Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 327

March 12, 2015: Jazzy Connections: Charlie Parker’s Death

[Inspired by today’s anniversary of Charlie Parker’s death, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying some figures and issues related to the very American musical genre of jazz. Please share your own responses and thoughts for a swinging crowd-sourced weekend post!]On what is lost when a genius dies far too young—and what endures, now more than ever.For one of my non-favorites posts last year, I wrote about Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, and specifically about our tendency to romanticize the lives and arcs of talented artists who self-destruct and die too young. Jazz has its share of such artists and stories as well, and none looms larger than Charlie “Bird” (or “Yardbird”) Parker, the virtuouso be-bop saxophonist and composer (a forty-minute recording, to be clear, but worth every second of your time) who died on this date sixty years ago at the tragically young age of 34. Parker’s official causes of death were pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but he was also suffering from chronic cirrhosis and heart problems as a result of his long-term (if apparently by that time overcome) addictions to heroin and alcohol, and it thus seems fair to me (although I’m not that kind of doctor) to lump him in with other talented musicians and artists whose self-destructive tendencies contributed to their far too early deaths.In the non-favorites post, I was perhaps overly hard on Morrison and Cobain, especially in terms of my sense that their music has been over-rated. Because in truth, one of the most tragic things about such youthful deaths (at least on the communal level—of course the loss to their families, loved ones, and friends is the most tragic thing) is that we are denied the chance to see how these artists and their voices and talents evolve, grow, and deepen over time. If I try to imagine, for example, the career of my own personal favorite, Bruce Springsteen, if it had ended in the mid to late 1970s (when he was about the ages at which Morrison, Parker, and Cobain died), it would be far less rich and impressive, diverse and influential. Similarly, another artist whom I highlighted in a non-favorites post this year, Elvis Presley, died at the still-youthful age of 42, robbing us of the same chance when it came to his own later decades and works. When I think about where all these artists might have gone in their subsequent efforts, what new and important works they could have created, such losses become, collectively, one of the greatest tragedies in American culture and history.Those losses and that tragedy are unmistakable, and nothing I write here can blunt their edge. But at the same time, one of the most important things about art and culture is that they endure beyond the life of any individual artist, or any generation or period—all of which, of course, whether early or late, tragic or inevitable, end. That’s always been true, as evidenced by the remarkable fact that around this time in the semester I’ll be teaching a five hundred year old Shakespeare play in my Intro to Lit Theory course. But in our increasingly digital 21st century moment, art’s endurance—and more exactly our ability to find and connect to art—has never been more apparent. As of the moment of this writing, a YouTube search for “Charlie Parker” produces “about 202,000 results,” most of which lead to interesting and exciting performances, compositions, and works. No one of course could possibly watch and listen to all those results—not without some sort of NEH grant and a lot of coffee, anyway—but the opportunity to check out even a few, and thus to connect to the life and work of one of jazz’s greatest talents, gone too soon but still with us in so many ways, is something to be prized.Last jazzy connection tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Jazzy connections you’d share?

March 11, 2015: Jazzy Connections: Whites and the Harlem Renaissance

[Inspired by the anniversary of Charlie Parker’s death—on which more in Thursday’s post—this week I’ll be AmericanStudying some figures and issues related to the very American musical genre of jazz. Please share your own responses and thoughts for a swinging crowd-sourced weekend post!]On white America’s troubling and exploitative yet potentially productive obsession with black culture.The trope of African American cultural trends entering the American mainstream through white imitations is a very familiar one: from the high five to graffitito rap music, and right up through twerking and numerous other 2014 trends, the pattern is as clear as it is consistent. Yet I don’t know that the pattern was ever more central to American culture and society than in the 1920s heyday of the Jazz Age, a period overtly named (by none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, natch) for an African American cultural genre. Obviously New York City only comprises one part of America, and Harlem only one neighborhood within that city—yet as the endurance of Fitzgerald’s name for the era suggests, the entire period came to be and often still is associated with precisely that city and community; and more exactly, I would argue, with the large crowds of (mostly) white Americans who descended on Harlem to enjoy its jazz clubs and scene.No single figure better encapsulates that trend than Carl Van Vechten, who rose to fame as a patron and photographer of the Harlem Renaissance, and no single work does so more clearly than his novel Nigger Heaven (1926). As that excellent linked New Yorker article indicates, Van Vechten knew full well that his title would be a controversial one, and went ahead with it anyway—partly, it seems, because of his belief that he had “succeeded in getting into most of the important sets” of Harlem African Americans (as he wrote in a 1925 letter to his friend Gertrude Stein about the novel-in-progress), and thus that he had a pass to use such a word; and partly, I would argue, because he knew that the title would draw more attention to the novel, and thus help it make a significant splash (which it certainly did). Which is to say, even though Van Vechten undoubtedly and genuinely supported the Harlem Renaissance and the broader Harlem community, it seems clear to me that he likewise exploited the place and its art and identity to advance his own career and success.Yet at the same time, it’s difficult to argue that the Harlem Renaissance, and specifically the period’s jazz artists and performers, did not benefit significantly from the interest both illustrated and generated by folks like Van Vechten. In order for musicians and artists to survive and succeed, after all, they need enough support (of all kinds), as well as the kinds of publicity and attention that can increase audience awareness and support. I don’t know that Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Duke Ellington, and their many 1920s peers could have gained enough support from within the Harlem or African American communities alone to achieve the broad and deep levels of success, prominence, and influence that they did—and I do know that American music, culture, and identity would be significantly impoverished if it did not include those artists and many others. That effect doesn’t in any way mean we can’t still analyze and, if appropriate, critique the attitudes and actions of Van Vechten or any of those Jazz Age white audiences; but as we do so, it seems to me that we must also thank them for doing their part to help bring these jazz artists, and their community and period, into our collective consciousness and national story so fully.Next jazzy connection tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Jazzy connections you’d share?

March 10, 2015: Jazzy Connections: Jazz Literature

[Inspired by the anniversary of Charlie Parker’s death—on which more in Thursday’s post—this week I’ll be AmericanStudying some figures and issues related to the very American musical genre of jazz. Please share your own responses and thoughts for a swinging crowd-sourced weekend post!]Three engaging and important examples of jazz’s influence on American literature.1)      Langston Hughes’s Jazz Poetry: As I wrote in that post on Hughes’s Collected Poems, his voice, style, and themes can’t be reduced to any one element or influence. Yet as illustrated by his important essay “Bop,” Hughes was deeply interested in jazz and its many variations, and that interest manifested itself in a good deal of his poetry. Take, for example, the complex short work “Dream Boogie,” the opening part of Hughes’s book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). “Dream Boogie” both uses and analyzes the sounds, rhythms, and styles of “bop,” and in the process makes a subtle but compelling case for the genre’s social and cultural significance as well as its aesthetic appeals.2)      The Prologue of Invisible Man (1952): The Prologue of Ralph Ellison’s titantic mid-century novel has much to do as the rest of that sweeping book, but is anchored by a recurring allusion to one specific text: Louis Armstrong’s “Black and Blue” (1929). In a Prologue—and a novel—defined so fully by metaphors and allegories, Ellison’s use of Armstrong’s song does two important things: illustrating how jazz specifically and African American art more broadly have likewise utilized such extended metaphors; yet at the same time grounding his metaphors and symbols in a song and sound that are quite potently concrete and real. When he ends his Prologue with the question, “But what did I do to be so blue?,” Ellison is thus reiterating how much the allusion, the song, and jazz itself can tell us about his narrator’s American story and identity.3)      Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992): Morrison’s historical novel, set in the 1920s (a period seen and defined as the height of jazz’s popularity and influence in America) in Harlem (the locus of those trends), has a great deal to say about that time and place, the potency yet also potential problems of jazz as both a cultural form and a way of life, and how those things connect to the long arcs of African American and American history. But it also offers a successful prose equivalent to Hughes’s jazz poetry, a fictional style that includes improvisation, call and response, and other hallmarks of the musical genre. Taken together, these three works trace jazz’s literary presence and influence across the 20th century.Next jazzy connection tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Jazzy connections you’d share?

March 9, 2015: Jazzy Connections: Scott Joplin

[Inspired by the anniversary of Charlie Parker’s death—on which more in Thursday’s post—this week I’ll be AmericanStudying some figures and issues related to the very American musical genre of jazz. Please share your own responses and thoughts for a swinging crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the musical and the cultural legacies of the hugely influential composer.I’ve written before about the unavoidably cross-cultural origins of rock and roll in America, the ways in which the histories of even an individual hit song (much less artists, groups, recording studios, and so on) were connected to African American blues singers, Jewish American songwriters, European American guitarists and performers, and so on. When it comes to the PS. What do you think? Jazzy connections you’d share?

March 7-8, 2015: James Fallows on Forgotten 21st Century Wars

[Two hundred years ago this week, the U.S. declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the unremembered conflict about which I wrote in Monday’s post. That Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history, and for this series I’ve highlighted and analyzed others, leading up to this special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model AmericanStudiers.]On how and why we’ve managed to forget one of our most visible communities.Given the amount of news and media coverage dedicated to the American military, it would seem preposterous to suggest that we have in any way forgotten that national community. But in his extremely impressive recent Atlantic cover story “The Tragedy of the American Military,” writer and journalist James Fallowsmakes the case that we have in some key ways done just that. To quote the start of his first main section, “This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not.” And shortly thereafter Fallows ties this argument to both the specialized nature of our current volunteer military (noting that many more Americans now live on farms than serve in the military) and, most relevantly to my mind, the distant nature of our 21st century wars. “As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not.  A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.”The whole piece is challenging, provocative, and well worth your time, and I wanted to use this weekend post to link to it. But I also wanted to suggest a connection between my week’s series and these current acts of collective forgetting or elision. That is, it seems highly relevant to me that we tend to remember well—or remember at all—those wars for which we can develop relatively clear and coherent narratives, and that can make us feel good about their outcomes and effects in the process: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II. The obvious and definite exception is the Vietnam War, which forced its way into our collective consciousness for a variety of reasons—the innovative media coverage it included, the protests and divisions it spawned, the generation of filmmakers it inspired—and has remained there. But while Vietnam narratives certainly don’t tend to make us feel good, I would argue that they have likewise become clear and coherent, a shared set of images and stories through which we understand that conflict. Whereas when we have not developed such a set of narratives, as I would argue we have not for any of the wars on which I have focused this week—and, perhaps, we have not for our contemporary wars—we have a far more difficult time remembering or engaging with them at all.So am I suggesting that what we need is more established narratives of these forgotten histories, past and present? I’m not—if anything, as I’ve written elsewhere, I think our established narratives of wars like World War II themselves need challenging and complicating. No, I’m suggesting the opposite: that if we better remember the messier past wars, the histories that can’t be reduced to images or narratives nearly as easily or neatly, it might well make it more possible to remember and engage with our contemporary messy wars as well. And thus, to come back to Fallows’ main point, to remember and engage with the lives and experiences of all those Americans who have participated in those wars—not just in the sweeping and superficial “Support the troops” way, but in all their more complex, messy, and human stories and details. Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?

March 6, 2015: Forgotten Wars: Remembering the Sand Creek Massacre

[Two hundred years ago this week, the U.S. declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the unremembered conflict about which I wrote in Monday’s post. That Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history, and I’ll also highlight and AmericanStudy others for the remainder of the week’s posts. Leading up to a special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model AmericanStudiers.]Three impressive sites and pieces on the 150th anniversary of an event that seriously complicates any easy or simplistically good-and-evil narratives of the Civil War:1)      The Colorado Commemoration Commission’s official site;2)      Ned Blackhawk’simpressive New York Times op ed on why and how we should remember the massacre;3)      And an NPR story on the Colorado governor’s apology, and how it reflects some of our contemporary engagement with these histories.Special post this weekend,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?

March 5, 2015: Forgotten Wars: The Occupations of Nicaragua

[Two hundred years ago this week, the U.S. declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the unremembered conflict about which I wrote in Monday’s post. That Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history, and I’ll also highlight and AmericanStudy others for the remainder of the week’s posts. Leading up to a special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model AmericanStudiers.]On two conflicts that are all too representative, and how to remember them specifically nonetheless.In one of the many snarky and pointed footnotes in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), Junot Díaz (or perhaps his narrator Yunior, it’s never quite clear who authors those footnotes and cases can be made for either man) writes, of the 1965-1966 U.S. invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic, that “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.” The same could be said of many other 20thcentury U.S. occupations, including another of the Dominican Republic (between 1916 and 1924), a handful of occupations of Cuba between the Spanish American War and the Communist Revolution, and of course the South Asian conflicts in both the Philippines and (most famously and most frequently compared to Iraq) Vietnam. Indeed, few histories seem as consistently central to the American Century as the occupying, conflicted, controversial, enduring presence of U.S. military forces around the globe.In many ways, the 1909-1910and 1912-1925 U.S. occupations of Nicaragua simply exemplify those enduring histories. Just look at some of the quotes from those relevant years on the Stanford timeline at that first link: “U.S. troops impose a puppet government”; the puppet ruler “requests U.S. military assistance to control civil unrest,” but “Nicaraguans resist U.S. occupation and the national hero, Benjamin Zeledón, dies”; as a result of their presence in the nation “the U.S. acquires the right to build” canals and naval bases there, “provoking anti-North American sentiment and guerilla warfare in Nicaragua, and eliciting protests from other Central American countries”; “when U.S. forces withdraw, rebellions ensue; the marines return to quell the disturbances”; and so on and so forth. Four different presidents, from both parties, led the U.S. during those decades, but in Nicaragua, as in so many other places around the world before and since, the story remained the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as our French friends (no strangers to 20thcentury international occupations themselves, of course) might put it.Yet at the same time, lumping all such international occupations together is a limited and ultimately problematic thing to do: for lots of reasons, but mostly because it reduces these specific situations and histories, and even more so these individual nations and communities, to interchangeable parts of an ongoing pattern. Take Benjamin Zeledón, for example, the lawyer, politican, and military leader who was killed by U.S. Marines in 1912, at the age of 33, while leading the fight to depose the U.S.-backed (and perceived U.S. puppet) President Adolfo Díaz. Zeledón seems to have a great deal in common with José Martí, but with one crucial difference: Martí led Cuba’s fight against Spanish occupation, aligning him with the U.S. (as did his prior years of exile in America); while Zeledón’s battle was against U.S. occupiers and their Nicaraguan allies. Perhaps that’s one reason why nearly all of the web pieces I could find on Zeledón, including the two to which I’ve linked above, are written in Spanish; remembering this man and his story, including it in our U.S. histories, would force us to think about the effects of our Nicaraguan occupations in a tangible and unsettling way. I’d say it’s long past time we did so.Last forgotten war tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?

March 4, 2015: Forgotten Wars: The Aroostook War

[Two hundred years ago this week, the U.S. declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the unremembered conflict about which I wrote in Monday’s post. That Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history, and I’ll also highlight and AmericanStudy others for the remainder of the week’s posts. Leading up to a special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model AmericanStudiers.]On national history, local history, and lumberjacks.I wrote a paragraph about the 1839 Aroostook War in this 2012 post on complex American histories of territorial conflict and expansion, and argued there for that forgotten and bloodless war’s significant national and international connections and legacies. Much like the far more extended, violent, and famous (if inaccurately remembered) Mexican American War, the Aroostook War helped determine a border that has become a permanent part of the national and continental landscape. And its culminating Webster-Ashburton Treaty likewise illustrated and amplified the period’s international policing of the continuing, illegal slave trade, giving the war, like the state of Maine in which it took place, a promiment role to play in the era’s tensions over slavery and gradual moves toward sectional division and the Civil War.Better remembering (or rather remembering at all) this forgotten war would thus help us engage with a number of significant 19th century, national and international histories. Yet just as no history of the Mexican American War can ignore the much more specific local histories at play, neither can we tell the story of the Aroostook War without a deep engagement with particular details of Northern Maine, New Brunswick, and their environment and world. Or rather with one specific such detail: timber, the vital natural resource that was and still is found in particular abundance and quality in precisely the disputed territories between those northeastern regions. If we have to understand the period’s two Barbary Wars as centrally defined by and illustrating international relationships and histories (as I have argued in the week’s prior two posts), then it seems just as clear that, its national and international consequences and meanings notwithstanding, the Aroostook War was the era’s (and perhaps American history’s) most local conflict, the most driven by issues and realities present on the ground in (and to a degree only in) the specific area in question.Plus, lumberjacks. From one of the most prominent mythological representations of American identity (and his big blue ox) to the unique and popular sports competition show that has become a mainstay of ESPN’s non-major-sport coverage, lumberjacks have occupied a longstanding place in our collective consciousness. Yet despite that cultural presence, I don’t know of any well-known American histories that include this community or allow us to engage with what they have contributed to our national story and identity. Well, the Aroostook War provides just such a history and opportunity, one that can also help us locate historical lumberjacks in the central role they played in the development of the Industrial Revolution in America (and around the world). After all, there’s a reason why both the U.S. and Britain were so desperate to lay claim to those disputed northeastern territories and their miles of prime timber—and better remembering their dispute can help put timber and those who work with it back in our historical as well as cultural narratives. Next forgotten war tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?

March 3, 2015: Forgotten Wars: The First Barbary War

[Two hundred years ago this week, the U.S. declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the unremembered conflict about which I wrote in Monday’s post. That Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history, and I’ll also highlight and AmericanStudy others for the remainder of the week’s posts. Leading up to a special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model AmericanStudiers.]On three longstanding legacies of the late 18th century conflict.I wrote an early post about what I would call the most significant legacy of the First Barbary War (1801-1805): the Treaty of Tripoliwith which it concluded, and more exactly that treaty’s unequivocal statement on the separation of church and state in America. In order to nip in the bud precisely the kinds of anti-Muslim sentiments about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, the Treaty’s authors (John Jay and Joel Barlow) included an article that begins “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” in order to argue that “no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” I’ve written at great length about “historian” David Barton and his continual attempts to argue that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation; I don’t pretend that widespread knowledge of the Treaty of Tripoli would dissuade Barton himself, but it might put a dent in the number of Americans convinced by his inaccurate and mythologized accounts.If the peace treaty that concluded the First Barbary War provided one such lasting legacy, the battle that won the war for the U.S. produced another. Although the Barbary Pirates were primarily a naval threat, this war was won not just at sea (as was the Second Barbary War) but also and perhaps most significantly on land: led by Marine Corps Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, a small group of U.S. Marines and hundreds of foreign mercenaries marched from Egypt into Algiers, capturing the city of Derna, raising the U.S. flag in victory on foreign soil for the first time, and contributing substantially to the decision of Barbary ruler Yusef Karamanli to sign the peace treaty. It’s to remember this victory that the Marine Corps Hymnincludes the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” in its opening line—although, given the fact that O’Bannon’s troop included far more mercenaries than Marines, it’d be important to complicate that enduring image of U.S. strength with a recognition of how much we have also always depended on non-traditional fighters and allies for such victories.Many of the First Barbary War’s soldiers were thus not part of the American military proper—but many also were, and a group of six prominent such American soldiers who were killed in the course of the war’s assaults on Tripoli were honored in the nation’s oldest military monument: the Tripoli Monument . Designed and sculpted in Italy with the help of the Bishop of Florence, transported to the U.S. aboard none other than the U.S.S. Constitution, and displayed first at Washington’s Navy Yard, then on the grounds on the Capitol, and finally at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, the monument thus reflects not only the war’s efforts and losses, but also the international, naval, and evolving Early Republic histories and identities to which both Barbary Wars can and must be connected. Yet it also and most simply—and in many ways most crucially—reminds us that these wars, like all of our military conflicts, depended on the lives and sacrifices of individual, ordinary Americans, both those who survived to return to life in America and those who did not. I won’t make that point about every war in this week’s series—but I could, and we should be sure to remember it.Next forgotten war tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?

March 2, 2015: Forgotten Wars: The Second Barbary War

[Two hundred years ago this week, the U.S. declared war on the North African nation of Algiers, leading to the unremembered conflict about which I’ll write in today’s post. That Second Barbary War is one of many such forgotten wars in American history, and I’ll also highlight and AmericanStudy others for the remainder of the week’s posts. Leading up to a special weekend post responding to a relevant recent piece by one of my model AmericanStudiers.]On why we should remember forgotten wars, and why perhaps we shouldn’t.It’d be possible to make the case that the Second Barbary War just represented a second theater within the much more famous War of 1812. Algiers had allied itself and its significant naval might with England during that war; although the U.S. conflict with England was officially ended by the December 1814 Treaty of Ghent, the Battle of New Orleans took place a month after that event (news was slow to cross the Atlantic in those days), and President James Madison’s early 1815 request for Congressional approval of military action against Algiers was thus a partial response to the African nation’s role in that prior war. Yet the new war was also driven by other forces, especially ones related to U.S. shipping interests and experiences in the region: tributes that Algerian raiders were requiring of ships trading in the Mediterranean; a group of U.S. sailors that had been impressed into captivity and service on Algerian ships; and so on. In any case, Madison dispatched two armadas to engage the Algerians, and the force commanded by Stephen Decatur won a decisive victory and dictated the terms of the peace treaty in June 1815.There are lots of reasons why we should better remember the Second Barbary War, starting with the always appropriate “Because it happened!” But I would argue that it’s particularly useful as a way to push back on any sense of an isolated American identity in this post-Revolutionary, Early Republic era. It’s true that the U.S. did not develop overt, globe-spanninginternational imperial ambitions until later in the century (although of course the continental imperial ambitions already well underway by this time were entirely international in their era as well). But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. didn’t have an extensive international presence throughout the 19th century, and indeed from its earliest post-Revolutionary moments; there’s a reason why all of our late 18th and early 19th century wars (with the exception of 1812, at the start of which we were invaded) were precipitated because of conflicts that began on the high seas, after all. Moreover, the slave trade and the related international relationships such as the Triangle Trade to which it connected also linked Early Republic America to the rest of the world very fully. All of those would be histories that would help us remember our longstanding, indeed originating, international ties, but the Second Barbary War provides a particularly clear example of the existence and effects of those links.So we should remember it, on its own terms and for what it can help connect us to about our national identity. Yet I have to admit that I’m somewhat hesistant, in an era when so many Americans believe us to be at war with Islam (and concurrently fear the threat of “sharia law” and the like here on the homefront), to remind Americans that two of our earliest wars (both the Second and the First Barbary War, on which more tomorrow) were with Muslim nations. Of course the answer to ignorance isn’t more ignorance, and I’m not genuinely arguing that we should continue ignoring forgotten histories because they could feed into contemporary ignorance. But at the same time, histories that connect to such contemporary controversies and bigotries are especially in need of careful and nuanced presentation and analysis, of framing and contextualizing that can provide understanding as well as awareness. To remember the existence of the Second Barbary War, that is, is only the first of many steps we need to take when it comes to this forgotten war.Next forgotten war tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other under-remembered conflicts you’d highlight?