Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 281

September 2, 2016: Fall 2016 Previews: Book Four!

[The Fall semester is just around the corner, so this week I’ll preview some of the courses and plans for which I’m excited as a new semester gets underway. I’d love to hear your own upcoming courses, plans, work, or whatever else has you excited for Fall 2016!]Three things that have changed about my upcoming fourth book since this late May post on it:1)      The Title (again): I thought we had this nailed down as of late May, but fortunately I’m really happy with the project’s final title, as it reflects both my subjects and (I believe) the book’s contemporary stakes and significance: History and Hope in American Literature: Models of Critical Patriotism. Works for me!2)      A (rough) Release Date: Rowman & Littlefield have been extremely efficient and helpful to work with, and the project is moving smoothly toward a planned December 2016 release. I’ll do everything I can to move that up a bit, as I’d love for the book to be out right around the election (for the reasons I’ll get to in a moment)—but for a project that’s been so long in gestation, having a due date before year’s end feels very good indeed.3)      The Stakes: It’s no coincidence that Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy Tweeted this message just after the close of July’s DNC convention in Philadelphia. I’ve always believed that my book’s subjects, and especially my evolving emphasis on critical patriotism, are deeply interconnected with our current moment and its central issues and debates. But this election has reinforced and extended those connections a thousandfold, and convinced me that the stakes for these ideas couldn’t be higher. I’m beyond excited to be part of that conversation, and can’t wait for the chance to share the book where I make that case most explicitly.Monthly recap this weekend,BenPS. Upcoming work of yours to highlight? Other previews or plans you’d share?

September 1, 2016: Fall 2016 Previews: Stories of Salem

[The Fall semester is just around the corner, so this week I’ll preview some of the courses and plans for which I’m excited as a new semester gets underway. I’d love to hear your own upcoming courses, plans, work, or whatever else has you excited for Fall 2016!]For my next Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) course, this time linked to a fall ALFA field trip to Salem, I’ll be sharing a series of stories and histories linked to my favorite Massachusetts city. Here are some of the many, many many, posts and series that demonstrate why I feel that way and feature many of the subjects I’ll share with the great ALFA students:1)      The Post of the Seven Links: One of the most fun parts (at least for me!) of keeping this blog for nearly six years is the chance to see how my ideas and perspective have evolved over that time. A case in point is this post, which reflects the first moment when my interests in Salem and its many stories and histories (and spaces) began.2)      Series on the 2012 NEASA Colloquium: Choosing to hold our second NEASA Colloquium at the House of the Seven Gables both deepened my interest in Salem and helped bring together a wonderful group of AmericanStudiers to consider the city and its contexts. That hyperlinked concluding post illustrates both those effects, as well as the many questions I still had and have about this complex American place.3)      Bad Memories, Part One: It was in this post, that kicked off a series on how we Americans remember some of our darkest histories, that I really began to articulate why I love Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial (my favorite public site) as much as I do—and really began to plan my fourth book, on which more tomorrow, as well!4)      House Histories: Salem and the East: It was with this series, inspired by both Hawthorne’s novel and the House that bears its name (or, y’know, vice versa), that I really collected the body of Salem stories and histories that I hope to include and have us talk about in the course of this fall’s ALFA class. The students will have visited the House on their field trip, so they’ll have lots of great starting points of their own as well!5)      New NEASA Books: A History of Spiritualism and the Occult in Salem: I’d be remiss if I concluded a Salem post without mentioning Maggi Smith-Dalton, the public scholar, educator, and musician whose work and voice—along with those of the equally multi-talented Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello of Salem State University—have been guiding lights for me in my SalemStudying. I’ll make sure to mention them and their work to my ALFA students too!Last preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this course? Other previews or plans you’d share?

August 31, 2016: Fall 2016 Previews: Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy

[The Fall semester is just around the corner, so this week I’ll preview some of the courses and plans for which I’m excited as a new semester gets underway. I’d love to hear your own upcoming courses, plans, work, or whatever else has you excited for Fall 2016!]On two telling changes in the revised version of a classic work of American science fiction.Along with the other two fall classes I’ve already discussed this week, I’m also gearing up to teach for the fourth time one of my favorite courses on one of my favorite subjects: the Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy class that I created back in 2007 in response to student demand. This course offers a number of distinct pleasures (I hope for the students, but certainly for their professor!), but one has been the opportunity to read and re-read authors and works for which I might not otherwise have found the time and space in my schedule. A case in point is Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), a seminal science fiction text that I had last read in junior high before putting it on the syllabus for that 2007 pilot version of the course (and for each of the three versions since). Among my many revelations in returning to Bradbury’s book was the fact that it had been significantly revised for a 1997 edition, with the two most significant changes reflecting two complex and critical issues not only with this particular text but in the genre of science fiction overall.The most striking revision was to the dates in which Bradbury’s series of interconnected short stories are set. In the original 1950 text, the brief opening story was set in 1999, the first full story in 2000, and the stories continued forward in time from there, an obvious use of the still-distant millennium as a symbolic complement to Bradbury’s futuristic tales of rocket expeditions to Mars and the alien (in every sense) culture they encounter there. By the time of the 1997 revision, however, it was clear that such events were not going to take place in the next few years, and so the dates were pushed 30 years further into the future, with the opening stories set in 2029 and 2030 and so on. On the one hand, the revision made perfect sense, as Bradbury was seeking to imagine and predict a period a few decades in the future, and the change both allows the new edition to reflect his purposes and goals and helps 21st century readers imagine our own futures. Yet at the same time, the change makes it far more difficult for those 21st century readers to engage with a key aspect of Bradbury’s original book—its reflection of mid-20thcentury visions of the future and the millennium. Science fiction is always straddling that line, reflecting its moment and yet imagining futures that may or may not come to pass, and this revision of Martian Chronicles illustrates yet perhaps also blurs that issue.The majority of science fiction also offers commentary on its own society through the lens of those imagined futures, however, and on that note too the revisions to Bradbury’s book do complex and somewhat troubling work. One of the more striking stories in the 1950 Martian Chronicles is “Way in the Middle of the Air,” which uses communal hopes and dreams of Martian settlement to comment on race and Jim Crow segregation in the mid-20th century South. The story has some issues to be sure (notably with stereotypical dialect and characterizations), but it also adds historical and cultural issues to the book that would be largely absent otherwise. Which means that they are absent from the 1997 version, which replaced “Way” with “The Wilderness,” an interesting standalone story from 1952 about gender and pioneer communities but one that has nothing to do with the themes and subjects of “Way.” Again, I understand the change, and perhaps it produced a book that was more a part of the 1997 moment of its publication (although of course race and all its interconnected American histories remain just as relevant in the 21stcentury as they were in 1950). Yet the revision also makes it literally impossible to read and analyze fully Bradbury’s engagement with the America in which he wrote and published his book, a key goal of his as of so much science fiction.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this course? Other previews or plans you’d share?

August 30, 2016: Fall 2016 Previews: Honors Seminar on the Gilded Age

[The Fall semester is just around the corner, so this week I’ll preview some of the courses and plans for which I’m excited as a new semester gets underway. I’d love to hear your own upcoming courses, plans, work, or whatever else has you excited for Fall 2016!]Two changes I’m making in my second iteration of a course—both of which could use your input!It’s rare, in my experiences at Fitchburg State at least, to create a new course and then have the chance to teach it again a year later, learning from that first version and then getting to apply those lessons immediately; but that will be the case this fall with my Honors Literature Seminar on America in the Gilded Age. As I wrote in the semester recap post, the class went really well and yielded some striking and significant collective conversations and insights along with the impressive individual work you’d expect from our Honors Program’s exemplary students. As a result, I haven’t changed the course’s units and readings—either the multi-week long texts or the complementary shorter ones in a variety of genres/disciplines—much at all, other than the usual tweaks with those couple texts that just didn’t quite connect with enough students to yield meaningful discussion. Yet as always there were elements of the course that didn’t work as well, and in response to two of them I’ve made changes that remain in development and on which I’d love to hear your thoughts.One change involves the course’s student presentations. I use various types of individual presentations in almost every class I teach, but in keeping with the rigor of an Honors seminar, I opted last fall for Discussion Leading, a form I use in senior-level courses where each presenter takes over as the professor for an extended period of both presentation and discussion. The presenters all did great jobs, but the readings and material were just too dense and demanding to make for easily vibrant conversations, and these periods of class consistently felt very quiet and low energy. I’m certainly not going to abandon the individual presentation component, though, so this fall I’m trying a form I’ve never used before: panel presentations, where 3-4 students present on the same text/materials and engage each other in conversation before opening it up to the class as a whole. I’m sure this form will feel intimidating to many students, but I’m hoping to make clear both that it’s not group work (ie, they don’t have to meet to prepare ahead of time in order for a panel to be successful) and that it’s excellent preparation for a variety of educational and professional settings (from conferences to meetings). But as I say, I’ve never used this model in a class before, so I’m very open to any and all thoughts, tips, concerns, or other takes you’d like to share!My second change is far less clear-cut, but one to which I’m also committed. As I wrote in the semester preview post for last fall’s first version, I have no problem with asking students to work with the kinds of historically distant and formally demanding readings and materials on which this course focuses; but as I’ve noted many times in this space, I also believe there’s a good deal to be said for finding ways to engage students sufficiently that they can get to the more challenging analyses and ideas. For this course, one way I’ve decided to provide that engagement is through pop cultural texts that portray some of the same periods and issues—with exhibit A being an episode or two from the first season of Deadwood, a ridiculously entertaining TV show that deals with many of the themes (not just the West, but also gender and identity, class and work, Chinese American communities, and more) at the heart of the class. Yet at the same time, I know it’s not enough just to screen an episode—we’ll have to find ways both to analyze this cultural text and to put it in conversation with other class texts and materials. I’ve done that with multimedia texts in other interdisciplinary courses (such as my team-taught Intro to American Studies class focused on the 1980s), but never in a literature seminar like this one. Which means, once again, that I’d love to hear your thoughts!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this course? Other previews or plans you’d share?

August 29, 2016: Fall 2016 Previews: Analyzing 21st Century America

[The Fall semester is just around the corner, so this week I’ll preview some of the courses and plans for which I’m excited as a new semester gets underway. I’d love to hear your own upcoming courses, plans, work, or whatever else has you excited for Fall 2016!]One thread I’m definitely adding to a new undergrad seminar, and one I’m wondering about.When I started designing an English Studies Senior Seminar on Analyzing 21stCentury America (our department’s Senior Seminar rotates between all our faculty and focuses on a new topic each time it does so), I knew I wanted to include and modify a number of aspects of last summer’s hybrid grad course on the same subject: the overall interdisciplinary methodology, including short stories from a contemporary Best Of anthology complemented by readings from a variety of other disciplines; collections of online materials grouped around key 2016 themes like climate change and cultural appropriation; and student presentations on TV shows and films that portray and engage with our moment in one way or another. All of these will look different in both an undergrad course and a semester-long in-person one than they did in a hybrid summer graduate course, but hopefully all will continue to work as well as they did last summer and will help us talk about the complex topic that is our 21st century nation and world.One of the key differences with a semester-long course as compared to a five-week one, however, is that we have room for many more readings, and indeed for books as well as short stories and online materials (to be clear, our grad students can handle multiple books in a summer course, but I opted for lots of shorter readings instead). I considered a few different options for how to select those longer readings for the seminar, but as the year unfolded felt more and more certain that it made sense to group them around an inescapable 2016 theme: #BlackLivesMatter. We’ll be reading four texts that all connect to that movement and issue yet offer a variety of disciplines and forms that will hopefully keep our conversations evolving and fresh: two creative literary works, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanahand Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen: An American Lyric;and two works of nonfiction, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. I also hope to bring in excerpts from many other writers and works, from Jelani Cobb to Jesmyn Ward, Fruitvale Station to Blackish, and more. I fully expect that these conversations will get testy and heated at times, as they should and must—but also that every student, and their teacher, will gain a great deal from each and every reading and conversation on this key topic.Speaking of key topics and heated conversations, though—I knew when I proposed a seminar on this topic that the presidential election would come to its culmination during the semester, but I have to admit that I didn’t quite think through whether and how to make it part of our class. Of course many of our topics are inherently political, and will require us to talk about contemporary debates and divergent perspectives and the like; yet that’s still not the same (it seems to me) as talking overtly about Trump and Clinton, and about (for example) my own increasingly strong feelings on that choice and election. As I’ve discussed before in this space, my perspective on politics in the classroom is an evolving one, yet I remain convinced that my job is centrally about helping students develop their own voices and perspectives, not sharing mine with them. I haven’t figured out whether and how I can directly bring up and bring into our class the election without doing more of the latter than I’m comfortable with—but I know that’s an inescapable question with which to grapple in a course like this, and I’d very much appreciate any thoughts and tips you might have!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this course? Other previews or plans you’d share?

August 27-28, 2016: Historical Writers of America Conference Recap

[Inspired by my annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series has focused on AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to this special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers of America conference in Williamsburg!]Last weekend I had the chance to present on “Building a Public Scholarly Career through Short-Form Online Writing” at the HWA Conference in Colonial Williamsburg. I didn’t get to attend as much of the conference as I would have liked (for a very good reason—touring Jamestown and Williamsburg with the boys!), but I did also get to hear one great session before my own. So here are three takeaways from that session and my own:1)      Making Connections: The other session I attended was led by Shari Stauch, the creator and CEO of the website Where Writers Win. Shari’s talk focused on strategies for building readership through targeting what she calls industry influencers, and although she was talking specifically to authors of fiction, I found most of her suggestions highly relevant for my own books and public scholarly career. For example, Shari highlighted the role that the presidents of state Library Assocations play in contributing to the programs and activities at public libraries across a state, and thus suggested contacting those officials in order to help set up readings and talks; I’ll definitely be doing so when my next book comes out later this year. An audience member chimed in with a similar idea for state Humanities Councils, which have speaker bureaus that authors can apply to be part of. All ideas that any and all writers should consider as we work to reach audiences and enter conversations.2)      The Varieties of Online Writing: I structured my talk around three sub-genres of short-form online writing with which I’ve worked in the last few years—personal scholarly blogging (duh), writing for scholarly sites such as We’re History, and writing for more public sites such as Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post. Preparing and giving the talk helped me really think through those different sites and sub-genres in a more analytical way than I previously had, and I was able to identify some interesting distinctions and their effects on my writing as a result. For example, for We’re History contributors are asked to minimize hyperlinks (combined to my heavy reliance on them in posts here), and that leads to a form of writing in which I include more info and contexts in the pieces themselves, rather than linking to such materials as I often do in this space. For another example, for the public sites I’m often asked to write shorter paragraphs than the 250-or-so-word ones in posts here, which leads to writing that hits key points while leaving sub-topics or supporting evidence more implied than explicitly addressed. All aspects of this gig about which I’ll keep thinking, aided by the HWA talk and my conversations with the audience members there.3)      I Need You: Or, more exactly, your comments! At my talk, one of the audience members asked who comes to the blog, what draws them there, what they find, and the like, and I had to admit that I often am not sure. Blogger’s statistics give me a good sense of how many views I get, where around the world you all come from, and whether you arrive here through searches or other websites. But I’d sure love to hear more about who you are, what you’re looking for and/or finding here, and any thoughts or responses you’d share, whether on particular posts/series or on the blog as a whole. So if you have a chance to share any such thoughts in comments (or, if you prefer, by email), I’d very much appreciate them. Thanks!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Lessons for online, historical, or other forms of writing you’d highlight? Or, one more time, care to say hi in comments?!

August 26, 2016: Virginia Places: Three Lakes

[Inspired by my annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series will focus on AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to a special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers of America conference in Williamsburg!]Briefly AmericanStudying three childhood favorite spots—mine and now my boys!1)      Chris Greene Lake Park: Located in Albemarle County, which surrounds my hometown of Charlottesville, Chris Greene was the go-to lake beach of my childhood (I have vivid memories of both the minnows nibbling on my youthful toes and of the taste of the hot dogs at the concession stand). The lake was first developed in the mid-20th century as a potential county reservoir but ended up a site for recreational swimming and boating, fishing, hiking, and more, an interesting reflection of how our public natural spaces evolve and shift in their identities and roles. This AmericanStudier is also very interested in who Chris Greene was, especially given the complexity of public names in Charlottesville and the South, but so far my researches have been stumped—any help would be much appreciated!2)      Mint Springs Valley Park: A bit deeper into Albemarle County, near the small town of Crozet, is the much more secluded and scenic Mint Springs. This one felt to a young AmericanStudier like a day trip, and my strongest memories are of renting a canoe and exploring the lake that extends well beyond the park’s small beach (although I also remember climbing high up into the playground’s undoubtedly not-to-code metal rocket ship). Per this excellent blog post, the park apparently also features a number of impressive hiking trails, reinforcing (as that blogger also notes) how fully a trip to Mint Springs takes you away from modern life (even in a small town like Crozet). Charlottesville’s not exactly the big city either, of course, but nonetheless the difference between Cville and Mint Springs is striking, reflecting just how quickly and fully much of Virginia shifts back to a rural landscape that hasn’t changed much over the years. I didn’t really appreciate that side of the state while I lived there, but as a resident of the far more congested greater Boston area, I certainly do now.3)      Sherando Lake Recreation Area: Yet on the spectrum of settled to natural, urban to rural, in Virginia, Mint Springs isn’t all the way toward those latter ends—that designation is reserved for protected areas like Shenandoah National Park and the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests. Nestled in those forests, close to the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is my favorite Virginia spot for swimming, Sherando Lake. I’ve taken both my sons and my fiancée to Sherando in recent years, and each time have felt exactly the same as I did on my childhood visits—in awe of the (it seems to me) untouched and unchanged natural beauty, and of the chance to spend a few hours within such a sacred space.  Shenandoah National Park is full of such spaces, of course, but there’s something extra special about a relatively unknown place like Sherando, and about the chance to find there what John Muir called “the clearest way into the Universe.”Special conference recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Interesting places (in any state) you’d highlight?

August 25, 2016: Virginia Places: Fairfax Court House

[Inspired by my annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series will focus on AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to a special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers of America conference in Williamsburg!]Two other important contexts for a site closely tied to the Civil War’s opening salvos.While of course the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Charleston’s Fort Sumter, the war’s first land conflict is generally considered to be the June 1, 1861 skirmish between Union scouts and local militiamen known as the Battle of Fairfax Court House. You can’t throw a Virginia peanut anywhere in the state without encountering Civil War history of one type or another, though, and while each such moment was certainly significant to both its individual participants and the war’s evolving trajectory, it can also begin to feel as if each community is competing to make the case for why this particular battle was more meaningful or worth memorializing. (A phenomenon not unique to either Virginia or Civil War history—just ask residents of Lexington and Concord precisely where the Revolutionary War began!) And from a military history standpoint, the second Battle of Fairfax Court House (fought just over two years after the first, on June 27, 1863) was far more significant, as it impacted Confederate troop movements and availability not long before the war’s decisive conflict at Gettysburg.In any case, Fairfax Court House connects to additional and even more unique and interesting American histories than those Civil War moments. The first Fairfax county courthouse was constructed at a site known as Spring Fields in 1742, and a second, more sizeable structure built 10 years later in the town of Alexandria. These county courthouses featured and reflected a new, interestingly aristocratic and ad hoc form of justice and governance in the colony, as “gentleman justices” (including both George Washington and George Mason) appointed by the Governor met on “court day” not only to decide on criminal and civil cases and punishments, but also to set and levy taxes, authorize new construction and development, and generally run much of the colony’s financial and civic affairs. Elites occupied central roles in the governments of every 18thcentury colony to be sure, but nonetheless this overt reliance on the wisdom of individual landed gentleman differentiated Virginia from the “town meeting” narrative of New England communal governance. It’s thus perhaps not coincidental that while New England’s Revolutionary activities began with secret societies and nighttime tea parties, Virginia’s began with gentlemen serving the colony in the House of Burgesses and yet openly declaring their commitment to liberty and independence.The gentleman justices were not the only, nor the most numerous, Virginians present at the courthouse on court day, however. As the opening of that interesting hyperlined article (on Virginia courthouse architecture) notes, court day was a deeply communal and festive occasion, one that brought out a wide cross-section of 18thcentury Virginia’s population. Yet at the same time, Old Courthouse Road (address of the historic Fairfax County Courthouse site that remains in operation to this day) intersects with Gallows Road, still in use as a state road but of course named for a far different and darker social purpose (or perhaps not, as argues—but as noted there, a gallows was built in Alexandria in the same year as the courthouse construction there, so the larger point certainly stands). Since at least Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, the relationship between Virginia’s elites and its broader population had been a fraught one, and the move toward revolution across the 18th century cannot be separated from that uneasy and evolving dynamic. In both celebratory and darker ways, the history of the Fairfax Court House thus interconnects with that interplay between the colony’s “gentlemen” and its men (and women) more broadly.Last VA places tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Interesting places (in any state) you’d highlight?

August 24, 2016: Virginia Places: Newport News

[Inspired by my annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series will focus on AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to a special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers of America conference in Williamsburg!]Three ways that transportation revolutions contributed to the development of a coastal city.1)      That unique name: There are apparently , but to me the most plausible is also the most historically interesting: a group of Jamestown colonists led by Captain Christopher Newport abandoned the colony during the horrible winter of 1609-10, only to encounter an arriving ship carrying new governor Thomas West and resupply. While some returned to Jamestown, others stayed in this new place, and named it after both their famous Captain and the unexpected good news. As with Plimoth Plantation and the Massachusetts colonies, it’s difficult to overstate both the period’s uncertainty over arriving ships and the role that such ships played in Virginia’s early English histories. Such news quite literally meant the difference between life and death for many individuals and communities (if not indeed the entire enterprise), and I like the idea that Newport News offers a permanent memorial to that historical reality.2)      A railroad magnate: Newport News remained a small fishing village for more than two and a half centuries after that origin point, and might have continued in that role if not for a post-Civil War invitation that exemplifies the idea of the “New South.” Not long after the war’s end, former Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham invited California railroad magnate Collins Huntington to contribute his expertise and funds to a new southern railroad line. Huntington linked another line on which he had worked, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, through Richmond and down to Virginia’s coast, a development known as the Peninsula Subdivision. While his initial goal was to transport coal eastward from West Virginia, he quickly saw the shipping possibilities of the Newport News area, and created the Chesapeake Dry Dock & Construction Company (later the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co.) there. I don’t want to overstate Huntington’s individual role—obviously many people and communities were involved in and affected by these shifts, as in every industrial and corporate development—but the emphasis on him in the narratives reflects quite potently the role of such magnates (or robber barons) in the Gilded Age generally, and the New South specifically.3)      The Great White Fleet: Even a prescient industrialist like Huntington couldn’t possibly have foreseen just how much shipbuilding work his dry dock would soon be offered, though. When he became president after William McKinley’s assassination, Theodore Roosevelt made the development of an American naval fleet one of his top priorities, and turned to the Newport News docks for the bulk of that construction. Not only did the company build seven of the first sixteen warships, but when the Great White Fleet (as it had come to be known) set sail in December 2009 for its 14-month worldwide voyage, it did so from nearby Hampton Roads. Both the area overall and Newport News in particular have been intimately associated with the navy and armed forces ever since, with Newport News Shipbuilding still primarily serving those government contracts, the joint Air Force and Army base Langley-Eustis one of the city’s largest employers, and three naval vessels to date named after Newport News. But while such a longstanding connection might seem inevitable from our vantage point, it’s always worth thinking about the multiple transformative moments that have contributed to any city’s 21stcentury identity.Next VA place tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Interesting places (in any state) you’d highlight?

August 23, 2016: Virginia Places: Lexington

[Inspired by my annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series will focus on AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to a special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers of America conference in Williamsburg!]Two prominent histories that echo in the tiny Western Virginia city, and one lesser-known but very telling complement.1)      Revolutionary renamings: Named in 1778 (upon its incorporation as a town) by the Virginia Legislature, Lexington was one of the first American cities named after the Massachusetts site of the Revolution’s first battle. In 1796, President George Washington donated a substantial gift of James River Canal stock to the city’s struggling Augusta Academy, which changed its name to Washington Academy (later to become Washington & Lee University, as I’ll detail below) in appreciation. Besides providing interesting historical trivia answers, these renamings remind us of the breadth of the Revolution’s and Early Republic’s effects and legacies, the ways in which those founding periods and their prominent moments and figures changed the trajectory of every American community (even one with a population that as of the 2010 censusstill hadn’t come close to 10,000) in a variety of ways.2)      Confederate memories: Lexington saw even less Civil War action than Lynchburg, although the same Union general (David Hunter) from the Battle of Lynchburg did also lead a raid on the city’s Virginia Military Institute (VMI). But in the war’s aftermath, few Virginia spaces became more crucial to the South’s evolving collective memories of the conflict and the Confederacy than Lexington. The city hosted General Stonewall Jackson’s house, which quickly became and remains a museum to the controversial Confederate (who is also buried there). But it was the process of deifying Jackson’s boss, Robert E. Lee, in which Lexington participated most centrally. Shortly after the war’s end, Lee became President of what was now known as Washington College and remained in the role until his 1870 death, leading to the final renaming of the institution as Washington and Lee University. Due to that connection, the university constructed Lee Chapel, the final resting place for both Lee’s body and (just outside) the remains of his famous horse Traveller. These are quite literally sacred sites for the Lost Cause narrative of the war and the South, making Lexington one of the holiest places in that belief system.3)      A different story: Revolutionary and Civil War histories obviously occupy a central place in Virginian and American history overall, and those connections thus make tiny Lexington a significant part of our collective memories. Yet while Washington, Jackson, and Lee were of course hugely prominent players in those histories, they were also wealthy white landowners, and ones closely linked to the system of slaveryat that. Providing a provocative and necessary complement to those histories, in terms of both race and class, is an award-winning Young Adult novel written by Lexington’s own William H. Armstrong: Sounder (1969), the classic story of an African American sharecropping family and their faithful dog. While Armstrong purposefully leaves his novel’s setting ambiguous in both place and time, he also based it directly on a local story he heard as a child; Armstrong family were poor white farmers in the Lexington area, and writes in the book's "Author's Note" that he learned the story from his "teacher, a gray-haired black man who taught the one-room Negro school several miles away." So it’s fair to say that in every way, Sounder reminds us of Lexington histories and communities that contrast with, complicate, but ultimately can complement those of the Revolutionary and Confederate leaders.Next VA place tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Interesting places (in any state) you’d highlight?