who won an Academy Award for her Anita and went on to become the first Hispanic performerto win an Oscar, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy Award. Robbins and company might not have planned to make their musical into a Puerto Rican and American milestone—but in some unexpected and key ways it became that nonetheless.Next musical tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other musicals you’d highlight and analyze?

September 13, 2016: MusicalStudying: Rodgers and Hammerstein and History

[September 12thmarked the 150th anniversary of the first performance of The Black Crook , generally considered the first stage musical (although opinions vary). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy both Crook and other exemplary stage musicals—and will ask you to share your solos and choruses for a crowd-pleasing weekend post that’s sure to garner a standing O!]Historical stereotypes and revisions in three of the uber-talented duo’s most famous musicals.1)      Oklahoma! (1943): The first collaboration between the established and successful composer Richard Rodgers and the equally accomplished lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! is best known for its significant role in advancing theatrical history: the musical is considered a pioneering “book musical,” one of the first to truly center a serious (rather than comedic) plot and story on the songs and musical numbers, building on but extending further the starting points provided by yesterday’s subject The Black Crook and other prior works like Show Boat (1927). But as a hugely popular cowboy Western, Oklahoma! contributed a great deal to the resurgence of that genre ahead of its cultural heyday in the late 1940s and 1950s. And like so many of those popular Westerns, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s forgoes nearly all the region’s historical and cultural complexities, in favor of a stereotypical story of laconic cowboys, innocent farmgirls, feisty cowgirls, and their star-crossed but ultimately idealized romances.2)      Carousel (1945): For their much-anticipated follow-up to Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein started with a well-known Hungarian play (Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 Liliom) and transplanted its story to the Maine coast in the 1870s. They kept the central plot, that of a neer-do-well carnival barker who falls in love with and impregnates a working class girl, turns to robbery in a desperate and failed attempt to support their family, but is able to redeem himself before a semi-tragic but romantic conclusion. But because the setting has been shifted to late 19th century New England, Carousel is able to engage with some key historical issues and communities, from industrialization (heroine Julie Jordan and her friend Carrie Pipperridge both work in the town’s mills) to rising inequality (the relationship between the incipient Gilded Age and the desperation of Julie, Carrie, tragic hero Billy Bigelow, Carrie’s fisherman beau Enoch, and others). Here, that is, the star-crossed romances and the characters’ resulting fates serve a more complex and revisionist historical purpose than they do in Oklahoma!3)      South Pacific (1949): The duo’s third stage musical (after they co-wrote the 1945 musical film State Fair) was technically still historical but set in a much more contemporary period: the Pacific Theater of World War II, as depicted in James Michener’s Pulitzer-winning short story collection Tales of the South Pacific (1947). Yet South Pacific differs widely from overtly, simplistically patriotic musicals like the film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), choosing to focus instead on themes of racial conflict and understanding across multiple cultures, including an American nurse and serviceman but also their respective lovers, a French plantation owner with mixed-race children and a Tonkinese (from a region of Vietnam, in the era’s parlance) young woman. The musical is not without its stereotypes in portraying these identities and relationships, but for its immediate post-war moment (and really for any period’s popular culture) it also features a surprisingly progressive vision of race and community. Within a six-year period, then, these titans of musical theater had themselves progressed quite a bit in their depictions of American and world history.Next musical tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other musicals you’d highlight and analyze?

September 12, 2016: MusicalStudying: The Black Crook

[September 12thmarks the 150th anniversary of the first performance of The Black Crook , generally considered the first stage musical (although opinions vary). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy both Crook and other exemplary stage musicals—and will ask you to share your solos and choruses for a crowd-pleasing weekend post that’s sure to garner a standing O!]On two debates surrounding the historic musical, and one particularly clear legacy.As with any text deemed the “first” of its kind, there are significant debates among scholars and theater historians on the question of whether The Black Crook (which opened at New York’s famous Niblo’s Garden on September 12, 1866) was indeed the first “book musical.” Numerous prior stage productions had included songs and dances, as illustrated by the popular J.N. Barker musical melodrama The Indian Princess (1809) and the even more popular, longstanding and evolving genre of the “[Uncle] Tom Show.” Moreover, many of Crook’s musical numbers were adaptations of existing songs, with only a few newly written for this production. Yet at the same time, Crook was apparently the first stage production in which such musical numbers were performed by the actors themselves and interspersed around and throughout the dialogue sections of the play, both attributes closely associated with the stage musical as it has existed for these subsequent 150 years. So while, as always, the question of “first” will likely remain in dispute, Crookunquestionably represented an important theatrical innovation.An important and very controversial one, that is. The musical featured a scantily-clad female chorus who performed a series of bawdy dances, leading the New York Herald to note , in a scathing review, that there may have been “in Sodom and Gomorrah such a theatre and spectacle on the Broadway of those doomed cities.” Soon after the prominent New York minister Reverend Charles Smythe took up the refrain in a public lecture, attacking the musical and specifically “the immodest dress of the girls, … allowing the form of the figure to be discernible.” These public condemnations only increased interest in the musical, of course, and theater and burlesque historian Robert Allen has so far as to argue that much of this negative press might have comprised a “covert advertising ploy on behalf of the theatre management.” As Shakespeare and many others could attest, attacks on the morals of the theatre were nothing new—but both the era’s rise of newspapers and mass media and the boundary-pushing nature of the evolving genre known as the burlesque musical lent Crook and its controversial content and contexts a new and significant prominence. All those factors combined to make Crook a huge hit, and one that (along with The Black Domino , a self-proclaimed “musical comedy” that had opened earlier in 1866 to a briefer but still prominent run) spawned a wealth of stage musicals in the years that followed. Niblo’s Garden alone ran two more musicals, The White Fawn and Barbe-Bleue, as soon as Crook closed its initial, record-breaking 474-performance run in 1868. But to my mind, Crook’s most overt legacy is in the ways it uses and adapts prior cultural texts, including both Goethe’s Faust (among other European Gothic texts and folk legends) and existing popular songs and music. Many of the hugely prominent musicals on which this week’s series will focus have offered similar adaptations of existing material, from West Side Story’s use of Romeo and Juliet to Rent’s revision of La Bohéme. Indeed, while as I noted above some historians have argued that its dearth of original material makes Crook less of a contender for the title of first musical, the genre’s history suggests precisely the opposite—that in this way among others The Black Crookat the very least helped originate what the stage musical remains 150 years later.Next musical tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other musicals you’d highlight and analyze?

September 10-11, 2016: Labor Day Links

[To continue the Labor Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ve highlighted and analyzed images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. For this weekend post I wanted to share links to handful of other great Labor Day posts and stories—add yours in comments and make sure to show your work!]Labor historian Heath Carter wrote this wonderful piece for the Oxford University Press blogon the holiday’s origins.Carter also Tweeted a series of thoughts on the relationship between churches and labor unions in America.Jay Zagorskywrote about the importance of remembering the holiday’s histories more accurately for The Conversation.Denise Oliver Velezwrote this great piece on African Americans and the labor movement for Daily Kos.Finally, this evolving story from India makes clear how fully labor struggles continue, around the world as here in the U.S.And while it’s not as directly linked to Labor Day, the Native American protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline taking place at Standing Rock comprise another contemporary event rooted in history that we must do a better job highlighting and remembering—and my most recent Huffington Post piece tried to help us do just that.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Any other links or stories you’d highlight?

September 9, 2016: Cultural Work: Miner Texts

[To continue the Labor Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ll highlight and analyze images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. Please share texts, images and narratives, or histories and issues you’d highlight for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll do work!]On three different types of cultural representations of mining communities.There’s not much point in trying to figure out which American experiences are the most difficult or destructive, so I’ll simply start this way: the life and world of our mining communitiesare fraught with hardships and dangers. In response to those harsh realities, some of the most prominent cultural portrayals of mining communities have focused on children who found a way out of those communities and into other (and, implicitly or explicitly, better) situations: country superstar Loretta Lynn (Sissy Spacek) in the film Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980); and NASA engineer Homer Hickam Jr. (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the film October Sky (1999; based on Hickam’s 1998 memoir Rocket Boys). Both films portray the protagonists’ miner fathers (played by Levon Helm in Daughter and Chris Cooper in October) with sensitivity and nuance, but nonetheless make clear that their children have escaped to a better life.While some of the difficulties of the mining life as simply inherent to that job and world, others, it’s important to note, have been amplified by the mistreatment and exploitation practiced by many of the mining companies. Those histories came to a head in one of America’s most forgotten conflicts, the multiple West Virginia Mine Wars of the early 20th century. John Sayles’ historical film Matewan (1987), about which I wrote at length in yesterday’s post, provides an impressive introduction to the mine wars, if one as I noted there overtly and thoroughly sympathetic to the miners’ side and perspective. I share those sympathies, but of course whatever we think about their cause the mining company operators and their hired soldiers were all complex people in their own right, and so it’s worth complementing Sayles’ film (as I also argued yesterday) with Diane Gillam Fisher’s poetry collection Kettle Bottom (2004), which constructs with wonderful nuance and humanity the first-person perspectives of multiple sides and stories from the mine wars.I wholeheartedly recommend all of the aforementioned cultural texts, but they are all focused on extreme, or at least unusual, aspects of the mining life and communities. There’s also something to be said for a representation of more everyday experiences and realities within a community and world, that is, and providing such a representation is Steve Earle and the Del McCourty Band’s wonderful song “The Mountain.” Drawn from the 1999 album of the same name, Earle’s song creates the first-person perspective of a representative miner, one who has seen and experienced the century’s historical and social conflicts and changes, as well as the effects of the mining life on his own identity, but whose mountain home and community remain for him what they have always been. That community is as present in America as it’s ever been, and Earle’s song, coupled with all these texts, helps us consider that presence as well as our past.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Responses to this week’s posts? Other work texts or histories you’d highlight?

September 8, 2016: Cultural Work: John Sayles’ Matewan

[To continue the Labor Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ll highlight and analyze images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. Please share texts, images and narratives, or histories and issues you’d highlight for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll do work!]On when subtlety isn’t necessary in portraying oppression and activism—but why it still helps.John Sayles’ historical drama Matewan (1987) tells the still nearly forgotten story of the 1920 West Virginia coal wars, when striking coal miners were pitted against both imported scabs and hired guns brought in by the Stone Mountain Coal Company (one battle within a long history of such conflicts, as both of the latter two links indicate). Sayles’ hero, played by one of his (and my) favorite go-to actors Chris Cooper, is a United Mine Worker labor organizer named Joe Kenehan who has come to town to help unionize the miners and is eventually killed by the outside thugs; it is to this character that Sayles gives a line that sums up his movie’s entire ideology quite succinctly. The white miners are planning to fight the newly arrived African American and Italian American scabs when Kenehan notes, “They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign … when you know there ain’t but two sides in this world: them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you got to know about the enemy.”Sayles’ more political films can tend toward the preachy, and this is one of his more overt such moments (although interestingly, the single most effective labor advocacy in the film is delivered as part of a far more subtle and symbolic sermon, one preached by the young activist Danny who idolizes Kenehan). But does such overt ideological preaching necessarily constitute a weakness or mistake? I would argue that, at least in this particular case, there are strong arguments that it doesn’t. For one thing, there’s no question that the striking Matewan miners were indeed facing an enemy, one who had been explicitly paid to stop them at all costs; recognizing that fact, as Kenehan urges them to here, was thus key for their survival, much less their success. And for another thing, Sayles is dealing in this film with a history that’s almost entirely unknown in late 20th and early 21stcentury America—in such a case, you could argue that trying to be too subtle or understated would risk not making his audience aware of the history at all.So I wouldn’t say that Sayles’ lack of subtlety in that quote, or in the film overall, is a shortcoming. But on the other hand, that element, coupled with the corollary black-and-white worldview it brings with it (for example, the two characters who represent the hired guns are pretty much evil incarnate), does elide the complex but unavoidable reality that every person and group in this story were as human as every other. For a compelling potrayal of that shared humanity, I can’t recommend strongly enough Diane Gillam Fisher’s poetry collection Kettle Bottom (2004); in it Fisher portrays the West Virginia coal wars through the first-person voices and perspectives of numerous characters, representing every group and side within these histories. Because whatever the practical necessity of Kenehan’s quote, the truth is that it comprised a particular and limited vision of “work,” one that includes certain people in the community and excludes others; whereas a work like Fisher’s can help us think about the work, as well as the lives, of every person in this historical world, wherever our ultimate identifications and sympathies might fall.Last work work work work work tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Texts or histories you’d highlight?

September 7, 2016: Cultural Work: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ “Tenth of January”

[To continue the Labor Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ll highlight and analyze images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. Please share texts, images and narratives, or histories and issues you’d highlight for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll do work!]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 Gatestrilogy) 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 work work work work work tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Texts or histories you’d highlight?

September 6, 2016: Cultural Work: Melville’s “Paradise” and the Lowell Offering

[To continue the Labor Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ll highlight and analyze images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. Please share texts, images and narratives, or histories and issues you’d highlight for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll do work!]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 Offeringdidn’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 work work work work work tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Texts or histories you’d highlight?

September 5, 2016: The Radical Origins of Labor Day

Before I kick off a Labor Day week series on work in American literature and culture, here’s a link to a Talking Points Memo piece I wrote on the holiday’s forgotten radical histories and why it’s vital that we remember them in our 21st century moment. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that piece and on any other Labor Day connections you’d highlight, whether over there or in comments here!Series starts tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Labor Day histories or contexts you’d share?

September 3-4, 2016: August 2016 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]August 1: Native American Leaders: John Ross: A series on native leaders starts with three American histories that look far different when viewed through the lens of the Cherokee Nation chief.August 2: Native American Leaders: Sarah Winnemucca and Authenticity: The series continues with the late 19th century book and leader that embody the complex concept of “authentic” voices.August 3: Native American Leaders: Remembering the American Indian Movement: Why and how we should better remember the 1960s activist leaders, as the series rolls on.August 4: Native American Leaders: Wilma Mankiller: How a trailblazing leader reflects the best and worst of contemporary native communities.August 5: Native American Leaders: 21st Century Leaders: The series concludes with three leaders who illustrate how much our own moment is extending the past’s examples.August 6-7: Donna Moody’s Guest Post on 21st Century Native American Scholarly Activism: A Guest Post from one of our best contemporary Native American Studies scholars!August 8: American Fathers: Mr. Mom: A fatherhood series kicks off with what’s changed and what hasn’t in the decades since the stereotyping 80s comedy.August 9: American Fathers: Fathers of Their Country: The series continues with the clear and consistent but also complex images of two beloved, paternalized leaders.August 10: American Fathers: Southern Sons: The generational relationship and perspective that helps explain the Southern Renaissance, as the series rolls on.August 11: American Fathers: Missing Fathers: Political, literary, and cultural engagements with a vexing late 20th century American issue.August 12: American Fathers: Sitcom Dads: The series concludes with the clichéd extremes of sitcom dads and the often overlooked men in the middle. August 13-14: Jonathan Silverman’s Guest Post on How to Be the American President: Another great Guest Post, based on Jonathan’s Fullbright lecture on images, narratives, and presidential campaigns.August 15: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011: A birthday week series starts with 34 of my favorite posts from the blog’s first year.August 16: Birthday Bests: 2011-2012: The series continues with 35 favorite posts from the blog’s second year.August 17: Birthday Bests: 2012-2013: 36 favorite posts from the blog’s third year, as the series rolls on.August 18: Birthday Bests: 2013-2014: 37 favorite posts from the blog’s fourth year!August 19: Birthday Bests: 2014-2015: 38 favorite posts from the blog’s fifth year!August 20-21: Birthday Bests: 2015-2016: The series concludes with 39 favorite posts from the last year on the blog.August 22: Virginia Places: Lynchburg: A series AmericanStudying interesting Virginia places begins with two interesting histories and one troubling one in the small central Virginia city.August 23: Virginia Places: Lexington: The series continues with two prominent and one alternative history in the small western Virginia town.August 24: Virginia Places: Newport News: Three transportation revolutions that contributed to the development of the coastal city, as the series rolls on.August 25: Virginia Places: Fairfax Court House: Two other important contexts for a site closely tied to the Civil War’s opening salvos.August 26: Virginia Places: Three Lakes: The series concludes with AmericanStudies contexts for three favorites spots from my and now my boys’ childhoods.August 27-28: Historical Writers of America Conference Recap: A few takeaways from my presentation and time at the HWA conference in Colonial Wiliamsburg.August 29: Fall 2016 Previews: Analyzing 21st Century America: My annual fall preview series starts with one thread I’m definitely adding to a new senior seminar, and one I’m still wondering about.August 30: Fall 2016 Previews: Honors Seminar on the Gilded Age: The series continues with two changes I’m making for the second version of a class—both of which could use your input!August 31: Fall 2016 Previews: Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy: Two telling changes in the revision of a sci fi classic, as the series rolls on.September 1: Fall 2016 Previews: Stories of Salem: A handful of prior blog posts that reflect my long history of AmericanStudying Salem, previewing my new Adult Learning class on the city.September 2: Fall 2016 Previews: Book Four!: The series concludes with three things that have changed about my upcoming fourth book.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Lemme know!