Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 348

July 9, 2014: ALA Follow Ups: Teaching Asian American Literature

[In late May, I had the chance to make a quick trip to Washington, DC, to attend a portion of the American Literature Association’s annual conference. I wasn’t able to stay as long as I would have liked, but did have a chance to attend some very interesting panels while I was there. So this week I’ll highlight a few of them, as well as a couple other contexts for the conference. If you were there, I’d love to hear your takeaways for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On three of the many things I learned from an inspiring roundtable.The other panel I had the chance to attend was a roundtable on New Directions in Teaching Asian American Literature, where Yoonmee Chang, Patricia Chu, Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, and Caroline Rody shared a number of exciting strategies and ideas from their own teaching. Here I’ll just highlight three of my takeaways from this great panel:1)      I’ve written before, hereand elsewhere, about my work with a multi-generational family timeline and history project in my ethnic American literature course. But Patricia shared a text that provides its own version of such a project, May-Lee Chai and Winberg Chai’s The Girl from Purple Mountain (2002), as well as ways in which she gets her students to conduct their own interviews and analyses through their work with the book. Now I can’t wait for the chance for the next time I teach the ethnic course, to bring this book into the course and enrich the student projects immeasurably as a result.2)      Besides his teaching and work toward a PhD in English, Lawrence is also a founding director of the non-profit Asian American Literary Review , as well as the developer of its education project the Mixed Race Initiative. I look forward to learning more about both of those endeavors, but was particularly struck at this panel by the special issue of AALR that Lawrence brought with him: it’s entitled Mixed Race in a Box , and I honestly don’t think I can do it justice in mere words. Check out the pictures at that link, and if you get a chance to look further into this unique and wonderful project, you definitely should. I know I will!3)      In her talk, Caroline highlighted numerous books she’s taught in her Asian American, ethnic American, and contemporary literature courses—some I’ve taught myself, some I’ve read and hope to teach, some I’ve heard of and hope to read, and some I had never heard of and now can’t wait to check out. In the latter category falls Lore Segal’s The Education of Ilka Weissnix (1995), a cross-cultural, inter-ethnic, historical fiction that sounds as if it couldn’t have been tailored to my interests and obsessions any more fully if I had ordered it created. As with everything that these four presenters highlighted, learning about this book promises to deeply enrich my work and teaching.Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. Were you at ALA? If so, what stood out to you?

July 8, 2014: ALA Follow Ups: Rebecca Harding Davis

[In late May, I had the chance to make a quick trip to Washington, DC, to attend a portion of the American Literature Association’s annual conference. I wasn’t able to stay as long as I would have liked, but did have a chance to attend some very interesting panels while I was there. So this week I’ll highlight a few of them, as well as a couple other contexts for the conference. If you were there, I’d love to hear your takeaways for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On two complex questions raised by the career of one of our more under-appreciated authors.One of the other panels I had the chance to attend focused on the mid-19th century novelist and activist Rebecca Harding Davis, and specifically on some of the stories she serialized in Peterson’s Magazine . Arielle Zibrak, a faculty member at Case Western Reserve University, analyzed The Second Life ; Sarah Gray-Panesi, a PhD candidate at Middle Tennessee State University, focused on Put Out of the Way ; and Jane Rose, Associate Professor of English at Purdue University North Central, read A Wife, Yet Not a Wife. As the absence of a link for that last story, and the less than ideal ones for the other two, indicate, these are texts that have barely been recovered at all, much less read extensively, so I greatly appreciated hearing more about all three.The three papers also collectively highlighted a couple of complex issues, not only in how we read Davis and these works, but in how we approach 19th century American literature more generally. For one thing, Peterson’s was a popular magazine , and the stories that Davis contributed to it were similarly popular in genre and tone—in categories such as sensation fiction and gothic stories, as the three presenters alternately designated them. That classification is at least partly why these stories have received far less attention than Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills (1861), which appeared in the more highbrow Atlantic Monthly. But all three presenters did a great job complicating any such divisions or hierarchies, not only by arguing for the complexity and value of these particular texts overall, but also by making a more specific and compelling case for the texts’ own combination of realism and sensationalism, reform and entertainment. Sarah in particular noted our problematic tendency to separate sales from seriousness, and these stories certainly seem to challenge that separation.In the question and answer portion of the panel, the presenters raised a second interesting and important question. Noting that both Second Life and A Wife feature disturbingly negative portrayals of women, characters who are at best weak and at worst entirely self-destructive, both Arielle and Jane pushed on the question of how we read such characters, particularly in light of Davis’ lifelong commitment to social reform and activism (including for women’s rights). Of course, an author of fiction—especially realistic fiction—can and must create all types of characters, including unattractive and weak ones. But if we are to make the case for these works as serious and socially engaged, I would argue that we can’t at the same time ignore such questions about their characters and how they represent social and cultural identities and experiences. So as our readings of stories like these move forward, it’d be important to consider further what we make of these characters—and these three great presentations provided strong starting points for that question, as well as many others about these works.Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. Were you at ALA? If so, what stood out to you?

July 7, 2014: ALA Follow Ups: Contemporary Literature and Culture

[In late May, I had the chance to make a quick trip to Washington, DC, to attend a portion of the American Literature Association’s annual conference. I wasn’t able to stay as long as I would have liked, but did have a chance to attend some very interesting panels while I was there. So this week I’ll highlight a few of them, as well as a couple other contexts for the conference. If you were there, I’d love to hear your takeaways for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
I attended ALA to chair a panel on “Contemporary Literature and Cultural Movements,” for Karen Weekes and the Society for Contemporary Literature. I look forward to hearing a lot more from the three impressive young scholars who presented on the panel:1)      Agnieszka Herra: Agnes recently completed her dissertation in Comparative Literature at Ontario’s Western University, where she studied post-Civil Rights and -Polish resistance literature. For her paper she provocatively extended these analyses to a complex recent novel about protest movements, Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens (2013), arguing for how Lethem uses his multi-generational, multi-perspectival, non-chronological structure and frame to engage with much of 20thand 21st century American history. I look forward to seeing the next places to which Agnes takes these interests!2)      Joseph Darda: Joe is working on his PhD in English at the University of Connecticut, where he also just finished a two-year stint editing LIT (look for their special issue on literary counter-histories of US exceptionalism!). His ALA paper was drawn from the larger dissertation project, which connects historical fictions of the Korean War (such as Toni Morrison’s Home [2012], on which his talk focused) to a broader argument about the rise of the military complex and establishment since World War II. Joe’s dissertation promises to challenge and enrich our literary, historical, and political conversations substantially, and I look forward to it!3)      Amy Robbins: Amy’s an Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College (CUNY), where she focuses on 20th and 21st century poetry, multicultural literature, and feminist theory. Her ALA talk was drawn from her forthcoming first book, American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form (Rutgers), which reads a handful of 20th and 21st century American women poets through the lens of their hybrid styles and voices and their engagements with mass media and culture. As her talk illustrated, Amy’s book will add significantly to our understandings not only of these poets, but of hybridity, gender, and culture in contemporary America. Keep an eye out for it, and for the work of all three of these scholars!Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. Were you at ALA? If so, what stood out to you?

July 5-6, 2014: AmericanMythbusters: 4th of July Special

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

July 4, 2014: AmericanMythbusters: George Washington

[As is the case with any nation, American identity has been built on a number of central myths—and occasions like the 4th of July bring them out in force. So this week I’ll be highlighting and challenging five such myths, leading up to a special holiday weekend post. Add your thoughts on these or other myths, American or otherwise, in comments!]
On three of the many inaccuracies at the heart of our Washington mythos (not even counting that whole cherry tree thing):1)      He was a great general: I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as Gore Vidal does in Burr (1973), where he has his fictionalized Aaron Burr say, noting Washington’s “military short-comings” and his “eerie incompetence,” that he “was never to defeat an English army.” But certainly Vidal’s Burr is closer to the mark than our predominant narratives of General Washington, whose eventual military triumph in the Revolution was due almost entirely to other leaders, both Americanand European. Yes, he did cross the Delaware—but that’s one successful strategy in the course of an eight-year war!2)      He was universally beloved: It’s true that Washington’s presidential administration brought together leaders of both major political parties, and that his two elections were uncontested (the only two such in American history). But the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion should put to rest any notion that Washington’s America wasn’t divided, or that his terms were without controversy or division. Indeed, Washington has been far more universally beloved in the centuries since his death than he was during his lifetime—which means we should probably work harder to find the complexities that were evident in his own era.3)      He freed all his slaves: This one’s seriously complicated, and I’ll mostly leave it to the excellent Mount Vernon website to get into the details. It is true, as the site notes, that Washington freed a portion of his estate’s more than 300 slaves in his will—a number more were subsequently freed by his widow Martha, perhaps (as Abigail Adams argued in a private letter) because she was afraid for her life. But the simplest fact is that Washington owned slaves for 56 of his 67 years, and as far as we know did not free a single one during his lifetime. We can credit the small moments of racial progress in Washington’s life without eliding, indeed working as with all these myths to better and more accurately remember, this clear and significant fact about our first president.Special holiday post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other myths, American or otherwise, you’d want to bust?

July 3, 2014: AmericanMythbusters: Rosa Parks

[As is the case with any nation, American identity has been built on a number of central myths—and occasions like the 4th of July bring them out in force. So this week I’ll be highlighting and challenging five such myths, leading up to a special holiday weekend post. Add your thoughts on these or other myths, American or otherwise, in comments!]

On the okay, better, and best ways to remember an iconic moment and figure.Given that Rosa Parks has to be on the very short list for the best-remembered African Americans (and historical Americans period), it would seem silly to argue that we should remember her better or more fully than we do. If anything, many historians and journalists have argued that narratives of the Civil Rights movement focus too fully on Parks as an origin point, and not enough on all the others who contributed to and influenced the movement. While it’s always good to broaden our collective memories, I think our starting point for remembering Rosa Parks is indeed not a bad one, and that it’s both appropriate and American (in the best sense) that we connect the movement’s origins not only to public leaders like King, but also to a much more private individual like Parks.On the other hand, Park’s famous stand (or rather seat) was neither as private nor as individual as our dominant narratives emphasize. Parks (born Rosa McCauley) had been connected to the NAACP since her 1932 marriage to Raymond Parks, already an active member of the organization; she herself joined the Montgomery chapter in 1943, and was elected the chapter’s secretary in the same year. She had thus been active in the civil rights organization for a dozen years (and connected to it for more than two decades) by the time of her fateful December 1955 bus ride; and moreover, four months earlier she had attended an August 1955 mass meeting in Montgomery at which activist T.R.M. Howard outlined the many different ways African Americans could advocate for their rights in their own communities. All of which is to say, it’s far from coincidental that Parks’ refusal to give up her seat precipated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an activist effort led by organizations like the NAACP and activists like Howard (among many others of course).Yet if it would be better for us to remember that Rosa Parks spent her lifetime working in and with communities and organizations dedicated to civil rights, it seems to me that the best way to remember her and her bus ride would be to push one step further still, linking the private and public sides to her action. After all, however much her refusal to give up her seat may have been part of a larger strategy or effort, it was also a profoundly individual, and profoundly courageous, choice; that August 1955 meeting was in response to the Emmett Till lynching, a stark reminder that every African American in the Jim Crow South was at all times in danger of violent attack and death—and certainly that any who fought the power, who bucked the system in the ways that Park did (or, indeed, in far less overt ways, like Till), were doubly at risk for such terrorism. Which is to say, Parks’ connection to and knowledge of her city and region’s civil rights histories don’t diminish her individual action in the slightest—instead, they amplify its impressiveness.Last myth tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other myths, American or otherwise, you’d want to bust?

July 2, 2014: AmericanMythbusters: Pocahontas

[As is the case with any nation, American identity has been built on a number of central myths—and occasions like the 4th of July bring them out in force. So this week I’ll be highlighting and challenging five such myths, leading up to a special holiday weekend post. Add your thoughts on these or other myths, American or otherwise, in comments!]
On some of the truths behind one of our most mythologized figures.If, as I’ve argued before in this space, John Smith is relatively unknown in our communal conversations, Pocahontas, daughter of the Virginia chief Powhatan and Smith's continual partner in the historical narratives, suffers from the opposite problem: she's perhaps the most broadly famous Native American figure in our history. More exactly, compared even to other prominent Native Americans such as Sacagawea, Geronimo, or Sitting Bull, the name Pocahontas immediately conjures up (even for relatively non-historically minded Americans) a set of pretty specific images: sacrificing herself to save Smith, developing a pseudo-romantic relationship with him, eventually marrying another Englishman (John Rolfe) and ending her life in England with him, and so on.

Many of those images of Pocahontas have been around since Smith's own narrative, so that in this case, the Disney version of history actually lines up quite closely with the most accepted national narratives (although I don't know that Pocahontas had as good a singing voice as Vanessa Williams in those earlier narratives). As best as scholars can tell from the scanty historical evidence (scanty other than, again, Smith's own somewhat unreliable account), the realities of Pocahontas' life and identity were significantly different, particularly in terms of her relationship with Smith: she was likely very young, something like 13 at the oldest, when they met; and so if she did save him and his fellow Englishmen from execution, it was likely for reasons other than those of romance in any explicit sense. Terrence Malick's film The New World (2005) seemingly attempts to represent those realities more accurately but achieves only mixed results, casting a very young Native American actress (Q'orianka Kilcher) as Pocahontas but still portraying her relationship with Colin Farrell's John Smith in explicitly romanticized ways.

But to my mind, the most interesting and meaningful American truths about Pocahontas don't depend on whether she was 12 or 20 when she met Smith, or whether they loved each other deeply or barely knew each other, or any variation on those questions. The most significant question to me is broader and more complicated still, and is the issue of whether her identity across the centuries of narratives is more stereotyped and limiting or more layered and humanizing, whether she's just an "other" falling for the superior white guy or is in fact an American who has a rich and full an identity as any European American figure. The answer, as with any of our most complicated questions, likely lies somewhere in the middle, and a great illustration of both sides is J.N. Barker's musical melodrama The Indian Princess (1809). Barker's Pocahontas is at once entirely a stereotype and yet a fleshed-out (and not in the Disney sense) heroine, just as his play's Englishmen run the gamut from stereotypical comic relief to complex (at least for an 1809 melodrama) heroes.

We're not likely to stop telling the story of Pocahontas, since it, like all of the most engaging American stories, connects to universal and powerful themes and narratives: love and sacrifice, loss and redemption, past and tradition vs. future and change. But it also, if more subtly, reveals much of what is both worst and best about our shared American identities, within and across ethnic and racial communities, and the more we can remember and retell those elements too, the more meaningful our stories of this Indian Princess will be.Next myth tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other myths, American or otherwise, you’d want to bust?

July 1, 2014: AmericanMythbusters: The Statue of Liberty

[As is the case with any nation, American identity has been built on a number of central myths—and occasions like the 4th of July bring them out in force. So this week I’ll be highlighting and challenging five such myths, leading up to a special holiday weekend post. Add your thoughts on these or other myths, American or otherwise, in comments!]
On the gaps in our memories of an American icon, and why they need filling.The John Harvard Statue, located at the center of Harvard Yard and a favorite spot for tourist and parent-student pictures, is colloquially and accurately known as the statue of three lies: the statue’s likeness is not of 17th-century Pilgrim John Harvard but of a 19th-century student who posed for the sculptor; John Harvard is identified in the statue’s inscription as Harvard’s “Founder” but in fact was just one of the college’s earliest and most crucial financial backers; and the 1638 founding date listed in that same inscription is two years later than the actual 1636 founding (by a vote of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s General Court). The lesson here is, to my mind, two-part and significant: people are drawn to statues as particularly evocative and unifying symbols of a place or community or history; and yet they can not only condense but also oversimplify and even misrepresent those broad and complex identities and stories. And while none of the misrepresentations contained in the John Harvard Statue have much import outside of the Yard (if they do even inside it), those connected to one of the nation’s and world’s most famous Statues, the Statue of Liberty, are much more influential.The oversimplifications and misrepresentations in our national narratives about the Statue exist on two distinct and even interestingly contrasting levels. For one thing, most of those narratives and our central images of the Statue link it to the broad theme of immigration to the United States; those connections are superficially verified yet significantly complicated by Emma Lazarus’s great sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883), which was written as part of a collection to raise money for the construction of the Statue’s pedestal and eventually (although only long after Lazarus’s 1887 death) inscribed onto the completed pedestal. Lazarus’s poem is, like many of the dedications at the Statue’s opening, most certainly a tribute to what she calls America’s stance of “world-wide welcome”—but I would stress just how strikingly democratic and open her vision of this core national attribute truly is, in the era of (in fact just one year after the passage of) the Chinese Exclusion Act and a decade in which the first huge waves of Eastern European and Jewish immigration (communities to which Lazarus was connected by ethnicity and distant nationality, although her family had been in America for over a century) were being greeted with significant degrees of distrust and open hostility. Virtually every adjective and phrase with which Lazarus’s “Mother of Exiles” describes her hoped-for immigrants carries a seemingly negative connotation (tired, poor, huddled masses, wretched refuse, homeless), and so the Statue’s and poem’s embrace of these arrivals thus not only welcomes them to America, but makes clear how fully our most ideal national identity is constituted out of, not in spite of, such superficially unwanted immigrants and communities.On that level the gap between the Statue’s identity and the popular images and narratives is not a particularly large one, although I think we could use some more consistent reminders of the call to welcome all arrivals. Much more wide and meaningful, though, is the gap between definitions of the Statue as connected to immigration and ideal images of America as the Land of the Free (which would include Lazarus’) and its actual point of origin. The idea for the Statue originated with a Frenchman, Edouard Laboulaye, and both his overall perspective and his moment of inspiration were extremely specific: Laboulaye was the chairman of an anti-slavery society, and it was at a dinner party mourning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that he conceived of a monument to liberty in the United States as a gift for the nation’s 1876 Centennial. While certainly he was thinking in part of the nation’s founding and its ideals of liberty (and France’s role in helping it achieve independence from England), he very definitely hoped to remind Americans and outsiders alike of both the tragic legacy of slavery that existed alongside those ideals and of the role of a leader like Lincoln in helping end that system and bring America’s practices of liberty a bit more fully in line with the ideals. Once Laboulaye’s chosen sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, came to America and began planning the Statue, he moved away from those specific connections and toward the broader and more ideal American visions; the speeches and dedications at the opening ceremonies entirely echoed those emphases, as did works like Lazarus’, and the Statue’s separation from those questions of slavery and abolition became entrenched in the narratives and images from then on.As with most of the narratives and images I’ve argued for in this space, I don’t think this is either-or—we can most definitely celebrate the ideals of our history as a nation of immigrants and of our founding values of liberty and equality while remembering some of our most dark historical realities and betrayals of those ideals. And if the Statue of Liberty could become thus a symbol not only of all that it has already meant and continues to mean, but also of (for example) slavery and of the Chinese Exclusion Act, it would be that much more meaningful and authentic of an American icon.Next myth tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other myths, American or otherwise, you’d want to bust?

June 30, 2014: AmericanMythbusters: The Pledge of Allegiance

[As is the case with any nation, American identity has been built on a number of central myths—and occasions like the 4th of July bring them out in force. So this week I’ll be highlighting and challenging five such myths, leading up to a special holiday weekend post. Add your thoughts on these or other myths, American or otherwise, in comments!]
On the widespread fundamental inaccuracies about an emblematic American text.A few years back, my younger son’s preschool class—made up of kids between 3 and 4 years old, not surprisingly—learned to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day. I didn’t have a particular problem with that, for a couple of reasons: it was a pretty diverse group of kids, and I liked that they could all learn from a very young age that America ideally means all of them, equally, no questions asked; and it was just so darn cute to hear him recite his version of it. So the practice, again, not an issue. But having heard the main classroom teacher articulate the theory while telling a fellow parent about her reasoning behind having them recite it—she said, and this is a paraphrase but it’s close, “It’s just one of those founding American things, you know? So I feel like they should know it as soon as possible”—helped confirm for me something that I’ve long suspected, which is that our communal knowledge of the Pledge is pretty significantly inaccurate on two key fronts.For one thing, the Pledge’s historical origin is both more recent and much more radical than we probably know. It was created not in the Founding era, but more than a century later, in 1892; the still fresh sectional division of the Civil War, and its resulting destructions and continuing bitterness, meant that the word “indivisible” was not at all a given, and instead very much a point of emphasis for the Pledge’s creator. And moreover that creator, Francis Bellamy, was thinking not only of those divisions, but also and even more strikingly of the Christian Socialism to which both he and his cousin Edward Bellamy (author of the socialist utopian novel Looking Backward) subscribed: Frances Bellamy later admitted that he originally planned to include “equality” along with “liberty and justice for all,” or even to use instead the French Revolutionary slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity,” but recognized that in the late 19th century such beliefs were still unfortunately “too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization.” Yet even the emphasis on “liberty and justice for all,” in the same decade in which the Supreme Court confirmed the legality of Jim Crow segregation and the same year in which the number of lynchings of African Americans reached an all-time high, was like “indivisible” far from a given; and Bellamy’s reaffirmation of those core ideals, particularly as located in the Pledge’s culminating phrase, was and remains a significant and inspiring statement.As valuable and influential as it would be for those origins to be part of our public consciousness of the Pledge, however, it would be even more significant for us to recognize its most overt evolution, and the contexts behind it. For the first sixty-two years of its existence, the Pledge included no reference to religion; it was only in 1954, after a campaign by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, that Congress added the words “under god.” It should, I believe, be impossible not to recognize the very specific contexts for that addition, in an era of still strong McCarthyism (with its tendency to conflate atheism with anti-Americanism) and likewise a period in which opposition to the “godless Communism” of the Soviet Union was becoming entrenched in every aspect of American government and society. Less absolute but still worth our awareness is the reaction of the Bellamy family to this addition—Frances had been dead for over twenty years, but his granddaughter argued vehemently that he would have been opposed to the change, noting that he had been forced out of his church in 1891 due to his socialist perspective and had toward the end of his life voluntarily left a church in Florida because of its endorsement of racial discrimination. While we can never know for sure what Bellamy would have thought, we can certainly acknowledge the very contemporary and politicized motivations behind this addition; doing so, to my mind, would—especially if coupled with an understanding of Bellamy and the Pledge’s origins—make it much more difficult to see critiques of “under god,” or of the Pledge itself, as un- or anti-American.I am not, to be clear, arguing that we should discard the Pledge, or even necessarily alter its current version. Instead, as I hope is always the case in this space, I am arguing first that we can’t ever assume that our versions of core national texts and stories are necessarily accurate or complete, and that we have to try to tell the fuller, more complex, perhaps more dark but usually also more rich and meaningful, stories and histories behind them. Second, and even more significantly, I’d argue that when we do, it opens our history and identity up, truly democratizes them, makes clear how much they have evolved and how much they continue to do so, and thus how much of a role we have to play in shaping and carrying them forward.Next myth tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other myths, American or otherwise, you’d want to bust?

June 28-29, 2014: June 2014 Recap

[A recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]
June 2: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: The Celestials: My annual series on books to bring to the beach begins with a wonderful recent historical novel.June 3: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Spoiled: The series continues with a book of short stories that spoke to me powerfully despite my initial misgivings.June 4: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Personals: An engaging, witty, and thoughtful poetry collection by a colleague and friend, as the series rolls on.June 5: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Amusing the Million: If you take just one work of AmericanStudies scholarship to the beach this summer, I vote for this amazing book.June 6: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: The Chinese Exclusion Act: The series concludes with a shameless but earnest pitch for putting my most recent book on your summer list.June 7-8: Crowd-sourced Beach Reads: The beach read responses and nominations of fellow AmericanStudiers in one of my fullest crowd-sourced posts yet—add your own in comments, please!June 9: D-Day Stories: Band of Brothers: A series inspired by the invasion’s 70thanniversary starts with the best part of the great miniseries.June 10: D-Day Stories: The Longest Day: The series continues with the blockbuster film and what it tells us about such images of war.June 11: D-Day Stories: Eisenhower: What we can learn from the story of the general turned president, as the series rolls on.June 12: D-Day Stories: The 29th Infantry: On one of the more subtle but enduring ways we can remember military units and service.June 13: D-Day Stories: Frank Draper, Jr.: The series concludes with the website that illustrates what the 21st century can add to how we remember soldiers and wars.June 14-15: War Stories: Board Games: Following up the D-Day series, and in honor of my best friend’s birthday, a post on a few board games from which I learned a lot about war and history.June 16: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summer Wind: A series on summertime songs begins with some thoughts on performance, authorship, and collective memory.June 17: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summertime Blues: The series continues with the rock classic that reveals multiple sides to the voices of youth.June 18: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summer in the City: Whether and how we can historically contextualize a fun rock song, as the series rolls on.June 19: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summertime: On two distinct but complementary ways to AmericanStudy the Fresh Prince and one of his biggest hits.June 20: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: All Summer Long: The series concludes with a song that captures both pseudo-nostalgia and the genuine influence pop culture can have on our lives.June 21-22: Crowd-sourced Summer Jams: A crowd-sourced bbq, featuring the responses and nominations of fellow AmericanStudiers—bring your grilled favorites in comments, please!June 23: AmericanStudier Camp: Camp Virginia: A series AmericanStudying summer camp starts with the camp without which there’d be no AmericanStudier.June 24: AmericanStudier Camp: Hello Muddah: The series continues with the novelty song that became a multi-faceted relfection of American society and culture.June 25: AmericanStudier Camp: Jewish Summer Camps: The preservation and revision of culture and tradition, as the series rolls on.June 26: AmericanStudier Camp: Playing Indian: On the vital work of AmericanStudies scholarship that can help us make sense of a troubling summer camp tradition.June 27: AmericanStudier Camp: Friday the 13th: The series concludes with a recent change in the cultural images of summer camps, and what we can make of it.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Share ‘em, please!