Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 397

January 10, 2013: American Homes, Part Four

[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]
On the interesting, and definitely American, layers underlying one of our silliest holiday classics.As much as I believe in the power of AmericanStudies analyzing, I’m still not gonna try to make the case that the stunning and perennial popularity of Home Alone (1990) has been due to complex national themes. No, the John Hughes-scripted, Chris Columbus-directed, Macaulay Culkin-starring mega-hit was and remains popular, first and foremost, because of the spider on Daniel Stern’s face, the flying metal bucket to Joe Pesci’s head, Culkin’s reaction to using aftershave for the first time, the pizza guy who thinks the gangster film is reality, and the movie’s many other silly and funny moments. As a lifelong devotee of the Zucker Brothers, I would never judge anyone’s enjoyment of silly and slapstick humor, and for much of its second half Home Alone is a masterclass in those styles.Yet just because a movie is entertaingly silly doesn’t mean we can’t find and analyze other elements and layers to it; if anything, Home Alone’s popularity means that any and all details and themes within it have likely been viewed and engaged with by many millions of Americans (and audiences around the world), and so are doubly worth our attention. For example, there’s the secondary but ultimately crucial plotline involving “Old Man Marley,” Kevin’s (Culkin) scary neighbor; Marley is rumored to have killed his family, but eventually Kevin learns that he is simply lonely and estranged from them, and the two help each other: Marley saves Kevin from the burglars, Kevin helps Marley reconnect with his son and granddaughter. The character and plotline strongly echo Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird, suggesting some of the same themes: the need to move beyond communal gossip and myths and learn about the truths of an individual’s identity and life; the ways in which such connections can ultimately save and sustain our own lives and homes. Both Kevin and Marley, after all, spend much of the film “home alone,” and both find their way back to full houses thanks to each other’s efforts.This is more of a stretch—or an extrapolation, let’s say—but I would also connect Kevin’s arc in the film to defining American narratives of individualism and the self-made man. Kevin isn’t exactly a Horatio Alger protagonist, but for most of the film he’s pretty close: like Ragged Dickand all his peers, Kevin finds himself separated from his parents (and particularly his beloved Mom), and is forced to depend on his own wits and strengths to survive and prosper. Yet while Alger’s orphans have forever lost their childhood homes, Kevin is temporarily orphaned within his home, and that crucial detail, coupled with the film’s parallel plotline of his Mom’s frenzied efforts to get back to Kevin, significantly complicates the film’s engagement with these national narratives. Like the Marley plotline, that is, these details both suggest the importance of individual identity and actions and yet reflect the way our lives and homes ultimately depend on community, on the presence of those influential others who help make our homes what they ideally are. There’s some definite value to spending time home alone and to the self-making for which such an experience allows, Kevin’s story argues, but at the end of the day it takes a village to make that home what it is.Final home connections for the week tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this movie and these ideas? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?

January 9, 2013: American Homes, Part Three

[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]
On two dark, cynical, and crucially human portrayals of home in one of our most home-ly poets.It’s not really accurate to say that Robert Frost spent his life in rural New England: he was born in San Francisco and spent his first eleven years there; when his family then moved east they lived in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost graduated from high school; and he spent significant later time in London, in Ann Arbor, and in Florida, among other places. But nonetheless, the popular and dominant association of Frost with that one region, and even more exactly with his home on a New Hampshire farm, remains, and with good reason: not only because it was his most consistent and stable locale, but also and even more significantly because so many of his best and most enduring poems utilize details and elements of that setting and world. Yet if those popular narratives, based perhaps on “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” categorize Frost’s rural world as a calm and peaceful one, they miss much of the complex darkness he also portrayed within that setting.Interestingly, and importantly, two of the darkest such images are created in poems that are centrally concerned with the idea of home. “Home Burial” (1915), included in Frost’s early collection North of Boston , comprises a strained and difficult dialogue between two parents who have recently lost their young son (and whom the father, to the mother’s anger, buried himself on their property). “The Death of the Hired Man” (1915), from the same collection, focuses on a conversation between an elderly farm couple about the titular employee, who has spent many years working for them and has come back to their farm at the end of his life; discussing why he has done so, the couple offer one of the most famous passages about home in American poetry: “‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ / ‘I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’” While those two ideas differ in tone, they’re both more dark and cynical than stereotypes such as “Home is where the heart is.” And similarly, while the first poem’s association of death and home is a tragic and painful one, and the second’s more accepting and natural, the two are nonetheless united, from their titles on, by that sense of home as a place of inevitable and even defining loss.So should we just conclude that Frost was a good deal more cynical and curmudgeonly than popular favorite “Stopping by Woods” would indicate? I don’t think that’d be a false conclusion—this is the poet who wrote “Good fences make good neighbors,” and while that’s the voice of a character within the poem you get the feeling that Frost didn’t disagree—but I also would argue that something else, something more universal, is going on in “Burial” and “Hired Man.” After all, it’s entirely true that home is where the heart is—but of course the heart contains, particularly as we get older, as much loss as it does love, as much sorrow as it does joy, as much death as it does life. And so too are homes not only full of those with whom we share them, amazing as those presences hopefully are; they’re also full of those with whom we don’t, for all the complicated and sad and tough and human reasons that lead to those absences. That Frost was able to recognize and put into poetic words those darker sides to home only cements his status as one of our most home-ly national voices.Next home connections tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?

January 8, 2013: American Homes, Part Two

[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]
On the utterly fictional, vaguely uncomfortable, and unquestionably compelling homes created by the father of American music.I’m not sure how many 21st century Americans know his name, but I’d guarantee that most of us can still sing (or at least hum) along to one or more of the melodies composed by Stephen Foster(1826-1864). Maybe the silly but mournful “Oh! Susanna”remains the most popular; perhaps it’s the upbeat excitement of “Camptown Races”; or the tender, idealized love of “Beautiful Dreamer.”It’s likely in any case that the specific contexts for these tunes have been almost entirely lost; I doubt many who sing the first two, for example, know that they began as minstrel songs, with their lyrics written in the dialect of African American slaves in the antebellum era (or at least Foster’s approximation of the same). And that same two-sided point, popularity on the one hand yet complex and uncomfortable contexts on the other, extends doubly to Foster’s two most formally sanctioned songs: “Old Folks at Home”and “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night.”I call those two songs formally sanctioned because each is still, more than 150 years after its composition, an official state song: “Old Folks,” with its nostalgic embrace of life upon Florida’s “Sewanee river,” has been Florida’s official state song since 1935; while “Kentucky,” obviously, serves as that state’s official state song. I call their contexts complex and uncomfortable partly because both were also composed as minstrel songs in slave dialect, with lyrics that have had to be revised in recent years in order to ameliorate controversy and protest: the African American speaker of “Old Folks” finds himself “still longing for de old plantation”; while the second line of “Kentucky” establishes our setting as “summer, [when] the darkies are gay.” But perhaps even more strange is that the nostalgia of each song is entirely fictional, both in their specifics and in their overarching preference for Southern life; Foster was born in Pennsylvania, lived in New York for most of his tragically brief life, and never set foot in either Kentucky or Florida (he only visited the South once, on a steamboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans).In terms of American cultural and literary history, Foster’s nostalgic embrace of a South he had never known foreshadowed the local color movement known as the plantation tradition, many of the practitioners of which were likewise northerners. But I would also say that it’s worth engaging more broadly with this kind of communal, created nostalgia: a constructed yet still compelling embrace of homes that never actually existed yet that exercise a significant hold on our national imagination nonetheless. How much of what we mean by “America,” in our narratives and images and popular usage, depends on a similar kind of communal, created nostalgia? And while partly that idea can be a divisive one—connected for example to what the Tea Partiers mean by “I want my country back”—I believe that it’s also a unifying and shared concept, and that even recent immigrants can and do often embrace this kind of constructed image of our communal “home.” There’s nothing necessarily wrong that—not if it can help create a unified national community—but at the very least, it’s worth asking what about such constructed images of home appeals to us so much; wondering why, that is, we still sing along to those songs.Next home connections tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?

January 7, 2013: American Homes, Part One

[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]
On the promise and perils of returning home after many years away.The romance of traveling abroad, and finding ourselves anew (or perhaps finding new selves) there, forms a common trope in our national narratives. That’s particularly true, I’d say, of our images of artists and authors, as exemplified by the Roaring ‘20s expatriates whose European journeys continue to fascinate us (see Woody Allen’s engagement with them in the recent Midnight in Paris). We tend to engae much less frequently, however, with the other side of that coin: with what it means when such travelers return to their American homes. Literary and cultural critic Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934) offers a particularly rich and complex examination of what that experience of return meant for those 20s expatriates, and more exactly of both the hopes and the fears that those Americans felt as they made their way back to their home.Even more telling, and at the same time substantially stranger and more surprising, are James Fenimore Cooper’s contemporaneous, interconnected, yet dueling fictional representations of the same experience. In 1826, at the height of his first literary successes, Cooper took a job as a US consul and moved his family to France, where he remained, traveling through Europe and continuing to write, for the next seven years. When he and they returned to America, and to his childhood and lifelong home of Cooperstown, in 1833, he found the place after those years away at once familiar and yet changed, nostalgically comforting and yet threateningly foreign. Some of those shifts were in the community (Jacksonian Democracy was in full force, and the nation was indeed changing), while some were in Cooper himself (in his more mature and elite status, in his European-influence d perspective, and more). And as he did throughout his prolific career, Cooper responded to his experiences and the world around him by writing novels, in this case two that he published in the same year: Homeward Bound; or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea (1838) and Home as Found (1838). The latter novel was subtitled “Sequel to Homeward Bound,” and indeed the two works feature many of the same central characters. Yet on the other hand they feel hugely and interestingly distinct. Partly those are differences in genre and setting: the former is a seafaring adventure that takes its characters to multiple exotic destinations; the latter a comedy of manners set entirely in homes and social settings within New York York and Templeton (Cooper’s fictionalized Cooperstown). But the differences in tone go beyond those elements, and reflect some of the disappointment suggested by the phrase as Found, the gap between the idea of home (toward which the characters ostensibly move throughout Homeward Bound, although in reality they adventure around the world) and the reality of what is encountered when it is reached. That gap is perhaps inevitable for anyone returning home, especially after years away; but it’s also complex and troubling, given the importance that our homes hold in our identities and psyches throughout our lives. In any case, such experiences are likely universal, and Cooper’s novels, like Cowley’s book, can help us understand and engage with them in our own lives.Next home connections tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?

January 5-6, 2013: Crowd-Sourcing our Biggest Issues

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ve highlighted four of the biggest and suggested a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Everybody was apparently still too hung over to add their crowd-sourced responses and thoughts, but I’m still gonna put this post up, and hope that you’ll share some of yours in the comments. Thanks in advance, and let’s make this a truly American, in the best senses, 2013!]
Next series begins Monday,BenPS. What would you add to these thoughts?

January 4, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: Poverty

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the hugely difficult, and equally crucial, step we need to take if we are to address our most desperate American lives and circumstances.I’ll be the first to admit that I have a hard time wrapping my own head around, much less writing about or teaching, the depths of poverty in which so many Americans have lived throughout our national existence and continue to live today. That difficulty is at least a bit ironic, since as a professor of (among other things) Ethnic American Literature I spend quite a bit of time teaching and writing about authors and communities whose American identities and experiences are, despite shared and core similarities for which I will argue until my last breath, quite distinct from my own in many ways. And yet while I would never claim to be able to speak for what a Frederick Douglass, a Sarah Winnemucca, a Gloria Anzaldúa experienced or lived, it is for whatever reason with significantly more hesitation still that I write about the identities and worlds of those (of any race or ethnicity, any gender, any community) in the American underclass.Part of the reason, I think, is that it’s so hard, for those of us who have been fortunate enough not to experience poverty in our own lives and who likewise have not in our professional careers engaged in any specific or experiential way with these harshest economic realities, not to speak in abstractions or generalities, not to lapse into politics or sociology. There’s no one surefire way to counter that tendency, short of going to live for a month at a homeless shelter or the equivalent (and even then, it seems to me that living in poverty as an experiment is as different from living in it as a swimming pool is from the Pacific); but certainly it helps, from an AmericanStudies perspective at least, to turn to those American authors and artists and reformers who have worked to depict with particular sensitivity and accuracy these most desperate and difficult conditions and existences. And near the top of that list by any measure has to be the Danish American reformer, journalist, and photographer Jacob Riis(1849-1914), and most especially his complex but indispensable masterwork How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890). Riis, who immigrated to the US at the age of 21 and worked for many years as a journeyman laborer, experiencing significant poverty in his own right, before making his way into the newspaper trade, is a worthy nominee for the Hall of American Inspiration for sure. He was a pioneer of the use of flash photography in America, was one of the first muckraking social journalists and a model for many Progressive writers of the next generation, and fought for poor and working Americans and for relevant necessary urban causes and reforms throughout his career and life. But even if he were only to be remembered for Other Half, it should be sufficient to ensure him a place in our national narratives and histories. The book is not without its flaws, most especially in its stereotyping portrayals of ethnic minorities such as the Chinese. But in its incredible depth and density of detail, its painstaking accuracy about places and living conditions (including extensive sketches and layouts produced on site by Riis), its use of photographs to ground that work in images as well as words more than in any prior American text, and, perhaps most impressively, in Riis’s ability to push past whatever generalities and images and narratives existed in his own head about these communities and lives and to engage with and represent the realities of their existences on their own terms (again, not for every community with equal success, but for most of those on which he focuses), the book stands alone, in its own era and in many ways into the century and a quarter that has followed.I can’t pretend to know much of what it means to be part of the “other half” in 2013, but I can do the best I can to remember and understand and (ideally and crucially) empathize with those lives; and Riis remains a very meaningful voice in that process. BenPS. Crowd-sourced post this weekend, so one more time: what do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

January 3, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: Education Reform

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the two simple and crucial truths about education that AmericanStudying can help us remember.As anyone who has read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011) can attest, the policies of accountability, testing, and school choice—cornerstones of educational reform for the last decade plus—have largely failed. It’s not quite as straightforward as that, of course; but Ravitch, herself one of the chief architects of those policies before extensive experience and evidence convinced her of their problems and limitations, dismantles No Child Left Behind and its many corollary concepts pretty thoroughly. To my mind, the much more difficult question is where we go from there, how education reform can move away from those models and toward something new and hopefully better. Ravitch has some ideas, of course; President Obama’s Race to the Top program represents some other possibilities; and the coming years will see many more suggestions, I’m sure.I don’t pretend to be equipped to argue educational policy, although I would always come back to something I’ve addressed in this space on multiple occasions: universal preschool. But beyond the specific and evolving questions of policy lie some basic truths about education that I feel sometimes get lost in the shuffle, and there I believe AmericanStudying can help remind us of what’s most important. For one thing, some of the most compelling American memoirs include passages that highlight the immense and inspiring power of education, its ability to offer hope in even the most desperate and difficult circumstances. From Frederick Douglass secretly learning to read and write as a slave on the streets of Baltimore to Richard Wright forging a library card and checking out classics from a Mississippi library, Mary Antin feeling like an American for the first time in her elementary school classes to Richard Rodriguez challenging his parents on the importance of learning English, and so many similar moments, these American lives were profoundly changed by the chance to become a student in the fundamental and significant sense. Remembering that basic and crucial fact, of the shared promise of education for all American children, itself becomes an argument for universal preschool, for focusing on improving the conditions and possibilities in every classroom and for every student, for keeping students (not institutions, not accountability, not outcomes) at the heart of every policy choice.There are various ways we can keep our focus on students, but I would argue that the most effective entails remembering and supporting the other most important part of every educational moment: the teacher. AmericanStudying reminds us that behind many of the most influential and inspiring Americans we can find the contributions of an impressive teacher: Annie Sullivan, the “Miracle Worker” who taught Helen Keller; William James, whose Harvard mentorship helped W.E.B. Du Bois achieve his full potential; Ella Baker, who mentored many of the Civil Rights movement’s leaders and activists; and so many other American educators and mentors, including those in my own AmericanStudying life (and, I’m quite sure, yours). Far from worrying so much about holding public educators “accountable,” much less critiquing them as so many of our current narratives do, it seems to me we should focus on empowering them as best we can to do their crucial job, and then getting out of their way. Who knows where the next Sullivan, James, or Baker is working with her or his Keller, Du Bois, or Martin Luther King, Jr.—and where some extra funding for resources, some professional training, some parental input and support, some communal encouragement could provide these inspiring teachers and students with the push they need?Next big issue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

January 2, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: The Debt

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On how AmericanStudying can help us understand the importance of responding to the dominant narratives about our current fiscal bogeyman.I’m deeply sympathetic to those who argue that the national debt is significantly less of a problem, particularly in a time of economic downturn, than our current narratives indicate. Besides my own perspective, that opinion is shared by multiple voices I trust in our current political and social climate: smart and rational bloggers like Digby and David Atkins; influential and brilliant economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich; and even the American Studies Association, whose 2013 annual conference’s main theme will focus on ways to move “Beyond the Logic of Debt.” Again, I share that perspective in many ways—but as someone with a strong interest in the history of national narratives, I have to admit that I’m pretty uneasy about deploying a narrative that was expressed most succinctly and overtly by none other than Dick Cheney: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”Moreover, even if I were comfortable sharing the same spectrum—or universe—of thought with Dick, AmericanStudying reminds me of a crucial reason to engage more fully with our collective concerns about the debt: a desire to take care of future generations, to leave them with a world better and stronger than our own. Such a desire is perhaps the most consistent and core element of the American Dream, and illustrates why a tragedy like the Newtown elementary school shooting resonantes with all Americans more deeply than any other parallel such event (horrific as they have always been). Even more signficantly, many of our most inspiring and influential advocates and campaigns for social change and progress have depended precisely on appeal to that shared and collective desire—as exemplified most poignantly by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a better future for his and all American children. To downplay these concerns about the world we leave subsequent generations is thus to deny core aspects of what has both defined America and helped us move toward our ideals.At the same time, such narratives of debt and the future provide an opportunity to talk about our communal priorities, and on this note too AmericanStudying can provide inspiring examples. Whatever your political position on Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, it’s hard to disagree that they were developed, at a time of economic crisis and fear, in response to precisely such questions of priorities: the programs demonstrate an explicit emphasis on the public arts, on infrastructure and energy, on providing steady and constructive jobs to as many Americans as possible and rebuilding national spaces in the process. On the other hand, we can look to more recent history, and specifically to how the George W. Bush administration entered office with a substantial surplus and quickly spent it all on the largest tax cut in national history, to illustrate the pursuit of a very different set of priorities in response to federal and governmental economic circumstances. Each case, like every other and like our own moment, is specific and demands its own analysis—but what they reveal in sum is the significance of making overt our conversations about our communal priorities, and about how we respond to federal debt and surplus, deficit and boom, through their lens.Next big issue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

January 1, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: Climate Change

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On how a few important and inspiring AmericanStudiers would suggest we respond to the most long-term yet most pressing world crisis.“Simplify, simplify.” Those words and that message are at the heart of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)—of Chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”; and of the purpose and message of Thoreau’s time at the pond and book about the experience. It’s true that Thoreau wasn’t nearly as alone in his cabin as his book sometimes suggests—that he went to town and received visitors from there, that he depended on some help from his parents, that he was social as well as solitary during his Transcendental sojourn. But far from making Thoreau or the book hypocritical, as has sometimes been suggested, those facts make him and it more human and genuine and inspiring—represent his lived experience and demonstrate his attempt to wed that experience to ideals of simplicity and reconnection with the natural world. If we’re going to change the way we live in this 21st century moment, Thoreau would argue, it’s going to have to start with simplifying and reconnecting for sure.“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” So pioneering naturalist, conservationist, and author John Muir once noted in his journals (collected in this wonderful 1938 book, John of the Mountains). Muir is often described as a founding father of the National Park movement—or at least as sharing that honor with Teddy Roosevelt, since Muir died before the National Park Service was created—and there’s a good deal of truth to that designation. But even truer would be the recognition that for Muir, there’s no meaningful individual life, no communal American identity, and perhaps no world period that doesn’t include engagement with, respect for, and preservation of our natural spaces. Preserving, appreciating, and venturing into the wilderness isn’t, by itself, nearly enough to reverse or even impact climate change, of course. But the more we move into the wilderness in our individual lives—and the more we allow it to move into all of our perspectives—the more, Muir would argue, we can connect to the most universal and crucial human questions.“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.” So wrote environmental activist, scientist, and author Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), one of the 20th century’s and America’s most prescient and salient works. Carson’s specific attention to the dangers of pesticides, and similar environmental hazards, had in her era and have continued to have significant, lasting, and very beneficial effects. But when it comes to her most overarching message, her concerns over the path of progress and where it is taking us, we have been far less able to hear and respond. Doing so won’t be easy, not only because of inertia and momentum, but also because progress and development most certainly have their own positive and beneficial impacts on the world and those who live in it. But at the very least, Carson would insist, we must examine every aspect of our world, and recognize that in a significant number of cases we will have to move away from easy or attractive ideas (see: fracking) in order to travel on the harder but more sustainable road.All voices we must hear, it seems to me. Next big issue tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

December 31, 2012: December 2012 Recap

[Recapping the month that was in AmericanStudying.]
December 1-2: Chilly Crowd-sourcing: A series on winter in American culture concludes with the responses and thoughts of some fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours, please!December 3: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part One: A Pearl Harbor-inspired series starts with a post on commemorating or remembering war—and Clint Eastwood films.December 4: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Two: The series continues with the two distinct sides of San Diego’s USS Midway Museum.December 5: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Three: On Midway, The Thin Red Line, and two distinct eras and types of war movies.December 6: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Four: On what I took away from a childhood building war-related models, as the series rolls on. December 7: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Five: The series concludes with a special post on remembering Pearl Harbor and similarly infamous days. December 8-9: Lincoln, Culture, and History: Another special post, this one on some of the questions about cultural images of history raised by the new Spielberg film. December 10: Fireside Reads, Part One: A series on AmericanStudies works to read on long winter’s nights begins with two late 19th century mega-novels.December 11: Fireside Reads, Part Two: The series continues with Carlos Bulosan’s contribution to our fireside reading.December 12: Fireside Reads, Part Three: On my favorite American poet, and one with whom you could definitely spend some quality time by the fire.December 13: Fireside Reads, Part Four: The American mystery novelist who will give you the best kind of winter chills, as the series rolls on.December 14: Fireside Reads, Part Five: The series concludes with some worthy fireside reads from international, honorary AmericanStudiers.December 15-16: Crowd-sourced Fireside Reads: Suggestions for fireside reads from fellow AmericanStudiers—add your own, please!December 17-23: AmericanStudier Needs You: The old AmericanStudier site is sadly defunct, but I plan to rebuild in the new year—and would love your suggestions, contributions, and feedback!December 24: Making My List (Again), Part One: My annual list of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves kicks off with the Christmas Eve attitude we could all use a bit more of.December 25: Making My List (Again), Part Two: The series continues with my wish for what we can all take away from the best Christmas film ever.December 26: Making My List (Again), Part Three: On my wish for American attitudes toward and inclusion of atheists.December 27: Making My List (Again), Part Four: The website and project that all Americans should engage with and support, as the series rolls on. December 28: Making My List (Again), Part Five: The series concludes with my wish for an experience that all American kids should get to have.December 29-30: Making Our Lists: A crowd-sourced post on AmericanStudies wish lists—but it could use some more wishes! Add yours, please!New year and series stars tomorrow,BenPS. Things you’d like to read about in this space in 2013? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Lemme know!