Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 308

October 22, 2015: UN Histories: Secretary Generals

[October 24thwill mark the 70th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connect to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on the worst and best of the US’s relationship to the organization.]What three representative UN leaders tell us about the organization and its histories.1)      Dag Hammarskjöld (1953-1961): Sweden’s Hammarskjöld was not the first elected UN Secretary General (that honor went to Norway’s Trygve Lie), but I would argue he was the first to illustrate the new organization’s international influence. That was particularly illustrated by the controversial 1960-1961 Congo Crisis, in which the precise nature of the UN’s involvement and influence remains under debate by historians. While the UN had not been able to prevent the Korean War (a situation that contributed greatly to Lie’s 1952 resignation), in the Congo the organization wielded its power and authority far more successfully, in the process shaping that nation’s and its continent’s future for many years to come. While we might debate President John F. Kennedy’s statement(after the Secretary General’s tragic death in a 1961 plane crash) that Hammarskjöld was “the greatest statesman of our century,” he unquestionably made the UN into far more of a global player than it had previously been.2)      Javier Pérez de Cuéllar(1982-1991): Each of the subsequent Secretary Generals have extended that legacy, dealing with their own global crises and wielding the organization’s authority and influence in their own ways. Peru’s de Cuéllar was the first Secretary General from the Western Hemisphere, and on that level alone reflects the organization and the world’s evolution into and beyond the 1980s. Moreover, a number of the crises through which de Cuéllar led the UN connected closely to postcolonial settings and issues as well: from mediating Britain and Argentina’s disputes in the aftermath of the 1982 Falklands War and promoting the 1983-4 work of the Contadora Group (a transnational Central American organization working for regional peace) to negotiating Namibia’s 1990 bid for independence from South Africa, among other moments. Such issues had been part of the world for centuries, of course, but they gained much greater visibility in the 1980s, and de Cuéllar’s UN reflected and amplified that presence.3)      Kofi Annan (1997-2006): Like de Cuéllar, Ghana’s Annan was significant in part because of geography: he was the first UN Secretary General from sub-Saharan Africa. But in many of his most prominent actions and initiatives, Annan also helped usher the UN into the new millennium, working to reform and strengthen its management, secretariat and Security Council, and Human Rights Council, among other efforts. It was in part for these necessary and meaningful reforms, and in part for such pioneering initiatives as the UN Global Compact and The Global Fund (for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria) that Annan and the UN were co-recipients of the 2001 (centennial) Nobel Peace Prize. While the UN is far from perfect, as I’ll work to analyze in the next two posts, Annan ensured that it would move into the 21stcentury in evolving and vibrant ways, extending and deepening the legacy of these prior Secretary Generals and of the organization’s global role and impacts.Last UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 21, 2015: UN Histories: Muir Woods

[October 24thwill mark the 70th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connect to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on the worst and best of the US’s relationship to the organization.]On a potent symbolic expression of memory and community.In this post on the histories and meanings of Northern California’s Muir Woods National Monument, I highlighted a unique and striking May 19th, 1945 ceremony. On that spring day representatives from 50 nations, in the midst of the meetings in San Francisco that would produce the United Nations Charter, traveled to the woods to commemorate Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the histories and ideas that had led them and the world to this moment and the new organization it would create. Roosevelt, who had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just over a month before the ceremony (on April 12th), had proposed (inspired by his visionary, activist Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes) that the conference as a whole take place at Muir Woods. While that did not end up being the case, the May 19thceremony in the woods represented a clear way for the group to honor Roosevelt’s vision, one cemented by their placing of a commemorative plaque at the site’s sacred Cathedral Grove in tribute to the fallen president and world leader.The plaque and tribute bring into stark focus the contrasts between Roosevelt’s role in the origins of and support for the United Nations and those of Woodrow Wilson for the League of Nations. There were of course numerous factors and histories that contributed to those contrasts, and it’s neither fair nor productive to compare the two presidents and moments (or the two world wars, for that matter) as if they existed in a vacuum or on a level playing field. Yet without using the contrast to judge or blame Wilson, necessarily, it is nonetheless instructive to note Roosevelt’s far more consistent and successful connection to and advocacy for the international organization he had helped found. Indeed, while we might criticize the level of individual influence wielded by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the UN’s origins, there can be little doubt that without those two leading figures, and the ways in which they pushed their fellow Allied leaders to sign and support the 1942 UN Declaration, the idea for the UN might never have survived the subsequent years of war. For those and many other reasons, the May 1945 ceremony and plaque rightly remembered and celebrated Roosevelt’s foundational and vital role in the UN’s development.The Muir Woods ceremony did more than just remember a fallen leader, however. It also captured two distinct but interconnected elements of an ideal global community, both reflected in Harold Ickes’s initial argument for holding the UN conference at the woods: “Not only would this focus attention upon the nation’s interest in preserving these mighty trees for posterity, but in such a ‘temple of peace’ the delegates would gain a perspective and sense of time that could be obtained nowhere better than in such a forest.” The first clause of Ickes’s inspiring sentence highlights the global environmental advocacy toward which the UN would move over the next half-century; such environmentalism was of course not a focus of the organization’s wartime efforts, but could and did become an important ongoing emphasis for such a groundbreaking international entity. And Ickes’s second clause reflects the idea of a long view of global history and community, one that does not focus simply on specific conflicts or issues but also seeks to move beyond them and toward the kind of overarching understanding of humanity and the world on which the survival of both those entities ultimately depends. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” Muir himself argued—an idea expressed nicely by this symbolic and significant 1945 ceremony.Next UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 20, 2015: UN Histories: World War II

[October 24thwill mark the 70th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connect to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on the worst and best of the US’s relationship to the organization.]On why it’s important, and challenging, to remember the UN’s wartime origins.I imagine just about everybody with a sense of history understands that the United Nations was created in the immediate aftermath of, and thus directly due to, World War II. Yet far less well known, I would argue, are the UN’s earlier origin points, the two crucial wartime moments that produced this next international organization. Both followed almost immediately upon the US’s official entrance into the war: in late December 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill worked together to draft a “Declaration by United Nations”; and just a short time later, on New Year’s Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the leaders of the USSR and China signed what came to be known as the United Nations Declaration, with representatives from 22 other world leaders adding their signatures in the days that followed. While the organization would not be formally established until the war’s end, it was these wartime moments that set the process in motion.While of course it’s important to remember these histories accurately for their own sake, doing so also helps us differentiate the origins of the United Nations from those of the League of Nations (about which I wrote in yesterday’s post) in two meaningful ways. First, while the League was formed as part of a contentious peace process, and thus seemed to some observers to be punishing particular nations and rewarding others based on the Great War’s enmities and outcomes, the idea for the United Nations originated in the horrors and exigencies of war; indeed, that initial 1942 UN Declaration overtly prohibited signatories from making their own peace and bound these global allies together. Which is to say, while the League’s creation arguably and ironically amplified international divisions and separations, the UN’s Declaration responded to existing such divisions (reflected in an ongoing war) by constructing instead a vision of global unity and shared effort. The new organization’s name itself exemplified that emphasis on global unity, on a mutual recognition of the interdependence that bound together even seemingly opposed nations such as the US and the USSR.At the same time, there was an irony within this wartime origin point for the UN. That is, not only was the new organization not overtly framed (as had been the League) as seeking to achieve to international peace, but in fact a prominent element of the 1942 Declaration was the signatories’ pledge to put forth “maximum war effort.” That may have been an understandable and necessary element in the heat of World War II, but as the UN has transitioned into its full postwar existence and mission, and especially into the emphases on global peacekeeping about which I’ll write more later in the week, the challenge of wedding that mission to the organization’s origins has persisted. To cite one prominent component of that challenge, the five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US) are drawn directly from those nations that signed the 1942 Declaration (along with France, which was occupied at the time but closely tied to the UK in its resistance to the Nazis), and quite purposefully do not include any of the war’s Axis nations (Germany, Italy, Japan). That choice does not necessarily lead to any particular actions or outcomes, but it certainly reflects the complex legacies of the UN’s wartime origins into its ongoing existence and identity, legacies we can better consider if we remember when and why the UN was created.Next UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 19, 2015: UN Histories: The League of Nations

[October 24thwill mark the 70th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connect to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on the worst and best of the US’s relationship to the organization.]On how and why the UN’s predecessor failed at its central mission, and how it succeeded nonetheless.The League of Nations, created as part of the January 1919 Paris Peace Conference that formally concluded the Great War (later known of course as World War I), was designed specifically to prevent future wars. The 26 articles of the League’s Covenant went far beyond that and into many other arenas and topics, of course, but the document’s opening phrases—“In order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security”—make clear the primacy of global peace as the organization’s founding objective. And even before the Second World War put the final nail in that objective and thus in the League itself (which ceased performing any meaningful actions as of 1939 and was formally replaced by the 1943 vote I’ll discuss tomorrow), a number of other conflicts (including the Chaco War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War) had demonstrated the League’s inability to achieve international peace in any consistent way.There were many factors that contributed to the League’s failure, including perhaps fundamental, unchangeable realities of human nature and society that make war such a persistent, enduring element. Yet there’s no doubt that one prominent factor which weakened the League from the outset of its existence was the United States’s decision not to join the organization. President Woodrow Wilson, whose January 1918 Fourteen Points speech had served as a launching point for the concept of the League, spent much of 1919 working to convince Congress and the American people of its significance and of the necessity of joining its efforts. But he did not succeed, at least not with Congress, which, led by isolationist figures such as Senator and longtime Wilson adversary Henry Cabot Lodge, ultimately voted not to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, a choice that greatly weakened the international organization and made its chances for success far smaller.Yet even if the League was unable to maintain or foster international peace—and again, it’s quite possible that no organization could ever come close to achieving those goals—that does not mean that this groundbreaking entity did not produce meaningful successes. Many of them came in response to specific territorial disputes and conflicts, such as Germany and Poland’s hostilities over the Upper Silesia region in which the League successfully intervened in 1921-22; this dispute might well have turned to war without the League. And on a truly international level, perhaps the League’s most enduring success lay in the creation of the Nansen Passport, the first internationally recognized refugee identification and travel document. Brainchild of the League’s High Commissioner for Refugees Fridtjof Nansen, who along with his Nansen International Office for Refugees received the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nansen Passport represented a vital step in recognizing, engaging with, and ameliorating the plight of global refugees and migrants. Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, long after the League of Nations ceased to exist, the UN’s own strategies for aiding this vulnerable international community remain indebted to the Nansen Passport, reminding us that the League’s legacy is not quite as one-sided as it seems.Next UN history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 17-18, 2015: Siobhan Senier's Guest Post on Dawnland Voices

[Siobhan Senier is Associate Professor of English and English Graduate Program Director at the University of New Hampshire. Her groundbreaking scholarship, teaching, and activism in American Studies, Native American Studies, and New England Studies have offered a model for this AmericanStudier for many years, and I’m very excited to share this Guest Post on one of her most recent and most important projects.]
Many thanks to Ben for inviting this guest post on Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England.  If your concerns here are to introduce “compelling writers and voices,” and to ponder the “differences these might make to our national identity and narratives,” then this new anthology definitely aspires to contribute.
It was more than ten years ago that I started compiling material for this book. Upon coming to teach in New England, I felt a responsibility to represent the indigenous writers of this place. But no one seemed to know who those writers are, aside from the two Heath anthology staples, Samson Occom and William Apess.  I hated to see our teaching and scholarship perpetuating the vanishing-Indian mythology. We northeasterners do love our James Fenimore Cooper and apocryphal chiefs jumping off cliffs.
Almost immediately, I figured out that I wasn’t going to be able to publish a collection of regional indigenous writing on my own steam. I started inviting area indigenous writers and historians to my classes, and it became eminently clear that they knew their own literary histories, whether or not these had survived the much-vaunted “test of time.” Wayne Newell (Passamaquoddy) showed me bilingual books Xeroxed or even mimeographed for dissemination among tribal members. The Dove family (Narragansett) kept copies of the short-lived 1930s magazine The Narragansett Dawn, and the many other writings of its editor, Princess Red Wing.  Lisa Brooks told me about nineteenth century Abenaki-language primers, long out of print but still cherished and circulated among Abenaki people. And hilariously, tribal elders were patently unimpressed by my archival “discoveries.” When I asked Joan Tavares Avant (Mashpee Wampanoag) if she knew of Wampanoag poets, she hesitated, until I triumphantly showed her Alfred DeGrasse, who had published in the Carlisle Arrow.  “Oh, him,” she said, and proceeded to tell me about her great-aunt Mabel Avant, whose poems are still recited at tribal events today.
So I asked as many people as I could whether they would be willing to serve as editors for a new collection of this literature. Indigenous knowledge-keepers, after all, are in the best position to select materials that are meaningful in their communities, whatever their “literary” credentials. They knew where to find historic writings and from whom to solicit newer ones.  They knew how to navigate culturally sensitive questions surrounding which texts to include, and which to leave out.  They knew how to present this material to a diverse audience of tribal and non-tribal readers.  We organized Dawnland Voices by tribal nation, because the editors felt that this best reflected how Native people think of their own literary histories. The beauty of how this played out is that every tribal nation’s section has its own distinct character, determined partly by tribal history and partly by the editor’s knowledge and approach. Jaime Battiste, an attorney by training, selected heavily historic and legal documents for the Mi’kmaq section.  Stephanie Fielding and Donald Soctomah used their broad community connections to solicit quite a bit of contemporary poetry for the Mohegan and Passamaquoddy sections. Ruth Garby Torres and Trudie Lamb Richmond drew on their considerable family archives for the Schaghticoke section. Indeed, finding material was never the problem. The book clocks in at nearly 700 pages and includes a rather dazzling variety of genres: a redrawn petroglyph; news articles; a triolet and hip-hop poems; blog entries; political petitions and historic letters; language lessons and recipes.  And there was still so much more we could have included.
The anthology thus challenges the formation of “New England,” and of “American literature” more broadly, insofar as it puts the original people of these places, presumed to have vanished, back at the center—not only as authors, but also as stewards and scholars of their own literary histories.  Carol Bachofner, one of the Abenaki poets in the volume, calls it “the gathering place.” She says, “it’s like a small village, where all these voices have come together, in terms of historical documents, and exposé, and telling things that were secret for so long because they were painful or shameful, all the way through to the light-hearted song lyrics. . .all of those things have come together and now exist for those people who have forever, really, not understood us, to understand us.”  These voices are telling stories of settler colonial violence, yes, but also of continuous indigenous presence, of survival and resilience and resurgence.
Because there was so much more we could have included, we are starting an online extension of Dawnland Voices.  (As I write this we are migrating from indigenousnewengland.com to dawnlandvoices.org). We have spaces for tribal historians to upload and curate historic documents; for students to collaborate with Native institutions on exhibits; and for young and emergent writers to share their work.  We very much welcome new project partners—whether you are an aspiring Native writer; a tribal member or a museum/archival employee with particular documents to share; or a teacher of Indigenous Studies who would like to involve your students in this kind of work--so please do contact Siobhan.Senier@unh.edu if this looks of interest. 
[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?]

October 16, 2015: Early American Writers: Annis Boudinot Stockton

[To complement last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new anthology of Native American writing!]Three layers to the case for recovering the Revolutionary-era poet.1)      The Literary: First and foremost, Stockton was a very talented, engaging writer. Her poem “A Sarcasm against the ladies in a newspaper; An impromptu answer” (1756) exemplifies her witty and impassioned voice, her clever and effective use of rhyme and structure, and her ability to move effortlessly between tones and themes within even a short work. And that’s only one of the hundreds of unique and compelling poems Stockton produced in a career that rivaled those of Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley for the most prolific and significant by an American poet before the Revolution. Stockton should be in our collective literary memories because without her that tradition is impoverished.2)      The Historical: Just as Bradstreet and Wheatley offer us vital windows into social, cultural, and historical issues in their Americas, so too does Stockton. As I wrote in this We’re History piece (and I apologize for quoting myself, but the histories remain the same!), “Stockton, wife of the New Jersey lawyer and Declaration signer Richard Stockton, was famous in the era for her political activities: the only woman elected to the secret American Whig Society, she safeguarded the group’s papers during the Revolution at her Princeton estate, where she also hosted George Washington and other luminaries.” Moreover, she was also a long-term member of the era’s Mid-Atlantic Writing Group, alongside future Prospect Poets Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge along with many other writers. Remembering Stockton better connects us to these vital Revolutionary-era political and literary histories.3)      The National: Those histories aren’t just relevant to understanding the Revolutionary era, however; and neither are Stockton and her poety just a part of our literary tradition. At the end of the day, the canon is more than what we read in a classroom or about whom we produce scholarship—it’s about what narrative of our nation we construct and share. Ever since their own era, the nation’s framers have been portrayed as originating visions of what America is, of identity and community in this new and evolving place. I’m not here to contest that portrayal, but rather to argue, as I have in this space many times, for expanding it. Why can’t our vision of the framers include Annis Boudinot Stockton as well as Richard Stockton? And if it did, think of how much else in the stories we tell of ourselves would change and grow as well.Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?

October 15, 2015: Early American Writers: John Woolman

[To complement last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new anthology of Native American writing!]On the autobiographer who traced his own wanderings, and so can help guide us on our own.
Maybe this will change as I get older and realize just how much kids today don’t get it and how much they could use a wise older voice and perspective (not unlike my own, mayhaps) to show them the light, but for now, I have to admit that many of the works of American literature most overtly intended to inspire change, to convince an audience of the benefits of following the author’s revolutionary philosophical ideas, leave me pretty cold. From 19th century/American Renaissance classics like Emerson’s “Nature”(1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854) to Beat manifestos like Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)—and each of those four texts is far more complex than I’m giving them credit for here, but all I believe are meant to leave the reader convinced that the author has, if not all of the answers, at least some good starting points toward them—my response has largely been the same: I see the power and brilliance, but I’m ultimately more annoyed than impressed.
If I had to boil the reasons for my annoyance down to one idea, it’d be that all those texts seem to have been written with the answers already in mind, with the author already comfortable in his philosophical position and hoping both to narrate how he got there and convince us to do the same. That might seem to be a necessary condition for the writing of any work, much less a philosophical or persuasive one, yet I think it elides just how much any individual’s perspective and philosophy, like his or her identity and experiences, continue to evolve and (ideally) grow and deepen. For that reason, I find the Emerson who emerges in his journals to be infinitely more interesting and complex and attractive (as a thinker, as a writer, as an inspiration) than the one from whom we hear in the speeches and essays. And likewise, my vote for the most powerful and convincing work of American philosophy would be another journal, and one only published posthumously and so not at all written with immediate publication and persuasion among its goals: the journal of John Woolman (1720-1772), the itinerant Quaker minister who traveled through America for much of the 18th century, developing an impassioned and evolving perspective on religion and faith, community and charity, anti-slavery and Indian rights, pacifism and social activism, and many other complex questions through those journeys and the many people and worlds he encountered on them.Woolman’s journal is eloquent and beautifully written, a literary masterpiece that has been in print since prior to the Revolution (it was published in 1774, two years after Woolman’s death) and so can lay claim to being one of our most foundational texts. Yet despite that stylistic and formal impressiveness it has an intimate quality, a rawness of perspective, that makes clear just how closely it reflects the open mind and heart of its author. From its first line—“I have often felt a motion of love to leave some hints in writing of my experience of the goodness of God, and now, in the thirty-sixth of my age, I begin this work”—Woolman stresses both that intimacy and the text’s fluidity, its ability to grow and develop alongside him and his identity (and indeed he would write it throughout his final decade and a half of life). And in the book’s twelfth and final chapter, written over the months before Woolman’s death—and in fact in that chapter’s final paragraphs, likely composed just days before that tragic event, with it perhaps in sight—Woolman writes, “I have gone forward, not as one travelling in a road cast up and well prepared, but as a man walking through a miry place in which are stones here and there safe to step on, but so situated that one step being taken, time is necessary to see where to step next.” I don’t know that any single sentence has ever better captured life’s journey than that one—and I do know that few American texts offer a better guide to moving through life than does Woolman’s journal.Last early writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?

October 14, 2015: Early American Writers: Jonathan Edwards

[To complement last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new anthology of Native American writing!]On the problem with defining a writer by one work, and why and how to get beyond it.
Finding an audience, being read and remembered, is of course a central if not the central goal of all of us who write or seek to share our voices with the world in any medium, but it can without question be a double-edged sword in all sorts of ways. Stephen King, for example, has written extensively about the experience of being defined so fully as a horror writer that it becomes hugely difficult to publish (and even to a degree write) anything else. A heightened sense of audience expectations based on the success of his first novel, Invisible Man (1952), seems to have crippled Ralph Ellison’s ability to finish any of his subsequent novels (which were all published only after he had died). But those audience-driven problems at least arose during the writers’ lives, making it possible (if certainly not easy) for them to respond, to write out of those boxes, to find new audiences or challenge their existing ones, or even, of course, to ignore audience demands or responses (as much as any writer can).
Infinitely—eternally, even—more difficult is when a sizeable and multi-generational audience latches onto a particular, not necessarily representative text and uses it to define the writer’s whole career and perspective after the writer has passed away. This is a potential problem for any writer whose works are (or, more exactly for this problem, one of whose works is) frequently anthologized—and if that writer was also a preacher, and thus produced literally tens of thousands of sermons among his many other written works, the danger of one of those sermons being turned into his anthologized, career-defining work is both greater and significantly more unfair. And that’s precisely what has happened with Jonathan Edwards, perhaps America’s greatest theological philosopher and writer, one of the 18thcentury’s leading intellectuals, and a principal influence on the First Great Awakening, the nation’s most widespread and democratic religious movement. Yet for generations of American schoolchildren—and since those schoolchildren tend to grow up to be adults, for generations of Americans period—Edwards has meant one thing and one thing only: the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), a fire-and-brimstone, extremely dramatic, old-school Puritanical text that Edwards delivered in Enfield, Connecticut in the midst of the First Great Awakening.
“Sinners” certainly captures a particular and powerful side of Edwards the preacher, and illustrates without question why he was able to produce such significant fervor and conversion rates during the Great Awakening. But it’s likely that any number of fellow preachers, in that era and in American history more generally, could have and did deliver very similar sermons, some week in and week out. It is instead in both the breadth and the quality of his interests and ideas and writings, as well as his wide range of forward-thinking opinions (on issues such as women’s rights and roles in the church, Native Americans, and scientific discoveries), that Edwards outstrips any other American theologian and would greatly enrich modern audiences’ perspectives on faith, spirituality, and the church in America’s history and identity. Edwards at his best (which was most of the time) combined the theological rigor of the Puritans with many of the Enlightenment’s most important advances, including those aforementioned opinions but also an abiding interest in aesthetics and a willingness to recognize the role of personal emotion and perspectives (what Edwards sometimes called “the affections”) in determining the shape and course of one’s faith. Even his tragically early death at the age of 54 was the result of his impressive openness and desire to lead his fellow citizens into better paths—having just taken over the Presidency of Princeton College from his son-in-law Aaron Burr (father to the famous figure of the same name), Edwards decided to demonstrate the need for a new medical innovation, smallpox inoculations, by getting one himself, but died from the resulting infection.
Edwards’ literary future and identity are of course out of his hands, as all of ours will one day be (and if I had to accept that gaining a multi-century audience would mean that they’d only be reading one blog post, well, I might take that deal). But on the other hand, they remain very much in our collective hands, and the more we can try to reconnect with the much richer and more impressive works and career and man behind “Sinners,” the closer we can get to inhabiting the kind of America for which Edwards consistently worked. Next early writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?

October 13, 2015: Early American Writers: Bradstreet and Taylor

[To complement last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new anthology of Native American writing!]On Puritan confessional poetry.Imagining our way into the perspectives of the past is never an easy task, and I don’t know that there’s a more challenging community into which to imagine ourselves than 17th century Massachusetts Puritans. This was the group for whom both Anglican England and Protestant Holland were sufficiently liberal to force them across the Atlantic, for whom Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinsonrepresented dangerous characters who must be banished, for whom every minute element of nature and life presented what Cotton Mather would term Wonders of the Invisible World (1693). And if we take Michael Wigglesworth’s hugely popular mid-17th century epic poem “The Day of Doom” (1662) as a representative literary text from this community, then we see the most extreme version of their perspective; Wigglesworth’s speaker takes great joy, for example, in imagining the souls of newborn babies who died before being baptized suffering for all eternity in the fires of hell.Wigglesworth may have sold the best of any Puritan poet, thanks in no small measure to his ability to gratify his audience’s holier-than-everybody impulses, but I would argue that two 17th century poetic peers had him beat in talent: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. To be sure, both Bradstreet and Taylor feature their own representations of extreme Puritan perspectives: in two of Bradstreet’s most famous poems she expresses understandable sorrow for the death of a grandchild and the burning of her house but then instantly rebukes herself for that emotion and instead celebrates these losses as examples of God’s Providence; while Taylor not only composed individual poems in which he imagined himself the Lord’s “Spinning Wheele” and portrayed all humans as flies caught in spider webs of sin and damnation, but also wrote thousands of “Preparatory Meditations,” poems intended to be read nightly before taking the Lord’s Supper. In these and many other works, both Bradstreet and Taylor reflect not only their close relationship to Puritan orthodoxy (Taylor was a pastor, while Bradstreet’s father and husband would both serve as governors of the Massachusetts Bay colony) but also the central role of Puritan ideology in their personal perspectives and lives.Yet it is precisely because Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s poems are so much more personal than (for example) Wigglesworth’s epic that I find them far more compelling and successful as well. Long before the concept of confessional poetry had been coined, that’s what Bradstreet and Taylor were producing—not just in the religious sense, although certainly both poets were influenced by and could be said to participate in the 17th century American genre of the Puritan confession narrative; but also, and most relevantly for my purposes here, in the sense of turning their intimate emotions and thoughts into carefully constructed, formally complex poetic works. This is perhaps most clearly reflected by Bradstreet’s wonderful “The Author to Her Book,”a poem in which Bradstreet captures a number of different emotional responses to learning that her first book of poetry had been published (without her knowledge) in England. Bradstreet’s poem is the expression of both an individual person surprised and yet gratified by publication and a Puritan woman unsure of the appropriateness of what has happened—yet it is also a carefully composed, cleverly structured, well-written and engaging poetic work, as are all the texts produced by these two talented Puritan poets.Next early writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?

October 12, 2015: Early American Writers: las Casas and de Vaca

[To complement last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new anthology of Native American writing!]On two of the first truly inspiring American voices.
I get why we focus so many of our exploration-era narratives on the conquistador types. They were daring warrior-explorers who wore crazy hats and searched for lost cities of gold and fountains of youth (especial points of emphasis half a century ago) and killed and enslaved a ton of Native Americans in the process (especial points of emphasis these days). And certainly my somewhat in-depth engagement with the life and writings of their founding father, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself, Columbus, makes clear that they weren’t just one-dimensional cartoon villains by any stretch. But what a difference it would make to our national identity and narratives if the first years of European arrivals became the story first and foremost not of Christopher Columbus and his fellow explorer-conquistadors, but of the Spanish Priest (later Bishop) who befriended Columbus and even edited his journal: Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566).
Toward the end of his life, Las Casas published The Destruction of the Indies (1552), an incredibly honest and scathing account of the treatment of Native Americans by Spanish explorers, colonists, politicians, soldiers, and commercial interests. He would spend his final decade and a half expounding on that topic at the Spanish Court, pleading for a more just and mutually beneficial Native policy. But those events were simply the culmination of half a century of impressive efforts and actions—beginning almost immediately after his 1502 initial arrival in Hispaniola, Las Casas worked on behalf of the island’s and region’s natives on a variety of levels: certainly religious, attempting to convert them to Catholicism (not a particularly appealing thought from a 21st century perspective, but far more inclusive than most of the early arrivals’ perspectives); but also social and communal, proposing and working for a variety of experiments and initiatives intended to better integrate the European and Native communities and give proof to his steadfast beliefs that the two cultures could coexist peacefully and successfully.
My other favorite early European arrival is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish naval officer who was shipwrecked on the coast of Florida in the 1530s, spent nearly a decade wandering across the continent and living with numerous Native tribes and nations, and developed a complex, hybrid new perspective and identity as a result; in my second book I identified de Vaca as one of the first Americans because of that hybridity and identity. But whereas de Vaca’s shifts were the result of extraordinary circumstances, las Casas simply observed what was happening in the Spanish New World, responded to it as a truly moral and good person should but so few of his peers did, and then, more impressively still, wrote and acted on that response, consistently and unceasingly, for the remainder of his life. His efforts did not, of course, counter-balance the horrors of genocide and enslavement and destruction, and no one person’s could; but they help us to see that America began not only with those horrors, but also with fundamentally good people seeking a more perfect union of the diverse cultures present here.If it’s way too easy to be a jingoistic patriot about America, it is, in some ways, also too easy to be purely cynical or pessimistic about what we’ve been and are. Resisting that second perspective partly means acknowledging and engaging with the complex humanity of even a Columbus. But it also, and more optimistically, means remembering and reclaiming the legacy of a Las Casas, as evidence that even the most horrific and destructive moments in our history have contained their voices of hope as well. Next early writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?