Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 284

July 29, 2016: American Camping: Camping and Race

[This week, I’ll be camping with family up in Maine’s beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts for this longstanding form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in comments, please!]On two historical and cultural contexts for a complex American divide.Earlier this week, I mentioned the growing conversation over race—and especially African Americans—and camping in America. As those hyperlinks illustrate, in the last couple decades more and more National Park Service officials and other camping and nature advocates have noticed and commented on a stark divide in how much different ethnic American communities take part in those activities and make use of those spaces. While there’s no necessary reason why this would be a problem, America’s national parks and natural spaces represent a significant, shared national resource, and of course it would be ideal for all Americans to have the chance to experience and benefit from that resource. And in order to address this communal division, it’d be important to analyze some of the historical factors that have contributed to its 21st century existence.At the first hyperlink above, Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson (himself African American) diagnoses the problem as a communal “disassociation from the natural world,” one based, “in part, [on] a memory of the horrible things that were done to us in rural America.” Exemplifying that perspective on nature are a couple of seminal early 20th century cultural texts: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s historical Gothic poem “The Haunted Oak” (1900) and Billie Holliday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit” (1939; based on a poem written by New York city schoolteacher Abel Meeropol). While trees have tended to represent pastoral and even spiritual beauty and power in many American literary and cultural texts—see Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” (1913), one of the most popular works of poetry from Dunbar’s era, for an early 20th century case in point—Dunbar and Holliday’s texts illustrate the far different cultural and historical roles that trees have played for African Americans. Given that the National Park system was createdin precisely the same era as those texts (and the lynching epidemic that they reflect), it’s certainly understandable that many African Americans wouldn’t hasten to embrace the natural world preserved by those parks.I’d also highlight another cultural factor in that disassociation from the natural world, however—although to be clear, this is amateur sociology that I have in no way researched, and as always I welcome any pushback or other perspectives. Camping, it seems to me, is often a profoundly individual activity, one undertaken by small groups (families, groups of friends, even organizations like Cub Scout troops or the like) who are overtly separating from the society and broader communities around them in order to escape into this natural space. And while this is of course a reductive overstatement, I would argue that for most of American history members of minority communities have understandably sought safety and solace in community, the kinds of ethnic enclaves that allow for individuals to receive the kinds of support and comfort too often denied them by the broader American society. Indeed, Camping in Color, the camping blog on which my first hyperlinked article above appeared, is overtly framed as an effort by its authors to create and pass on such a shared camping community for African Americans, “presented with the goal of infusing family with the appreciation of nature.” If camping is to become a truly national American experience, perhaps such a redefinition from the individual to the more communal will have to accompany that growth.Monthly recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?

July 28, 2016: American Camping: Appalachian Trailblazers

[This week, I’ll be camping with family up in Maine’s beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts for this longstanding form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in comments, please!]Three men who helped blaze the nation’s (and one of the world’s) premiere hiking trail.1)      Benton MacKaye: It stands to reason that the idea for the Appalachian Trail was first developed, in the 1921 article “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” by a Forestry professor and civil servant. But what is perhaps more surprising, and very important, is MacKaye’s lifelong emphasis on such wilderness exploration as an integral part of human society, rather than in any sense separate from it; he called this connection of nature to society both “Regional Planning” and “Geotechnics,” and dedicated his career to arguing for and enacting it. As other posts this week have illustrated, many of our narratives of camping and the wilderness define them as distinctly outside from (and contrasted with) our more “settled” social spaces and communities—but that’s not the narrative or understanding with which the Appalachian Trail began, and remembering MacKaye’s vision is a vital part of celebrating the Trail.2)      Myron Avery: The building of the Trail required not only a visionary creator from within the forestry world, but also dedicated laymen advocates and leaders from outside it, and it found two such champions in retired Judge Arthur Perkins and his lawyer protégé Myron Avery. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Perkins and Avery worked to make MacKaye’s vision a reality; Perkins passed away in 1932, but Avery continued the work, serving as chairman of the Appalachian Trail Conference from 1931 until his own death in 1952 (the wonderful 75th anniversary article at that hyperlink includes a great deal of info on all of the subjects of today’s post). MacKaye and Avery did have their conflicts, most especially over the relationship between outside influences (both governmental and business) and the trail; as you might expect, the lawyer Avery was more open to such connections than the forester MacKaye. Yet the simple truth is that the creation, development, and maintenance of the Trail depended on both men and perspectives, and still does as we near the Trail’s 100th anniversary.3)      Earl Shaffer: Yet for the Trail to grow and prosper and endure, it needed more than creators and leaders—it also, and most crucially, needed hikers. No AT hiker was more famous or influential than Earl Shaffer, the outdoorsman and World War II veteran whose 1948 through-hike was the first documented journey of the whole Trail (and earned him the nickname The Crazy One). Shaffer’s associated with the Trail continued for the rest of his life, most especially in his 1998 anniversary through-hike (at the age of 79!), which provided the material for his book The Appalachian Trail: Calling Me Back to the Hills . While of course Shaffer was singular in many ways, I would argue that he was also and most saliently deeply representative—not only of those intrepid souls who have completed the whole of the Appalachian Trail, but of all for whom it has become a meaningful journey and space. Shaffer once said that he completed the 1948 hike in order to “walk the war out of my system,” and who among us doesn’t have such life experiences and motivations for a walk in the woods?  Last camping context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?

July 27, 2016: American Camping: Into the Wilds

[This week, I’ll be camping with family up in Maine’s beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts for this longstanding form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in comments, please!]On the distinct but equally American cultural traditions for two recent wilderness stories.From their titles on, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996; later made into the 2007 film starring Emile Hirsch) and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012; made into the 2014 film starring Reese Witherspoon) seem to have a great deal in common. Chris McCandless, the protagonist of Krakauer’s book, was 24 years old when he hiked alone deep into the wilds of Alaska’s Stampede Trail; Strayed, the protagonist of her own memoir, was 27 years old when she hiked the 1100-mile Pacific Crest Trail solo. Both young people were responding to tragedies and traumas in their lives and families and seeking something different, something more and more meaningful, in those wilderness escapes. Yet their stories could not have ended more differently: McCandless died on his trek, his body found months later by hunters, requiring his mysterious story to be re-imagined and told by Krakauer; Strayed not only survived her journey but turned the experience into a bestselling autobiographical book that has helped launch her evolving and very successful literary career.There are lots of specific details and contexts for each of these individuals and stories that help explain their divergent outcomes, as of course do the vagaries of luck and fate in each case. Yet at the same time, each story can be linked to broader, longstanding American narratives, national images that can help us understand why these stories have resonated so deeply with audiences on both page and screen. Strayed’s story exemplifies two famous American quotes about which I have written previously in this space: Henry David Thoreau’s lines from Chapter 2 of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”; and John Muir’s belief that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” Like those two iconic figures, as well as many others both real (such as John Woolman) and fictional (such as Rip Van Winkle), Strayed turned to the wildnerness both to escape unattractive aspects of her life and society and to find compelling alternative perspectives and ways of living, ones that she could then bring back with her upon her inevitable return to society.Yet as McCandless’ story reminds us, such returns are not at all inevitable, as the wilderness is not just and not mostly a place for our own self-discovery; it is also its own distinct world, one with realities and dangers that we ignore or minimize at our own peril. Innumerable American cultural texts have focused on stories of those dangers and their destructive and often fatal effects, from classics such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1902) to recent works such as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea (1997) and Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (2006). While a cynical case could be made that we return to such stories again and again in the same way that we rubber-neck at accidents on the highway, I would argue that we also and most importantly find in such stories reminders of both our own limitations and of powers and forces outside of and beyond our own identities. While those realities can be too much for any individual to experience first-hand—and I’m not suggesting for a moment that McCandless’ death was anything other than a tragedy, for it certainly was—the stories of them have an important cultural role to play, one complementary to and as valuable as the lessons taken from wilderness survival stories like Strayed’s.Next camping context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?

July 26, 2016: American Camping: The Gunnery Camp

[This week, I’ll be camping with family up in Maine’s beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts for this longstanding form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in comments, please!]Two vital lessons we can learn from the father of American camping.I couldn’t possibly do a better job telling the amazing American story of Frederick Gunn, the educational reformer, abolitionist, and activist considered “the father of recreational camping,” than does this wonderful ConnecticutHistory.org piece by scholar and Gunnery Schoolhistorian Paula Gibson Krimsky. Along with urging you to read that piece before you continue with my post, I’ll also note that (at least of the mid-June moment in which I’m writing this post), CT Humanities, the vital organization that runs ConnecticutHistory.org among many other resources and projects, is in serious danger of disappearing, having had its funding cut entirely from the state budget by Governor Malloy. After you read that piece and before you return here, I’d ask you to support CT Humanities in any and every way you can—I know Frederick Gunn would agree that such public and communal humanities organizations represent an essential part of education, civic life, and American society.Welcome back! Clearly Gunn’s life and work have a great deal to teach us, on many topics; but here I want to emphasize a couple lessons related specifically to his emphasis on the great outdoors and on recreational camping (as Krimsky’s piece notes, Gunn’s 1861 two-week camping trip with a group of students is considered by the American Camping Association to be their historical origin point). For one thing, Gunn would most certainly argue with my use of the term “escape” in the bracketed intro section for this week’s series; to him, the Gunnery camping trips, like all explorations of the natural world, were a vital part of the education he and his school offered, a necessary complement to the students’ classroom work. The first 1861 trip drove home that point with particular clarity, as the campers spent time practicing military drills in preparation for Union Army service during the Civil War; not sure any camping activity could be more overtly distinct from the concept of “escape” than that. But Gunn and the school continued the trips long after the war’s end, and so they became a more overarching and philosophical component of his educational and service work—and thus remain a powerful argument for what camping can add to our identities and communities.To this day, however, as I’ll analyze at length in the week’s final post, camping is associated with some ethnic and racial communities in America much more than others. And on that note as well Gunn and his school and camp have a great deal to contribute to our collective conversations. Gunn’s abolitionism and his educational reform efforts were very much of a piece, as he saw his school as helping prepare students and citizens for a future society that would be transformed by such activism and would require new skills and perspectives as a result. Although Gunn did not, as far as I can tell, have African American students in his school and camp during his lifetime, I hope and believe that was due to circumstance rather than prejudice—a hope given credence by Gunn’s early 1870s admission of four Chinese students who were part of Yung Wing’s Chinese Educational Mission in nearby Hartford. In any case, Gunn seems very likely to have seen camping in precisely the same progressive and egalitarian light as he did education and society—and that’s a light that we could still do a far better job shining consistently on the possibility and power of recreational camping.Next camping context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?

July 25, 2016: American Camping: The Wendigo

[This week, I’ll be camping with family up in Maine’s beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts for this longstanding form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in comments, please!]On the camping trip scary story that also offers cultural and cross-cultural commentaries.I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough to stick with me nearly three decades later: an account of a party of hunters on a camping trip in rural Canada encountering the supernatural demon known as the Wendigo. I can even remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, from then on I knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside of the pages of that very scary story to do so.So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements about what’s at the heart of all mythology being largely discredited these days—there seems to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity and perspective of these various tribes.But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent something else, and perhaps something even more telling: tales of the perils of cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by the creature tend to be non-native hunters and campers, often if not always venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite their own. Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and symbolically, shifted over time.Next camping context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?

July 23-24, 2016: IcelandStudying

[Earlier this month, my fiancé and I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to this special post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]Three things I learned about America while traveling in Iceland.1)      Not so rugged: “Rugged individualism” has been one of the myths at the core of American identity for centuries, but in recent decades has been challenged by another narrative: that we’re an overly litigious nation, prone to take offense and sue at the slightest mishap. I’ve always agreed with that second hyperlinked article’s arguments that our litigiousness is greatly exaggerated, but I have to say that Iceland shifted my thinking somewhat. Time and again we were presented with extremely hazardous situations and settings, ones that came with no warnings or “at your own risk” statements of any kind. Given that some of them (like the mighty Skógafoss waterfall, which featured a narrow outcropping high above the fall on which visitors could walk with no railings of any kind) are also among the island’s most highly touristed areas, I can’t imagine that there aren’t at least occasional accidents and deaths, yet it seems no one has sued as a result of such tragedies. At least when it comes to signage and guidance, Iceland feels far less litigious than America.2)      But much more inclusive: In many of the same places I was also struck by a very different side of Iceland and its attractions, however: their complete inaccessibility to disabled visitors, or even those who might not fit the criteria for a disability but have mobility issues of any kind (such as the elderly). To name just one example, the beautiful walk behind the Seljalandsfoss waterfall seems at first to be relatively accessible, but then turns (again, with no signage or warnings of any kind) into a scramble up slippery, steep rocks, one that requires a great deal of mobility to complete without significant danger. Iceland doesn’t have its own version of the Americans with Disabilities Act, of course, so it’s not under any legal obligation to make such public spots accessible—and it’s fair to say that in many cases such accommodations simply might not be possible. Yet in any case, traveling in Iceland made me proud of the steps America has taken to become more welcoming and inclusive for disabled Americans and visitors, perhaps especially in our public and shared spaces.3)      A model of collective memory: On a very different note, I was extremely impressed with the ways Iceland remembers one of the main subjects of my week’s posts: the sagas, and the collective stories and histories they present. We visited a number of museums dedicated to the sagas and their contexts, including my personal favorite the Saga Centre, and found that they did an excellent job highlighting the sagas’ complex, even contradictory elements: their fictions and storytelling yet their relationships to history and geography, their influences and imaginations, their role in shaping a national culture and identity and how scholars have both challenged and validated their details, and more. While America doesn’t have a single body of texts that parallel the Icelandic sagas, it’s fair to say that much of our early literature has performed similar communal roles—and thus that a prospective space such as the American Writers Museum (for which I’ve been honored to work as both a scholarly advisor and a blogger) could learn a great deal from how these saga museums have contributed to Iceland’s collective memories of its literature and culture.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Icelandic experiences or perspectives you’d share?

July 22, 2016: VikingStudying: Vikings on the Screen

[Earlier this month, my fiancé and I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]On the key difference between a spate of 1960s films and a 21st century TV show, and what has endured.One of the biggest films of 1958 was The Vikings, a Technicolor blockbuster starring real-life couple Tony Curtis and Janet Leighas the hero and heroine, alongside such Hollywood icons as Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine. As usual in the movie business, one successful film led to a group of strikingly similar follow-ups, including Erik the Conqueror (1961; more or less an Italian remake of the 1958 film) and The Long Ships (1964, and perhaps the most noteworthy of the bunch from an AmericanStudies perspective as it starred Sidney Poitier as a Moorish king). All these films would have to be contextualized in the period’s craze for Biblical epics, including the trend-setting Quo Vadis (1951), Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956), and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), among others. Indeed, while The Vikingsdid make a point of filming many of its scenes in Norway for authenticity, from what I’ve seen these Viking epics often shared a great deal, in both style and storytelling beats (such as a love triangle where the outcast hero contends with a more powerful brother-like figure for the female lead), with those contemporary historical dramas.It would be fair to wonder, then, whether and how such films could do any specific justice to Viking histories and cultures, or whether they simply comprised a substitute of Norse for Mediterranean or Arabic character and place names within relatively unchanging plotlines. Things seem far different with Vikings, an epic TV series that premiered in March 2013 on the History channel and is in the midst of airing its fourth season this spring. Although this Vikings was likewise inspired by a broader cultural trend (in this case the success of HBO’s Game of Thrones and the spate of historical/fantasy dramas it has spawned), creator and showrunner Michael Hirst has consistently emphasized his reliance on historical sources, both 13thcentury Icelandic sagas and other chronicles from the period, to research and tell the stories of his legendary protagonist Ragnar Lothbrok (played by Travis Fimmel) and his family and world. As that last hyperlinked post illustrates, Hirst and company have certainly taken artistic liberties with those histories, as any dramatic work would; yet nonetheless, starting and engaging with those historical and cultural sources to my mind already reflects a significant shift from the storytelling origins and contexts for the mid-20th century films.Ragnar Lothbrok was also the character played by Ernest Borgnine in the 1958 film, however, and that one link can help us perceive a fundamental similarity across these distinct periods and their historical dramas. While Hirst’s show might be more consistently and thoroughly grounded in its sources than were the films, that is, it continues to tell what we could call legendary stories, epic myths of conquest, family strife, larger-than-life heroes and villains, and so on. That continuity stands to reason, since such mythic stories are generally at the heart of the Icelandic sagas, themselves (as I noted in Wednesday’s post) as much epic poems and family dramas as they are historical chronicles. The sagas have long been and remain the best source for Viking history, and as long as that’s the case it will be difficult for any representation of Viking stories not to tend toward the legendary (even Hagar the Horrible focuses on both conquest and family strife, although in a slightly different tone to be sure). And perhaps those legendary stories do capture the essence of Viking culture and identity—but on the other hand, it’s difficult for me to imagine that the everyday life and experiences for most Vikings weren’t as different from the legends and epics as was (for example) the world of most Britons from the tales of King Arthur. If so, that’s a Viking story that has yet to find its way onto the screen.Special trip follow-up post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?

July 21, 2016: VikingStudying: Historic Sites

[Earlier this month, my fiancé and I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]On lessons from the two New World Viking sites discovered to date, and what might be next.1)      L’Anse aux Meadows: The first confirmed Viking/Norse site in the Americas was discovered and excavated in what we might call the old-fashioned way: in 1960, a pair of married Norwegians, explorer Helge Ingstad and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, were led to a group of mysterious Newfoundland mounds by local resident George Decker; the Ingstads spent the next eight years carrying out excavations of the mounds, eventually amassing enough evidence to prove that the site was definitively of Norse origin. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, L’Anse has continued to offer up cultural and historical revelations in the half-century since its discovery, and remains the center of archaeological exploration and Canadian collective memory of the Viking settlers.2)      Point Rosee: The second, not-yet-confirmed but quite possible Viking/Norse site in the Americas was discovered in what we would have to call a very 21stcentury way: in 2015, archaeologists Sarah Parcak and Gregory Mumford (also a romantic couple, one interesting link between the 1960 and 2015 discoveries) examined infrared satellite images and high-resolution aerial photographs of a site that appeared to have once featured buildings; magnetometer readings revealed high quantities of iron, and subsequent excavations have encountered evidence of iron smelting at the site (a process likely only used in the region in that period by Norse settlers). Whether Point Rosee is indeed a second Viking site remains in some dispute, but no matter what the final verdict, this evolving conversation indicates how fully both archaeology and our study of historic cultures have changed over the fifty years since L’Anse.3)      What’s next: I’m sure that the next fifty years will feature just as many changes and advances, and that our archaeological and historical knowledge will be extended and enhanced through all of them. But at the same time, I would argue that it might be just as important for our collective memories of these Viking settlers to create historic sites akin to Plimoth Plantation: not located in the site of the original settlement, but recreated in a place that can capture its setting and world; not based on excavations of artifacts or buildings so much as a space in which such artifacts and buildings can be recreated as accurately as possible; not really an archaeological site at all, but rather an educational tourist attraction that can introduce visitors to the histories, stories, and world of this historic community. If we’re going to teach elementary school students about the Viking explorers and settlers, as I noted in Monday’s post we are, I’d say it’s time we had the kind of site where students (and everyone) could themselves explore and engage with what that community might have experienced and been.Last VikingStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?

July 20, 2016: VikingStudying: The Sagas

[Earlier this month, my fiancé and I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]On two AmericanStudies contexts for the literary epics that recount the Vikings’ voyages.Although there are apparently very minor references to it in a couple of historical chronicles from the period (including Ari the Wise’s Book of Icelanders), by far the most overt and extensive contemporary (relatively speaking; within a couple of centuries, at least) documentation of Leif Erikson’s voyage to the Americas is found in two 13th century Icelandic sagas: the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders . Like all the Icelandic sagas, these prose texts comprise a complex combination of family histories and genealogies, exaggerated epic prose-poems, and detailed historical accounts, and demand the kind of extensive contextualization and nuanced close readings that I’m in no way able to provide in this brief post (as well as specialized literary and cultural knowledge that I don’t have in any case!). But if we view these sagas of exploration through the lens of American literature and culture, a subject about which I have a great deal more to say, they can be provocatively and productively linked to two very distinct texts and contexts.For one thing, I think the Icelandic sagas have more in common with William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation than we might initially think (and I can feel my late professor Alan Heimert cursing me eternally for this comparison, but we AmericanStudiers must go where the trail takes us). Because Bradford writes his history of the Mayflower Pilgrims and their Plymouth colony in a detached third-person narrative voice, it’s easy at times to forget that he was both an integral part and a leader of the community, and that the book is thus a personal and family history as well as a communal chronicle. Moreover, he is just as subjective in that perspective as is any epic poet, and his treatment of his book’s focal subjects (such as Thomas Morton and his splinter community) just as potentially exaggerated or slanted. None of that means that his history of the Pilgrims’ community, voyage, and settlement is necessarily inaccurate, of course, no more than are the Icelandic sagas—just that his text combines genres and perspectives as fully as do those sagas, a comparison that could help us see all of them as helping create a new form of New World chronicle. (To reiterate, the sagas were written some centuries after the voyages, a key difference from Bradford’s contemporaneous book to be sure.)It would also be interesting to compare the Icelandic sagas to a 20th century epic poem such as Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage.” To be clear, Hayden’s poem focuses on the horrific and brutal forced voyages of African slaves (and the slave traders and sailors who shared those voyages with them) to the New World, a far different form of Atlantic travel than was Leif Erikson’s journey of exploration. Yet to portray those voyages centuries after they took place, to create out of those histories a literary representation of their experiences and essences, Hayden creates a multi-vocal and multi-genre poem, a work that combines personal and historical accounts with imagined poetic descriptions and images. The result is both something new and something old, a text that feels experimental and innovative and yet one that gets closer (I would argue, and have argued) to the Middle Passage than have many historical analyses. Different as they are in so many ways, it would still be possible to see Hayden’s poem and the Icelandic sagas as two parts of a longstanding and still evolving literary tradition of New World epics.Next VikingStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?

July 19, 2016: VikingStudying: Leif Erikson

[Earlier this month, my fiancé and I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]Three telling details about the Iceland-born explorerconsidered one of the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas.1)      His multi-national heritage: It’s not at all surprising that Leif made the journey to (what is now) Newfoundland, Canada, as he was the descendent of two generations of nomadic Vikings. His grandfather Thorvald Asvaldsson had been banished from Norway and helped bring the Vikings to Iceland; Thorvald’s son Erik the Red was subsequently banished from Iceland and established the first permanent settlement in Greenland. Besides highlighting the frequency of banishment for the volatile Vikings, these moves both reflect a highly mobile culture and (I would argue) suggest why Leif’s resulting mindset might have readied him for global exploration. It’s no coincidence, that is, that Christopher Columbus had traveled far before he began his Atlantic voyages—exploration is not only the vehicle for but just as importantly the illustration of an increasingly mobile world, and Leif’s heritage exemplified that mobility.2)      His religious conversion: Before he made the journey to the Americas, Leif and his crew traveled east to Norway (after a detour to the Hebrides), where he spent time in the court of King Olaf Tryggvason and converted to Christianity. When Leif and company returned to Greenland, he brought that new religion with him and it became a divisive element in the Viking community, with Leif’s father Erik opposed to its influence but his mother Thjódhild likewise converting and building a famous church. Besides telling us a good deal about the era’s complex interplay of European cultures and perspectives, this history can remind us that the European communities that explored and settled the Americas were just as cross-culturally influenced and evolving as was the new society they would help create. And indeed, that such cross-cultural shifts, like the geographic mobilities in Leif’s family tree, likely helped produce the perspectives and conditions that made global voyages and explorations possible.3)      His holiday: I like to think that I know a lot about American memory days—hell, I invented a whole calendar of them!—but I’ll confess to not having known before researching this post that October 9this Leif Erikson Day. Originally created in Wisconsin in 1929, the holiday was put on the national calendar by Congress in 1964 and has been celebrated annually ever since. Lyndon Johnson’s first Erikson Day proclamation (available at that last hyperlink) connected “the intrepid exploits of the Vikings of Erikson’s time” to America’s 1960s “adventurous exploration of the unfathomed realms of space,” illustrating one of the many ways that this Viking explorer and his voyages can continue to resonate in our collective consciousness. But as always, I would want a memory day to allow most especially for historical understanding and engagement, and in Leif’s case that could include not only his pioneering voyage to the Americas, but also some of these cultural, familial, and individual factors that made it possible.Next VikingStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?