Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 378

July 18, 2013: AmericanStudies Daytrips: Concord

[If you’re like me, you’re always looking for new places to take your crazed 7 and 6 year old sons/wrestlers in training, while introducing them to some American history and culture at the same time. Even if you’re not like me, daytrips are fun. Because I live in New England, I’ll be highlighting NE daytrips this week, leading up to a special weekend guest post; I’d also recommend prior blog focal points Salem and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But feel free to share great daytrips from around the country, or the world, in comments!]
On three reasons to visit one of America’s most defining spots.Concord’s Minute Man National Historic Park is one of the most unique and effective historic sites I’ve ever encountered. While the park does have a perfectly acceptable visitor’s center, complete with exhibits and an orientation film and the like, its true genius resides outside—in the five-mile Battle Road Trail,a walking path that takes visitors from Concord to Lexington, along the route of the Revolution’s first battles. The Trail encompasses famous sites such as North Bridge (home to the “shot heard ‘round the world”), anonymous yet exemplary ones such as the eleven 18th-century “witness houses” that stand along the way, and various wetlands, woods, rocky terrain, and open fields along the way—and while of course it can’t possibly be what it was in 1775, it sure feels in many spots as if we could be then and there, marching with the Minute Men or the Redcoats.A few miles away stands a much more overtly artificial yet just as compelling historic re-creation: a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin. If the Battle Road Trail impresses at least in part because of its extent, the sense it gives of how far the troops on both sides marched through still-dark terrain, the uncertainty and fear of battle and death all around them, the Thoreau cabin replica does precisely the opposite: the tiny dwelling looks more like an outhouse than a man’s primary abode for two years. Yet it is apparently a close approximation of Thoreau’s cabin, based on the extensive details he provides in Walden (1854); and while it smallness might at first make the cabin feel anticlimactic, that emotion quickly turns to admiration, to a recognition that (however much he mythologized certain details in his book) Thoreau did indeed construct a home in which he could—must—live very simply during his sojourn at the pond.Walden Pond itself does not feel as it did during Thoreau’s 1845-1847 stay, of course. While Don Henley and other activists have so far succeeded in their quest to save the pond from development, the trek from the replica cabin to the pond crosses a busy state road and leads down to a public beach, complete with restrooms and lifeguard station, left-behind plastic shovels, ropes extending into the water to designate the children’s swimming area, and so on. But to my mind those things are not only generally good (it’s a beautiful spot for a family beach trip) but specifically right—Thoreau liked to emphasize his solitude (again, often at the expense of reality), but he also wanted all Americans to get to Walden Pond and its equivalents far more often. And if you swim out, past the ropes and across the pond, out where you might indeed encounter a loon, you can most definitely find your way to the essence—of the place, of Thoreau’s ideas, of the powerfully American histories and stories to which it all connects.Next daytrip tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on these places? Other daytrips you’d highlight?

July 17, 2013: AmericanStudies Daytrips: Fort Warren

[If you’re like me, you’re always looking for new places to take your crazed 7 and 6 year old sons/wrestlers in training, while introducing them to some American history and culture at the same time. Even if you’re not like me, daytrips are fun. Because I live in New England, I’ll be highlighting NE daytrips this week, leading up to a special weekend guest post; I’d also recommend prior blog focal points Salem and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But feel free to share great daytrips from around the country, or the world, in comments!]
On a site that brings light, and darkness, to a contested past.No matter what you’re looking for in a summer daytrip, the twelve islands and various boat excursions included in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area probably offer it: secluded beaches and picnic areas, hiking and camping trails, kayaking, lighthouse tours, whale watching and sunset cruises, and, yes, American history. Embodying the latter is Fort Warren, the National Historic Landmark located on Georges Island; the Fort’s history dates to the early 19th century and includes 20th century service during both World War I and World War II, before it was decommissioned and turned into a historic site in the late 1940s; but it is most famous and interesting for its role as both a Union Army training camp and a prison for captured Confederates during the Civil War. I have visited Fort Warren before, many years back, but when I took my sons on a trip out to Georges Island and the Fort a couple months ago I noticed something particularly impressive about its presentation of that Civil War history. Many historic sites feel the understandable need to guide a visitor’s experiences, to present numerous exhibits and placards, paths to follow and interpretations with which to engage; since this here blog seeks (among other goals) to add histories into our collective conversations of which (I believe) many Americans are not aware, I can’t fault the sites for their own delineation of salient histories. But in so doing, they run the risk of turning the site’s once-living history into a lesson, of not allowing visitors to connect to what’s there. Whereas at Fort Warren, where (outside of the visitor’s center, which is separate from the historic site) there are very few placards or interpretations of any kind, the visitor is asked to make his or her own way through the site and its histories.I saw first-hand how much my boys were able to connect to the Fort through that open and un-guided (in the best sense) nature, and how much more it spoke to them than any dry lesson could. Ironically, but tellingly, I felt that most strongly in the places they were most hesitant to go—the Fort’s dark inner tunnels, which even at noon on a summer day receive no sunlight and are not artificially lit in any way. Even a step or two into those tunnels was enough for my boys to hold back, recognizing perhaps one of the few places they have yet encountered that is truly unknown, where anything might happen. Certainly that feeling might approximate some part of the experience of being a prisoner, at the Fort or anywhere. And just as certainly, it parallels the true nature of historical investigation—where the more we connect to the past, the more we realize how much we have to feel our way through, bringing whatever light we can with us but open to where the tunnel leads. All lessons Fort Warren can teach us, young and old.Next daytrip tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this site? Other daytrips you’d highlight?

July 16, 2013: AmericanStudies Daytrips: Plimoth Plantation

[If you’re like me, you’re always looking for new places to take your crazed 7 and 6 year old sons/wrestlers in training, while introducing them to some American history and culture at the same time. Even if you’re not like me, daytrips are fun. Because I live in New England, I’ll be highlighting NE daytrips this week, leading up to a special weekend guest post; I’d also recommend prior blog focal points Salem and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But feel free to share great daytrips from around the country, or the world, in comments!]
On a few of the many reasons why a pilgrimage to Plimoth is well worth your time.The museum and historic site at Plimoth Plantation is a hugely interesting and significant AmericanStudies space for at least three distinct, if interconnected, reasons. For one thing, since the Plantation’s origins in the late 1940s, it has worked to create what is usually known as a living history museum, a site in which highly trained and educated “interpreters” reenact the identities and voices and perspectives of early 17thcentury Pilgrims. The work done by such living history museums has become an increasing subject for scholarly research and analysis; it’s not unrelated to Civil War reenactments, but with an explicit and central emphasis on education, with the reenactors not so much fulfilling their own interests or passions (as do Civil War reenactors) as seeking to connect audiences to the people and period they’re recreating. The performers are exceptionally good at what they do, almost disconcertingly so; for an AmericanStudier like me, it’s difficult to talk to them without trying constantly to break the fourth wall and discuss their own choices and goals—but it’s well worth the effort, as they always have something new and interesting to say.If those living history components to Plimoth go back many decades, the second AmericanStudies element is significantly more recent. Just a few hundred yards from the Plantation recreation is the Wampanoag Homesite, a very different kind of living history: while the Homesite’s spaces and places, its tools and cooking processes and the like, are indeed recreations of their 17th century equivalents, the staff of Native Americans (many Wampanoag, but others from various other nations) exist entirely in our 21stcentury moment, providing their own perspectives on the historical, cultural, and national questions to which the site connects. More broadly, the Homesite illustrates just how fully and to my mind successfully Plimoth has worked in the last few decades to provide a historical and educational experience that does full justice to the Wampanoag community and stories. Certainly it’s possible to experience the Homesite and Plantation as two very distinct and separate spaces, an effect that could be called a component to multicultural American history and identity more generally; but at least in part the job of the Plantation is to tell each part of the story, and then to allow its audiences to consider for themselves how those parts and communities interconnect.Yet the Plantation’s third AmericanStudies element exemplifies the site’s most complex but, I would (unsurprisingly) argue, its most crucial goal: highlighting the ultimately and fundamentally interconnected stories and identities of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. This element, the orientation film, is one that at many museums would likely be the least interesting or innovative feature; but at Plimoth the current film, entitled “Two Peoples: One Story,” was produced by the History Channel and is, despite its relatively straightforward basic agenda (to introduce arriving audiences to what they’ll find out at the Plantation and Homesite), a complex and very impressive work. For example, the Wampanoag characters/actors in the film speak in the Wampanoag language, a small detail that is anything but when we recognize the long history of Native American languages being silenced or even actively repressed in favor of English. Yet it’s really the film’s title that reflects its most impressive quality, its consistent insistence on cross-cultural story- and history-telling, on narrating the stories of these two communities as, from those first 1620 moments down to the present museum experience, entirely and crucially intertwined. That doesn’t meant that the film elides the more destructive results of contact for the Wampanoag nation—far from it—but it does give every arriving visitor a clear reminder that the story of Plimoth Plantation is a story of multiple cultures coexisting and conversing and influencing one another in every way, from the most negative to the most potentially inspiring.Next daytrip tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this site? Other daytrips you’d highlight?

July 15, 2013: AmericanStudies Daytrips: Battleship Cove

[If you’re like me, you’re always looking for new places to take your crazed 7 and 6 year old sons/wrestlers in training, while introducing them to some American history and culture at the same time. Even if you’re not like me, daytrips are fun. Because I live in New England, I’ll be highlighting NE daytrips this week, leading up to a special weekend guest post; I’d also recommend prior blog focal points Salem and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But feel free to share great daytrips from around the country, or the world, in comments!]
On the complex historic site that definitely floated my boys’ boats.As part of last year’s series on San Diego and AmericanStudies, I blogged about the U.S.S. Midway, the aircraft carrier that has been turned into a floating naval and aviation museum. I tried in that post to balance two very distinct but equally present goals I had identified in the museum—creating empathy for what individual sailors and servicemen and women go through; and glorifying our national military endeavors. It might seem as if those two effects would go hand in hand—certainly the “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers suggest as much—but I disagree; I believe that empathy for military service can be far more nuanced about, if not openly critical of, wars and what they entail and mean than more broadly jingoistic attitudes can ever be.The many naval vessels that comprise Fall River (MA)’s Battleship Cove, however, put my theory to the test. The unique museum includes a battleship (U.S.S. Massachusetts) that saw extensive World War II action, a destroyer, a submarine, and even a Cold War-era East German corvette, all of which visitors can walk onto and explore. While the battleship does have some interesting permanent exhibitions on various semi-related themes (women in the military, the use of radar, and so on), it does not include nearly as much detail as the Midwaymuseum on the lives and experiences of the sailors who served on it; and the other Battleship Cove ships offer even less contextual information. In the absence of those kinds of histories, it’s very difficult not to simply be awed by the ships’ size, their armaments, their military might—that’s most definitely what my 7 and 6 year old responded to when we visited the Cove earlier this year.And yet. First of all, 7 and 6 year old boys would fixate on big guns no matter what else was around—and it didn’t hurt that we visited on Memorial Day, when one of the battleship’s 5-inchers fired more than a dozen rounds in tribute. Second, and more importantly, there was just something deeply inspiring about seeing my boys excited to be on board these historic vessels, asking questions, experiencing their spaces and settings first hand. I guess we could call this the visitor-response school of museum studies, one in which each visitor can make of the site what he or she will; in that case the relative dearth of information or exhibition on board the ships allowed me and my boys to develop our own experience of and connection to them. For that reason, and for its simple uniqueness, Battleship Cove is definitely a worthwhile AmericanStudies daytrip.Next daytrip tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this site? Other daytrips you’d highlight?

July 13-14, 2013: Southwest Stories: Folk Heroes

[This week’s series has focused on some of the many AmericanStudies stories that can be found in the Southwest—in addition to those included, for example, in this prior series on Mexican American histories. This special post on Southwestern folk heroes, cross-posted from my guest post on William Kerrigan’s great blog, rounds out the week!]

On two folk heroes, and the competing frontier histories they reveal.Even as a kid, encountering his stories in a compilation of tall tales, I could tell that Pecos Bill was a bit of a Paul Bunyan knockoff—an outlandish origin story (Bill fell out of a wagon as a baby and was raised by a pack of wolves as one of their own), similarly larger-than-life animal companions (his otherwise un-rideable horse Widow-Maker, the rattlesnake Shake that he used as a lasso), an equally mythic love interest (Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande). So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bill was a late addition to the “big man” school of tall tales, likely created in 1916 by Edward O’Reilly and shoehorned back into the mythos of Westward expansion and the frontier.That Bill didn’t come into existence until a half-century after the closing of the frontier doesn’t lessen his symbolic status, however—if anything, it highlights just how much the mythos of the American West was and is just that, a consciously created set of myths that have served to delineate after the fact a messy, dynamic, often dark, always complex region and history. Moreover, that mythos was as multi-cultural as the West, as illustrated by Mexican American folk hero Joaquin Murrieta, “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”: Murrieta, a California 49er from northern Mexico, first came to national prominence in a popular dime novel, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854); the tales of his banditry have been a part of the region’s folk history ever since, including a cameo as Zorro’s older brother in the Antonio Banderas film The Mask of Zorro (1998).Yet however much Murrieta’s story has been fictionalized and mythologized, it did originate with an actual historical figure—and that distinction can help us see past the myths to some of the frontier’s messier, darker, and more defining realities. For one thing, Murrieta apparently began his outlaw career after he and his family were violently dispossessed of a land claim, events which connect to the social and legal aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For another, his gang’s victims included not only Anglo settlers but also Chinese laborers, revealing California’s genuinely and often painfully multicultural community as of the mid-19th century. A fuller engagement with these histories would in part force Americans to confront the centuries of conflict and violence that have so frequently comprised the world of the frontier—but it would also allow us to push beyond tall tales of larger-than-life individuals and to recognize just how collective and communal are both the myths and realities of the Southwest, and of America.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Southwest stories or histories you’d add to the series?

July 12, 2013: Southwest Stories: Southwestern Mysteries

[This week, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies stories that can be found in the Southwest—in addition to those included, for example, in this prior series on Mexican American histories. Leading up to a special post on folk heroes!]
On some great mysteries that symbolize the lure of the Southwest, then and now.There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park stood out to me among the many amazing stops on my family’s National Park trip. Exploring thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved petroglyphs, surprising a lone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds of experiences that will hit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way. But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the question of why the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliff dwellings less than a century into their time there, and what happened to them after their departure. Archaeologists and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s fate will always remain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers (and all the rest of us) coming back to Mesa Verde.Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominant features of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas, dwellings in the sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lend themselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on that element more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor who wrote (among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteries focused on Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but I’m pretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I know that I won’t ever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking of how Hillerman captures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and pitch-perfect opening to that novel.Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known) also round out perfectly a series that began with Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved to New Mexico for his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeply interested in and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, and communities. (As he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the Navajo felt about Hillerman’s books, from everything I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman treated his focal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and admiration he did his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps the one thing that links every post this week is just how fully all of my focal figures found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, to its histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?

July 11, 2013: Southwest Stories: Rudolfo Anaya

[This week, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies stories that can be found in the Southwest—in addition to those included, for example, in this prior series on Mexican American histories. Leading up to a special post on folk heroes!]
On the Southwestern writer whose debut novel redefined American literature—and was just the beginning.One of the questions that have most consistently driven my work on this blog has been why we remember the things we do, why we forget others, and, perhaps most especially, how we can challenge those narratives and add much more into our collective memories and conversations. While I have certainly often focused on darker and more difficult such additions, I hope that the scales have been balanced by the many inspiring and compelling moments, figures, and works I have likewise sought to highlight (many of them, of course, arising directly out of the darker histories). Mary Hunter Austin, the focus of Monday’s post, is one exemplary Southwestern such figure; New Mexico-born Mexican American novelist and professor Rudolfo Anaya is most definitely another.It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Anaya’s debut novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972) fundamentally shifted the American literary and cultural landscape (and continues to!). Anaya’s book was far from the first Chicano American text, far from the first to include both Spanish and English, far from the first to focus on Mexican American lives in the Southwest—those honors go to authors from a century prior to Anaya’s debut, writers such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Maria Cristina Mena. But like contemporary Native American authors N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, Anaya brought his literary and cultural heritage to a new prominence and visibility, helping originate a late 20th century Chicano literary boom that would come to include Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and many more. Moreover, like Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, Anaya’s novel deals both with local and cultural contexts and with universal experiences and themes, making it as accessible as it is challenging, as engaging as it is controversial. It’s just a great American novel, and deserves a much wider readership.But it’s not like Anaya has just sat around waiting for that response. In the four decades since he published Ultima, he has published more than a dozen other works of fiction, ten collections of writing for children, numerous anthologies and collections (of his own work and other Chicano American writing), and five plays, all while teaching at the University of New Mexico and serving as a mentor for many younger writers. One of those children’s works, My Land Sings: Stories from the Rio Grande (1999), perfectly illustrates just how much Anaya’s work has always been and remains connected to, influenced by, and contributing to the culture and identity of the American Southwest. He has blessed the region many times over, and we’re all blessed to have his voice and works to help embody and carry forward all that the Southwest is and means.Last Southwest story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?

July 10, 2013: Southwest Stories: Los Alamos

[This week, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies stories that can be found in the Southwest—in addition to those included, for example, in this prior series on Mexican American histories. Leading up to a special post on folk heroes!]
Three ways to AmericanStudy one of the world’s most important and controversial laboratories.The central laboratory in the Manhattan Project, the World War II program through which the United States developed the first atomic bombs, was located in Los Alamos, New Mexico for a very specific reason: J. Robert Oppenheimerloved the area. Oppenheimer, the physicist who would become the laboratory’s first director and the so-called “father of the atomic bomb,” had traveled to New Mexico at the age of 18 to recover from a devastating illness and had, like yesterday’s artists and so many other visitors (including a certain 13 year old AmericanStudier during his family’s national park vacation) fallen in love with the place. By 1942, when he was selected to head the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer owned a horse ranch near Los Alamos, and his familiarity with the area, coupled no doubt with his sense of how conducive it would be to privacy and secrecy, led him to recommend it as the laboratory’s site. So on one key level, Los Alamos reflects the complex and often contradictory personality of its first and most famous director.The selection of Los Alamos and New Mexico for that site also engendered at least one more deeply ironic contradiction. Oppenheimer’s love for the area was due in no small measure to its spectacular landscapes; the Southwest is like nothing else in America, and, as Willa Cather captures so perfectly in her historical novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), its mesas and canyons can capture for life the heart and soul of any visitor. Yet it was precisely that wild and open landscape that made the area ideal for not only the Los Alamos laboratory but also its culminating moment: the Trinity test, the July 16th, 1945 first explosion of an atomic bomb. Perhaps the test site near Alamagordo, in the Jornada del Muerto Valley, was indeed uninhabited and available for such an explosion—but even if that were the case, the denotation without question destroyed thousands of square miles of Southwestern landscape, flora, and fauna, and permanently affected and altered whatever was left behind. I don’t believe the cliché that we always hurt the ones we love, but in Oppenheimer’s case, his choice certainly damaged the place he loved.Moreover, I’m not entirely convinced that the Trinity site was as uninhabited as the Manhattan Project’s planners believed. In the climactic section of her novel Ceremony (1977), just a few pages from the amazing conclusion about which I have blogged before, Leslie Marmon Silko locates her protagonist Tayo close enough to the Trinity site (in not only geography but also, as a World War II veteran, chronology and experienc) that he can reflect on its status as yet another theft and destruction of sacred tribal lands by the U.S. government. To be clear, the Jornada del Muerto Valley had not belonged to Tayo’s Laguna Pueblo people, nor any other Native American tribe, for some time, making that theft and destruction more metaphorical and overarching than immediate or legal. But as each of my posts this week have highlighted, the simple fact is that Southwestern land has been contested and cohabitated for centuries, and certainly remained that way into the era of the Trinity test. Los Alamos, that is, is as Mexican American as its name suggests and as Native American as all of New Mexico, making the Manhattan Project likewise emblematic of the American project at its worst and best.Next Southwest story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?

July 9, 2013: Southwest Stories: Taos

[This week, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies stories that can be found in the Southwest—in addition to those included, for example, in this prior series on Mexican American histories. Leading up to a special post on folk heroes!]
On three telling American histories connected to one small New Mexico town.Thanks in no small measure to the scholarly work of AmericanStudies legend Lois Rudnick, for most AmericanStudiers Taos means first and foremost Mabel Dodge Luhan, and the experimental artistic and social community she helped organize, supported, and in many ways led there. That Taos Art Colony would come to include such luminaries as Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams and Mary Hunter Austin (who produced the book The Taos Pueblo while living there, as I highlighted yesterday), and Leon Gaspard; it represented in equal measure the rise and possibilities of modernist art, an alternative to the capitalistic excesses of the Roaring 20s, and a deeply local connection to the region’s peoples, settings, and histories, among other meanings.Thanks to both Luhan’s widespread properties in the area and her interest in the international artistic community, Taos also became home for two years (1922-1924)to English novelist and critic D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Lawrence is generally classified as part of the English literary tradition, and with good reason; but his time in Taos illustrates how much AmericanStudies can and must also include international voices and texts. It was while living at the Taos ranch, for example, that Lawrence began The Plumed Serpent (1926), his complex novel of the Mexican Revolution and its impact on both Mexican and American characters and communities. And it was likewise while living at the ranch that Lawrence revised and published his collection of essays Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)—a book still considered one of the most trenchant analyses of American literary narratives and motifs, and one that can and must be connected to the Southwestern and frontier world in which Lawrence was immersed while completing it.Nearly a century earlier, Taos was also home to an event that embodied the darker and more divisive sides to that Southwestern setting. In early 1847, with the Mexican American War(s) still ongoing, U.S. forces and settlers occupied the area, and the local Mexican and Pueblo (Native American) communities decided to respond. A mixed group led by Mexican Pablo Montoya and Pueblo Tomás Romero led what came to be known as the Taos Revolt (or Rebellion), killing the new Anglo governor Charles Bent and attacking communities of Anglo settlers and traders. The U.S. military responded with a series of battles, including the extended Siege of Pueblo de Taos; eventually the U.S. forces succeeded in putting down the revolt and executed the leaders. But since Taos, like the Southwest overall, remains home in the 21st century to Anglo, Mexican, and Native American communities (among others), it’s important to note that all of these histories and stories, communities and identities, are American ones in equal, complex, and crucial measure.Next Southwest story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?

July 8, 2013: Southwest Stories: Mary Hunter Austin

[This week, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies stories that can be found in the Southwest—in addition to those included, for example, in this prior series on Mexican American histories. Leading up to a special post on folk heroes!]
On three of the many interesting and inspiring sides to the muse of the Southwest.If Mary Hunter Austin’s only claim to fame was The Land of Little Rain (1903), that would be more than enough to guarantee her a place in both the Southwestern and American cultural and historical landscape. Much like another book from the same year, The Souls of Black Folk , Austin’s pioneering work brought together many different genres: the book is at once a naturalistic account of California’s deserts and an engaging description of the region’s mythologies and spiritualities, an autobiographical glimpse into Austin’s immersion in the area (after moving there from her native Illinois) and an ethnographic study of its Native, Mexican, and Anglo American communities, and more. Land does justice to all of those goals but, like Du Bois’ book, is also more than the sum of its parts, and as such comprises a unique and vital American text.Land might exemplify Austin’s unique perspective and style, however, but it’s also only the first of the more than twenty books she wrote and published in the next three decades, before her too early death in 1934 at the age of 65. Those include: The Arrow Maker (1911), one of the first New York-produced plays to focus on Native American life; collections of regional folklore and children’s stories such as The Basket Woman (1904); and regionalist and proto-modernist novels such as Santa Lucia (1908), which anticipates Willa Cather’s Southwestern fiction. She also collaborated with photographer Ansel Adams on The Taos Pueblo (1930), a beautiful combination of prose and photographs that rivals its contemporary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an exemplification of the possibilities of that kind of artistic collaboration and regional representation. Those works all reflect just how much Austin lived as well as wrote about the Southwest, and so too do two other, distinct but complementary sides of her California experiences. In the first years of the 20th century, Austin and her husband Stafford were deeply involved in the California Water Wars, fighting on behalf of the farmers and residents of Owens Valley whose water was being diverted to supply Los Angeles (a largely forgotten history that was fictionalized in one of the greatest American films, Chinatown[1974]). And after separating from her husband and leaving the area, she moved to Carmel, where she joined an experimental artistic community that included the likes of Jack London and Ambrose Bierce and helped found the modernist Forest Theater. Much of the period’s social and artistic history of California can be illustrated by those two communities—and thus, like much else in the Southwest, by Mary Hunter Austin.Next Southwest story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?