Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 319

June 15, 2015: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Killing Mr. Watson

[Each of the last few years, I’ve helped kick off summer with a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition! Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll put its toes in the sand!]On the atmospheric historical thriller that’s also a lot more.As always I’d welcome any corrections to this opinion in the comments, but I don’t think we’ve really had a great cultural representation of the Everglades yet. Such a unique, evocative American space and landscape, full of prehistoric monsters and uncharted islands and bizarre subcultures, and the closet thing I can think of to a work of art that really engages with that setting in a central way is the film Wild Things (1998; and I know I’m stretching the phrase “work of art” to the breaking point with that one, although it is actually a pretty smart, fun thriller). Even the real-life story of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the woman who almost single-handedly helped save and preserve the Everglades from development and construction in the 1940s and 50s, would make for a compelling novel or screenplay.Well, it turns out that a great historical thriller was indeed written about the ‘Glades a couple decades ago, and somehow I didn’t hear a thing about it until my favorite book recommender sent me a copy earlier this year. That novel is Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson (1990), a historical mystery based on a much-mythologized, almost undocumented figure from the early 20 century and the many Florida lives, families, and communities impacted by his combination of entrepeneurship and outlaw tyranny. Much like Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising, Mattheissen’s novel weds an impressive historical re-creation (of a far more distant time and place than Locke’s 1980s Houston) with page-turning mystery and suspense, making for a pitch-perfect beach read from which you can also learn a lot about this evocative and again under-represented American place and world. If it were just all that, it would be plenty for me to recommend it as the week’s first AmericanStudies Beach Read.But in his inventive and compelling use of perspective and narration, Matthiessen adds another significant layer to his novel. As he moves across the book’s different and characters and communities, Matthiessen creates their first-person perspectives, sometimes in narrations to an outside interviewer, sometimes in written documents, always evoking their individual voices and identities just as fully as he does either Mister Watson or the Everglades setting. These first-person voices are interspersed with glimpses into the saga of that interviewer, investigating Watson and through him exploring these historical worlds and mysteries as a result. Through this structural and stylistic inventiveness, Matthiessen has created a novel that truly captures a wide and deep swath of the identities and communities present in that unique American space, and one that stands as a great American novel without losing any of that page-turning, local color appeal. Now that’s a good beach read! Next Beach Read tomorrow,BenPS. Other Beach Reads you’d share?

June 13-14, 2015: Playing a Significant Role

[In honor of the upcoming birthday of an old friend, this week’s series has focused on histories and stories from the Tarheel State where he lives. This special post pays tribute to that friend and one of the many ways he’s present in my life and identity!]On the stigmas and the scholarly benefits of D&D and other role-playing games.Monday’s the 38th birthday of my oldest and still best friend, Steve Peterson. I mention that partly because it’s past time Steve made an appearance in this space—despite not being a scholarly AmericanStudier per se, Steve has taught me much of what I know about a range of important questions, from friendship and family to taking chances and following life’s unexpected opportunities—but also because it was with Steve that I got into one of my most enduring childhood pursuits: tabletop role-playing games. We didn’t play the best-known such game, Dungeons & Dragons; but most of our gaming was with a system, Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP), that was deeply indebted to D&D (although created by an amazing local Charlottesville company, Iron Crown Enterprises; whether you have ever role-played or not, if you’re a Tolkien fan I can’t recommend strongly enough trying to get your hands on one of ICE’s beautiful and fun companion books about the world of Middle-earth). I’m ashamed to admit that I hesitated a bit in deciding to make role-playing this post’s focal point, and the reason is clear enough: the substantial social stigma that comes with the subject, and really with any reference to Dungeons & Dragons. You’d think that the widespread popularity of video games (including many, such as Skyrim, that owe quite a bit to D&D and its ilk), of fan conventions like Comic-Con, of fantasy literature, films, and television shows, and the like would have changed these narratives, but I don’t believe that it necessarily has: to my mind, and in my experience, cultural references to D&D almost always entail the same tired clichés of socially awkward nerds in their parents’ basements, creating fantasy worlds to escape the tragicomic circumstances of their realities. Moreover, the broader and even more damaging social narratives and fears, of D&D turning teenagers into suicidial or even homicidal outcasts, have likewise remained in play, at times virtually unchanged from the first such stories when D&D was new. There are a variety of ways to pushback on those stigmas and argue instead for social, communal, and individual benefits to role-playing games (including some exemplified by the pieces at those last two links); here, I’ll just highlight two that connect to this blog’s focus on scholarly questions. For one thing, role-playing games require consistent leaps of imagination in a way that differentiates them from many other toys or games—on the part of the game-master, the person in charge of creating the world and scenarios and guiding the other players into and (to a degree) through it; but also from all those players, who have to both respond to what’s unfolding in front of them and yet create their own stories and futures. And for another, the specific experience of being the game-master—of creating that world and its different narratives, of conveying it to the players, and yet then of being required to adjust and shift it as the game plays out, and even to scrap any or all of it in favor of where the players are going and of producing the most fun and meaningful experience as a result—was, to my mind, about the best training for teaching I could have ever gotten. Just another reason to thank Steve, who, along with MERP, prepared me pretty well for this crucial part of my career and life.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Happy birthday, buddy!

June 12, 2015: North Carolina Stories: Moral Mondays

[In honor of the upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories in comments, y’all!]On two complementary contexts for an inspiring protest movement.Just over two years ago, in April 2013, a number of North Carolina religious and political leaders, including NAACP chairperson and reverend William Barber, began organizing weekly civil disobedience activities known as Moral Mondays. Outraged at a number of extreme laws passed by the state’s newly-elected GOP majority in the state legislature and signed by Governor Pat McCrory, including restrctions on voting rights, cuts to numerous social and educational programs, and the repeal of the state’s ground-breaking Racial Justice Act, these progressive activists organized sit-ins at the legislature, marches and protests, and other civil actions in Raleigh that subsequently spread, both across the state and then to other neighboring states and beyond. Originally intended to end that same summer, the Moral Monday protests have instead continued and expanded, and are still going strong as we near the summer of 2015.The obvious and important context for Moral Mondays is the Civil Rights Movement, for which these protests seem like a clear 21st century parallel: not only because they have been led by African American leaders and have frequently focused on issues of or closely related to race, but also and even more importantly because of their reliance on strategies of civil disobedience, passive resistance, and other hallmarks of the Civil Rights movement. I call those latter Civil Rights parallels more important because much of the time, contemporary social and cultural movements such as #BlackLivesMatterhave been critiqued by their opponents as being more divisive or violent than the Civil Rights Movement’s protests. While of course many of those critics are hypocrites who would have opposed the Civil Rights Movement just as strenuously, and for whom no contemporary arguments would change their perspective, many others might benefit from a greater awareness of just how fully current movements echo that prior one—with Moral Mondays being a prime example.There’s a second, just as significant historical context for Moral Mondays, however. In this April piece for the great We’re Historysite , I argued that we need to include in our collective memories a much fuller sense of the progressive side within American Christianity, the ways in which our most conservative or exclusionary religious views have been consistently counter-balanced by liberal, inclusive, activist forms of religious community. In an era when Christian activism is most frequently associated with discriminatory efforts like the “Religious Freedom” laws to which I was responding in that piece, it’s more important than ever to note that there are likewise ongoing expressions of progressive religion, movements that wed spirituality and faith to social justice and reform. From their very name on to every aspect of their history, purpose, and leadership, North Carolina’s Moral Mondays represent such a progressive spiritual movement—just one more reason why we should include these activist efforts in any and all conversations about contemporary American politics.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?

June 11, 2015: North Carolina Stories: North Carolina Basketball

[In honor of the upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories in comments, y’all!]On schadenfreude, bigger problems, and the need to keep an open mind.As a lifelong fan of the University of Virginia’s sports teams, I have to admit that the recent, ongoing allegations against and investigations into Roy Williams’ men’s basketball program at the University of North Carolina have prompted some serious feelings of schadenfreude. Partly that’s just sour grapes, of course; outside of the brief mid-1980s window of Ralph Sampson’s heyday, UNC has consistently dominated UVa in men’s basketball, and the childhood traumas of repeated sports butt-kickings tend to linger. But while Virginia is of course not an Ivy League school in its approach to athletics, it nonetheless felt, to this Virginia at least, that UNC represented a more aggressively cynical athletic powerhouse, a university where the “student athletes” tended to be even further removed from the official definition of that category. So I can’t lie, stories about rampant cheating and malpractice at UNC have resonated satisfyingly with the me who will forever be about 10 years old.Yet the me who is 37 years old and an analytical AmericanStudier to boot believes that the details of UNC’s academic fraud and programmatic skirting of the rules and other violations represent, as do pretty much all such revelations about college athletics, much more of an example of trends taking place around the country than an anomaly. If that’s true, if we would find similar or at least parallel efforts at numerous other big-time college sports programs, than simply punishing UNC, necessary as such a response no doubt is, might well become at the same time an elision of the bigger problems, indeed would serve as an implicit argument that UNC’s particular program rather than the NCAA in every way comprises the problem. Seen through this lens, efforts to unionize college athletes such as the one underway at Northwestern thus become far more significant collective responses, and the ones on which we should focus our communal attention as much as possible. And then there’s Dean Smith. For permanently 10 year old me, Smith was the symbol of all I despised about North Carolina basketball. Yet when Smith passed away earlier this year, I had the opportunity to learn a number of striking stories and histories about which I, to my shame and perhaps because of that instinctive antipathy toward Smith, had previously known nothing. Such stories, including both of the ones hyperlinked previously in this paragraph as well as this amazing Twitter story, make clear that Smith represented the best of what college sports can include and mean, as well as just a genuinely inspiring and influential-in-the-best-sense American life. As I’ve written before in this space, being willing to admit all the things I don’t know is as vital to my evolving AmericanStudying as any other element or perspective, and I’m very happy to say that my ignorance about Dean Smith has been replaced by a more knowledgable, and far more beneficial, awareness of just how much we can learn from this North Carolina basketball icon.Last Carolina story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?

June 10, 2015: North Carolina Stories: Duke Lacrosse

[In honor of the upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories in comments, y’all!]On the pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars.There’s a school of revisionist historical scholarship that actively seeks to recover and portray the less attractive (or, to put it more bluntly, bad) sides of idealized public figures and events, to tear down (for example) some of the “great men” on whom historiography long depended. I think that kind of revisionism was never as widespread as its critics would argue, and is largely absent from contemporary work; but it certainly was a prominent part of the field in the 1970s/80s era, accompanying (if not necessarily caused by) the rise of multiculturalism. And while I find it too simplistic in its attitudes toward its subjects—mirroring, ironically, the mythologizing of the “great man” narrative and its ilk—I also understand and to an extent agree with the rationale behind such revision. After all, when the pendulum has been located so consistently on one side of its arc, it almost has to swing all the way to the other if a full trajectory is ever to be achieved.But when the pendulum swings, it has effects in the present as well as on our sense of the past—contemporary impacts that are just as understandable but that also have the potential for more genuine damage. Exemplifying that possibility would be the infamous Duke lacrosse case, the 2006 incident in which three white members of that team were accused of rape by a young African American woman (a student at nearby North Central Carolina University) who had attended (and likely stripped at) a house party. In an earlier era, perhaps even a couple decades earlier, the privileged white male students would have been given the benefit of the doubt, and it would have been very difficult to charge them with assaulting an African American woman; in this case, thanks in part to that swinging pendulum and to other factors (including an overzealous and unethical prosecutor), it was the woman whose story received that benefit, despite substantial evidence in favor of the lacrosse players’ stories. More than a year later, long after the team’s 2006 season had been canceled, the coach forced to resign, and so on, the state’s Attorney General dropped all charges against the three players and the prosecutor was disbarred; the fallout from the case has continued in a variety of forms since.One of the more controversial aspects of the case were the actions of the so-called Group of 88, a group of Duke faculty members who co-signed an advertisement (which appeared in the Duke Chronicle but is no longer available online) addressing both the case and broader issues of racism and sexism on campus. As a public scholar, one who works to address contemporary as well as historical issues and themes, I’d be a hypocrite to critique any other scholars for doing the same. On the other hand, by addressing an ongoing investigation and trial, and moreover one that involved students at their own institution, these faculty members did reflect, at least in part, one of the dangers as the pendulum swings—that too overt revisionism does not allow for the kinds of thoughtful and nuanced analyses that scholars would otherwise bring to their work. A statement addressing issues of sexism and racism in general, on the other other hand, would be a perfect example of how public scholars can engage with the broader issues at stake in any event, while reserving judgment on the specifics of a case and hopefully in the process contributing to communal and analytical narratives rather than divisive accusations.Next Carolina story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?

June 9, 2015: North Carolina Stories: Thomas Wolfe

[In honor of the upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories in comments, y’all!]On the largely, ironically forgotten author who deserves to be remembered and read.A few years back, I wrote a series on AmericanStudies connections found in a US Airways Magazine. Just after a feature on Charlottes, the magazine included a briefer piece on various historic sites elsewhere in North Carolina. A few of them are connected to Asheville, the Western North Carolina, mountain city that has provided hotel stays and getaways for many prominent Americans (including multiple presidents at George Vanderbilt’s enormous Biltmore House) over the last century and more. Unmentioned among those references, however, is the modernist American novelist who grew up in Asheville and whose mother made her living in the city’s booming early 20th century real estate and boarding businesses: Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s absence from the article is unsurprising, as he has I would argue largely been forgotten in the 65 years since his tragic early death; but it’s also both ironic and unfortunate.The irony of Wolfe’s elision, both from our collective memories and from an article on North Carolina, is that he was, as much as any American author, deeply concerned with the question of how and whether an artist—or anyone—can both remain part of and escape from his home and past. The original subtitle of his novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was A Story of the Buried Life, and the novel begins with a fragmented quote that includes the lines “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language” and “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Throughout, Wolfe’s hugely autobiographical novel engages both backwards—into his own, his family’s, his city’s, and the national pasts—and forwards, wondering whether its protagonist can unearth those pasts, will become himself buried in the process, should instead move on into a more separate future, and so on. Five years later, Wolfe would explore those same themes again, from some of the same yet also very distinct angles, in You Can’t Go Home Again (1934). For this author to be absent from most of our national narratives of modernist writers, American literature, or even his home state is, again, powerfully ironic.But it’s more than that: it’s a shame. Even in his own lifetime, Wolfe struggled with his editors over his sprawling and difficult style, and found limited (or at least more limited than he otherwise might have) audiences and successes as a result. Yet it seems to me that Wolfe’s style is as entirely interconnected with his content and themes as were those of his fellow modernists Hemingway and Faulkner; while it’s fair to say that Wolfe’s was not as influential as either of theirs, I would also argue that the experience of reading his can be just as rewarding and meaningful on its own terms. Moreover, while some of Hemingway’s characters and stories feel more focused on European experiences and some of Faulkner’s more specific to the South, Wolfe’s works are, to my mind, profoundly representative of shared American (and perhaps human) questions, both from that early twentieth century moment and from across all our generations and communities. Time to put him back on the map, I’d say.Next Carolina story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?

June 8, 2015: North Carolina Stories: Wilmington and Hope

[In honor of the upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories in comments, y’all!]On the counter-intuitive but real and important urgency and immediacy of hope.Hope can seem like a long-term proposition, an emphasis on the need for such overarching, big-picture thinking when the present’s immediate circumstances feel untenable or at least unchangeable. Certainly I would agree that hope does entail and require an ability to look beyond the specifics or details of any one moment or situation, to consider what might be possible and different tomorrow as long as we don’t let those individual moments and situations become all-encompassing. But on the other hand, I think there can be a real danger in the idea that hope takes time to come to fruition, that we have to be willing and able to wait for it; sometimes perhaps there’s no other way, but in many circumstances, as the old saying goes, waiting gives the devil time, allows the worst of the present to become hardened into something set and even more difficult to change.In my very first post on this blog, I wrote about the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina massacre and coup, one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history; at the end of that post, I linked to a letter sent by an anonymous African American woman to President McKinley, pleading for federal intervention as the massacre’s violence and horrors continued into the weeks beyong Election Day. In the face of some of the most desperate circumstances ever to face a community, the letter expresses not only the despair and pain and frustration and terror that she and all of her peers were feeling, but also in its very existence a profound hope; that is, her choice to write and send the letter speaks to her hope, spoken “from the depths of my heart,” that she can reach her nation’s government and its highest elected representative, that her voice and experiences can change the course of history and save her community. Of all the tragedies surrounding this American low point, none is more tragic than the simple fact that her hopes were not rewarded; McKinley and the federal government did nothing, and the events in Wilmington continued to run their horrific course.There are a number of things we could learn from Wilmington, if we better remembered it, and certainly many of them are bleak; high on that list would be the simple fact that the federal government, like the national media and much of white America, was all too willing to accept and even support the white supremacist stories of events such as Wilmington. But from McKinley and company’s inaction we can also learn just how often and how much hope must be met by action, as urgently and immediately as that hope demands. As I wrote in that earlier post, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901), the novel inspired by the Wilmington events that is also my favorite American novel and one of the two with which my book will open, ends with a moment of almost utopian hope that precisely captures this dynamic: the novel’s final line, which I can quote without spoiling the details, is “There’s time enough, but none to spare.” The sentence’s first clause is indeed a profoundly hopeful one, in the face of the many horrors that have preceded it; and the second, despite the “but” formulation, to my mind complements it, suggesting that the hope will not endure if it is not acted upon and made into something more concrete and lasting. The arc of history might be long, but sometimes both history and hope require immediacy as well.Next Carolina story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Carolinian histories or stories you'd share?

June 6-7, 2015: Crowd-sourced Spring Walks and Sites

[If you’re in New England, there are few more beautiful spots for a spring walk than Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. In this week’s series, I’ve highlighted a few American connections for this unique site and all it includes. This crowd-sourced walk moves through the responses of fellow AmericanStudiers to those posts and other spaces they shared—add yours in comments, please!]On Facebook, Monday’s post received a number of responses, including from such knowledgable Mount AuburnStudiers as Rob Velella and the Friends of Mount Auburn!Also on FB, Ian James writes, “I live in Medford and we have a beautiful preserve, the Middlesex Fells. In addition to great trails, shade, and some wildlife, it has a tower on a high hill. From the tower you can look in two directions to see Boston clearly, or in two other directions to see wilderness as far as the horizon.”Andrew DaSilva highlights, “Nickerson State Park in Brewster, the Cape Cod Bike Trails, Nauset Beach in Orleans, Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, the conservation trails all around the Brewster Natural History Museum, Commercial Street in Provincetown, Castle Island in Boston Harbor (great for kite flying), Scargo Tower in Dennis, Purgatory Chasm in Sutton, and last but not least the Keystone Arches in Westfield. I think that about gives ya a taste of what this great Commonwealth has to offer.”Rob Gosselin argues, “Take the commuter rail to North Station. Take the T to Copley Square. Visit at the Boston Public Library. Check out some artwork and have a coffee in the courtyard. One of Boston's best spots. Then walk up Dartmouth Street to Beacon Street. Take a right. Walk all the way up Beacon, past the Boston Public Garden and Boston Common. Have a picnic on the common. Then take a tour of the State House. Catch the T back to North Station. Then write about it on the way home. I've done this dozens of times, and each time I end up writing something totally different.”Also lots of great Twitter ideas to share:Ann Little notes that “Independence National Park was only lightly trafficked last Friday morning—we got 9:30 tour tickets for Independence Hall at 9:10.”Joseph Adelman writes, “I’m always a fan of the Freedom Trail, and the weather is supposed to be beautiful in Boston finally! And as my students know, I also recommend a stop at Mike’s Pastryon the way back.”Cynthia Lynn Lyerly shares a ton of great New England options: “The Black Heritage Trail in Boston. Breakheart Reservation (nature).  Mt. Auburn for both history and nature. If you have a full day—Nantucket is amazing (with a Black Heritage Trailtoo), and so is New Bedford Whaling Museum. And for Gilded Age, those Newport Mansions are not well contextualized, but I think everybody gets that they had too much money.” She adds, “I forgot Deerfield!  Haven't been to Old Sturbridge but that's on the agenda this year. Concord is great for Revolutionary War buffs.”Ian Delahanty says “Yes to the New Bedford Whaling Museum! Nearby is a monument for New Bedford’s soldiers in the 54th and 55thMassachusetts.” He also highlights the “Blue Hills and Middlesex Fells reservations, and in Western MA, Mount Greylock, which gave Melville inspiration for Moby Dick.”A Tweeter for the Fitchburg Historical Societywrites, “I like Fitchburg's Steamline Trail...also, the Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge: you walk on the old Union turnpike.”Mike Rogers shares sites for Indianapolis: “Crown Hill Cemetery(James Whitcomb Riley, President Benjamin Harrison), the cemetery’s Civil war section, the Soldiers & Sailors Monument, the World War Memorial, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other responses and/or spaces you’d share?

June 5, 2015: Mount Auburn Connections: Cemeteries and the Past

[If you’re in New England, there are few more beautiful spots for a spring walk than Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. In this series, I’ll highlight a few American connections for this unique site and all it includes. Please share your thoughts, on this site and any other beautiful or evocative spaces you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend walk!]On two overt ways cemeteries can add to our collective memories, and one very subtle way.As my posts this week have illustrated, Mount Auburn Cemetery is one of America’s most carefully designed, planned, and constructed cemeteries, as much a public memorial and site as a place to bury and remember those who have passed away. Yet in truth, even the most seemingly simple cemeteries are also designed and constructed, are the product of planned efforts to create such sites of rest and remembrance. Whether their planners were individuals, families, communities, government entities, religious institutions, the military, or some other forces, they in any case thus provide significant opportunities for us to consider the attitudes, ideologies, time periods, and worlds of those behind them. Indeed, there are few such spaces more consistently present in American communities, nor many that go as far back into our past, and thus we cannot ignore what cemeteries have to teach us without losing a unique archive of primary texts as a result.Such primary texts also exist within each and every cemetery, in the form of the tombstones, crypts, monoliths, monuments, engravings, and many other forms through which families and communities remember those who have passed. Even a brief walk around Mount Auburn, for example, makes clear that the stones and engravings for even the cemetery’s most private individuals (ie, not the famous ones like Shaw and Eddy on whom earlier posts this week have focused) are complex, compelling, rich repositories of lives, identities, families, historical perspectives, and more. The sad but inevitable reality, of course, is that many of the cemetery’s oldest stones are rapidly fading (if they have not already done so), a problem that is only amplified at the nation’s much older cemeteries like Plymouth’s Cole’s Hill Burial Ground (first built in 1620!). Which is to say, this particular archive of American primary sources is a time-sensitive one, making it all the more important that we recognize what we can learn from these public sites and engage with them while we can.In both those sweeping and intimate ways, cemeteries represent a vital AmericanStudies resource. Yet at the same time, it’s important to note that most of our communal cemeteries don’t include or engage with some of the American histories most in need of better collective memory. From slaves to Native Americans, Chinese railroad workers to South Seas sailors, and many other cultures, oppressed or marginalized American communities have far too often been excluded from our shared cemeteries, forcing them to create far more easily overlooked or destroyed resting places. Perhaps the best single example of this exclusion is the absence of the Salem Witch Trials’ victims from the city’s main burial ground, an absence foregrounded pitch-perfectly by the adjacent Witch Trials Memorial. In this way too cemeteries have a great deal to teach us about our past—but this particular lesson requires attention to what’s not in our cemeteries as well as what is, a complex, easily overlooked, but crucial complement to AmericanStudying beautiful resting places like Mount Auburn Cemetery.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Perspectives on Mount Auburn, or other sites or spaces you’d share?

June 4, 2015: Mount Auburn Connections: Mary Baker Eddy

[If you’re in New England, there are few more beautiful spots for a spring walk than Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. In this series, I’ll highlight a few American connections for this unique site and all it includes. Please share your thoughts, on this site and any other beautiful or evocative spaces you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend walk!]On how her Mount Auburn memorial helps us think about a controversial, pioneering American.There’s no shortage of Boston-area public and historic sites that can help us remember the life and impact of reformer and Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. First and foremost, there’s the downtown Boston Christian Science Plaza, featuring the Mary Baker Eddy Library, the publishing offices of the Christian Science Monitor , some seriously impressive architecture, a beautiful reflecting pool, and the unique and fun Mapparium. If you want to get more intimately acquainted with Eddy’s life and times, in the Chestnut Hill area of neighboring Newton there’s the Mary Baker Eddy historic home, one of eight such Eddy housesscattered across Massachusetts and New Hampshire. And if want to do your own private reflecting and contemplating, the city features numerous Christian Science Reading Rooms, including the first such space that was founded back in 1888 and remains in operation today.Those are all interesting spaces, but of course all in one way or another are run by the Church of Christ, Scientist, meaning that they offer a relatively non-critical, if not indeed celebratory, perspective on Eddy and the movement she founded. To be clear, and despite the similarity in names, Eddy’s church is certainly not to my mind on the level of a cult or scam like L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. Yet at the same time, Christian Science has some definitely problematic elements, most especially in its general rejection of medical care and treatments. While that perspective has some clear late 19th and early 20th century roots and significance, I don’t have a lot of patience with it in the early 21st century—especially when it comes to parents refusing care for their children, who of course are not yet capable of making such decisions for themselves. Almost all organized religions involve one form or another of indoctrinating children into their mix, of course; but when such indoctrinations can result in unnecessary illness or death, they become particularly troubling.So as an organized religion or doctrine, and most especially as a multi-generational movement, Christian Science at least requires more critical engagement than that provided by its own Boston-area spaces and sites. But it’s worth recognizing that the movement and its ideas can also operate on a more individual level: asking individuals to do their own reflecting on such significant topics as faith and science, belief and education, just as Eddy herself did throughout her life. All religions likewise offer space for such individual contemplations—but in its emphasis on reading and reflection, Christian Science is particularly appropriate as a means for encouraging such practices. I can think of few Boston spaces more suited for reflection and contemplation than Mount Auburn Cemetery, and there are few Mount Auburn spots more perfect than the Mary Baker Eddy memorial. But don’t take my word for it—if you’re in the area on a beautiful spring day (or any other time), stop by the memorial and see what reflections come to you!Last connection of mine tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sites or spaces you’d share?