Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 301

January 13, 2016: Spring 2016 Previews: Major American Authors of the 20th Century

[Next week brings a new semester, the last of my 11th year at Fitchburg State University. So this week brings a series of spring 2016 preview posts, this time focused on the texts we’ll be reading in my spring courses. I’d love to hear about your spring syllabi, and other spring plans, in comments!]Honestly, for a course like this the issue is what Marlo Stanfield would call one of them good problems: far, far too many authors and works that I want to teach. Here’s the roster of 7 to which I’ve narrowed it down for the Spring 2016 syllabus (and with which I’ll have the help of a great student Writing Associate):1)      Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900)2)      Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)3)      Langston Hughes’ Collected Poems4)      Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems5)      Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984/1993)6)      Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997)7)      Junot Dịaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)Next spring preview tomorrow,BenPS. What are you teaching/reading this spring? Other spring plans you’d share?

January 12, 2016: Spring 2016 Previews: English Studies Capstone

[Next week brings a new semester, the last of my 11th year at Fitchburg State University. So this week brings a series of spring 2016 preview posts, this time focused on the texts we’ll be reading in my spring courses. I’d love to hear about your spring syllabi, and other spring plans, in comments!]My English Studies Capstone course has to wear a lot of pedagogical hats: the course’s overt purpose is to provide a space in which the students produce their senior portfolios, but I also see it as both a place for very practical conversations about the future (professional and educational) and for more philosophical ones about English Studies and the different tracks that constitute it at FSU. Our five readings help us approach one or more of those subjects:1)      William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (2006 30th Anniversary Edition):  Because of the portfolios, and because it simply links all of our different English Studies identities, writing is a central topic throughout the Capstone, and so we did into Zinsser’s engaging and essential guide many times over the course of the semester. The book includes a great deal of practical and professional advice, but is also a manifesto for why writing (and English Studies) matters.2)      Steven King’s On Writing (2010 10th Anniversary Edition): To focus on Professional Writing, one of our three English Studies departmental tracks, we spend a couple weeks reading King’s memoir/guide/advice book. King is overtly the crazy, successful uncle to Zinsser’s wry, grandfatherly sage, and the two books pair very nicely. Yet King is also quite simply a model professional writer, not only in his career but in his voice and style.3)      Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013): I’ve previously used Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as the text for our two week focus on the Literature track, but decided it was time for a change—and for a chance to teach Adichie’s wonderful recent novel for the first time. I couldn’t be more excited to share this novel with a group of senior English Studies majors, and especially to hear their responses to it.4)      Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s A New Culture of Learning (2011): Finding a reading that works well for our two week English Secondary Education unit has been a challenge; I used this short book for the first time in my last Capstone section, and while it’s not perfect I think it very effectively introduces a number of key challenges and concepts for 21st century American education and society. Getting students thinking about those issues is a key goal for this part of the course, and this book should help me do that.5)      Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013): While our Theater track moved a few years ago from English Studies to the Communications/Media department, I still believe that including a dramatic reading in Capstone is an important way to keep this part of English Studies in our collective conversations. I’ve always used Death of a Salesman in this spot, but once again it was time for a change and a more contemporary work. I admit to not yet having read Baker’s play (we finish the semester with it, in my defense), but it comes highly recommended by my colleague and friend Joe Moser (who has taught our American Drama course multiple times), and that’s more than enough for me! Next spring preview tomorrow,BenPS. What are you teaching/reading this spring? Other spring plans you’d share?

January 11, 2016: Spring 2016 Previews: Ethnic American Literature

[Next week brings a new semester, the last of my 11th year at Fitchburg State University. So this week brings a series of spring 2016 preview posts, this time focused on the texts we’ll be reading in my spring courses. I’d love to hear about your spring syllabi, and other spring plans, in comments!]In my Ethnic American Literature course, I use readings in a different way than in any other class I teach: pairing two long readings and working with them simultaneously for three weeks (rather than the usual two for a longer work). Here’s an article in which I explain why I made that choice and how it works in practice! The pairings have evolved a bit with each iteration of the course, and here are the four units for Spring 2016:1)      Frederick Douglass’ Narrative (1845) and Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945): My Ethnic Lit students produce for their individual work in the course not conventional papers but a multigenerational family timeline and history, and so we start our readings with two autobiographical works, as well as two that can help us analyze African American identities, histories, and writings across a century. 2)      Mary Doyle Curran’s The Parish and the Hill(1948) and Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls (1999): Another central goal of my Ethnic course is to remind my students that we’re all “ethnic”—when I came to FSU the course was unfortunately titled “Other Voices,” and there remains a sense (among scholars as well as students) that “ethnic literature” means literature by writers of color. This pairing of two Irish American works helps push beyond that concept, and toward conversations about ethnicity and race—among many other topics—as part of all identities.3)      Poems by Martín Espada and Excerpts from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street(1984): By the end of Unit 2 the students have done a ton of reading, and so both to change things up and to allow for more close reading practice we spend the next unit working with much shorter texts: a dozen or so Espada poems and the first twenty or so of the short short stories that constitute Cisneros’ great book. The two authors also help us think about Latino American and immigrant identities and communities, among many other subjects.4)      Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984/1993): By the last unit we’re ready for more comparative analyses, as well as to model more overtly the project’s histories, and these multigenerational family novels (one of four Chinese American immigrant women and their daughters, and one of three generations in a pair of Chippewa Native American families) allow us to do both those things—and to enjoy two of the most talented American writers (“ethnic” or otherwise) of the last half-century.Next spring preview tomorrow,BenPS. What are you teaching/reading this spring? Other spring plans you’d share?

January 9-10, 2016: Canobie and Theme Park Histories

[In November, I finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of interest in all three places. So this week I’ve DisneyStudied five such details, leading up to this special weekend post on themes parks in America!]How one New Hampshire site captures three stages in the evolution of American theme parks.Like two other sites about which I’ve written in this space, Newton (MA)’s Norumbega Park and Charlottesville (VA)’s Fry’s Spring Beach Club, New Hampshire’s Canobie Lake Park began (after its 1904 opening) as an early 20th century trolley park. Designed as escapes (or at least respites) from the period’s increasingly crowded and modernizing urban spaces, a logical complement to the Progressive Era’s City Beautiful movement and its emphases on the need for the pastoral in that developing world, these trolley parks often focused on green and flowering spaces, and Canobie in this first stage of life was no different. For its first few decades, the park was best known for its elaborate botanical gardens and promenades, with visitors often arriving in their Sunday best and with the park’s featured attractions (such as canoeing and picnic areas) fitting nicely into that pastoral landscape and relaxed ambience. That wasn’t the only kind of theme park in this early 20th century moment, of course, but it seems to have been the most common version.By the mid-20thcentury, however, Canobie had taken on a significantly more up-tempo identity. That included the 1936 introduction of the first roller coaster, the Yankee Cannonball (please don’t watch that video if you have issues with motion sickness), a wooden beast that endures to this day (this AmericanStudier and his sons rode it last summer!). But it also included a new emphasis on popular entertainment of the musical variety—between the 1930s and 1950s the Canobie Lake Ballroombecame a Big Band era destination, with performances by Duke Ellington, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and many other prominent acts and artists. The rise to dominance of the automobile and the development of the suburbs had made the escapist quality of trolley parks much less unique or necessary, and so theme parks had to evolve alongside those innovations, becoming less a pastoral alternative to the city and more a combination of high-powered entertainments for which there wasn’t room in any one city space (and which, at least in the case of the musical performances, were unlikely to be found in the suburbs).By 1957, a number of catastrophes (including a fire and a hurricane) had almost destroyed the park, and the Big Band era was likewise coming to a close. When new owners purchased Canobie and reopened it in 1958, they did so as part of a new era, that of Disneylandand Palisades Park and Pacific Ocean Park, among the many other amusement parks (most of which have long since closed) that were booming in the late 50s. These many theme parks provided both inspiration and competition for a newly revitalized park like Canobie, requiring the park to constantly add new and more elaborate roller coasters and attractions (such as an extensive water park section), as well as specialized entertainments like the Halloween screamfest. Again, the majority of late 20th century theme parks have not survived into the 21st century; but those that have, like Canobie, have grown ever bigger in their efforts to remain a destination. It’s hard to say whether there will be another stage in Canobie’s evolution, but if the enjoyment of my AmericanStudier sons is any indication, there’s certainly still a place for theme parks in the American future.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?

January 8, 2016: DisneyStudying: Small Worlds

[In November, I finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of interest in all three places. So this week I’ll DisneyStudy five such details, leading up to a special weekend post on themes parks in America!]On three sides to globalization captured by Disney’s parks.On Wednesday’s post I mentioned that the attraction It’s a Small World, likely best known for its insanely catchy “It’s a Small World After All” song, was created for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The attraction itself is pretty simple—animatronic figures representing peoples from around the world, far less realistic than those in many other Disney attractions but with a quaint charm to be sure, located in settings meant to loosely capture their different cultures, all singing that darn song in their own languages, leading up to a climax where all the cultures are brought together to sing as one—which is perhaps why it became the phenomenon it did. And as someone who both appreciates multiculturalism and strives for an ideal of cross-cultural transformation, I certainly liked the ride’s two-part process, the recognition of distinct world cultures and yet the movement toward a unifying final scene. A simple but compelling vision of globalization, and one created just at the outset of that worldwide trend.Disney didn’t just reflect globalization, of course—it also served as one of the trend’s principal catalysts and vehicles. That’s true not only in the company’s spread around the world (and the creation of Disneylands in other countries), but also in the many ways that Disney has worked to welcome the world into its American parks. None of those efforts has been more visible, nor more influential, than Epcot’s World Showcase; I didn’t quite realize this until I was there in person, but more or less a full half of Epcot is dedicated to this space that seeks to recreate the architecture, environments, and (most of all) the food and drink of eleven nations. Visiting with two young boys, and during an annual food & wine festival to boot, meant I didn’t venture into any of the showcase’s restaurants or establishments. But even walking around the showcase briefly, I was struck in two distinct ways by the space’s jarring shifts in tone from spot to spot: partly these shifts emphasized the area’s artificial and superficial quality, the ways in which none of its focal nations could be captured with any true depth; but at the same time they felt like possible starting points, initial glimpses of other cultures that could ideally be complemented with travel, research, even conversation with other visitors. It’s not impossible that global community could come from such origin points.On the other hand, global community requires a consistent recognition of cultures other than our own, and I have to admit that in most other places and ways Disney’s parks felt far more American-centric. A case in point would be The Great Movie Ride, an attraction at Hollywood Studios that takes visitors through the last century of filmmaking with a combination of live actors and animatronic scenes. Of course no one attraction can capture all of film history, and this one is part of a park dedicated explicitly to the Hollywood film industry; yet nonetheless, it seems to me that a ride purporting to reflect some of the key moments and genres in film could work to include at least a moment or two focused on films or figures from other cultures. After all, none other than the record-shattering film property recently acquired by Disney (and focus of a future theme park that unfortunately the boys and I were too early to check out) began with a film (A New Hope) that echoed in some significant ways a Japanese classic film (Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress). Too often, America’s role in globalization has entailed eliding the rest of the world in favor of our own perspective, and that side of the trend too is unquestionably present on the complex, contradictory, compelling grounds of Disneyworld.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of Disney or theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?

January 7, 2016: DisneyStudying: Splash Mountain

[In November, I finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of interest in all three places. So this week I’ll DisneyStudy five such details, leading up to a special weekend post on themes parks in America!]On what’s present in and absent from a playful water ride and its contexts.On the map, the Magic Kingdom attraction Splash Mountain looks like just another log flume ride. The boys and I have been to our fair share of amusement parks, and just about every one has had a log flume ride, a watery trip in a boat made to look like a carved-out log that ends with a long fall and big splash. There’s something about the experience and sensation that’s just universal (although I highly recommend waiting until the weather is warm enough if you go on such a ride in the New England area; perhaps I should add practical parenting advice to the list of topics at this blog’s masthead!), and we’ve certainly fallen under its spell many times. So, having not done my due diligence as a researcher I suppose, I was expecting more of that familiar log flume-y goodness from Splash Mountain—but what I got instead was an attraction that literally makes the riders part of the Br’er Rabbit folktales, with each twist and turn presenting a new moment in the stories and even the long fall representing a key climax of the Br’er Wolf saga (Rabbit’s trickster-esque escape into the briar patch).Br’er Rabbit, Wolf, and all their friends and foes are created with the same kinds of animatronic technologies and performances that I’ve written about in the last couple posts, and on which many of the park’s spectacular rides (such as Pirates of the Caribbean) also rely. They’re extremely well done, capturing the personalities and tones of the Br’er Rabbit tales in a way that’s both timeless yet still compelling for young audiences jaded by video games and film special effects, and (as did each of the attractions about which I’ve written this series) led to some great conversations with the boys about the stories and histories behind the ride. But of course, that’s where things get extremely complicated—because although the ride itself references none of this, the Br’er Rabbit stories are inextricably linked to the controversial work of Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus books; and because it was those Uncle Remus books that were adapted into the most controversial Disney film of all time, The Song of the South (1946), which features both animated Br’er Rabbit tales and live action, well, plantation tradition nostalgia.I wrote, in the post hyperlinked under “Joel Chandler Harris…” above, about the question of whether Song of the South should be released from the vault in which it currently resides; to sum up, my answer was that it should be but that it certainly could use more parental supervision than your average Disney animated film. Certainly it seems odd (as my Temple University colleague and friend Jaime Lynn Longo recently noted) that the Magic Kingdom features a hugely popular ride based on a film that virtually no American kids would currently be able to see. Yet at the same time, I would argue that the ride also could use more guidance—for both kids learning about the Br’er Rabbit folktales and adults who might want to talk about it with them—then it currently features. Like any folktale character, Br’er Rabbit is partly about universal stories and themes—but also and just as importantly about the particular cultural and social worlds and communities out of which he and those stories emerged. Whether featured in a ride or portrayed in a film, he and his friends need those contexts to have their true meaning and power, and neither hiding those portrayals nor failing to engage the contexts is going to help communicate those multi-layered stories.Last DisneyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of Disney or theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?

January 6, 2016: DisneyStudying: The Carousel of Progress

[In November, I finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of interest in all three places. So this week I’ll DisneyStudy five such details, leading up to a special weekend post on themes parks in America!]On an attraction that highlights the best and worst of Disney’s visions of America.Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California in 1955, and by less than a decade later—the New York World’s Fair of 1964—the company had become synonymous enough with American theme parks that Disney was commissioned to produce four significant attractions for the fair. Of those four, It’s a Small World(about which I’ll write in Friday’s post) is probably the most famous, and certainly reflects an important and evolving element of Disney’s perspective: the company’s embrace, likely for both practical/commercial and philosophical reasons, of a global worldview. But if Disney was already by 1964 moving toward global domination, it was also first and foremost, then as now, a part of America’s landscape and culture. And it is another of the World’s Fair attractions, known initially as Progressland and ever after as the Carousel of Progress, which to my mind best embodies Disney’s influential contributions to American perspectives and identities.The Carousel, often said to be Walt Disney’s favorite of all the Disney attractions created in his lifetime, presents some of the same ideas of social and technological innovation on which Spaceship Earth (Monday’s subject) focuses. But while Spaceship Earth focused on the broadest levels of human history and society, and on topics of equal breadth such as the development of language and art, the Carousel brings progress down to its most intimate level: creating, in a quartet of animatronic settings and performances, the home and voices of an “average” American family across four time periods (1904, the 1920s, the 1940s, and “the present,” initially 1964 but having evolved multiple times over the half-century since). Those scenes are not without their broader historical resonances, both of Disney’s own histories and of the society beyond, but they nonetheless focus on the most everyday and personal meanings of progress: the change from one type of stove to another, new methods for young people to communicate with their friends, the different views out the windows of urban and suburban homes. This intimate vision of progress not only complements Spaceship Earth’s nicely, but also reflects the most communal, shared experience of history.Well, kind of shared. Certainly stoves and youthful relationships and homes are significant parts of most American (and human) lives, but there’s no doubt that the Carousel’s portrayal of both its particular time periods and of progress overall is in other ways quite narrow. It’s not just that this “average” family happens to be white and (in my recollection) overtly Christian, for example, but also that in the father’s extended monologues about each time period we get precisely no engagements with any of the more complex histories unfolding in those eras; while of course many of the periods’ darkest histories would seem to be outside the concept of “progress,” others (such as Progressive labor reforms or the women’s suffrage movement) were deeply tied to that ideal. Yet the Carousel’s extremely rosy vision of the future (captured in the attraction’s song, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”) is closer to the easy form of optimism and patriotism, the kind that makes it difficult to include the challenges and struggles on the road to shared progress. That’s a clear and consistent downside to the Disney worldview, and one front and center in this popular attraction.Next DisneyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of Disney or theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?

January 5, 2016: DisneyStudying: Tom Sawyer Island

[In November, I finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of interest in all three places. So this week I’ll DisneyStudy five such details, leading up to a special weekend post on themes parks in America!]On the history, appeal, and limits of Disney’s most unique space.Most of the rides and attractions at the Magic Kingdom park fall into one of two categories: those inspired by existing Disney characters and stories (Mickey and company, fairy tale princesses and their friends like the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan and Captain Hook, and so on) and those that represent original settings created for the park that have now become part of popular culture (with the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion as exhibits A and B). But in the middle of a small lagoon that stands in for the Mississippi River, and accessible only by raft, sits an attraction that’s in a third category unto itself: Tom Sawyer Island, a walkthrough area based on Mark Twain’s novel and its characters and world. As detailed at my Dad’s Mark Twain in His Times website, the island (originally built for California’s Disneyland and then copied for Disneyworld) is apparently the only park attraction designed by Walt Disney himself; Disney was from Missouri and had grown up on Twain’s novels, and had such a specific vision for Tom’s island that he scrapped Marv Davis’ original design and came up with his own.I’m glad he did, as the resulting attraction is not only unique but full of wonderful small details that my boys were very happy to explore for longer than we spent at any other part of the park. We were particularly big fans both of the winding system of caves (labeled Injun Joe’s Cave, natch) that connect one side of the island to the other and of Fort Wilderness, the site of Tom and his comrades’ imaginary battles which includes a secret passage that leads out to the safety of the woods. But there were a number of other areas and elements to discover, and unlike most of the park’s crowded and time-limited rides, we were able to explore them at our own pace and return to them as many times as we wanted (I won’t divulge how many times we exited the fort through the secret passage, but suffice it to say that Tom would have been proud). That sense of leisurely exploration is, of course, entirely in keeping with not only the overarching tone of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , but also and most especially the world of Jackson’s Island and how it serves as an escape and respite for Tom, Huck, and their friends in that novel.Twain followed up Tom Sawyer with its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (originally subtitled Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), however, and while the latter novel does likewise feature an island that serves as an escape from the harsh shore world, it also and far more centrally refuses to let its title character, his runaway slave companion Jim, or its readers stay separate from those dark Southern realities for too long. It stands to reason that the Disney attraction would be based on the first novel, which is far more clearly and fully a children’s book; yet at the same time, just as Twain in Tom Sawyer mentions but refuses to engage with the existence of slavery all around its characters (much less the ethnic questions raised by a character like the villainous Injun Joe), so too does Tom Sawyer Island miss a chance to include any engagement with those social and historical issues. I’m not suggesting a slave auction site on the island, necessarily—but even a space dedicated to the character of Jim, perhaps a representation of his camp on the island after he had runaway from both slavery and his family, would help add this vital layer to the world of Tom Sawyer as we experience it at Disney.Next DisneyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of Disney or theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?

January 4, 2016: DisneyStudying: Spaceship Earth

[In November, I finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of interest in all three places. So this week I’ll DisneyStudy five such details, leading up to a special weekend post on themes parks in America!]On what stood out most to me and to my boys on Disney’s most interesting ride.Located within that big silver sphere that has come to symbolize Epcot, Spaceship Earth takes its riders on a compelling, multidirectional journey through time and human history. The ride (narrated by none other than Dame Judi Dench, whom even an AmericanStudier finds about as cool as it’s possible for a human to be) first goes back in time to the earliest humans and their prehistoric struggles for survival, moves chronologically forward through thousands of years of social and technological changes and innovations until reaching the 21st century present (located at the top of the ride, and presumably the top of that famous sphere), and then as it descends back to its starting point presents an interactive game through which each car’s riders can create a video depicting their own ideal version of future innovations and society. The ride was both my and my boys’ favorite at Epcot, for different but complementary reasons that reflect each of our perspectives and identities.What this AmericanStudier appreciated was the central thrust of the social and technological innovations on which Spaceship Earth focuses at every stage: communication, both in its most practical and most artistic senses. It was the invention of cave paintings that made isolated groups of cavemen into organized societies, in the ride’s opening scenes; from there, sections focus on the Phoenicians inventing the alphabet, on Alexandria and its great library (and the way its knowledge was preserved even after the great fire), on Gutenberg and his printing press, on Michaelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, on the telegraph and the radio and the computer and many more innovations. It stands to reason that a ride sponsored by Siemens would emphasize the role of technology in human development—but I was very pleasantly surprised that language and art were the most consistent threads of the communication advancements through which the ride moves, and the cores of its argument about what has made us most human. That’s an argument I wasn’t expecting to find in a theme park ride, and one I can get behind!What the boys loved most was the ride’s final section, that interactive segment during the starry descent back to the start. There’s no doubt that their enjoyment was closely tied to the video’s most interactive component: having secretly taken a picture of the car’s occupants at some early point in the ride, the video is able to position their faces atop animated bodies in the imagined future they have created, a feature that both personalizes the ride and makes it different each time. And at least for us, this feature was far more than a gimmick: it really allowed the boys to think about what kind of future society they would want to create and how they would want to experience it, and on our subsequent rides they carefully considered their answers to the questions that help imagine that future. Of course I hope that language, art, and communication continue to play important roles in their futures, and they remained important to this part of the ride to be sure; but at the same time, it’s most important to me that my boys have a say and role of their own in shaping both their and the world’s futures, and Spaceship Earth gave them a chance to do so in an imaginative and inspiring way.Next DisneyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other aspects of Disney or theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?

January 2-3, 2016: December 2015 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]November 30: AmendmentStudying: Summertime Blues and the 26th Amendment: A 13th Amendment-inspired series kicks off with how a classic summer song connects to a generation-shifting amendment.December 1: AmendmentStudying: Santa Clara County and the 14th Amendment: The series continues with the seemingly offhand sentences through which the Supreme Court radically revised history.December 2: AmendmentStudying: The 19th Amendment and the ERA: How the long road to women’s suffrage might parallel a current political journey, as the series rolls on.December 3 AmendmentStudying: Washington DC and the 23rd Amendment: How the 1961 amendment reflects and helped shift the city’s complex history.December 4: AmendmentStudying: Prohibition Culture: The series concludes with three texts that help us understand the world the 18th Amendment made.December 5-6: AmendmentStudying: On Not Taking the 13th Amendment for Granted: On the amendment’s 150th anniversary, three reasons we should not see it as a historical given.December 7: Circles of Friends: Revolutionary Circles: A Sinatra-inspired series starts with three circles that helped create the Revolution and a new nation.December 8: Circles of Friends: Five of Hearts: The series continues with three books that help illuminate an intimate and influential late 19thcentury circle.December 9: Circles of Friends: The Algonquin Round Table: Four members of the modernist circle who might surprise you, as the series rolls on.December 10: Circles of Friends: The Brat Pack: Three layers to how we can AmericanStudy the mid-80s circle of young actors.December 11: Circles of Friends: The Darker Side of Friends: The series concludes with three dark sides to the very successful and funny TV comedy.December 12-13: Circles of Friends: The Rat Packs: A special Sinatra birthday post on how the famous group of friends started and evolved, and why the changes matter.December 14: Semester Recaps: First-Year Writing: A Fall 2015 recap series on student work kicks off with three ways my first-year writing students responded to digital opportunities.December 15: Semester Recaps: American Literature I: The series continues with three examples of inspiring student outside connections in their individual author presentations.December 16: Semester Recaps: Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone: Three of the Capstone senior projects that give me hope for our future, as the series rolls on.December 17: Semester Recaps: Honors Literature Seminar: Three impressive collective perspectives from the class conversations in my Gilded Age lit seminar.December 18: Semester Recaps: ALFA Class on Contemporary Short Stories: The series concludes with the five author and stories we read in my adult learning class on emerging writers.December 19-20: Spring 2016 Preview: Five things I’m looking forward to in the Spring 2016 semester—add your own fall reflections and spring anticipations in comments, please!December 21: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: The CEM Baseball Team: A series on American stories that should be made into blockbuster films starts with an inspiring team and game.December 22: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: Ely Parker’s Life: The series continues with a 19th century Renaissance American whose biography rivals our greatest stories.December 23: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: Ida B. Wells’ Crossroads: A turning point moment that embodies the worst and best of America, as the series rolls on.December 24: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: Burr: The (con-)Founding Father who’s enjoying a bit of a comeback, and why he deserves his own blockbuster story.December 25: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: To Save the Man: The series concludes with a wish that’s already been granted, in John Sayles’ upcoming film.December 26-27: Emily Lauer’s Guest Post on Hamilton: In my latest Guest Post, a NeMLA colleague and friend writes about the hit musical and its connections to New York City.December 28: AmericanStudying 2015: Syrian Refugees: A series AmericanStudying some of the year’s biggest stories starts with three ways to make the case for resettling refugees.December 29: AmericanStudying 2015: Trump: The series continues with what’s not new about the GOP frontrunner, what is, and how to best stop him.December 30: AmericanStudying 2015: Bernie Sanders: The AmericanStudies reason why I’m not quite feeling the Bern, as the series rolls on.December 31: AmericanStudying 2015: Campus Protests: Two ways AmericanStudies can help us take the newest wave of college protests seriously.January 1: AmericanStudying 2015: Star Wars Mania: The series concludes with two things I love about the new Star Wars film and one that worries me.First series of the New Year starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!