Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 421

March 19, 2012: Old Town State Historic Park

[This week, I'll be blogging about some of the many interesting sites and spaces of public memory and community in San Diego. This is the first in the series.]

The historic re-creation that both reflects a divided history yet also captures and exemplifies a shared city.

In many ways, San Diego serves as an embodiment of the forgotten history of Mexican American homelands and dispossessions that I chronicled in this post. Founded in the mid-18th century by Father Junipero Serra as the site of California's first Mission, the city served as a center for the state's growing Hispanic American population for nearly a century; Father Serra's dual goals of conquest and conversion make clear that the history of Spanish arrival and settlement in the Americas, and particularly their relationship to the area's native peoples (as documented so thoroughly by Bartolomé de las Casas), is no less conflicted than that of the English in Massachusetts (for example). But it was in any case a long and rich history, and one found nowhere more fully than in the San Diego blocks, homes, and community surrounding that first mission.

Then came the Mexican American War, and more exactly the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended it; as I wrote in that prior post, despite the treaty's attempts to guarantee certain land ownership for Mexican Americans, it generally instead served as one factor among many that led to increasing dispossession of the Mexican American landowners in favor of Anglo arrivals, squatters, gold rushers, and settlers. The dates on virtually every historic house and site in San Diego's Old Town State Historic Park—a historic re-creation that spans six pedestrian-only blocks full of interesting and evocative spaces and details—tell the story: houses and establishments that belonged to Mexican American families and proprietors in the 1840s frequently had Anglo inhabitants and names by the 1850s. The Silvas-McCoy House is a particularly clear example: prior to 1851 the home belonged to Maria Eugenia Silvas, whose family had been in the region since the 1770s; by a decade later it was owned by James McCoy, an Irish immigrant who became the new town's sheriff and state senator.

Yet the truth is that the transition (like all historical shifts) was rarely as clear-cut or as absolute as that, and in fact the details of many of the Old Town houses and sites reveal Mexican American residents and establishments remaining present and active into at least the late 19th century, and thus an area and community that was significantly multi-cultural (and –lingual) for many decades. Or, to be more exact, an area that is, like San Diego itself, still significantly multi-cultural and –lingual, both in the people who live in and around Old Town, and in the Historic Park's own identity and public memory. Walking through there a week ago, I was deeply impressed by both the many different cultures and communities re-created (including not only Mexican and Anglo but also Chinese and Native American) and the consistent attempt to reflect their interconnections and interdependences. The history of San Diego cannot be told or understood without all those presences, individually but even more collectively, and Old Town State Historic Park fully illustrates that central fact.

Next San Diego site tomorrow,

Ben

3/19 Memory Day nominee: William Jennings Bryan, who came down on the wrong side of the law and of history in the Scopes "Monkey" trial, but whose most significant legacy is a long career of speeches, political campaigns, public service, and advocacy on behalf of the American people (hence his nickname "The Great Commoner").

March 10-18. 2012: Spring Break Question

This American Studier will be on a spring break vacation for the next week. For the relevant Memory Day nominees, please check out the Memory Day Calendar, where each nominee will have the usual brief introduction. New blog posts will resume on Monday March 19th.

But while you're here, I have a question: if you had the chance to share one American thing—a text, a film, a song, a work of art, a building, a person, an event, an issue, an idea, an object, a symbol, an image, you name it (literally)—with other interested American Studiers, what would you share? And why?

Please feel very free and encouraged to share your answers here in comments. I'll most definitely learn from them, and will also try to work them into future blog subjects, posts, series, and so on.

Have at it! And see you in a week,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

3/10 to 3/18 Memory Day nominees: Are available at the Calendar!

March 9, 2012: One Short Video, Two Impressive Women

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the sixth and final post in the series.]

One of our most talented and inspiring contemporary actresses, Alfre Woodard, reads a speech by one of the 19th century's most interesting and inspiring orators and activists, Sojourner Truth:

http://front.moveon.org/the-most-powerful-performance-of-history-youll-see-this-month/?rc=fb.rp.6

Happy Women's History Month!

More tomorrow, a question for your consideration as American Studier takes its spring break,

Ben

PS. Last chance to nominate exemplary American women as part of this week's series!

3/9 Memory Day nominee: David Davis, the Illinois legislator and judge who had a strong influence on a trio of crucial American moments: as Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign manager; as the Supreme Court justice who authored one of the strongest defenses of civil liberties, the post-Civil War Ex Parte Milligan (1866) decision; and as a complex political player in the contested and controversial 1876 presidential election.

March 8, 2012: Celebrating Sui Sin Far

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the fifth in the series.]

On this International Women's Day, celebrating the cross-cultural life and writings of one of the most transnational American women.

Much has been written, including by me in this space on multiple occasions, about the transnational turn in, the globalization of, American Studies. There's no question that the field of American Studies has over the past few decades increasingly recognized international connections for and influences on American culture and identity; moreover, there is of course equally little debate that our 21st century moment and world are particularly defined by global interconnections and links. Yet those contemporary trends can at times mask a deeper and, to my mind, more defining American reality: that many of the most striking and salient American identities and stories have been profoundly transnational since the first moments of contact. From Pocahontas to Olaudah Equiano, Judah Monis to Tom Paine, the first two full centuries of American life were full of such transnational lives, and the trend only deepened into the 19th and early 20th centuries.

There are many benefits to such a transnational vision of American identity—beyond the most beneficial feature, which is that it's accurate!—and high among them is that it can help us identify inspiring international Americans who might otherwise fall outside our national self-definitions. That definitely goes for the first documented Chinese American immigrant, Yung Wing, and for all those young men who would in the 1870s attend his Chinese Educational Mission school. But it's perhaps even more salient when it comes to Yung's semi-countrywoman Sui Sin Far (also known as Edith Maude Eaton): Far was born in England in 1865, to an English merchant father and Chinese immigrant mother; when she was still young they moved to Canada and settled in Montreal (where she began her journalistic and writing career); in the 1890s she moved to Jamaica for a short time; and only at the turn of the 20th century did she make the United States her permanent home, living in Seattle, San Francisco, and finally Boston (where she died at the far too young age of 49). Such a biography might seem to describe a citizen of the world, a woman and writer whose American connections were no stronger than were her English, Canadian, or Chinese ones.

Yet I would argue the opposite, and not only because Far spent her final two decades in the United States and published her best-known and most enduring works (such as the 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance) during that time. What truly makes Far a transnational, cross-cultural American writer is the sheer number of her works that powerfully and profoundly portray, critique, celebrate, and embody American histories, identities, communities, and stories: that goes for every story in Spring (and most especially the complex, funny, and striking title story); for her autobiographical piece "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian" (1890); and, to my mind most perfectly and compellingly, for her short story "In the Land of the Free" (unfortunately not available in full online, although a good bit of it is in the Google books version of Spring linked above). That story does at least three very significant American Studies things: portrays the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Chinese Americans; measures (to paraphrase what Bruce Springsteen has recently said about his own work and goals) the distance between the American Dream and many American experiences and realities; and, least overtly but just as crucially, represents the lives and worlds of a young Chinese American immigrant couple in San Francisco's Chinatown at the turn of the 20th century.

Doesn't get more international, more transnational, nor more American than that. Last exemplary American woman (for this week's series at least) tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/8 Memory Day nominee: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the Civil War veteran and eloquent legal philosopher and writer who became one of the most articulate and influential Supreme Court Justices, advocating (often in dissent) for significant early 20th century causes such as workers' rights.

March 7, 2012: Celebrating Margaret Fuller

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the fourth in the series.]

Remembering one of America's most talented and brilliant writers and philosophers, and her mercurial and tragically short life.

If Margaret Fuller had written only Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) , that book alone would be entirely sufficient to ensure her status as a unique and inspiring American. Building upon her essay "The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman Versus Women" (1843), which appeared in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, Fuller's book is perhaps without peer in American literary and political history: an argumentative, activist work that is also profoundly philosophical and erudite; a work in which scholarly allusions to Shakespeare, European philosophers, and classical authors mingle with legal arguments, autobiographical reflections, and sophisticated social analyses. Fuller's book not only makes compelling arguments for women's equality, it embodies those arguments, exemplifying why Emerson considered Fuller the smartest Transcendentalist.

If Fuller had written only her travel writing and journalism, those publications would certainly signal her unique and crucial national and international literary vision and communal perspective. Summer     on the Lakes (1844) , her memoir and philosophical reflection on a trip to the frontier (at that time) and the Great Lakes, stands with contemporary works like Caroline Kirkland's A New Home; Who'll Follow? (1839) as constituting a new western American literature, one linked to the east and America's past and yet carrying those legacies into an evolving regional and national future.     And when she traveled to Europe a few years later, she did so as the foreign correspondent for the New York Tribute and so first and foremost as a writer and journalist, documenting her journeys and, eventually, her powerful connections to the Italian revolutions in pieces that are just as self-reflective and philosophical and yet still stand among the best American travel writing.

If Fuller had written only her literary criticism, that work would on its own terms establish her as a significant voice and influence in the rise of a distinct and valued narrative of American literary and cultural identity. In particular, her Papers on Literature and Art (1846), and specifically her essay "American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future," take American literary production more seriously than virtually any other prominent writer (outside perhaps of Poe) had done; as illustrated by her earlier piece "A Short Essay on Critics" (1840), Fuller envisioned a similarly more meaningful and significant social and cultural role for literary critics, and her Papers, like all of the works I have highlighted here, exemplified and embodied those ideals and helped frame American literature (here and across the Atlantic) as a community of writers and voices with something meaningful to contribute to cultural and artistic conversations.

Yet Fuller wrote in all of those genres, and did so all before she was 40—the age at which, returning to America with her Italian revolutionary husband and their young son, her boat ran aground near New York and all three were drowned. A tragic loss, but one that could not destroy this immensely influential and inspiring American voice and life. Next inspiring woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any nominees?

3/7 Memory Day nominee: Henry Draper, the 19th-century physician and socialite who followed in his father's footsteps to become a pioneering amateur astronomer and astronomical photographer, receiving a Congressional medal for directing the 1874 expedition to photograph the transit of Venus and obtaining (in 1880) the first recorded photograph of a nebula.

March 6, 2012: Celebrating Zitkala-Sa

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the third in the series.]

Celebrating a writer, educator, and activist who turned some of her culture's and our nation's lowest points into a pioneering and inspiring life and legacy.

In one of my earliest blog posts, I wrote about journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (Barnett), calling her "A Voice from the Nadir." I wanted that title to sum up two seemingly distinct and eve opposed yet in fact interconnected and mutually dependent ideas, not only about Wells but about inspiring Americans more generally: that from the darkest moments in our histories (such as was the turn of the 20th century "nadir" for African Americans) often emerge the brightest and most inspiring lights. "Yet the shadows bear the promise/Of a brighter coming day," wrote Frances Ellen Watkins Harper during this same era; and as I argued in that Black History Month post on Harper, I believe—and am arguing in the book I'm hoping to finish this coming summer and fall—those lines means precisely that it is in the shadows that we must find the light, to the darkest histories that we must turn in search of hard-won hope.

While many historical periods could vie for the title of nadir when it comes to Native Americans, I think the 19th century's last few decades likewise have a very strong case: the "Indian Wars" were culminating with the final and complete defeat of all remaining independent nations; the removal and reservation systems were concurrently enveloping every nation more and more fully (with even the well-intentioned  Dawes Act playing into those trends); and, perhaps most egregiously, the system of "Indian boarding schools" was taking young Native Americans away from their communities and trying to force cultural assimilation and the loss of heritage on them. It was in direct response to and representation of those trends, and particularly the destructive boarding school experience, that Sioux author Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) emerged onto the national literary scene, with autobiographical pieces such as "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and "School Days of an Indian Girl" (both published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900); since most of us American Studiers still encounter Sa through those works in anthologies (as I did), it's easy to define her through them, and thus to see her as a complex and talented chronicler of this nadir period for her community and culture.

Yet the individual perspective that comes through in those pieces, and even more in 1902's "Why I Am a Pagan" (also published in the Atlantic), is that of someone who will not be defined, and certainly not limited, by any single experience or category. And indeed Sa spent the next few decades extending her career and activism in a variety of compelling and significant ways: compiling, editing, and publishing Old Indian Legends (1901) , a collection of Native folktales and stories; working with composer William Hanson to write and stage The Sun Dance Opera (1913) , one of the most unique and pioneering works in American cultural history; and founding (in 1926) and serving as the first president of the National Council of American Indians, an influential political and social organization that lobbied on behalf of Native American rights and citizenship throughout the 20th century. In these and many other efforts, Sa illustrated just how fully she had transcended the depths of the nadir, and exemplified the potential for all cultures and communities—and, most importantly, for America itself—to similarly find hope for a stronger future: in our histories, in our cultures, and in our most inspiring identities.

Next inspiring American woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any nominees for Women's History week?

3/6 Memory Day nominee: Ring Lardner, the pioneering American journalist, humorist, and novelist whose innovations in vernacular voice and a concise style predated and influenced modernists like Hemingway and late 20th century minimalists like Raymond Carver.[image error]

March 5, 2012: Celebrating Sophia Hayden

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the second in the series.]

Celebrating the inspiring life and incredible artistic achievement of a woman forced from the public stage far too early.

Being stereotyped and through those stereotypes attacked has long been a potential danger for anyone who enters our national public and political spheres—just ask Thomas Jefferson, who during the 1800 presidential campaign was called by Johns Adams supporters "the son of a half-breed squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father"—but it seems to me that the chances of such attacks are often doubled when it comes to public women. From the viciously degrading images of suffragettes featured in this 1910 children's book to the protesters who carried signs asking presidential candidate Hilary Clinton to iron their shirts, the assaults on Eleanor Roosevelt's femininity to the assaults on Janet Reno's femininity, and most immediately to Rush Limbaugh's profoundly out of bounds attacks on a Georgetown law student who testified before Congress about the medical uses of birth control, women in our public conversations have far too frequently had to face personal and discriminatory narratives that go well beyond the normal terms of political or social debates.

The limiting public narratives faced by Sophia Hayden were not, apparently, as overt nor as vicious as in any of those examples, but they nonetheless had a profound cumulative effect. Hayden graduated from MIT in 1890 with a degree in architecture (making her the first female MIT architecture graduate and one of the first women to receive the degree from any American institution), but couldn't find work in the field due (again apparently) to her gender, and so took a job teaching high school drawing. Two years later she entered and won a contest to design the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; her design and the building were praised and even honored, but were at the same time defined explicitly as "revealing the sex of its author" and otherwise embodying the limitations of women's artistic visions and designs, and such responses, coupled with the building's being torn down as soon as the Exposition concluded, led Hayden to retire from the profession shortly thereafter.

The goals of an event like Women's History Month certainly include remembering our darker histories and stories, and so it'd be important not to elide Hayden's choice and its apparently most significant (and certainly representative) causes. Yet it's even more important, it seems to me, that we not in any way replicate those causes by simply reinforcing (even sympathetically) negative, powerless, or purely tragic images of Hayden's life and work. For lots of reasons, but most of all this: this daughter of an Anglo father and a Chilean mother, this immigrant to the United States at a young age, this pioneering student and professional, this woman who at the age of 23 won a nationwide contest to design one of America's most important buildings, and who did so damn successfully and with a design that architecture students and scholars still analyze, is quite simply one of the most impressive, talented, and inspiring late 19th century Americans.

Next Women's History post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any inspiring American women you'd highlight?

3/5 Memory Day nominee: Michael Sandel, one of the most influential 20th and 21st century American philosophers, and one whose course "Justice" (offered for the general public as well as for undergrads) has made philosophical issues applicable and relevant to everyday issues and conversations for decades.

March 3-4, 2012: Celebrating Shirley Sherrod

[All this week, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be highlighting some exemplary American women. This is the first in the series.]

A tribute to a woman who is unfortunately best known for a malicious attack that entirely falsified her most inspiring work and qualities.

Conservative activist and propagandist Andrew Breitbart passed away this past week. Breitbart was only 43, and leaves behind a wife and four daughters, about whom I've tried to think a lot since I saw the news, so as to leaven some of my worst impulses in response to his death. Yet the complex truth is that we can recognize the tragedy of Breitbart's death for his family and loved ones while at the same time noting that two of his most enduring legacies are not only representative of his work more generally but also, quite simply, among the very worst things that have happened in American political life over the last decade: the destruction of ACORN, an organization that had been for four decades a vital resource for lower-income Americans; and the smearing and character assassination of Shirley Sherrod, a woman whose career and life exemplify some of the very best of what American can be.

The central problem with Breitbart's attack on Sherrod wasn't just that he pulled a quote entirely out of the context of the speech to the NAACP in which she spoke it, and used that out of context sound bite to smear her work on behalf of American farmers as driven in part by anti-white racism (leading to her losing that job with the USDA). All of that was bad enough, of course. But the central problem was that Sherrod's anecdote, as evidenced by the very next lines of her speech, served precisely the opposite purpose: it allowed her to identify some of her own past potential prejudices, and to argue for how important it had been for her to recognize and move past them, in order to do the best work she could on behalf of all those farmers (across racial and every other lines) who needed her and her organization's support. Sherrod's speech had thus exemplified both profoundly honest and inspiring self-reflection and the kind of cross-cultural community and transformation that, I have argued so many times in this space, is at the core of the most ideal American experiences and identities.

Moreover, the fuller details of Sherrod's biography and career only amplify those inspiring qualities. In 1964, when Sherrod (then Miller) was only 17 (and living in Georgia), her father was killed by a local white farmer, who was then acquitted of all charges by an all-white grand jury. While in college at Albany State in 1967, she and her future husband, Charles Sherrod, worked with SNCC, confronting some of the South's most enduring racisms and brutalities first-hand. And in 1969, the Sherrods' efforts on behalf of a local collective farming group, New Communities, were met with extreme and racist opposition from white farmers, suppliers, and the state's governor and political system, in the face of which the collective folded. Having experienced such personal, familial, regional, and professional discrimination, hatred, and violence (of all kinds), it would stand to reason that Sherrod would, at the very least, advocate first and foremost for the rights of African Americans. Certainly she did and has continued to do so—but at the same time she has consistently worked on behalf of all farmers, recognizing and embracing the interconnections and interdependences that have so long eluded white supremacists, critics of African American activism and of multiculturalism, and general purveyors of divisiveness like Breitbart.

More inspiring American women this coming week,

Ben

PS. Any women you'd nominate? Ideas, and even guest posts, very welcome!

3/3 Memory Day nominee: Beatrice Wood, the artist, sculptor and craftsperson, and writer who came to be known as the "Mama of Dada" for her profound influences on modern art and 20th century culture.

3/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Rebecca Gratz, whose late 18th and 19th century cultural and philanthropic contributions to Philadelphia and American society rival Ben Franklin's; and Myrtilla Miner, the abolitionist and educator whose 1858 Washington, DC Colored Girls School represented a pioneering and powerfully influential American advance.

March 2, 2012: 1936

[To celebrate Leap Day, this week I'll be American Studying some particularly interesting leap years. This is the fourth and final entry in the series.]

In the depths of the Depression, a year full of complex, multi-layered American moments.

Not to get all metaphorical on you, but American Studies is really quite a bit like Pringles—once you pop the lip off of this interdisciplinary approach to our history and culture, it's pretty hard to stop peeling off those chips. A more traditional historical perspective on 1936 in America would, it seems to me, focus pretty fully on the Depression—its resurgence in and after this year, Roosevelt's continued efforts to combat it on a variety of fronts (aided by his sweeping reelection in November), and so on. Such an approach would certainly touch upon the year's completion of a number of significant public works projects, from Hoover Dam to New York's Triborough Bridge. Perhaps it would engage with Dorothea Lange's simple and eloquent 1936 photograph "Migrant Mother." And it might even note that it was in this year that James Agee and Walker Evans received the Fortune magazine assignment that would culminate, five years later, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) .

But an American Studies approach would take us well beyond such overt historical connections, considering many other aspects of the year to which we might connect the Depression in more subtle but no less meaningful ways. There's the release of Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece Modern Times, a film that examines and satirizes ideals of efficiency and productivity that (for example) could be seen as having contributed to a shift away from certain labor forces and communities of working Americans. Or there are the debuts of Life magazine and of Billboard's first pop music chart —both of which could be read either as celebrations of the resiliency of American communities and cultures or as escapes from the Depression's harsh realities (or, of course, as connected to entirely distinct histories or narratives). Or there are the dueling Southern and American historical novels, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: the first largely embracing mythologies that could help Americans remember that "tomorrow is another day," and becoming one of America's best-selling works; the second attempting to force its audiences to confront some of our darkest realities, and selling hardly any copies at all.

Moreover, an American Studies perspective would help us remember that no single historical event or issue—not even one as sweeping as the Depression—ever monopolizes our national experience of a particular year. For example, two of 1936's most significant American events happened across the Atlantic, and were connected to very different political, social, and international histories and communities. At the year's Summer Olympics in Germany, Jesse Owens famously defied Hitler's racially supremacist predictions and captured four gold medals, becoming one of the nation's most unifying and inspiring athletes in the process. And no less inspiring in their own way were the thousands of Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the volunteer force who set sail for Spain to join with the forces resisting Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War. While the US's official military entry into World War II would not come until late in 1941, such events illustrate just how fully connected America was to Europe throughout the Depression years leading up to the war.

As with each of these years, lots more to think about and say—and thus for us American Studiers to do! More this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

3/2 Memory Day nominee: Theodore Seuss Geisel, the son and grandson of Springfield (Mass.) brewers whose The Cat in the Hat (1957) remains perhaps the single most influential children's book of all time, and whose long and complex American career began with World War II propaganda cartoons and culminated in a gently satirical work about aging in America.

March 1, 2012: 1912

[To celebrate Leap Day, this week I'll be American Studying some particularly interesting leap years. This is the third in the series.]

A year that witnessed a unique and hugely significant political contest—and two more subtle trends that foreshadowed some of the best and worst of the American century to follow.

I don't think there's much doubt that the biggest American story of 1912 (unless we count the sinking of the Titanic as an American story) was the three-way presidential contest between incumbent Republican William Howard Taft, Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson, and third-party candidate Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was of course only four years removed from the end of his combative and popular two-term presidency, and his Progressive Party (popularly known as the Bull Moose Party after TR was shot, finished a campaign speech, and said he felt as healthy as that animal) became one of the most successful third parties in American presidential history, garnering more than ten times the electoral votes of the incumbent Taft. Given the many significant legacies of Wilson's two terms, from World War I and its aftermath to the federal embrace of the segregated Jim Crow South, it's hard to overstate the importance of this election to American and world history.

Yet despite those undeniable political legacies, it's possible to argue that two other, less prominent 1912 trends even more centrally signaled core aspects of the American century that was just beginning to unfold in this era. One defining quality of that century was America's near-constant international interventions and conflicts, many of which never reached the status of a war but which of course were no less meaningful without that designation, and 1912 saw two of the first such interventions:
While such military interventions would become increasingly controversial in the second half of the twentieth century, the second, more cultural international American influence that truly began in 1912 has continued and only grown over the last few decades. In July 1912, New York cinema owner and entrepreneur Adolph Zukor screened the first full-length film drama shown in America (Sarah Bernhardt's Queen Elizabeth); later that year he founded the Famous Players Film Company, which would shortly thereafter incorporate into Paramount Pictures. And in classic Hollywood fashion, it did so at nearly the same time as its first true competitor, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (later Universal Pictures). American Studiers can debate and have frequently debated whether Hollywood's international dominance parallels the US military's, has complicated or even challenged that other national hegemony, or represents an entirely distinct part of the American Century—but in any case you can't tell those stories without Hollywood, and its dominance began in many ways in 1912.

Final leap year tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Any American histories or stories to which these events connect for you?

3/1 Memory Day nominee: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Irish American immigrant and sculptor whose democratic ideals and activisms were exemplified in one of America's most progressive, pioneering, and inspiring works of art, the Shaw Memorial. [image error]