Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 302

January 1, 2016: AmericanStudying 2015: Star Wars Mania

[In my annual end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and any other 2015 stories!]Two of the things this AmericanStudier loves most about the newest Star Wars film, and one that worries me a bit.I wrote about the “transnational force” at the heart of the Star Wars saga more than four years ago in this space, long before John Boyega and Daisy Ridleyhad been cast as the leads in a new trilogy (and Lupita Nyongo’o had been cast in a role that, without spoiling much, could be called the Yoda of that new series). I stand by my argument that the films have always been cross-cultural in important ways; but at the same time, there’s no disputing that the world of the original trilogy was extremely white (Lando Calrissian notwithstanding). Moreover, while Carrie Fisher’s Leia was certainly an impressive heroine in many ways, she was also, quite literally, the clichéd princess in need of rescue whose plea for help set the entire first film and trilogy in motion. So to sit next to my 10 and 8 year old sons while they watched a Star Wars movie in which Boyega and Ridley were the unquestionable, kickass, and entirely equal leads was, to put it mildly, a wonderful experience for this AmericanStudier. Take that, haters!I watched The Force Awakens with not only my sons, but also my Mom and Dad, and that multi-generational viewing experience was just as inspiring. While once again trying to avoid spoilers, I’ll note that the new film is deeply and powerfully focused on the relationships between the past and the future, including an emphasis on family bonds but also and most centrally through its pitch-perfect balance (in casting and character arcs, script and storytelling, plot and action, and much else) of the familiar and the new, of callbacks to the original films and fresh directions for the saga. In a world where my boys’ favorite toys (the Skylanders) were both created within the last ten years and utilize an innovative gaming technology I could never have imagined as a kid (and has spun off into app games that they play on an iPad, about every detail of which ditto), to have a cultural text that can so fully and successfully unite 1977 and 2015 is nothing short of incredible. To paraphrase E.B. White’s great “Once More to the Lake,” I wasn’t entirely sure, sitting in that theater, whether I was myself, my sons, or my parents—and that’s a feeling we should all get to experience!My only problem with that theatrical experience had nothing to do with the film itself, and yet represents the one thing about it that worries me. Before the movie began, there was the usual 10 minutes of commercials (before the usual 15 minutes of trailers), and I would say that about 9 of those advertising minutes featured Star Wars tie-ins. At the moment it feels like a roughly similar percentage of the TV and radio ads I encounter are part of the film’s merchandising empire. Star Wars has always had its share of associated products (writes the AmericanStudier who literally had a deal with a local store’s toy department to get a call every time a new Ewok figure was released), but it feels to me that Lucasfilm’s purchase by Disney has amplified those commercial and marketing campaigns many times over. I’ll write more about Disney in a separate series next week, and want to be clear that I’m extremely grateful that the company has made this new series of films (and all those positive effects) possible. But I do worry that this all-out marketing blitz has the potential to make Star Wars into just another product, rather than the cross-cultural, multi-generational story that has endured so potently for nearly half a century.December Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?

December 31, 2015: AmericanStudying 2015: Campus Protests

[In my annual end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and any other 2015 stories!]On two ways AmericanStudies can help us support the current wave of college protests.I get that the protests which have swept across many of the nation’s college campuses in the second half of 2015—and which are mostly, if unfortunately not entirely, linked to the #BlackLivesMatter movement—are complex, and as open to critique as any social movement (especially one led by 18-22 year olds). Indeed, such critiques are vital if the movement is to endure, grow, and fulfill its possibilities as a part of American higher education and society. But at the same time, to my mind far too many of the critiques have treated the student protesters as simply out-of-touch, spoiled brats, looking to turn college into a “day care” or the like. Such reductive responses not only elide many of the serious issues and events on campuses to which the protesters are responding (a list that seems to grow longer every day), but fail to recognize the historical parallels that can help us see this latest wave of protests for the significant movement they are.For one thing, those reductive responses to these 21st century college protests echo quite closely many of the official responses to 1960s college protesters. When protests erupted at New York’s Columbia University in the spring of 1968, for example, police were brought in to violently remove the protesters and the remainder of the spring semester was cancelled, an excessive administrative response that could logically follow from the refusal to hear or negotiate with college protesters that the “This is not a day care!” college president embodies. And while the shootings of student protesters at Kent State two years later represented of course another level of excessive response, I would argue that they were on the same spectrum of official rigidity and overreaction as Columbia’s actions. In each of these cases, as in too many of our current ones, dismissals of student concerns and voices led directly to an overt desire only to silence and shut down these protests, rather than to consider the sources of their grievances and how they might be engaged. History has not looked favorably on the 1960s official responses, a lesson that current administrations and officials would do well to learn.And then there are those football players at the University of Missouri. The team’s protest was frequently compared to the most famous moment in which sports were linked to social protest: the Black Power salute of athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Yet the very comparison reveals how rarely American athletes have been at the center of such protests—and since Carlos and Smith were protesting as amateur individuals, rather than as a team connected to a powerful and wealthy football program and its public university, I would argue that the Missouri protest was in many ways even more striking and radical (not least because it had the support of the team’s head coach as well). While big-time college football often seems to embody the worst of American higher educationin the 21st century, there’s no reason why it can’t also become part of movements to improve that system and the society of which it’s a vital part—and the Missouri protest represented an inspiring move in that direction.Last 2015 story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?

December 30, 2015: AmericanStudying 2015: Bernie Sanders

[In my annual end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and any other 2015 stories!]One AmericanStudies reason I’m not quite feeling the Bern.Most everything I’d want to say about Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the presidency, I said way back in May for The Conversation. When it got picked up by Newsweek online , they gave it an unnecessarily incendiary title: “He Can’t Win, So Why is Bernie Sanders Running?” As the original title (“Run Bernie Run … But Why?”) better illustrates, and as I hope the piece itself makes clear, I wasn’t trying to make predictions about whether Sanders can or will win the candidacy nor a general election; instead, I was arguing that his campaign can contribute significantly to our political and national conversations regardless of such outcomes. I stand by that argument, and believe that we’ve seen many such contributions over the campaign’s first eight months.At the same time, as a public AmericanStudies scholar, and one particularly interested in our collective memories and national narratives, I think there’s something to be said for symbolic identities and the very real things they can mean in our society and culture. And in the first post-Obama presidential election, and one in which so many of the defining issues have to do with the battle between exclusionary and inclusive images of America, between polar extremes like #BlackLivesMatter and a resurgent white supremacy (to put it bluntly and reductively, but not inaccurately), I think the difference between a candidate who would be the first woman to run as a major party’s presidential nominee and a 74 year old white man is not an insignificant one. (It’s worth adding that Sanders is Jewish in heritage, but is in his own words “not very religious”; and also that Joe Lieberman’s multiple prominent presidential bids make the possibility of a Jewish president far less striking than it once would have been.)Hillary Clinton might not be a revolutionary candidate or president in many ways, that is, but in one very important way she most certainly would be—and would represent an unquestionable broadening of what our highest office, federal government, and symbolic national identity can and would include. That’s not the only reason to vote or not vote for a candidate, of course—but even a cursory study of American history reveals that we overlook such symbolic narratives and images at our peril. Symbolic doesn’t mean insignificant, and indeed (as Benedict Anderson knew full well) nations are in many ways constituted out of symbols and narratives. If electing a candidate like Donald Trump would represent one kind of symbolic extreme, electing our first female president would certainly represent another. In what feels like a crucial, constitutive moment for America, that’s a possibility we should keep in mind.Next 2015 story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?

December 29, 2015: AmericanStudying 2015: Trump

[In my annual end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and any other 2015 stories!]How history reveals what’s not new about the presidential hopeful, what is, and how to stop him.As I wrote in this piece for Talking Points Memo, the longtime adoration for Donald Trump among many Americans (an attitude without which his current run for the presidency would have been unthinkable) is inextricably linked to a far more longstanding American narrative: our equation of wealth with success, and thus our admiration for the very wealthy (or often, as in the case of Trump, those who can appear very wealthy whether the facts bear out those appearances or not). I wasn’t trying in that piece to equate Trump to Ben Franklin, and of course the ever-increasing bigotry and ugliness of Trump’s campaign makes clear just how much he is not like that flawed but still very admirable founding American. Yet at the same time, there’s a national throughline between the two men, and it’s what Franklin called “the way to wealth.”On the other hand, I would argue that Trump does represent something new under the sun—not in his familiar and all-too-Americanexclusionary and bigoted rhetoric, but in the 21st century forces that have created a built-in, sympathetic audience for even his most extreme ugliness. As I wrote in the piece for The Conversation at that last hyperlink, from the earliest moments of his candidacy Trump has found a vital base of support on Fox News, the network on which he had appeared for years as a candidacy. Josh Marshall of TPM has called Fox News Trump’s Leni Riefenstahl, and I couldn’t agree more with the analogy; not because Trump = Hitler, necessarily, but because at no prior point in American history has there been such a perfect symbiosis between a propaganda network and a political figure. Fox News and Trump’s 2016 candidacy represent, to my mind, something different from any prior presidential campaign—and that’s a very worrisome shift indeed.Studying American history doesn’t only reveal those longstanding and new sides to Trump’s popularity and campaign, though. It also, and most importantly, reveals how to stop him: voting. In the years immediately following the Civil War, African Americans and their allies voted in elections throughout the South, and African Americans were elected to offices with regularity. With the subsequent rise and dominance of Jim Crow and white supremacy in those states, denying the vote was a vital way through which the worst bigots and bullies kept their power. And when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed and African Americans were finally able to vote once more, many the worst such leaders (such as Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, Alabama) were voted out of office. No amount of public scholarship or journalism or activism in other arenas could come close to achieving, in opposition to Trump and much else of the current extremism, what widespread voting can and will do. Fighting for that right for all Americans remains one of the most American and vital battles for the year ahead.Next 2015 story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?

December 28, 2015: AmericanStudying 2015: Syrian Refugees

[In my annual end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and any other 2015 stories!]Three ways to make the case for resettling Syrian refugees in the United States.1)      The Past, Part One: As I wrote in this piece for Talking Points Memo, Muslim American communities—and specifically communities of Muslim American refugees—are as old as America itself, quite literally. Any conversation about 21st century such communities that proceeds without that historical awareness is starting with a very significant gap—and while the past isn’t necessarily an argument for particular policies or positions in the present, such a gap inevitably distorts and weakens those present ideas.2)      The Past, Part Deux: Those Muslim American histories aren’t the only ones relevant to this contemporary issue, however. Many historians and public scholars linked arguments for refusing to accept Syrian refugees to one specific and shameful historical moment: when the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Imagining how our present actions might look to a future generation can be a difficult or uncertain thing to do—but when we have such a strong parallel past to which to look, and such a clear sense of how wrong we were then, it’d be crazy not to try to learn from it.3)      The People: Yet it shouldn’t take such salient pasts to convince us to do the right thing by this contemporary refugee community. And I’m convinced that it wouldn’t if all Americans had the chance to work with the students and families in Albemarle County’s Bright Stars program. My Mom (whose birthday it is today!) worked with that program for years, and because the county is home to a sizeable refugee resettlement community, many of the kids and families with whom she worked were refugees. They were, without exception, precisely as human as the rest of us—and, having experienced far worse than what 99.9% of us will ever experience, deserve our empathy and compassion as much as any fellow human can. Welcoming these refugees would represent the best of our past, reject the worst, and make us better in the present and future.Next 2015 story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?

December 26-27, 2015: Emily Lauer’s Guest Post on Hamilton

[I’ve gotten to know Emily Lauer through my time on the Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Board, where Emily is doing great work as the current President of the Contingent Adjunct Independent Scholar and Two-Year Faculty (CAITY) Caucus. She’s also an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College in NYC, and a prolific Tweeter and public scholar. I’m excited to follow up my brief post on Hamilton with her much more in-depth Guest Post on the musical and its (and her) city!]
New York is Hamiltown
Look, I don’t have a hook for this essay. I love reading all the thoughtful, enthusiastic stuff that is being written about Hamilton. I agree with all the reviews and blog posts gushing about the breathtaking talent, the race politics, the gender politics, the excellent music and the adorable fandom. I have yearned, however, for an essay about New York in Hamiltonand Hamilton in New York. So I decided to write it myself.
Hamilton is both set in New York and performed in New York. This convergence of content and context, New York City both on and around the stage, is more than just a coincidence of the location of Broadway theaters and historical happenstance. Sure, Hamilton's explicit references to New York are historically accurate and necessary for the plot of the play. However, they also function as a love letter from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's creator and star, to our current New York, the context of the productionof the play. 
I first started thinking about this because of a couple of lines in the second act. Hamilton chats with Aaron Burr about how General Mercer died and a street was renamed after him. Leslie Odom Jr. as Burr says, “and all he had to do was die.” Miranda as Hamilton replies, “that’s a lot less work.” Burr says, “We ought to give it a try.” In the context of the show, that line recalls some lines of George Washington, who has told Hamilton both that “dying is easy, young man - living is harder” and “winning was easy. Governing’s harder” to encourage him to rethink his priorities in different moments of the show. It also foreshadows the duel between Hamilton and Burr that will end the show and Hamilton’s life.  However, the exchange between Burr and Hamilton about Mercer brought up a whole host of associations from elsewhere, too, because it reminded me of all the characters in this play who themselves have bits of New York City named after them. I thought not only about my own experiences with Mercer Street as connecting me to the world of the play, but also about how there is a neighborhood of Manhattan called Hamilton Heights, and Lin-Manuel Miranda grew up in the adjacent neighborhood Washington Heights, and how these parts of the city were shaped and named after the characters in this play, and about how Miranda’s first Broadway musical was the Tony-winning In the Heights, and it took place in relatively contemporary Washington Heights and was about a different New York City immigrant community.
I am pretty sure the layering affect of associations is intentional, because Hamilton is about its own context in a variety of ways. There are references to theatrical classics, to rap and other contemporary music, and to politics and race, all of which indicate that Miranda is asserting Hamilton's legitimacy by situating it in a variety of theatrical and performance traditions while also affirming how appropriate and necessary the production is in our nation now.  Just think about the multiplicity of synapses that fire when Christopher Jackson as A) George Washington B) raps that he is the C) “model of a modern Major-General” on D) a Broadway stage in 2015. The effect is cognitive pastiche as an audience member’s associations with that Gilbert and Sullivan line merge with whatever associations they may have about George Washington and about rap and about Broadway today.
In fact, the pastiche is so multilayered that even if someone did not recognize the line from The Pirates of Penzance, they could still have a rich, nuanced experience as they process all those other associations in connection with one another.
Questlove addresses the concept of pastiche and multilayered associations in Hamilton with the conclusion that this makes the show inherently hip-hop, and if you get one thing out of reading this essay it should be to READ QUESTLOVE’S ROLLING STONE ARTICLE ABOUT HAMILTON [link: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/questlove-on-hamilton-and-hip-hop-it-takes-one-20150928] if you have not yet done so. He writes that Hamilton, because it is hip-hop,“locates the past and adds a layer of the present in a way that becomes genuinely forward-looking. That's the first great hip-hop characteristic of the show, to borrow all kinds of music equally, and to turn them toward one end.”
Putting together apparently dissimilar pieces of other things to make a layered whole that is greater than the sum of its parts: personally, I tend to think that is what makes Hamilton an example of high postmodernism, and if we start using the terms hip-hop and postmodern interchangeably, I, for one, will be fine with it. 
In both postmodernism and in the necessarily participatory experience of live theater, recognizing and appreciating all the references and allusions, all the associations and context, does not take the audience out of "the moment" because that IS the moment - the context is part of the content. 
The two are definitely united in Hamilton. In addition to quoting famous shows explicitly, Hamilton also alludes to its existence as a stage performance in other ways. For instance, after quoting Macbeth in a letter to his sister-in-law, Hamilton says that he trusts she will understand the allusion to a “Scottish tragedy without my having to name the play.” This works well for the development of these two characters who appreciate each other’s intelligence and wordplay, but it is also true that it is considered bad luck to mention the title of Macbeth in a theater. Superstitious people therefore refer to it as The Scottish Play when inside a theater, and productions of it are sometimes considered cursed or doomed. Lin-Manuel Miranda, as Hamilton, respects his sister-in-law. Lin-Manuel Miranda, as composer and performer, respects tradition.
Similarly, in the opening number, several characters sing to Alexander Hamilton, “we are waiting in the wings for you” and the audience hears about his ship “in the harbor now - see if you can spot him. Another immigrant, comin’ up from the bottom” as they narrate his arrival in New York City. Throughout the play, people will indeed be waiting in the wings - that is, the areas to the right and left of the stage where actors await their cues - as the action takes place on the stage of New York.
I am an English professor, so lines like those inevitably remind me of Shakespeare’s references, sometimes obvious and sometimes oblique, to his own Globe theater. For Shakespeare, all the world was a stage. For Miranda, it seems that all the stage is New York.
And of course this postmodern hip-hop self referential pastiche is perfect for New York City, itself a layered, allusive pastiche. The show feels organic to a ritzy Broadway theater, and quoting Macbethor Pirates of Penzance feels appropriately self aware. However, not all references are quotations and not all allusions are textual. I am positive I am missing the majority of the hip hop and rap allusions, for instance. I do, however, have a lot of context for the lines that introduce the Schuyler sisters in Act I: ”there's nothing rich folks love more/than going downtown and slumming it with the poor.” Lines like those reward audience members who are aware that before Hamilton opened on Broadway, before it cost either five hundred dollars or waiting a year to get a ticket, the show had an incredibly successful run at the Public theater downtown in the East Village on Lafayette Street, which is named after yet another character in Hamilton. This line ushers in a song about how the wealthy Angelica Schuyler, cognizant that “history is happening in Manhattan/ and we just happen/ to be in the greatest City in the world,” goes downtown without her father’s knowledge because she is “lookin’ for a mind at work.” Any rich folks (and God, I regret not being one of them) who went downtown to see Hamilton at the Public surely saw a mind at work.
All of these examples, including the explicit quotations from Macbeth or Pirates and the references to the wings, require prior cultural knowledge from an audience member. Some of them, such as a line about the Mercer legacy being secure after a street is named after him, or the line about rich folks going downtown to get a observe a “mind at work,” also reward the audience member who acknowledges that Miranda's text is self-aware not only of inheriting the legacy of different theatrical traditions and musical traditions, but also self-aware as a production in a particular time and place. 
The production is now, this time. Miranda is the same age I am. He has a one year old kid and a goofy dog and he uses words for a living; I have a one year old kid and a goofy dog and I use words for a living. It is no surprise that all of his cultural touchpoints feel natural to me, for those reasons.
The production is here, this place. It is in, of, and about New York. Hamilton is going to travel, and while I am sure the show will be excellent everywhere, I suspect it will not feel as organic or as layered when it plays in cities where the action did not take place. Audiences in London will not see it and think of Washington Square and Lafayette Street just downtown from the theater when Lafayette is singing with Washington; audiences in Chicago will not see it and think of Hamilton Heights and Washington Heights just uptown from the theater when those characters sing with each other. When characters mention that someone is buried in “Trinity Church near you” or that the location of the Federal Reserve means that “we’ll have the banks,” the “you” and the “we” will not include the audience along with the characters.
I look forward to seeing what Miranda will do for those other cities to make the show feel local to them, especially in light of the democratizing steps that have been taken to make the incredibly expensive show more accessible to a wider audience here in New York. Not only is there funding for high school students to see the show quite cheaply, not only is there talk of recording and broadcasting a performance, but also Miranda’s ham4ham performances have become famous in their own right. When there is a lottery for cheap tickets to the play, Miranda literally brings a performance into the street. Five minutes before names are drawn out of a bucket to determine who will get ten dollar tickets to go inside the theater, he goes outside with a bullhorn and introduces (and sometimes participates in) a live performance. Sometimes it is performers from Hamilton hamming it up on the sidewalk and sometimes they are joined by performers from other shows. It is postmodern in that it creates an ephemeral paratextual experience linked to but not replicating the experience inside the theater. It is democratic in that anyone who can shove their way to the front of the crowd gets to see world class performers for free outdoors. In that, it is in the spirit of the Public Theater, where Hamilton debuted, since that is the organization that produces free Shakespeare in the Park every summer, and provides a Mobile Shakespeare Unit that takes Shakespeare productions into prisons, shelters and care facilities so that world-class live Shakespeare performances can reach people who would not otherwise have access to them.
However, the ham4ham shows are democratic in another way as well. Anyone with a cameraphone can record ham4ham, and post their video of the performance online. That means anyone with internet access can watch ham4ham performances. Hamilton fandom is much wider than the five boroughs, and as Miranda retweets people’s ham4ham videos from his @lin_manuel account, these snippets of New York City performance are broadcast and watched and discussed all around the world. In Hamilton, New York City is described as “the greatest city in the world.” The historical Hamilton, acting in New York City, produced ripple effects that spread outward to affect the whole nation, and thus, the world. Now Hamilton does the same.
[Year-end series begins Monday!Ben
PS. What do you think?]

December 25, 2015: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: To Save the Man

[For eachof the last few holiday seasons, I’ve made some requests to the AmericanStudies Elves. This year, I thought I’d highlight some amazing American stories that are ripe for telling in historical fiction films, novels, TV shows, you name it. Share the stories you’d like to see told, or any other wishes for the AS Elves, ahead of a wish-full crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the wish that’s already been granted, in a historical film I can’t wait to see.I’ve written in this space onceor twiceor ahalf-dozen times—or, well, an entire week’s series of posts on top of those individual ones—about John Sayles. What can I say, I don’t know of any other filmmaker who has probed our national histories, identities, and communities more consistently and more successfully than Sayles. He’s already made a number of historical films, including: the very underrated Amigo (2010), which focuses on one of the histories that I believe all Americans should better remember, our post-Spanish American War imperialistic occupation of and war in the Philippines; and the slightly higher rated but still too-often-overlooked Matewan (1987), which focuses on another such under-remembered history, the 1920 West Virginia coal wars. I know lots of film fans would hope that Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorcese might tackle a tough historical subject, but for me nothing can replace the excitement I feel when I hear that Sayles is doing so once more.A few months ago I felt that excitement again, not only because I learned that Sayles’ next film will be such a historical drama, but also because in it he’ll be tackling an even more difficult and complex and absolutely crucial American history and story. In his upcoming To Save the Man (still in development, but I’m certainly hoping for a 2016 release), Sayles will tell the story of the young Native American students who were brought to Carlisle, Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the early created as our national policies toward this community moved to embrace Captain Richard Henry Pratt (the Carlisle founder)’s motto of “Kill the Indian: Save the Man.” One of the first announced steps toward this film was a nationwide casting call for young Native American actors, a move that didn’t surprise me in the slightest but that nonetheless ramped up my excitement level for this project that much more. You’ve already answered this wish, AmericanStudies Elves—now get to work on the other four from this week, as well as any shared in comments! Tough work, I know, but I have faith.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other wishes you’d share?

December 24, 2015: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: Burr

[For eachof the last few holiday seasons, I’ve made some requests to the AmericanStudies Elves. This year, I thought I’d highlight some amazing American stories that are ripe for telling in historical fiction films, novels, TV shows, you name it. Share the stories you’d like to see told, or any other wishes for the AS Elves, ahead of a wish-full crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the (con-)Founding Father who’s enjoying a bit of a comeback, but still needs more.As reflected by the fact that he sings much of the opening, title song of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton (2015), Aaron Burr plays an integral role in this theatrical smash hit that’s bringing all sorts of new attention to the Revolutionary era and many of its focal figures. Yet because Burr was (as he puts it in that song) “the damn fool that shot him,” in the most famous duel in American history, any text focused on Hamilton is of course going to portray Burr first and foremost as an antagonist, and while Miranda’s musical does some justice to Burr’s complexities and depths (particularly his relationships with two key women, his wartime lover Theodosia Prevost and his talented daughter Theodosia Burr Alston) when it focuses on him, he consistently takes a back seat to Hamilton and does ultimately play that antagonist’s role in the story. No offense to Hamilton, whose own life and story are as compelling as Miranda makes them, but when it comes to complex and interesting Founders, no one has Aaron Burr beat. Gore Vidal knew it, and his historical novel Burr (1973) is for my money not only the best historical novel of the Revolutionary era, but one of the greatest American historical novels. That’s partly because Aaron Burr’s life story is ridiculously full of dramatic incident, so much so that the duel with Hamilton is probably only the fourth or fifth most historic and interesting moment. And it’s partly because his story opens up so many complex and forgotten Revolutionary and Early Republic moments and issues, from the Revolution’s 1775 Quebec campaign to the hugely contested 1800 presidential election to the thin, thin line (if one exists at all) between Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and Burr’s mysterious, potentially traitorous plans for an empire in the West. And oh yeah, Burr lived for another three decades after that treason trial, becoming a pivotal figure in the rise of New York as a major American city, as well as the political careers of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.Seriously, AmericanStudies Elves, let’s make this happen!Last wishing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other wishes you’d share?

December 23, 2015: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: Ida B. Wells’ Crossroads

[For eachof the last few holiday seasons, I’ve made some requests to the AmericanStudies Elves. This year, I thought I’d highlight some amazing American stories that are ripe for telling in historical fiction films, novels, TV shows, you name it. Share the stories you’d like to see told, or any other wishes for the AS Elves, ahead of a wish-full crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the turning point moment that embodies both the worst and best of American history.In yesterday’s post I wished for one version of a historical biopic, the kind that tells the full life story (or at least a narrative version of it) of an amazing figure. Lives like Ely Parker’s, those of Renaissance Americans who moved through so many roles and worlds, demand storytelling that includes at least many of those stages and traces the evolution of their focal figures as well as their communities and nation through that lens. Yet some of the best historical biopics, as exemplified by last year’s phenomenal Selma (2014), focus instead on one specific, crucial moment in an individual’s life, a turning point moment that helps illuminate not only that life but also some of the period’s and nation’s issues and histories to which it connects.In 1892, journalist, editor, and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells experienced precisely such a turning point. Three of her Memphis friends, successful storeowner Thomas Moss and two fellow African Americans (Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart), were lynched after defending Moss’s store from a white mob; when Wells covered the lynching and its many contexts in her newspaper the Memphis Free Speech, rampaging whites destroyed the newspaper’s offices while she was on an overseas speaking tour and warned her not to return to Memphis or continue her efforts. No one could have blamed Wells if she backed down or at least took a break from her activism, but instead she did precisely the opposite: upon returning to New York CIty from abroad, she published her first book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), with a New York press and set about distributing it as widely as possible. This darkest moment in Wells’ life marked, to put it simply, the starting point for her moves toward a fully national presence and voice, one that would never be silenced.Can you imagine a better moment on which to focus a historical biopic? C’mon, AmericanStudies Elves, let’s make it happen!Next wishing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other wishes you’d share?

December 22, 2015: Wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves: Ely Parker’s Life

[For eachof the last few holiday seasons, I’ve made some requests to the AmericanStudies Elves. This year, I thought I’d highlight some amazing American stories that are ripe for telling in historical fiction films, novels, TV shows, you name it. Share the stories you’d like to see told, or any other wishes for the AS Elves, ahead of a wish-full crowd-sourced weekend post!]The 19thcentury Renaissance American whose biography rivals any of our most amazing fictions.It’s true that Ely Parker has technically been on screen already in recent years—but his character in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) had no speaking lines, and wouldn’t have been recognizable to anyone who didn’t already know about his vital role as General Grant’s aide. And as I traced at length in this post, Parker’s life story is as full, diverse, and thoroughly inspiring as any in American history. The fact that it ended in part in controversy and tragedy, tied to his role as the first Native Commissioner of Indian Affairs under none other than President Grant, only makes this that much more complex and compelling of an American story. Ain’t none of us clean, as Denzel’s character Tripp concisely puts it in Glory—and that doesn’t mean for a second that there aren’t stories and histories that can not only remind us of the messier sides, but also inspire us with their successes and achievements and legacies. I don’t know of any American story that would do all those things more fully than Ely Parker’s, so c’mon, Elves, let’s make it happen!Next wishing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other wishes you’d share?