Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 331

January 26, 2015: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Bad News Bears and Boys

[Each of the last few years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudy some sports histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]On the American obsession with lovable losers, and a problem with it.One of the best sports movies of all time, Rocky (1976), features a protagonist whom I’d call a heroic loser. That is, even before Rocky Balboa went on to win all the climactic fights in his subsequent films, his initial losing effort against Apollo Creed was a reflection of his heroic qualities: his grit and perseverance, his desire and ability to “go the distance.” Well, that’s not the kind of loser I’m going to focus on in this post. These losers are the drunken coach and his team of misfits and outcasts who lose the championship game and then start a brawl with the winners ( The Bad News Bears ), the drunken career minor leaguer who ends his career setting a record that nobody will remember and then quitting ( Bull Durham ), the drunken washed out golfer who blows his one chance at redemption due to a stubborn insistence on perfection over success ( Tin Cup ). Other than drunkenness, what defines this bunch is precisely how anti-heroic they seem.But on the other hand, they are the heroes of their stories, each of which culminates very fully with a moment that asks us to cheer for the protagonists—often in the precise moment of their lovable losing (such as Tin Cup’s catastrophic final hole), and always in triumphs that are framed as far more important than the actual on-field victories would have been (the Bears proving that they’re a team, Costner’s characters getting the girl). Concurrently, their stories’ actual victors are typically framed as either unlikable snobs (the Yankees in Bears, Don Johnson’s rival golferin Cup) or at best clueless jocks who will never understand what’s most important (Tim Robbins’ star pitcherin Bull). In a nation that was created out of a revolution that pitted farmers against the world’s greatest army, a nation whose general and first president pretty much never won a battle in the course of that revolution, it’s easy to see where this embrace of losers over snobs, the flawed but lovable everyman against the powerful champion, arises—and easy to embrace it ourselves as well.I enjoy those characters and their stories as well, and am certainly not advocating rooting for the Redcoats during the Revolution (you definitely lose your AmericanStudier card for that one). But I think there’s a subtle but significant problem with these lovable loser stories, now more than ever: they make it much easier to swallow substantial inequalities, to see it as sufficient to achieve pyrrhic victories against the powers that be and thus leave those powers ultimately unscathed. That is, whereas Rocky hit the unbeatable champion Apollo hard enough that he famously noted, “There’ll be no rematch,”in these lovable loser stories the champions don’t seem much affected at all—it’s simply about the little guy achieving whatever victory he can reasonably get, and us all being happy with that. And at the end of the day, that seems like a recipe for giving up even the idea that either side can win—an idea that, mythic as it may too often be, is to my mind at the core of the best version of American identity and community.Next MovieStudying tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

January 24-25, 2015: Crowd-sourced Selma

[In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this week’s series has focused on histories and stories salient to understanding and engaging with the life and legacy of one of our greatest Americans. For this crowd-sourced post, I decided to highlight a few of the many wonderful pieces that have been written about and in response to the film Selma—add your thoughts or reviews, please!]I’ll start by highlighting one more time my Talking Points Memo piece from this past Monday.Wesley Morris’s review of the film on Grantland was very much in the same vein as my thoughts.
As with this great Amy Davidson piece in The New Yorker.The inspiring John Lewis wrote an op ed sharing his own thoughts on both the film and the histories it captures.Public historian and scholar Devin Hunter wrote some first thoughts on the film here. Lonnie Bunch, director of the African American History Museum, had this perspective on the film.Scholar Brittney Cooper wrote a great piece for Salon.com on the LBJ controversy.Film critic and historian Robert Jones, Jr. wrote an open letter to the film’s director, Ava DuVernay. PS. What do you think? Other responses or connections you’d add?

January 23, 2015: MLK Stories: Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton

[In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a week’s series on histories and stories salient to understanding and engaging with the life and legacy of one of our greatest Americans. Please add your responses and other MLK connections for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the significance of two post-King generations and leaders.There’s a direct, and almost contemporaneous, through-line that links Martin Luther King, Jr. to Jesse Jackson and then to Al Sharpton. Fiery 24 year old Jackson had come to King’s attention after the 1965 Selma marches, and by 1967 had become the national director of Operation Breadbasket, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)’s economic organization. He was close enough to King to be with him at Memphis at the time of his assassination, and continued to run Operation Breadbasket after that tragic event. And a year later, in 1969, Jackson appointed a charismatic and ambitious 14 year old, Al Sharpton, as the youth director of Operation Breadbasket’s New York City branch. Even if you’re not willing to link Jackson and Sharpton in the negative, Fox News kind of way—and it should go without saying that I’m not—the two men are indeed inextricably linked by that organizational connection, and through it to King and his legacy.When it comes to how they have carried that legacy forward, however, I would have to separate the two. Two of Jackson’s most prominent endeavors, his early 1970s founding of the new political and social organization People United to Save Humanity (PUSH; the S was later change to Serve) and his 1984 creation of the Rainbow Coalition and subsequent presidential candidacy, represented what I could call important next steps for a post-1960s Civil Rights Movement, bringing similar perspectives and activisms to bear on evolving and new concerns and issues. Sharpton has helped create his own such organizations, from 1971’s National Youth Movement to 1991’s National Action Network, and I don’t want to downplay the significance of those efforts. But Sharpton’s most consistent role has been as a media presence and voice, culminating in his current work as both a radio and television host. The size and scope of media have of course grown substantially since King’s era, however, so this too could be seen as a next step in the legacy of his activism and movement.Each man has in any case followed his own personal and career path, and there’s no way to know with any certainty whether and how King would have connected to these next steps (although Coretta Scott King apparently declined to endorse Jackson’s presidential candidacy, arguing that her husband would never have run for president). But while I will admit to preferring many of Jackson’s choices to Sharpton’s (I’m not sure that being a syndicated radio and TV host is conducive to activism, to put it bluntly), it seems to me that the ideal way to view all three men is additive, rather than as alternatives or opposed. That is, the history and story of the Civil Rights Movement over the last sixty years cannot be told without all three, and more importantly without the broader factors and issues that they collectively help us remember. One of the great tragedies of American history is that King did not live to contribute to all those subsequent efforts, and no one can replace him; but Jackson and Sharpton have offered their own meaningful contributions, and have become an important part of King’s legacy in the process. Crowd-sourced post this weekend,Ben
PS. So one more time: what do you think? Responses or other connections you’d share for that weekend post?

January 22, 2015: MLK Stories: The Mountaintop

[In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a week’s series on histories and stories salient to understanding and engaging with the life and legacy of one of our greatest Americans. Please add your responses and other MLK connections for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the challenges, benefits, and limitations of humanizing our historical icons.As I was researching Tuesday’s post on the current film Selma, I learned that James Bevel, the Civil Rights leader who spearheaded the Selma march among many other efforts, was arrested a few years ago and convicted of committing incest with one of his daughters. I struggled with whether or not to include that detail as part of my reference to Bevel, but decided not to—partly because the conviction was more than 40 years after the Selma march, and so didn’t feel relevant to that historical moment; and partly for the more complicated reason that I was worried it would overshadow the more important points I was trying to make. Certainly I don’t think Bevel’s personal issues and crimes merit the same attention as the Selma march or the Civil Rights Movement; but on the other hand, are we doing a disservice to the activists and leaders of those events if we idealize them, pretend that they weren’t complex humans like all the rest of us?An argument that we are, and that we need to engage with the most human as well as the most heroic sides to such leaders and icons, can be found at the heart of one of the most acclaimed American plays in recent years, Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (2009). Hall’s play, which opened first in London and then made its Broadway debut with mega-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, depicts the final night in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life, imagining him engaged in an extended conversation, flirtation, and eventually inspiration with a Memphis hotel maid. The play offers a warts-and-all portrayal of its fictionalized King, including not only light details such as his smoking habit and smelly feet but more serious ones such as complex relationship with his wife Coretta and his supposed womanizing. Hall’s script ultimately returns to a more idealized depiction of King as an orator, leader, and philosopher, and it’s certainly possible to argue that such ideals are more believable when paired with the more complex and human details. Indeed, I’ve made precisely the same case in this space when it comes to towering American figures like Thomas Jefferson.So why do I feel that it’s a bit more problematic to portray such complex and human details for King, as Hall’s play does? For one thing, I’d say that timing is an issue—by setting her play on the eve (literally) of King’s assassination, Hall seems to be offering a culminating reflection on his life and work; King of course did not know it was his last night (although he was well aware of death threats, as the play notes), but the audience does, and such overarching reflections feel inevitable in that case. And I’ll be honest, I don’t think Hall’s less ideal details merit much of a place in those broad reflections on King’s life and work. And for another, and even more salient thing, I would argue (as I did in Monday’s post) that there are many hugely significant aspects of King’s career and perspective that we don’t yet remember well, particularly when compared to such widely and deeply remembered figures as the Founding Fathers. I don’t have any problem with a more humanized King eventually entering our collective memories, but I’d say much more of the historical and, yes, heroic sides to the man should take their place there first.Last MLK story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses or other connections you’d share for the weekend post?

January 21, 2015: MLK Stories: Coretta Scott King

[In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a week’s series on histories and stories salient to understanding and engaging with the life and legacy of one of our greatest Americans. Please add your responses and other MLK connections for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On why and how we should better remember King’s partner, in life and in activism.In a January 1966 interview with New Lady magazine, Coretta Scott King argued that the stories of the Civil Rights Movement far too often left out its female participants. “Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle,” she noted. “By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.” As I have written elsewhere in this space, even the one woman consistently present in our collective memories of Civil Rights, Rosa Parks, has been generally turned into nothing more than a tired working woman, rather than the longtime activist and leader she was. So I agree entirely with Coretta Scott King, believe that the problem hasn’t really been addressed in the half-century since her interview, and would argue that she herself represents a perfect opportunity for us to better engage with women in the Civil Rights Movement.For one thing, Scott King was there with her husband at every stage of his activism and leadership, complementing his efforts with her own. When she married King in 1953 she gave up a promising career in music performance and education (she was on a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music when the two met in early 1952), but in so doing also continued along an activist path that was well underway by that time: while at Ohio’s Antioch College she had joined both the college chapter of the NAACP and its Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committee, and had petitioned the administration to grant her a teaching placement in a local school despite a discriminatory denial. After their marriage, despite bearing and raising four children in eight years (from Yolanda in 1955 to Bernice in 1963, with Martin III and Dexter in between), Scott King worked alongside her husband in his evolving career, not only accompanying him to marches and protests in Montgomery and Selma but also doing her own consistent advocacy for Civil Rights legislation. For another and even more inspiring thing, after her husband’s 1968 assassination Scott King continued and expanded his efforts and legacy, all while raising their four children on her own. In the years immediately following the assassination, for example, she both published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969) and founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a pioneering institution for which she served as president and CEO for many years. Over the next few decades, so brought her activist perspective to bear on a number of other issues, from helping lead an anti-apartheid protest outside the South African embassy in 1985 to chairing a 1995 effort to register one million African American women voters ahead of the following year’s elections. Because of the tragic killings of King and Malcolm X, it can feel difficult to connect Civil Rights leaders to the events and issues of subsequent decades—but like another prominent female Civil Rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama, Coretta Scott King illustrates how fully the 50s and 60s efforts continued and expanded in the years beyond. Just one more reason to better remember her life and work!Next MLK story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses or other connections you’d share for the weekend post?

January 20, 2015: MLK Stories: Selma

[In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a week’s series on histories and stories salient to understanding and engaging with the life and legacy of one of our greatest Americans. Please add your responses and other MLK connections for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On what’s very inspiring, and what might be more problematic, about the new film.This is a great time for films about African American stories and histories. Steve McQueen, director most recently of 12 Years a Slave (for my money the best film to date about African American history, and on my short list of best films about American history period), has announced that his next project will focus on the amazing life of actor, performer, athlete, activist, and icon Paul Robeson. One of the breakout stars of McQueen’s film, Lupita Nyong’o, is set to star in an upcoming film adapation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stunning novel Americanah (2013). And there’s no need to wait for those two future films—in theaters now is Ava DuVernay’s historical and political drama Selma , perhaps the first mainstream American film to focus centrally on portraying histories and stories of the Civil Rights movement from African American perspectives.That last phrase is one main reason I find DuVernay’s film so inspiring. There have certainly been prominent and successful films about the Civil Rights movement: Mississippi Burning (1988) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), to name two of the most acclaimed. But I would argue that both of those, like similar but more slight films such as The Long Walk Home (1990) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), have approached Civil Rights and African American history through the lens of white protagonists and perspectives—perhaps an understandable choice, and one that (as I would argue Glory [1989] proves) does not render it impossible to connect with African American histories, but also a necessarily limiting starting point. I haven’t had the chance to see Selma yet, but it seems clear that its protagonists and central perspectives are King, his wife Coretta Scott King, and other Civil Rights activists and leaders (such as James Bevel, the principal architect of the Selma march). The fact that this groundbreaking film was directed by an up-and-coming female filmmaker who was born seven years after the Selma march? Well, that’s just one more inspiring detail.Ironically, given this inspiring reversal in racial emphasis and perspectives, the one critique of Selma I’ve encountered has been of its portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson as an adversary to King and the Selma march. That op ed was written by Joseph Califano Jr., one of Johnson’s principal domestic advisors for most of his presidency, which both lends it an air of accuracy yet also means it comes from a subjective point of view to be sure. And again, as of this late-December writing I haven’t had a chance to see DuVernay’s film yet, so I should try to reserve judgment. But if the film does set up Johnson as an adversary in the ways Califano suggests, I would say two things: that’s an understandable and reasonable storytelling choice, one that certainly highlights the substantial national opposition faced by King and his fellow activists; but nonetheless, on the spectrum of white American responses to the Civil Rights Movement, I would put Johnson toward the positive end for sure. And if Selma helps us think and talk about such questions, that’d be one more inspiring effect of the film.Next MLK story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses or other connections you’d share for the weekend post?

PPS. After I scheduled this post, DuVernay responded passionately and convincingly to Califano's criticisms.

PPPS. And long after, I had a chance to see the film, understood even more fully the motivations behind such choices, and wrote this piece about it: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/sel...

January 19, 2015: MLK Stories: The Real King

[In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a week’s series on histories and stories salient to understanding and engaging with the life and legacy of one of our greatest Americans. Please add your responses and other MLK connections for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the limits to how we currently remember King, and how to get beyond them.It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my AmericanStudies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the “I Have a Dream” speech is kind of overrated. I’m sort of saying that for effect, since I don’t really mean that the speech itself isn’t as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that’s true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King’s “content of their character” rather than “color of their skin” distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen “one day”—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.
But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of “one day”) has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King’s philosophies and ideas and arguments. There’s no question that the speech’s liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King’s work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X’s. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King’s rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the “Poor People’s Campaign” and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.
To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King’s perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can’t Wait , the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don’t think any American text can top the “Letter” itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King’s first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I’ll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter’s opening sentence, of his audience’s description of his protest activities as “unwise and untimely.” And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter’s closing paragraphs: “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of “I Have a Dream” is like remembering Shakespeare for the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that’s a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there’s, y’know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn’t bad either. It’s about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future. Next MLK story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses or other connections you’d share for the weekend post?

January 17-18, 2015: Spring 2015 Previews: The NeMLA Conference

[With the start of a new semester comes all the new opportunities and possibilities provided by a fresh group of courses. In this week’s series I’ll highlight a few of those semester plans, among a couple other things on my Spring 2015 radar. I’d love to hear about your spring plans and goals in comments!]On three additional reasons—besides the always-stimulating program of panels, roundtables, seminars, and talks—why I’m looking forward to NeMLA’s 2015 Conference in Toronto.1)      A Ground-breaking Keynote: NeMLA’s current President, Daniela Antonucci, has arranged for a truly innovative keynote address for Toronto. Christopher Innes and Brigitte Bogar will present “Multi Modal Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: A Performative Analysis,” featuring both a lecture component and accompanying musical and dance performances. The talk exemplifies Daniela’s commitment to bringing interdisciplinarity to NeMLA, not just as an element of scholars’ work but as a primary goal and methodology for the organization. I couldn’t agree more, and look forward to this keynote as a next step in that direction!2)      Welcoming New Board Members: We’ve completed our annual election, and have a number of new Board members who will be joining us in Toronto and for the next few years beyond: new 2nd Vice President Maria DiFrancesco; American Area Director John Casey; Comp Lit and Languages Area Director Richard Schumaker; Culture and Media Studies Area Director Lisa Perdigao; and Member-at-Large for Professional Development Angela Fulk. I’m very excited to work with all of these new folks as well as all our returning Board members, not least because of…3)      The Start of My Presidency Year: As of the membership brunch on Sunday, the transition to the 2015-2016 year—the year for which I’ll be NeMLA’s President—will be underway. In recent months I’ve really begun to feel that the movement toward the 2016 conference in Hartford has commenced, including securing two great University of Connecticut graduate students to be our local representatives and working with the wonderful Dean Shirley Roe and PS. What do you think? Spring plans you’d share?

January 16, 2015: Spring 2015 Previews: Independent Studies

[With the start of a new semester comes all the new opportunities and possibilities provided by a fresh group of courses. In this week’s series I’ll highlight a few of those semester plans, among a couple other things on my Spring 2015 radar. I’d love to hear about your spring plans and goals in comments!]On what three kinds of independent student work add to my semesters and perspective.This spring, I’ll have the chance to direct my fourth Interdisciplinary Studies (IDIS) Capstone project. Students majoring in IDIS at Fitchburg State are required to produce a senior project that combines three different disciplines; this past semester, for example, I worked with a student who combined English Studies, Art, and Comm/Media to create the first pages of an amazing graphic novel based on the King Arthur legend. My spring student will be bringing together English Studies, Early Childhood Education, and Psychology to study children’s books and their impacts on our individual and communal identities. Each of my Capstone experiences has been revelatory for me, opening my eyes to new ways to combine these disciplines and see our world, and I look forward to seeing where this one takes both the student and me!I’ll also be directing a different kind of individual undergraduate work this spring: an independent study, where a talented and dedicated student works with me to create a semester’s syllabus investigating a topic of interest to him or her. This student, whom I’ve taught in two prior courses and who is one of the couple best undergraduates I’ve worked with in my career, is hoping to apply to PhD programs next year and wanted to fill in one of the gaps in his coursework to date: Modernist American poetry. To say that I’m excited for the chance to spend a semester talking about Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, and the Harlem Renaissance poets (among others) would be to understate the case. But in truth, I’m much more excited still to see how this student responds to these poets, and how my own perspective on them grows and deepens through his work and our conversations. I’ll keep you posted!Finally, I will be working this spring with two graduate students who are completing their Master’s theses in our M.A. in Literature program. By complete coincidence, the two theses are interestingly complementary: one student is re-reading Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as an immigrant novel through connections to a number of 21st century such novels; and the other is analyzing Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a new kind of immigrant fiction, one informed by the genre of autoethnography as well as many only formal and stylistic trends. Compared to any of these other kinds of independent work, graduate theses are far more truly individual, and I see my role mainly as reading and responding to their work and ideas, rather than providing the kinds of more overt direction I do in the undergraduate cases. Which also means that I learn at least as much from the process each time as I contribute to it—and I can’t wait to see what I will learn about these past and present texts and their social and cultural contexts from these two strong students.Final preview this weekend,Ben
PS. What do you think? Spring plans you’d share?

January 15, 2015: Spring 2015 Previews: Bringing my Hall to ALFA

[With the start of a new semester comes all the new opportunities and possibilities provided by a fresh group of courses. In this week’s series I’ll highlight a few of those semester plans, among a couple other things on my Spring 2015 radar. I’d love to hear about your spring plans and goals in comments!]For my next Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) course, I decided to share the lives and writings of five figures (one for each week of the course) that I’ll be nominating for my Hall of American Inspiration project. The five I chose, and a prior post that helps explain why:1)      William Apess!2)      Ida B. Wells!3)      Sui Sin Far!4)      Abraham Cahan!5)      José Antonio Vargas!Can’t wait to see how my always-inspiring ALFA students will respond to the histories and stories, texts and contexts, to which these five connect.Next preview tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Spring plans you’d share?