Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 408

July 12, 2012: American Studies Beach Reads, Part Four

[Having spent many a youthful summer’s day with Tom Clancy’s latest, I’ve got nothing against a good low-brow beach read. But there are also works that offer complex, compelling, and significant American experiences along with their page-turning pleasures. This week I’ll be highlighting some of those American Studies beach reads—and please share yours for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
Why you should read an epic four-volume sci fi series on the beach this summer.If you’re a fan of science fiction already, I probably won’t have to work very hard to convince you to give Tad Williams’ Otherland series—all four 800-page volumes of it—a shot. Williams has had a long and impressively varied career in sci fi, fantasy, and related genres, in print and in numerous other media (Otherland is in fact currently being developed into an online gaming system and also has been optioned as a film which Williams is set to script), and to my mind this series remains his most significant achievement; I’d put it alongside Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels as the best sci fi series of the last couple decades. So if you’re a fan of the genre and haven’t read Williams’ series yet, feel free to stop reading now and go pick ‘em up; I promise you won’t be disappointed. But if you’re not a fan, I know that much of that paragraph—and especially the part about 3200 pages of epic science fiction—is more likely to send you running in the other direction than to scream “beach read!” to you. Moreover, Williams’ series is set in numerous places, real and virtual, and if I’m remembering correctly only two of its many central plot threads take place in the United States; hardly an obvious fit for a series on American Studies beach reads. Yet I am including Williams’ series in my own, and there are a couple of pretty good reasons why. For one thing, Williams sets his series in a near-future in which numerous early 21st century American and world trends—historical, cultural, technological, and more—have been extended and amplified; as with all of the best sci fi, then, his works allow us to consider and analyze our own moment and society from that distance. It doesn’t hurt, for the beach reading and for helping that socially critical medicine go down more smoothly, that Williams’ touch in these areas is both wry and funny; each chapter begins with a brief glimpse into one or another of these futuristic trends, and taken together they comprise a dark satirical vision on par with the kinds of black comedy I referenced in yesterday’s post.That’s one good reason for any American Studier to engage with science fiction, and particularly with a series as pitch-perfect in its futuristic world-building and social commentary as Williams’. But I would argue that the series’ central theme is even more salient for any and all 21st century American Studiers. I’m not going to spoil the specifics of how Williams develops this theme, as it’s central to the series’ mysteries and arcs, but will say that his characters and his books are concerned, on multiple key levels, with questions of story-telling: how we create and tell stories; what stories mean for individuals and communities; how stories can be put to the worst as well as the best uses; what the oldest and most enduring stories have to offer all of us in a 21st century, technologically driven society; and many more such questions. As I’ve argued many times in this space, I think few questions matter more to American politics, culture, society, and Studies than that of our national narratives, the stories we tell about our past, our community, our identity. Williams’ series makes for a hugely imaginative and entertaining way in to thinking about such narratives, and about the deepest human questions to which they connect. Definitely worth your suntanning time!Next beach read post tomorrow,BenPS. Nominations for American Studies beach reads, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post? Bring ‘em!7/12 Memory Day nominee: Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s foremost philosophers, environmentalists, political activists, travel writers, lecturers and essayists, and literary voices.

July 11, 2012: American Studies Beach Reads, Part Three

[Having spent many a youthful summer’s day with Tom Clancy’s latest, I’ve got nothing against a good low-brow beach read. But there are also works that offer complex, compelling, and significant American experiences along with their page-turning pleasures. This week I’ll be highlighting some of those American Studies beach reads—and please share yours for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
Why you should read two Holocaust novels on the beach this summer.When faced with the worst of what humanity can do and be, sometimes all we can do is laugh. That idea is at the heart of a particular post-war strain of American literature and art, the satirical black comedy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove(and later Full Metal Jacket), and other similar works. Yet while some of these works (especially Vonnegut’s novel) do feature relatively sympathetic characters, I would argue that our laughter is not with these characters so much as at them, or at least at the ironic and ridiculous situations in which we encounter them. Such laughter might well help us deal with the horrors behind those situations, or render the memories of them powerless to inflict further pain; but it also has the potential to distance us from the horrors, to make histories that were dead serious to those who experienced them instead seem somewhat silly to us.That’s one kind of laughter in response to the worst in humanity, and whatever its strengths and weaknesses, I don’t think it makes for entertaining beach reading (although to each his or her own!). But there’s another, very different kind of laughter, one in which the funny voices and perspectives of sympathetic characters lead us as an audience to laugh even as those characters deal with such historical horrors. I think that was the intent behind Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust-centered film Life is Beautiful (which I haven’t seen, so I can’t personally speak to the results!). And that kind of laughter also comprises a big part of two recent, popular and award-winning American Holocaust novels (written by a pair of married New Yorkers): Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated(2002) and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love(2005).Both Foer’s and Krauss’s novels are in many ways mysteries, puzzles in which the final pieces don’t lock together until their conclusions, and I’m certainly not going to spoil either here (what kind of beach read commendation would that be?). But I will say that one of the chief pleasures of both novels is in the very funny narrative voices of two of their protagonists: Foer’s Alex, a supremely self-confident yet secretly sensitive Ukrainian kid whose efforts at translating and writing in English aren’t exactly prize-winning; and Krauss’s Leo, a self-deprecating and gloomy elderly Jewish American man whose experiences posing nude for an art class form a throughline for much of the novel’s opening section. It’s no spoiler to say that the novels go many other places as well—they are, after all, Holocaust novels—but as readers we are guided to and through those places by Alex and Leo’s voices, and the genuine, sympathetic, and hearty laughs that each provides. Not a bad reaction to get from a beach read!Next beach read tomorrow,BenPS. Nominations for American Studies beach reads, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post? Bring ‘em!7/11 Memory Day nominee: Jhumpa Lahiri, author of some of the 21st century’s best American short stories and one of its best novels, and a singular talent whose next steps I can’t wait to follow!

July 10, 2012: American Studies Beach Reads, Part Two

[Having spent many a youthful summer’s day with Tom Clancy’s latest, I’ve got nothing against a good low-brow beach read. But there are also works that offer complex, compelling, and significant American experiences along with their page-turning pleasures. This week I’ll be highlighting some of those American Studies beach reads—and please share yours for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
Why you should read a collection of poems on the beach this summer.When I teach first-year writing, one of my four main units features close readings of song lyrics—collective practice with the skill with songs that I bring in; and individual papers in which the students analyze the lyrics to a song of their choice. There are lots of reasons why I think this unit is worth including on my syllabus—including its introduction to that skill of close reading and analysis, one that has applications well beyond the literary critical—but one of them is, I’ll admit, particularly sneaky: I think it’s a great way to show students that “poetry” doesn’t have to mean “incredibly dense and difficult literary works written in what seems to be a foreign language”; that the concept can instead describe works and artists that they already love. (I’ll also freely admit to stealing this idea from multiple teachers, including my two favorite English teachers growing up.)I start this post there because of my assumption—and if it’s wrong, forgive me, dear readers—that for many American Studiers, “poetry” and “beach reads” don’t exactly seem synonymous. There’s no question that much poetry, including the works of many of those poets I’ve highlighted in this space, requires the kinds of extended, in-depth, and challenging attention and reading that don’t seem possible when shared with umbrella drinks and sand castles. But there’s also no question that some of the greatest American poets and poems are as engaging and fun as they are deep and relevatory, enthrall and entertain while they also help us elucidate some of the most complex truths of identity and community, history and nation, and more. And at the very top of that list for me would be the poems anthologized in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994).The 868 poems collected in that book span nearly five decades, and so it’d be ludicrous of me to argue that there’s any single feature that links all of them—indeed, the book reveals most fully Hughes’s tremendous range and versatility, the breadth as well as the depth of his talents. Certainly it’s not the case that all or even most of Hughes’s poems are fun—there are plenty of fun and funny ones, such as all those in the “Madam” series and many in the book-length poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” but just as many are far more dark and dramatic, tragic and sarcastic, solemn and serious. Yet what I would say of all Hughes’s poems, in all those categories and many others besides, is that they’re compellingly readable; that they drawn readers in, making us part of their tones and themes, identities and communities, perspectives and worlds. Whether you dip into the collection at random, read it from cover to cover, or browse in any other way, you’re always likely to find poems that speak to you, engagingly and powerfully. Would make for a pretty good beach read!Next beach read tomorrow,BenPS. Nominations for American Studies beach reads, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post? Bring ‘em!7/10 Memory Day nominee: Mary McLeod Bethune, the pioneering civil rights leader, activist, and educator who started the National Council of Negro Women, founded Bethune-Cookman College, and served for nearly a decade in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, among many other achievements.

July 9, 2012: American Studies Beach Reads, Part One

[Having spent many a youthful summer’s day with Tom Clancy’s latest, I’ve got nothing against a good low-brow beach read. But there are also works that offer complex, compelling, and significant American experiences along with their page-turning pleasures. This week I’ll be highlighting some of those American Studies beach reads—and please share yours for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
Why you should read about a shoemaker on the beach this summer.For those of us who are interested in writing works of American Studies scholarship that will be engaging for a broad public audience, it can be particularly difficult to find great models of that style. There are plenty of hugely popular works on American history, but I would argue that most of them—such as David McCullough’s books about the Revolutionary era, or Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City —are explicitly written as narratives, focused on telling their interesting and important stories. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but once an author makes that choice, I would argue that it’s very tough for him or her to also include the kinds of analytical questions and themes with which American Studies scholarship engages. So when we can find a book that does address such questions while still creating a page-turning narrative—well, that’s a good American Studies beach read!Near the top of that list, for me, is Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000). Young’s book definitely highlights a compelling story, that of Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes, a man who both took part in the city’s pre-Revolutionary 1770s events (the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party) and later led some of the 1820s efforts to commemorate those events. Yet while telling the multiple stages of Hewes’ story, Young likewise—and just as engagingly, for this reader at least—highlights and engages with some pretty crucial American questions, of historical and communal memory, of contested commemorations, of the origins of the Founding Father narrative and other Revolutionary images, and of how American stories and histories developed in the Early Republic period. Needless to say, such questions remain pretty salient today, not only with the rise of our 21st century Tea Party but in a moment when how we remember and tell the stories of our past is so crucially tied to where we go in the future.But I’m making Young’s book sound more appropriate for the classroom than the beach. So let me be clear—this is a great story, and Young tells it very effectively; when he uses that story to address his American Studies questions, he moves between those levels smoothly and successfully, and never loses sight of what makes the story engaging and meaningful for a broad American audience. Young begins his book by asking “How does an ordinary person win a place in history?”, and he not only answers that question (and many others) very thoroughly, but exemplifies a parallel idea: that history can and should be written for audiences well beyond those trained in academic historiography. Those are key lessons for any public American Studiers, but they also make for a book that you’ll be entirely comfortable reading while sunbathing, drink in hand. Next beach read tomorrow,BenPS. Nominations for American Studies beach reads, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post? Bring ‘em!7/9 Memory Day nominee: Fanny Fern!

July 7-8, 2012: Two American Studies Requests

As this patriotic week concludes, two different ways in which you can support current American Studies efforts.
1)      Those of you who’ve been reading this blog since last summer might remember the New England American Studies Association (NEASA) Pre-Conference Blog that I organized, where conference presenters and attendees, and other interested American Studiers, had weekly dialogues about different conference (and related) topics and themes. Well I’m no longer NEASA’s Jefe, but the current President Sara Sikes, along with Webmaster Jonathan Silverman, have organized another Pre-Conference Blog, to lead up to this October’s digital humanities-centered conference. Please check it out when you can over the next few months (I’m sure I’ll mention it again!), add your voice and ideas to the mix, and take part in the conference this way, whether you can come to Providence in October or not!2)      Thanks to an email from last year’s NEASA keynote speaker, Jim Loewen, I’ve learned about a very worthwhile effort, to establish an endowed Civil Rights Chair at Mississippi’s Tougaloo College. Tougaloo’s students and faculty supported the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi as much as any community and organization, often at significant cost (in every sense); it’s the perfect place for such an endowed chair, and the position would allow the college to continue doing great work in the 21st century as well as to better remember and teach this vital American history. If you’re able to give any money (as I have) in support of the chair, this link tells you how; but even if not, you can still spread the word!Digital and institutional; forward-looking and historically grounded; conversational and educational; communal and dialogic. Sounds like American Studies to me!Next series this coming week,BenPS. Any American Studies links, conversations, or efforts you’d highlight? Don’t be shy!7/7 Memory Day nominee: Margaret Walker, the Alabama-born writer and poet who followed the Great Migration to Chicago, worked there for the Federal Writers Project and with Richard Wright, and published some of the most powerful political and social poetry and fictionof the late 20th century.7/8 Memory Day nominee: George Antheil, the Modernist avant garde composer who had a hugely prolific career, was also a talented writer, philosopher, and critic, and with actress Hedy Lamarr helped invent an innovative communications system that’s still in use today.

July 6, 2012: Newton’s Histories, Part 5

[If you live in the Boston area, you could do a lot worse, this 4th of July week or for any summer daytrip, than visiting Newton’s Jackson Homestead and Museum. For this week’s blog series I’ll be highlighting some of the many interesting stories and exhibits included in that small but compelling space.]
On the second of two far-too-unknown, unique, and compelling Massachusetts stories highlighted at the Museum.As I wrote in yesterday’s post, one of the most significant and worthwhile goals for any public American Studies scholar is to help bring to more national attention and prominence those interesting and inspiring American stories that we do not collectively remember as well as we should. While obviously I have some particular stories in mind in making that case, I need to make one thing very clear: every one of us who is interested in and passionat about American history has our own knowledge of and perspective on such stories, and thus at the same time every one of us has a great deal to learn from each other. That might seem like false modesty, but I have very specific and salient proof that it’s not: perhaps the most compelling American story highlighted in the Museum’s “Confronting Our Legacy” exhibition is one that I had never heard of until I visited the exhibition.The man at the center of that story is Captain Jonathan Walker. The Massachusetts Historical Society page at that link does a great job of summarizing Walker’s amazing life, from his youthful experiences as a Cape Cod sailor to his conversion to abolitionism, his ill-fated but hugely impressive attempt to sail with a crew of seven escaped slaves to freedom in the West Indies, his branding as a “S[lave] S[tealer]” as punishment for that “crime,” and his subsequent long life as an abolitionist orator, activist, and icon. The whole story, and most especially that daring voyage of escape and the branding that both punished it and yet came to symbolize Walker’s courage, seems tailor-made for Hollywood, and indeed—my own lack of knowledge notwithstanding—Walker and his hand were in his own lifetime remembered in multiple cultural forms: with a monument in his adopted hometown of Muskegon, Michigan; in the poem “The Branded Hand” (1846) by John Greenleaf Whittier; and in the 1853 daguerreotype of his hand featured in the MHS’s collections.Yet I didn’t know Walker’s story at all, and while I’m sure lots of American Studiers do, I can’t help but come back to the questions I posed yesterday: why is this amazing American story  not better remembered, and what can we do about that? The Jackson Homestead and Museum is doing its part; with this blog post, I’m trying to do mine. Each of those efforts remains local in one way or another, though: local to those fortunate enough to visit the Museum in the first place; local to those who find their way to my blog in the second. So when it comes to the next steps, to bringing a story like Walker’s to more national prominence, the questions remain—and all I can say is that it’ll depend, in this 21st century moment, on lots of us, highlighting and sharing a story like this broadly, widely, and consistently. So tell somebody about Jonathan Walker today, won’t you? And share a too-unknown American story of your own with me!Next post this weekend,BenPS. You know what to do!7/6 Memory Day nominee: Sylvester Stallone—perhaps the most debatable of all my nominees, but a man who created or helped create, in Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, two of the most iconic American cultural figures of the last half-century.

July 5, 2012: Newton’s Histories, Part 4

[If you live in the Boston area, you could do a lot worse, this 4th of July week or for any summer daytrip, than visiting Newton’s Jackson Homestead and Museum. For this week’s blog series I’ll be highlighting some of the many interesting stories and exhibits included in that small but compelling space.]
On the first of two far-too-unknown, unique, and compelling Massachusetts stories highlighted at the Museum.Since the third and final chapter of my recently completed book highlights a couple of interconnected American stories that should be far better known than they are—not to spoil the surprise, but let’s just say that this isn’t the first time I’ve written about these stories; although of course in the book I can and do go into much greater depth—I’ve been thinking quite a bit of late about that particular public scholarly question: why do certain American stories become prominent (or at least remembered at all), while other, equally inspiring and interesting ones do not? And, even more saliently, what can those of us who do remember the latter kind do to help them gain more awareness and attention, more of a presence in our national histories?The answer, of course, is likely to be not any one thing but a multitude of them, the variety of different methods and media through which any story can and must be disseminated in our 21st century world. One relatively traditional but still highly effective such method is through the inclusion of these stories in a Museum exhibition, bringing them directly to public audiences and at the same time (if the exhibition does its job) connecting them to other relevant stories and histories, to the many contexts and questions that a thorough and successful exhibition can highlight. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, the Jackson Homestead and Museum’s “Confronting Our Legacy” exhibition is most definitely thorough and successful, and it does indeed do a great job telling some forgotten, important, and compelling American stories; in today and tomorrow’s posts I’ll highlight two, one (today’s) that I had forgotten and one (tomorrow’s) that I hadn’t known about at all.The story I had forgotten is that of Henry “Box” Brown. Brown escaped from slavery at the age of thirty-three, settled for a time in Massachusetts, and published a Narrative of his life and escape shortly thereafter; but what makes him truly memorable, what gave him his nickname, and what serves as such a perfect metaphor for the lengths to which slaves would go for the chance at freedom, is the manner of Brown’s escape: sealing himself in a small (3 feet long and 2 feet wide!) wooden box and having it shipped to Philadelphia. The Museum’s exhibition has recreated Brown’s box in its exact dimensions, so visitors can climb inside and imagine themselves making that journey, uncomfortable and in pain and likely uncertain and terrified, yet at the same time moving with every jostling foot that much closer to the possibility of freedom. It’s a great way to bring Brown’s story to life, to carry forward the legacy of his metaphor and his narrative but to bring them home to 21st century audiences. And it definitely ensured that I won’t forget Box Brown again!Second of these stories, and the last of the Museum posts, tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Any stories we should better remember, and/or any successful efforts at remembering them that you’d highlight?7/5 Memory Day nominee: P.T. Barnum, whose most famous achievements and ideas tended to reflect some of America’s darker and nastier sides, but who nonetheless revolutionized American leisure and entertainment in a variety of ways.

July 4, 2012: Newton’s Histories, Part 3

[If you live in the Boston area, you could do a lot worse, this 4th of July week or for any summer daytrip, than visiting Newton’s Jackson Homestead and Museum. For this week’s blog series I’ll be highlighting some of the many interesting stories and exhibits included in that small but compelling space.]
On two distinct yet equally suggestive and compelling recreations in the Museum’s most successful exhibit.I’ve written before about my favorite American speech (and one of my favorite texts period), Frederick Douglass’s sarcastic, angry, eloquent, irrefutable, and so powerful “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” What Douglass does with particular clarity in that oration is to bring slavery—its realities and effects, but also its broader meanings and significance—home to his audience, making them aware of this defining American system in a way few authors had done prior or have since. That complex, challenging, and crucial goal would also be at the heart of any museum of American slavery (such as this long-in-development but eventually unsuccessful Virginia project). And it is also the purpose of the Jackson Homestead and Museum’s newest and most compelling exhibition, the basement-housed “Confronting Our Legacy: Slavery and Antislavery in the North.”Two specific elements within that exhibition do a particularly good job capturing key aspects of their respective subjects. To capture the feel (literally) of the Middle Passage, the exhibition features a vertical wooden box in which visitors are invited to stand; the box’s dimensions parallel exactly how much space each slave was given in the hold of a standard Middle Passage vessel. Stepping into the box, feeling its sides press against me (much as the slaves on either side would have), I was reminded of the justifiably famous passage in Alex Haley’s Roots when he descends into the hold of a recreated Middle Passage ship, clad only in his underwear, hoping to feel something of what his ancestor must have felt in that situation. Just as Haley’s experiment could not possibly capture the worst aspects of the Middle Passage—the diseases, the smells and sounds, the fears and uncertainties, the death and torture and worse—so too does the Museum’s space require us to imagine beyond our own moment and into all of those elements. But so would any such memorial, of course; and this one was at least, for me, a pretty evocative attempt.Far different, yet in its own way equally evocative, is the exhibition’s recreation of the Underground Railroad. There’s no question that William Jackson and his family took part in that network of antebellum resistance, aiding fugitive slaves on their journeys north; but by its very nature the Railroad was secretive, and so most of the specifics of how the Jackson Homestead was utilized for that purpose remain unclear. And the Museum reflects that nature quite effectively, engaging with and yet also questioning the potentially accurate yet possibly mythic story that the Jacksons used their basement well as a hiding place for such fugitives. The well has been left uncovered, so visitors can look down into it and imagine hiding within it; but the wall panels surrounding it present both the reasons why it may have been used that way and the arguments against the story, and thus explicitly ask that visitor not only to imagine him or herself into the history but also to try to decide whether to believe this particular Underground Railroad story. Such questions seem quite parallel to, and so to capture very effectively, the perspectives of potential fugitives, of other Underground Railroad operatives, of slavecatchers and officers of the law, of anyone for whom the status of the Jackson’s Railroad station would be of importance. Next Museum story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?7/4 Memory Day nominee: Nathaniel Hawthorne!

July 3, 2012: Newton’s Histories, Part 2

[If you live in the Boston area, you could do a lot worse, this 4th of July week or for any summer daytrip, than visiting Newton’s Jackson Homestead and Museum. For this week’s blog series I’ll be highlighting some of the many interesting stories and exhibits included in that small but compelling space.]
On the Museum’s most surprising room and the multiple iterations of the Newton space it highlights.One of the most interesting things about the Jackson Homestead and Museum is that its mission is threefold: to trace the Jackson family’s identities and histories about which I wrote yesterday; to go in depth into some of the American issues (especially abolitionism and slavery, but also the railroads, the Industrial Revolution, and more) to which that family connects (and on which more later in the week); and yet at the same time, as part of the organization known as Historic Newton, to highlight other aspects of the town’s identity and history, places and stories that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the Jacksons but that have helped define this four hundred year old Massachusetts community. The Museum fulfills that third purpose in a variety of ways, but does so most fully through the room dedicated to the multi-decade history, identity, and community of Newton’s Norumbega Park.One of the American Studies books that made the strongest impression on me as a college student was John Kasson’s Amusing the Million, a social history of New York’s Coney Island, and I would say that Norumbega’s history parallels that of Coney in many respects. Opened in Newton’s Auburndale village in 1897, at the height of Coney’s popularity, Norumbega was soon known (at least in its own promotional materials!) as “New England’s Finest Amusement Park.” Like Coney, Norumbega depended on new innovations, not only in gaming but also in transportation (it was one of the many so-called “trolley parks” that sprung up in late 19th century America) and in labor and leisure (the moves toward an eight-hour work day and toward the idea of the weekend allowing many more locals to visit the park than would otherwise have been possible). And by the time it closed in 1963, Norumbega had extended its defining connections to narratives of leisure in America to another very famous element: the Totem Pole Ballroom, one of the most exemplary spaces for the dance craze of the roaring 20s and beyond.Those leisure trends were far from universally acclaimed, of course, and over the course of Norumbega’s existence many different reformers and activists protested and worked to counter what they perceived as their nefarious effects. A panel in the Museum’s Norumbega room highlights a particularly striking such reformist effort: the anti-kissing campaign of the early 1900s, a reform that led to strict laws against public kissing or embraces (and to actual and not insubstantial fines, such as the $20 charged to the young man discussed in that linked essay). It can be very difficult to know how to analyze such efforts—the anti-kissing campaign, for example, was led in large part by Progressive reformers, the same activists who helped establish the more equitable labor environment and laws that made Norumbega more accessible to a variety of Americans. But one thing is certain: a space like Norumbega Park represented and symbolized in its own eras, just as it can continue to for those us looking back at them, many different, significant issues and trends in American society and life.Next Museum story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?7/3 Memory Day nominee: John Singleton Copley, one of America’s first and most enduring prominent artists, whose works captured Revolutionary heroes and ordinary American citizens with equal talent and humanism.

July 2, 2012: Newton’s Histories, Part 1

[If you live in the Boston area, you could do a lot worse, this 4th of July week or for any summer daytrip, than visiting Newton’s Jackson Homestead and Museum. For this week’s blog series I’ll be highlighting some of the many interesting stories and exhibits included in that small but compelling space.]
On the interesting and inspiring man whose life and legacy the Museum most fully commemorates.William Jackson didn’t build the home in which the Museum is now situated—that would be Edward, who was one of the first 17th century English settlers in the area and who bought the (then) Cambridge land and build the Homestead not long after his immigration—but it’s his and his wife Mary’s youthful portraits that greet visitors in the Museum’s lobby and first exhibit room, and for good reason; even a brief description of William’s life reflects just how much of an early 19th century Renaissance Man he was: selectman and school board member and state representative and U.S. Congressman; founder of the Newton Temperance Society and secretary of the Newton Female Academy; first President of the Newton Savings Bank; chandler and manufacturer and railroad advocate; abolitionist and Underground Railroad participant and founder of the Liberty Party.Each of those aspects of his biography is worth extended attention (and the Museum does a good job including all of them), but I was especially struck by why I would call a defining characteristic underlying many of them: Jackson’s willingness to take unpopular, or at least radical and controversial, stands in support of what he believed. That’s of course deeply relevant to his abolitionist efforts—we tend to think of Massachusetts as full of abolionists, but the story of how William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of mid-1830s Boston, which the Museum likewise highlighted, tells a different and more accurate story about how radical that position was. But it’s just as true of his early and impassioned advocacy for railroads; in the 1820s, a period when that new innovation was far from universally acclaimed, perhaps especially not among established families like the Jacksons, William consistently argued for its possibilities, its benefits to all his fellow New Englanders and Americans. And from what I can tell, his voice and efforts were instrumental in helping bring the railroad to Newton and extend it throughout the state and region.That’s one way to highlight William’s influence and legacy, looking at the issues with which he was involved. But I was also struck, thanks to the Museums multi-generational storytelling, by how much the subsequent generations, and particularly William’s daughters Ellen, Caroline, and Cornelia, carried his legacy forward. Cornelia helped found Newton’s Santa Claus Agency, a unique and impressive philanthropic organization, and published The Poems of the Jackson Homestead (1902); Caroline served as the city’s first assistant librarian, when the library became public in 1878; and Ellen especially extended both William’s and the Homestead’s legacies, compiling the Annals from the Old Homestead and serving for decades as president of the post-bellum Freedmen’s Aid Society. These impressive women don’t need William’s life to validate their own achievements and efforts—but they do, I believe, reflect just how much the family continued to embody William’s ideals, and some of the best of what Newton, Massachusetts, and 19th century America could be.Next Museum story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?7/2 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two towering and inspiring Civil Rights leaderswith tragicallydifferent stories—Thurgood Marshalland Medgar Evers.