Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 310

September 29, 2015: AMST Colloquiums: Studying Salem

[This past weekend, we held the fifth annual New England American StudiesAssociation (NEASA) Colloquium. So this week I’ll share some responses to each of the five colloquia to date, leading up to a special weekend post on AmericanStudies in 2015!]On one more layer to our analyses of a complex, crucial American city.I spent a week’s series of posts following up the 2012 NEASA Colloquium, and the presentations and conversations about Salem, Massachusetts that it featured. I won’t repeat here all that I highlighted in those posts, and will instead keep today’s post relatively short in the hopes that you’ll check out those brief 2012 follow ups and then return here to share your thoughts on them and Salem (and other such American spaces)!I will, however, add one more thing here. I have returned to Salem many times in the three years since that colloquium (it remains my favorite historic site in Massachusetts, and likewise features my favorite single public site I’ve encountered, the Witch Trials Memorial), and have found myself again and again thinking about the same question: do the city’s more tacky elements (the occult shops and ghost tours, the over-the-top Witch Museum, the reenactments of chasing a “witch” down the street) represent a contrast to the amazing sites and spaces?; or do they instead bring tourists and visitors to the city and give them the chance to experience the best sides of the city? I asked a pop culture version of that question in this piece for Ethos Review, wondering whether popular versions of Salem witches add to the mythologizing or bring audiences to the histories. I can’t say that I have come up with definitive answers to either of these questions yet—so I guess I’ll have to keep returning to Salem to think more about them!Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other complex American spaces you’d analyze?

September 28, 2015: AMST Colloquiums: Presenting Our Work

[This past weekend, we held the fifth annual New England American StudiesAssociation (NEASA) Colloquium. So this week I’ll share some responses to each of the five colloquia to date, leading up to a special weekend post on AmericanStudies in 2015!]On the three presenters (other than this AmericanStudier) at our inaugural 2011 Colloquium.1)      Elif Armbruster: Future NEASA President Elif Armbruster presented on her first book, Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home (2011). What stood out most to me in Elif’s presentation—and would become a model for my own subsequent book talks—was her use of multiple media and genres to share her work: photographs and primary documents alongside her own ideas and analyses. The combination made for a coherent, compelling way to share and publicize her important book.2)      Lori Harrison-Kahan: Like Elif, Lori shared work from and related to her newly-released first book, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (2011). In my own 2011 book, Redefining American Identity, I had just started to articulate my own ongoing interest in cross-cultural encounters and transformations, and Lori’s talk—like her book—provided a strong model for me, particularly in the skill of closely reading literary and cultural works through that cross-cultural lens.3)      Maggi Smith-Dalton: As the hyperlinks in that post indicate, I’ve written a good bit about Maggi in this space over the years, and for good reason: she (along with her husband Jim Dalton) is and long has been one of the foremost public AmericanStudiers in New England. I didn’t need any one presentation or colloquium to know that, but Maggi’s 2011 presentation highlighted with particular clarity one of her most significant scholarly skills—pulling together music, art, literature, and history to weave a compelling story of the past and its resonances for our own moment and world. Just one of many ways in which I’ve learned a lot from Maggi, as I have from all three of these 2011 presenters!Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Work, of yours or otherwise, you’d share?

September 26-27, 2015: September 2015 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]August 31: Fall 2015 Previews: American Lit I: A series of fall preview posts starts with the benefits for both students and faculty of getting creative in a lit survey.September 1: Fall 2015 Previews: Honors Lit: The series continues with the challenge and excitement of bringing an old favorite to a new audience.September 2: Fall 2015 Previews: First-Year Writing I: Two ways to bring the digital to a first-year writing classroom, as the series rolls on.September 3: Fall 2015 Previews: Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone: Three reasons I’m very excited to be teaching our IDIS Capstone course for the first time.September 4: Fall 2015 Previews: Adult Learning: The series concludes with how you can help me prepare the syllabus for my next adult learning course, on emerging young writers.September 5-6: Resources for Teaching: A special post on some of the teaching resources, mentors, and colleagues that have meant a lot to me—add yours in comments, please!September 7: AmericanStudying 9/11: Allies in Afghanistan: A series AmericanStudying September 11th, 2001 starts with Rambo, James Bond, and our shifting relationship to Afghanistan.September 8: AmericanStudying 9/11: Do No Harm: The series continues with doctors, dark histories, and remembering the worst of what we’ve done.September 9: AmericanStudying 9/11: The Neverending History?: On wartime excesses and whether our current ones will ever end, as the series rolls on.September 10: AmericanStudying 9/11: The Siege: The most troublingly accurate detail of a remarkably prescient pre-9/11 film.September 11: AmericanStudying 9/11: Art in the Aftermath: The series concludes with the strengths and limitations of three post-9/11 cultural works.September 12-13: Memorializing 9/11: A special post on what the 9/11 memorial does, what it doesn’t do, and why the difference matters.September 14: Given Days: Ruthian Realities: A series inspired by Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day starts with Babe Ruth, race, and myth in America.September 15: Given Days: The Influenza Epidemic: The series continues with what The Given Day helps us understand about the largely forgotten early 20th century health crisis.September 16: Given Days: The Boston Police Strike: What Lehane’s novel gets right and wrong about a controversial history, as the series rolls on. September 17: Given Days: The Great Molasses Flood: Three telling details about a unique historical event featured in Lehane’s novel.September 18: Given Days: The Future for Tulsa: The series concludes with how history can complicate a historical fiction’s happy endings.September 19-20: Crowd-sourced Historical Fictions: In one of my fullest crowd-sourced posts yet, fellow AmericanStudiers nominate other great works of historical fiction---add yours in comments!September 21: September Texts: Wake Me Up When September Ends: A series on September in American culture starts with the specific and universal sides to the Green Day hit.September 22: September Texts: Come September: The series continues with how biographies can add layers of interest to a mediocre romantic film.September 23: September Texts: See You in September: What a mid-level pop music hit from the 50s can tell us about music and America in the mid-20thcentury, as the series rolls on!September 24: September Texts: Until September: An 80s romantic comedy and the enduring appeal of Paris in the American imagination!September 25: September Texts: S         eptember Swoon: The series concludes with three contexts for a great book on baseball, race, and America!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics or themes you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

September 25, 2015: September Texts: September Swoon

[With another autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments, please!]Three contexts for William Kashatus’ book September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration (2004).1)      Baseball and public scholarship: In this 2013 post on Daniel Okrent’s Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game (1985), I made the case for that great baseball book as also a model of public scholarly writing. That’s even more overtly the case for September Swoon, both because Kashatus is in fact an academic historian and because his book does a masterful job connecting its baseball stories (both the 1964 National League pennant race and the rookie season of African American star player Richie [later Dick] Allen) to multi-layered American histories and debates from the 1960s.2)      Baseball and race: I’ve written a good deal in this space about the intersections between those two worlds, but there’s certainly more to say. That’s particularly true because every team dealt with integration in its own way and because those team and individual histories continued to unfold long after the initial moments of integration. Those realities are reflected in the very title of Kashatus’ book: more than 15 years after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby’s debuts, Richie Allen experienced a great deal of racism during his 1964 rookie season with the Phillies. In many ways, as Kashatus argues, baseball offered and continues to offer a perfect microcosm of these national issues.3)      Baseball and collective memory: On the other hand, there’s at least one striking difference between baseball and those national histories. I’ve argued many times, in many ways, that we Americans are quite bad at remembering our darkest histories, such as those of racial conflict and oppression. When it comes to sports histories, the opposite is true—we tend not only to remember them well, but to do so with passion, with clear perspectives and ideas. I’m willing to bet most Philadelphians who were alive in 1964 have strong memories of and an opinion on what happened with the Phillies’ September swoon. Which makes for a particularly good starting point for connecting those sports memories to national histories, of course…September Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?

September 24, 2015: September Texts: Until September

[With another autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments, please!]On two enduring roles of Parisian escapes in the American imagination.Until September (1984), likely best known as the film that offered director Richard Marquand a serious change of pace one year after Return of the Jedi (1983), tells the story of an American traveler to Paris (played by Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Karen Allen ) who misses her return flight to the States and finds herself stranded in the city (until September, natch) while she awaits a new travel visa. As you would expect, her story takes an unexpected turn, one driven by a chance encounter with a wealthy, married French banker (played by French actor and comedian Thierry Lhermitte). Despite their best intentions, the two fall under the spell of the City of Lights (or perhaps the more practical magic of a romantic comedy plot), and find themselves embarking on a love affair, with each character changing quite a bit as a result of this new, unfamiliar relationship.If that sounds quite a bit like the plotline of the Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline romantic comedy French Kiss (1995), I’d say that’s true and far from a coincidence (although the fact that French Kiss was directed by another Star Wars veteran, Lawrence Kasdan , likely is coincidental). In both films, a buttoned-up American (yes, Ryan is living in Canada at the start of French Kiss, but she’s still Meg Ryan so she’s an American!) finds an unexpected and beneficial escape from her everyday life in a romantic relationship that feels distinctly Parisian, not only because it’s with a Frenchman (although oui) but also because of the very nature of the city and its imagery and mythos. A very similar story, with the genders reversed, plays out in the recent Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris (2011), in which screenwriter Owen Wilson escapes from his relationship with his stereotypically materialistic American fiancé (Rachel McAdams) by literally time traveling back into Paris’s most romanticized era and culture (the artistic and cultural world of the Roaring 20s).Such Parisian escapes go far back in the American imagination, as traced with particular clarity by historian David McCullough in his book The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011). But at the same time, I would differentiate McCullough’s subjects (who are mostly artists and writers) and Wilson’s character (who is also a writer and joins an artistic community through his time travels) from the characters played by Allen and Ryan. Wilson’s writer traveled to Paris because he loved its iconic, mythologized identity, as did many of McCullough’s travelers; for them, the escape was expected, and the life-changing effects it produced sought-out and hoped-for. Whereas for Allen and Ryan’s characters, Paris and the romances and changes they found there were entirely unexpected and unplanned, indeed represented a drastic shift in their lives and journeys. There’s romance in both kinds of escapes, but something particularly romantic about a life-altering place that takes us by surprise.Last September text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?

September 23, 2015: September Texts: See You in September

[With another autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments, please!]On what a seemingly random 50s song can tell us about that era in music—and how we remember it.The story of “See You in September”(1959) reads like many others in American pop music history, if certainly sped up from the normal timeline. New York City songwriters Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards (the latter best known, many years down the road, as the composer of both the lyrics and music for 1776 ) collaborated to write the song in a single June 1959 day. It was shopped to producers that same day, and by that evening the Pittsburgh-based vocal group The Tempos had agreed to record the song. The group flew in the next day, the recording sessions were finished within the next few days, and the song was released soon thereafter; it hit the charts (becoming by most measures the biggest hit for both Wayne and The Tempos) but peaked that summer at #23 on the Billboard Hot 100. It seemed destined to remain a mid-level, soon-forgotten hit in a very busy era in American popular music.And then came the covers, and more covers, and a few more covers for good measure. Between 1959 and 1966, “See You” was covered by no fewer than ten artists and groups, including doo-wop artists The Quotations, Hong Kong pop group Teddy Robin and the Playboys, and covers in French (by singer Olivier Despax) and Spanish (by two different artists, Marta Baizán and Kinita). None of those were the most famous or successful cover, which was released in 1966 by The Happenings and reached #3 on the Billboardchart. The covers didn’t end there—the 70s included versions by Julie Budd and Debby Boone, among other artists—but without quite the voluminous quantity of the 60s collection. And I would argue that this laundry list of 60s covers reveals just how ubiquitous that trend was in the early era of rock ‘n roll, how much indeed the period’s music comprised not a group of distinct songs and performers so much as an interconnected, often cross-pollinating world of influences and inspirations. Seen in that light, “See You” is a very exemplary pop song indeed.You don’t have to take my work for it, as one of the most nostalgic examinations of late 50s and early 60s music and culture, George Lucas’ film American Graffiti (1973), uses The Tempos’ original version of “See You in September” on its soundtrack. Played (as most of the film’s songs are) by legendary DJ Wolfman Jack, the song is featured in this sequence, as protagonist Richard Dreyfuss contemplates the next stage of his life and says goodbye to his current one. It’s easy, when you listen to a dozen or more versions of the same song (as I did while writing this post), to lose sight entirely of its meanings, both literal and what it might mean for young people hearing it in that formative era of American popular music. But as it does with so many aspects of culture and society, American Graffiti effortlessly reminds us of such meanings, reflecting the role that music (among other cultural and social elements, especially cars) plays in the lives and communities of young Americans. In that way, any and every song, including “See You in September,” becomes both a window into the world of its production and a vehicle for remembering and reliving that world.Next September text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?

September 22, 2015: September Texts: Come September

[With another autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments, please!]On how biography adds compelling layers and questions to a forgettable romantic comedy.I honestly tried to watch the 1961 romantic comedy Come September in preparation for writing this post, but after a certain early point I gave up. Even the Wikipedia summaryof the film’s plot, and more exactly of who is wooing or leaving whom at any given moment, is almost impossible to follow; and on watching the opening the film feels more like an advertisement for Italy’s spectacular Ligurian coast than a coherent story. And the part that I did most fully understand, and that explains the film’s title, is more creepy than romantic: September is the month when American businessman Robert (Rock Hudson) annually escapes to his Ligurian villa with his Italian mistress Lisa (Gina Lollobrigida); but this year his visit is moved up to July instead, and when he informs Lisa of the change she cancels her imminent wedding to join Robert per usual. The course of true love and all, but not exactly the sweetest way to meet these two star-crossed lovers.So not exactly a must-watch classic—but if we delve into the biographies of the film’s stars, it takes on additional and more interesting layers of meaning. For one thing, the film’s two young lovers are played by popular crooner Bobby Darinand up-and-coming ingénue Sandra Dee, and the story of their connection behind the scenes is by far the film’s most romantic: Darin and Dee met for the first time on set, fell in love, and were married that same year. Portrayed in the recent biopic Beyond the Sea (2004), with Kevin Spacey starring as Darin and Kate Bosworth as Dee, the marriage lasted seven tumultuous years and produced their son Dodd Mitchell Darin before the couple divorced in 1967. And no matter what the future held for these two, there’s something fascinating about watching two young performers pretending to fall in love while (we know) they were actually falling in love as well, and the romance between these two popular artists makes for a much more compelling story than anything presented on screen in Come September.And then there’s Rock Hudson. It would be homophobic, narrow-minded, and just plain dumb for me to suggest that a gay actor couldn’t play a straight character, and of course Hudson’s entire career (much of it as the lead in romantic comedies) would belie that notion. Yet at the same time (and of course I’m far from the first to argue this), there’s something inarguably compelling about the reality that one of the most popular, traditional (that is, starring in the kinds of traditional love stories that were permissible and widespread in the buttoned-up entertainment culture of the 1950s) romantic leads in Hollywood history was throughout his life and career performing that sexuality, acting the part of a heterosexual sex symbol. Sir Ian McKellen argued earlier this year that when he finally came out as a gay man (at the age of 49), it made him a better actor; “my acting was disguise,” he put it, “Now, my acting is about revelation and truth.” Seen through that lens, and given that he never came out publicly during his lifetime (although his 1985 diagnosis with AIDS led to awareness of his sexuality shortly before and then after his death), Hudson’s acting was always a multi-layered, complex facet of his life, and one that lends another compelling layer to a film like Come September.Next September text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?

September 21, 2015: September Texts: Wake Me Up When September Ends

[With another autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments, please!]On what was necessarily time-sensitive about Green Day’s concept album, and what was more timeless.As an aside in this 4th of July post, I mentioned the critique leveled at Green Day’s American Idiot (2004) concept album/rock opera by Brandon Flowers, lead singer of The Killers. To Flowers, the album, and particularly its title track with the repeated line “I don’t want to be an American idiot,” represented a calculated and unnecessary bit of anti-Americanism, particularly when the band toured with it abroad. While I take his point about audiences in other countries singing along to that lyric, I think Flowers was more right than he realized in linking Green Day’s song to Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Like that complex stadium-rock song, Green Day’s punk rock anthem is easily oversimplified or misinterpreted, but to my mind forms one satirical part of a socially smart and meaningful whole work.Indeed, as an album American Idiot is far more consistently and cohesively linked to its moment than Springsteen’s (on which only the opening title track and closing “My Hometown” are overtly tied to the album’s mid-1980s moment). Indeed, if The Rising offers a definitive musical take on September 11th(as I argued a couple weeks back), then American Idiot is the front-runner for the definitive musical response to the George W. Bush era more broadly. Balancing the specific story of its everyman protagonist, “Jesus of Suburbia” (introduced in that epic four-part song that follows the title track and moves us into the rock opera proper), with the kinds of more thoroughly political statements made by songs like “Holiday”(which follows “Jesus,” immediately establishing the album’s back and forth structure), the album highlights both the subtle and the extreme discontents of life within Bush’s America. As a result, even the more non-specific songs like the mega-hit “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” become tied to those contexts—following “Jesus” and “Holiday” directly, “Boulevard” can’t help but be read as a vision of identity and community (or the lack thereof) in that Bushian nation and world.Well, it can’t help but be read that way if you’re listening to the album, anyway. As a single on the radio (where it achieved that mega-popularity), “Boulevard” has far more universal appeal, speaking to isolation and angst well beyond any particular moment or context. I would argue that that’s even more true of the album’s other ballad, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”—because of the song’s lyrics and the way they use the familiar imagery of summer’s end and fall’s arrival to reflect universal experiences of loss and grief, and because of the very personal September 1982 loss (of his father) out of which Billie Joe Armstrong drew the inspiration for the song. There’s nothing wrong with art emerging out of and engaging with very specific historical contexts (my favorite song is “American Skin [41 Shots],” after all)—but the greatest art has the power to endure well beyond those moments, and to speak to audiences distant from as well as connected to those particular contexts. “Wake Me Up” does just that, and it elevates Green Day’s concept album into something more as a result.Next September text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?

September 19-20, 2015: Crowd-sourced Historical Fictions

[As part of this summer’s beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (2008), one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the historical fiction recommendations and responses of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]First, an addendum to the series: after I had written it I learned of a wonderful new collection of American historical fictions, Dr. John Keene’s book Counternarratives (2015). Check it out!Also, my FSU American Studies colleague Kate Jewell’s first post for the Teaching American History blog makes a great argument for using novels and other literary works in the history classroom (and wants your input!).Joe Moser highlights Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and also Charles Portis’ True Grit.On Facebook, Kisha Tracy notes that “Rafael Sabatiniand Baroness Orczy have always been my historical fiction guilty pleasures.” She adds, “Samuel Shellabarger and Kenneth Roberts too.”Jennifer Berg admits that, “I also feel cheesy about this, but I really like Michener [Ben’s note: Me too!],” and adds that she “just read The Source this summer and loved it.” She is “now reading the Asia saga by James Clavell.” And she adds, “I also read some Isabel Allende ( Inés of My Soul and Island Beneath the Sea ) this summer.”Donna Moody continues the guilty pleasure thread, agreeing with the Michener recommendation and adding, “I guess this 'outs' my standards for what I term my 'mindless' reading but I really love Steve Berry'sbooks...John refers to them as 'pot-boilers' which I guess they are but he does some pretty extensive historical research into each topic and setting.”Heather Cox Richardson continues the Michener love, asking, “Is this where I confess I was mesmerized by Centennial when I was a teenager?”Larry Rosenwald writes, “Not sure exactly what counts here, but some of the pleasures I associate with historical fiction (I tend to read earlier historical fiction, Scott and Cooper and John Buchan and such) are also to be had from, say, Benito Cereno and Israel Potter (which I love, actually), and from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court —and isn't most of Hawthorne arguably historical fiction?” [To which I said: Yup yup and yup!]J. Indigo Eriksen nominates Far as the Eye Can See by Robert Bausch.Ian James goes with the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. Summer Lopezwrites, “Really love Hilary Mantel. The Wolf Hall stuff, but also A Place of Greater Safety , about the French Revolution, is amazing.”Heather Urbanski shares, “I loved Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene (and the sequel, Morning is a Long Time Coming ) when I was in junior high and high school. I still have my beat up copies in my bedroom shelf.”Vincent Kling nominates The Heaven Tree trilogy by Edith Pargeter.Andrew Da Silva writes, “Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman is an oldie but goodie.”Jeff Renye replies, “Vasily Grossman is always a real uplifter,” and adds Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels.Nancy Caronia highlights Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows.Sarah West goes with The Living by Annie Dillard.Meg Koslowski nominates Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao .Robert Tally notes, “I’m just starting Measuring the World , a recent German novel about Alexander van Humboldt, and it’s terrific so far.”While Karen Valeri is currently reading the genre-busting Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.On Twitter, Theresa Kaminski highlights Katharine Weber’s novel Triangle (2006), “as much about the fire as about doing history.”Schuyler Chapman shares Washington Irving’s “Philip of Pokanoket: An Indian Memoir” (1819), “which seems to really struggle with history-fiction distinction.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other historical fictions you’d highlight?

September 18, 2015: Given Days: The Future for Tulsa

[As part of this summer’s beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (2008), one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the problem with historical happy endings, and why we still need them.According to the ever-reliable internet, filmmaker Orson Welles once said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” Whether big O actually said that or not, the sentiment certainly holds true, as reflected in and commented on by such literary texts as Anne Sexton’s poem “Cinderella” and Margaret Atwood’s short short story “Happy Endings.” But while of course most creative writers have more or less absolute authority about where they stop their stories, and thus of what kind of ending they create, those working in a genre like historical fiction have another layer of complexity to the question: no matter where a historical novelist chooses to end his or her book, after all, history continued to unfold after that point, and our knowledge of those unfolding histories might well shift the happiness (along with every other aspect) of the book’s ending.[SPOILERS FOR GIVEN DAY FOLLOW:] This dilemma is particularly acute for the happiest ending to Lehane’s multi-faceted novel. In that ending, African American protagonist Luther Laurence returns to Tulsa, where he had left behind his pregnant wife Lila years before; not only is Luther reunited with and welcomed back by Lila, not only does he meet his son for the first time, but he also makes peace with the local criminal from whom he had been fleeing when he moved to Boston. That’s a particularly powerful scene, in which Luther has the jump on this man but chooses not to kill him, telling him he’s seen too many African Americans killed and doesn’t want to add another body to the mix; given the chance to kill Luther instead, the man returns the favor and lets him go. All of this takes place in Greenwood, the neighborhood in Tulsa that came to be known as “Black Wall Street” and that represented a space of especial possibility and promise for African Americans around the country—and the neighborhood that, less than two years after this happy ending, would be burned to the ground by a rampaging white mob, in one of the worst racial massacresin the nation’s long history of such events.It’s hard to know exactly what to make of Lehane’s Tulsa ending to Luther’s story, in light of this historical aftermath. Certainly Lehane (whose research for The Given Day seems impeccable) must have known about the massacre, so it’s possible that he intends the juxtaposition as one more reflection of the novel’s themes of the cycle of violence and its horrific effects. (Although in that case, even a brief mention of the massacre in his afterword would help make that link more apparent for his audience, many of whom I believe will never have heard of the massacre.) But on the other hand, it’s important not to let our knowledge of history become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, to read African American lives and communities solely through a teleology of the acts of individual and communal violence that have been directed against them throughout our past (and present). To put it simply: Luther has earned his happy ending, and then some (as has Lila to be sure); since Lehane chose to stop his story here, to give this character and us this deserved happiness, then there’s something to be said for embracing and enjoying that choice on its own terms.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: historical fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!