Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 317

July 8, 2015: Secret Service Stories: The Lincoln “What If?”

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Secret Service’s founding, this week I’ll highlight a series of histories and stories related to that unique department within our federal government. Leading up to a new Guest Post on the organization this weekend!]On unanswered questions, the timing of the agency’s founding, and historical frustrations.I’ve blogged before about the horrific, gradual, hard to quantify tragedy that followed a much more overt tragic act, Abraham Lincoln’s April 14th, 1865 assassination. As I wrote in that prior post, it’s of course impossible to know what a full Lincoln second term (and possibly beyond, since this was pre-presidential term limits of course) might have meant, for Reconstruction and the African American community and the post-war period and so many other issues. But it’s also impossible for any historian or AmericanStudier (or, y’know, thoughtful human) not to look at the presidency of Andrew Johnson, certainly in the running for the worst president in American history, and see as striking and frustrating a contrast with his predecessor as it’s possible to be for two successive presidents (and from the same administration no less).The tragedy and frustration of Lincoln’s assassination becomes even more aggravating when linked to the founding of the Secret Service less than three months later, on July 5th, 1865. It’s important to note, however, that it took nearly three decades before the agency began guarding presidents: at first its job was to suppress counterfeit currency, a rampant problem during and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; gradually the agency’s purview expanded to include “persons perpretrating frauds against the government”; but it wasn’t until 1894 that Secret Service agents began protecting President Grover Cleveland in a part-time role, and only in the aftermath of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley did Congress request that the agency formally perform such protective duties. So any sense that the Secret Service narrowly missed out on a chance to protect President Lincoln, while great as historical melodrama, doesn’t hold up to the historical facts.Yet even if the nascent Secret Service wouldn’t necessarily have helped protect Lincoln from John Wilkes Booth’s bullet, that’s not to say that we can’t be historically frustrated that there wasn’t someone standing out the Ford’s Theater balcony to do just that. For one thing, Lincoln had been the target of an assassination attempt (known as the “Baltimore Plot”) before he was inaugurated in 1861; that plot had been foiled thanks to Pinkerton agents and a private detective named Kate Warne, demonstrating the need for presidential protection to be sure. And for another, even more salient thing, Lincoln did have one official bodyguard on that April evening at the theater: a Washington policeman named John Parker, part of a rotating four-person police detail protecting the president. As that linked article notes, for reasons more likely of dereliction of duty than participation in the assassination conspiracy Parker seems to have abandoned his post at the worst possible time, a failure that makes the inaction of JFK’s Secret Service detail seem far less dramatic in comparison and that adds one more frustration to all the “what if’s” surrounding Lincoln’s killing.Next story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?

July 7, 2015: Secret Service Stories: In the Line of Fire

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Secret Service’s founding, this week I’ll highlight a series of histories and stories related to that unique department within our federal government. Leading up to a new Guest Post on the organization this weekend!]On a scene that humanizes the topic of yesterday’s post, and the shortcomings of the film around it.At the heart of Wolfgang Petersen’s film In the Line of Fire (1993) is one of those unforgettable, quiet, potent Clint Eastwood monologues. Eastwood’s character Frank Horrigan is an aging Secret Service agent who was part of Kennedy’s Dallas detail; the film’s villain, psychopath Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), is threatening to kill the current president, and while so doing taunts Horrigan with his failures during the Kennedy assassination and wonders if Horrigan has or ever had the guts to take a bullet for the president (an overt, and of course the most unique and difficult, part of the job of every Secret Service agent). In that linked monologue, Horrigan opens up to his fellow agent and love interest Lilly Raines (Rene Russo) about his failures on that November day in Dallas and how they have shaped his perspective and identity ever since.It’s an amazing couple minutes of film, and a nice reminder that Clint Eastwood is more than just an unhinged RNC speaker or over-the-top “Get off my lawn”caricature of a Grumpy Old White Man. But the In the Line of Fire monologue also does important, complex cultural work when it comes to the JFK assassination and the kinds of questions I raised (vis a vis the Susan Cheever article) in yesterday’s post. The assassination has long exemplified the “Where were you when you heard the news?” narrative of history, a reflection on just how communally traumatic its horrific events were. And if on the one hand the Secret Service’s failures seem to have done their part to contribute to that trauma, on the other it’s important to note that the trauma might be particularly devastating when the answer to that “Where were you” question is, “I was a few feet away from Kennedy’s car but did nothing to stop his killing.” At the very least, Eastwood’s monologue does what great art so often does: forces us to think about the humanity within history, complicating and enriching our perspective on that shared, national history in the process.Unfortunately, the rest of Petersen’s film not only fails to live up to that moment of complexity and humanity, but actively undermines the questions it raises. For one thing, Malcovich’s character and the way he drives the film’s plot is just another example of a psychotic, cat-and-mouse blockbuster bad guy, no different from contemporary villains such as Dennis Hopper in Speed (1994) or Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away (1994) or the like. And for another, more important thing, in order to complement that blockbuster villain, the film turns Eastwood’s agent into precisely the kind of superhero stereotype that the history of the Secret Service reveals to be nonsense; [SPOILER ALERT] in the film’s climax, for example, Horrigan not only proves to Leary, Raines, himself, and everyone else that he is willing and able to take a bullet for the president, but after being gravely wounded continues to chase and eventually overpowers and kills the would-be assassin. This action-movie silliness doesn’t ruin the seriousness of Eastwood’s earlier monologue, necessarily; but it reflects a film that as a whole fails utterly at maintaining that kind of humanity.Next story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?

July 6, 2015: Secret Service Stories: The JFK Assassination

[In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Secret Service’s founding, this week I’ll highlight a series of histories and stories related to that unique department within our federal government. Leading up to a new Guest Post on the organization this weekend!]On an article that raises a number of frustrating, vital questions.At the end of this week’s series, I’ll feature a post on the recent scandals that have rocked the Secret Service and, it seems to me, unmistakably shaken the public confidence in this shadowy but significant government organization (at a time, as I’ll also discuss more in that Friday post, when threats against the president have reached an all-time high). Without downplaying the seriousness of those scandals, however, it’s important to note that the real 21st century difference might lie not so much in the presence of such misbehavior among Secret Service agents, but rather in the more public coverage of those activites by cable news networks, the internet, and all the other media through which our 24/7 news cycle society operates.For evidence that the Secret Service has featured, and indeed been tragically affected by, such issues for at least half a century (and likely throughout its history), I turn to this late 2014 Vanity Fair article on the activites of the agents on JFK’s detail before and during his November, 1963 assassination. The article was excerpted from historian Susan Cheever’s forthcoming Drinking in America: Our Secret History (2015), and so focuses in particular on the role that alcohol (and especially excessive drinking by a number of agents the night before the assassination) may have played in the Secret Service agents’ inability to respond effectively or even adequately to the events as they unfolded on November 22nd. But Cheever also nicely describes the agency’s longer-term history, and more exactly the ways in which images of Secret Service agents as seasoned, consummate professionals have often butted up against realities of less professional behavior and activities.I need to be clear here: I’m not in any way blaming JFK’s assassination on the Secret Service; various conspiracy theories have done so over the years, and so it’s important for me to make that distinction. It’s equally important not to pretend that Secret Service agents are superheroes, rather than men and women doing a demanding, always potentially life-threatening, and largely thankless and unnoticed (until something goes wrong) job. Yet at the same time, there are few individual moments in our nation’s history more striking, and with more of immediate and destructive effects, than the assassination of a president; and the Cheever article, like the many other studies and responses she cites, makes plain that in this particular case the inactivity and missteps of multiple Secret Service agents at best failed to prevent, and perhaps worsened, the horrific events as they unfolded. As much as it might seem that the JFK assassination has already been over-included in our collective memories, this seems like a specific aspect of that tragedy which deserves the further attention and analysis that Cheever nicely provides.Next story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Secret Service connections you’d highlight?

July 4-5, 2015: The 4th in Focus: The Adams Letters

[To celebrate another 4th of July, this week’s series has highlighted different cultural contexts for this very American holiday. Leading up to this special July 4th weekend post!]On the myths, and the realities, revealed about the Revolution and its leaders in the Adams letters.Writing to his wife Abigail on July 3rd, 1776 (she was back at home in Braintree managing the family farm and raising their children), the day after the Continental Congress had drafted the Declaration of Independence, John Adams argued that “the Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epoch, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”On one level, the letter reveals just how much myth-making is inherent in any national celebration—we celebrate independence on July 4th because the Declaration was signed, dated, and sent out to the American public for the first time on that day; but Adams’ emphasis makes clear that the date was and is an arbitrary one, and of course that Revolutionary acts, like all historical moments, develop over time. On another level, however, Adams’ letter reveals quite impressively how aware the Congress was of the significance of what was happening: not only in his quite thorough prediction of the celebrations that would come to commemorate the event; but also in his recognition of all that would follow the Declaration. “You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not,” he wrote. “I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means.”Reading the Adams’ correspondence offers even more Revolutionary realities than those. For one thing, it deeply humanizes the second President (and by extension all the framers); I defy anyone to read John’s heartfelt July 20th, 1776 letter of concern for both his ailing family and his own separation from them and not feel differently about the man and moment. For another, the letters provide a visceral and compelling argument for the Revolutionary era’s hugely impressive community of American women—Abigail was not as publicly minded as peers such as Judith Sargent Murray and Annis Boudinot Stockton, but she makes a thoroughly convincing case for what Murray called the equality of the sexes: in her overt arguments for such equality, but just as much in her intelligence, her eloquence, and her strength in supporting both the family and its business and her husband and the nation’s. Many of my posts this week have complicated our idealizing national myths, but the Adams letters remind us that some of our realities have been just as ideal.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Any other contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?

July 3, 2015: The 4th in Focus: “Sandy (4th of July, Asbury Park)”

[To celebrate another 4th of July, a series on different cultural contexts for this very American holiday. Leading up to a special July 4th post this weekend!]On how Bruce captured the more intimate side of independence day.You didn’t think I could write a series about iconic images of America and not include the Boss, did you?! One of my most memorable youthful July 4th experiences, the fireworks show after a Richmond Braves minor league baseball game, featured star-spangled fireworks set to “Born in the U.S.A.”—yet another failure to listen closely to Bruce’s ironic anthem, of course, if also an association encouraged by Bruce’s own red, white, and blue album cover among other things. A fair portion of the ashes from those fireworks ended up in my cup of soda, which it’s hard not to read as a metaphor for the gap between the show and the song, the inspiring American spectacle and the far darker historical and social realities that “Born in the U.S.A.” seeks to capture. Indeed, Bruce read Ron Kovic’s memoir, and was inspired by it to write a much less well-known song, “Shut Out the Light”(1983).As it turns out, in the course of his long and prolific career Bruce has written two songs that even more overtly feature independence day, and offer far different and more personal images of the holiday. From the double album The River (1980) there’s the haunting “Independence Day,” a song that may or may not be set on the actual holiday but uses it as an extended metaphor for the speaker’s decision to leave his hometown and the limited world and legacy of his father (to whom he addresses his determined but apologetic reflections throughout the song). And from The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1974) there’s the bittersweet “Sandy (4th of July, Asbury Park),” in which the jaded young speaker pleads with his star-crossed lover that they should leave “this carnival life” and start anew, all while “the fireworks are hailing over Little Eden tonight/Forcing a light into all those stoned-out faces left stranded on this Fourth of July.”Besides being one of Bruce’s most beautiful and poignant songs (and featuring Danny Federiciat his absolute best on the accordion), “Sandy” reflects an essential but easily overlooked truth: that the Fourth of July, like all communal holidays and occasions, is perhaps most consistently meaningful through its resonances in our individual lives, journeys, and memories. For me, the 4thwill always mean both that childhood Richmond Braves game and the first time the boys and I stayed out on the Needham town common to watch the town’s fireworks show, images of community and connection in each case. For Bruce’s speakers, on the other hand, the holiday is a moment to declare independence from the communities that have produced and influenced but also limited them, to seek their own new journeys and identities as did America in that foundational moment. But across these disparate experiences, texts, and meanings, the 4th becomes an occasion to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going—an underappreciated, frequent, and very valuable side effect of holiday celebrations.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?

July 2, 2015: The 4th in Focus: “Speaking of Courage”

[To celebrate another 4th of July, a series on different cultural contexts for this very American holiday. Leading up to a special July 4th post this weekend!]On the July 4thsetting and climax of one of my favorite American short stories.I’m going to keep this post relatively short, as I’d love for you to read the story on which it focuses, Tim O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage” (that version has been annotated by, it seems, a group of high school students working with the whole of O’Brien’s novel/short story cycle The Things They Carried , in which “Speaking” appears). So go read that amazing story if you would (even if you’ve read it before, it benefits from re-reading), and I’ll see you in a few!Okay, welcome back. One of the interesting choices O’Brien makes in the course of “Speaking of Courage” is only gradually to reveal the story’s July 4thsetting, leading up to the striking final image of Norman watching the town’s fireworks display in a very specific and complicated location and way. While Rov Kovic made the Fourth of July a central, titular organizing metaphor for his memoir of war and the gaps between its myths and realities, that is, O’Brien links his story’s strikingly similar narrative of war’s contradictions—its ideals of heroism and the brutal realities that lie beneath those images, literally and figuratively—to independence day, and more exactly to the ways in which we collectively commemorate that holiday and through it our national mythos, in a far subtler but just as significant way. As with so many of O’Brien’s pitch-perfect short stories, the true payoff is in the final sentence: “For a small town, he decided, it was a pretty good show.”O’Brien’s book deals most directly and centrally with the Vietnam War, and with the project of war writing and memory captured in “How to Tell a True War Story.” Yet what “Speaking of Courage” makes plain—or rather makes subtle and circular and complex but crucial nonetheless—is that every American war story is also a story of America, of our collective memories and our communities, of the stories we celebrate and those we forget. If Norman Bowker’s is a particularly shitty story (pun entirely intended), it’s also a hugely telling and powerful one, a vital reminder of what war means and does, and of what operates just beneath the surface of our national commemorations and celebrations. It should be, it seems to me, required reading on every July 4th.Next 4thfocus tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?

July 1, 2015: The 4th in Focus: Fireworks

[To celebrate another 4th of July, a series on different cultural contexts for this very American holiday. Leading up to a special July 4th post this weekend!]On the history, symbolism, and limitations of an American tradition.As detailed in this Slate article, the intersection of fireworks and the 4th of July literally goes back to the first, 1777 celebrations of the holiday (the first because in 1776 July 4thwas the date of the Declaration’s actual dissemination and readings, rather than a holiday commemorating that occasion). I’ll have more to say about the John Adams letter referenced in that piece in my weekend post, so here I’ll keep this paragraph short and say that you should certainly check out that Slate piece by senior editor Forrest Wickmanfor a clear, concise depiction of the longstanding histories (both American and international) of fireworks.While fireworks might have been present from those earliest Independence Day celebrations on, however, I would argue that their July 4th symbolism really took hold after the War of 1812, and more exactly after Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the aftermath of the side of Fort McHenry during that conflict. After all, the central image of our national anthem is a contrasting visual one, of seeing the flag through the darkness—eventually “by the dawn’s early light,” but even more importantly by the glow of “the bombs bursting in air” that “gave proof through the night.” It’s a compelling and powerful image, the idea of a light in the darkness that allows us to keep an eye on our national ideals. And whether fireworks actually create a flag of fiery lights (as they often do for the 4th) or simply burst in the night sky for our collective vision and inspiration, they capture this defining national image in a visceral and affecting way.Visceral and affecting as fireworks might be, however, what they are not is thought-provoking; indeed, as with many spectacular entertainments, they require us not to think at all in order to get the most pleasure from their spectacle. To be clear, as a fan of Star Wars and the James Bond films, among many other spectacles, I don’t have any problem with such entertainments being part of our culture and society. But as a commemoration of our nation’s independence day, such a spectacle does seem to represent another example of what I’ve elsewhere described as the easy form of patriotism, the kind that asks nothing more of us than our awed appreciation. So while such awe can and perhaps should be a part of our July 4th celebrations, I’d love if there were space as well for more reflective engagement with our history and community. Am I arguing for Frederick Douglass-shaped fireworks? Maybe not—but I could definitely get behind a brief reading from “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” before every July 4th fireworks ceremony. Give it a couple years and it’d be just as much a part of the tradition as those fiery bombs bursting in air.Next 4thfocus tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?

June 30, 2015: The 4th in Focus: Born on the 4th of July

[To celebrate another 4th of July, a series on different cultural contexts for this very American holiday. Leading up to a special July 4th post this weekend!]On three evolutions of a classic, complex American phrase.To my knowledge, the phrase “born on the 4th of July” first appeared in “The Yankee Doodle Boy”(usually known as “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy”), a song that first appeared in George M. Cohan’s musical Little Johnny Jones (1904) and became most famous through James Cagney’s performance of it (as Cohan himself) in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). In this context, the phrase is a straightforward as it seems, capturing the speaker’s stereotypical all-American identity, an unironic embrace of the mythology that is amplified by every line in Cohan’s song: “I’m glad I am/So’s Uncle Sam”; “Yanks through and through/Red, white, and blue”; “A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam”; and so on. I suppose it’s possible to read the song’s question about this identity—“Oh say can you see/Anything about my pedigree that’s phony?”—as a recognition of its over-the-top embrace of stereotypical patriotism, but I don’t know that anything in the song, musical, or Cohan’s career and work warrants that kind of ironic reading.At the other end of the irony spectrum is the use of Cohan’s phrase in a searing autobiographical work published in the nation’s bicentennial year: Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Kovic, a Vietnam veteran turned antiwar protester, was indeed born on July 4th, 1946; but in his memoir that coincidence becomes a multi-layered metaphor for both the myths and ideals that contributed to his volunteering for service during the Vietnam War and the realities and gaps of his experiences in that conflict and upon his return home as a wounded veteran. As he puts it in a new introduction for a 2005 re-issue of the book, “I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war, … not the myth we had grown up believing.” While the myths of war about which Kovic writes were no doubt due in part to the very specific, post-World War II context of his birth and childhood, they’ve also been a part of our national mythos since the war with which our nation originated, a connection captured potently by Kovic’s evocation of July 4th.Oliver Stone’s award-winning 1989 film version of Born on the Fourth of July, adapted for the screen by Kovic himself (along with Stone), certainly represents another evolution of the phrase, one in which it ironically returned to a Cohanesque mainstream popular culture prominence (thanks in no small measure to the film’s breakout performance by its movie star leading man). Yet I want to highlight as well a more recent use of the phrase, one that exemplifies a more detached, less socially critical form of irony. In a middle verse of The Killer’s song “Sam’s Town” (2006), which opens their concept album of the same name, the speaker portrays his family’s iconic American identity thusly: “I still remember Grandma Dixie’s wake/I’d never really known anybody to die before/Red, white, and blue upon a birthday cake/My brother he was born on the fourth of July and that’s all.” Coupled with a preceding line, “Running through my veins an American masquerade,” this verse seems to offer the first steps toward a layered critique of American mythology to complement Kovic’s. Yet while the remainder of Sam’s Town is engaging rock and roll, socially or historically aware it is not—and indeed, the band’s frontman Brandon Flowers critiqued Green Day’s American Idiot album and tour for attacking America. By the 21st century, perhaps, the phrase “born on the fourth of July” has come to capture most fully the cypher that is American popular culture.Next 4thfocus tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?

June 29, 2015: The 4th in Focus: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

[To celebrate another 4th of July, a series on different cultural contexts for this very American holiday. Leading up to a special July 4th post this weekend!]On the stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 150 years ago.I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Quock Walker and his Revolutionary-era peers. Walker, his fellow Massachusetts slaves, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence in support of their anti-slavery petitions, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in the second hyperlinked piece above) that black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Walker’s case was a representative one, either in his era or at any time in the two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor I would I want to use Walker’s successful petition as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include a central strain of hypocrisy.If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Quock Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to begin this week’s series with Douglass’s speech. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American slave is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrises and flaws. And despite the ridiculous current attacks on “too negative” histories or “apologizing for America,” there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement wth precisely the lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.Next 4thfocus tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?

June 27-28, 2015: June 2015 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]June 1: Mount Auburn Connections: Origin Points: A series on the beautiful Cambridge site starts with three ways to contextualize its 19thcentury origins.June 2: Mount Auburn Connections: Blanche Linden: The series continues with three inspiring sides to the cemetery’s most significant historian.June 3: Mount Auburn Connections: Robert Gould Shaw: What his Mount Auburn memorial adds to our collective memories of the abolitionist and Civil War colonel, as the series rolls on.June 4: Mount Auburn Connections: Mary Baker Eddy: How her memorial helps us live out the best legacy of a controversial 19th century figure.June 5: Mount Auburn Connections: Cemeteries and the Past: The series concludes with two overt ways and one more subtle one that cemeteries can help us remember.June 6-7: Crowd-sourced Spring Walks: Lots more spring walks and sites shared by fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!June 8: North Carolina Stories: Wilmington and Hope: A Tarheel series starts with the paradoxical but vital urgency of hope.June 9: North Carolina Stories: Thomas Wolfe: The series continues with the ironically forgotten novelist and why we should remember and read him.June 10: North Carolina Stories: Duke Lacrosse: The pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars, as the series rolls on.June 11: North Carolina Stories: North Carolina Basketball: On schadenfreude and the worst and best of collegiate athletics.June 12: North Carolina Stories: Moral Mondays: The series concludes with two complex contexts for the inspiring current protest movement.June 13-14: Playing a Significant Role: In honor of my best friend’s birthday, a special post on role-playing games and their stigmas and value.June 15: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Killing Mister Watson: My annual Beach Reads series kicks off with the atmospheric historical thriller that’s also a lot more.June 16: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Pleasantville: The series continues with a new novel that literally forced its way onto my summer reading list.June 17: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Alexie’s Diary: Three things to know about Sherman Alexie’s young adult classic, as the series rolls on.June 18: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Big Man: The autobiography as messy and entertaining as its larger-than-life author.June 19: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: A Tragic, Compelling Life: The series concludes with a recent book that makes the case for why we should and must get serious at the beach.June 20-21: Crowd-sourced Responses to the Charleston Terrorist Attack: Following up the horrific terrorist attack as Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME church, a handful of the best public scholarly responses to the killings—please add your thoughts and links in comments!June 22: Gordon Parks and America: A Stunning Exhibition: A series inspired by the current, wonderful MFA exhibition opens with a few thoughts on the exhibition’s stunning photos.June 23: Gordon Parks and America: A Photographer’s Life: The series continues with three impressive and exemplary projects from Parks’ long career.June 24: Gordon Parks and America: The Learning Tree: Remembering Parks’ autobiographical novel and even more groundbreaking film version, as the series rolls on.June 25: Gordon Parks and America: Shaft: How Parks helps us understand the problems and the possibilities of the blaxsploitation genre.June 26: Gordon Parks and America: Portrait Photos and the Past: The series concludes with some reflections on what portraits can’t teach us about the past, and what they can.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!