Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 424

December 2010 Recap

December 1: The Prof, the Bluff, and the Union: Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War's turning point.December 2: A Touch of Class: What Thorstein Veblen forces all AmericanStudiers to remember and analyze.December 3: Alien Nation: How the Alien and Sedition Acts complicate both of our over-simplified narratives about the Founding Fathers.December 4: Remember It, Jake: Chinatown as an AmericanStudies primary source.December 5: American Dreams: Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father as an AmericanStudies primary source.December 6: I Know It When I See It: The case for Jacob Lawrence as our greatest American painter.December 7: Speak Now: Frederick Douglass, Chief Seattle, and two powerful American Renaissance speeches.December 8: Bonus Babies: The complex and crucial Depression-era history of the Bonus Army.December 9: Statue Limitations: Two distinct and equally important revisions to our dominant images of the Statue of Liberty.December 10: A Voice from the Nadir: Ida B. Wells and the lynching epidemic.December 11: Giving the Devil His Due: Ambrose Bierce and the value of pessimism.December 12: The Mother of All Stories: Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and the challenges and inspiring power of parenting in the most difficult circumstances.December 13: The Definition of Insanity: Dorothea Dix's pioneering and courageous work on behalf of the mentally ill.December 14: Family Matters: The Cat in the Hat, The Opposite of Sex, You Can Count on Me, and changing 20th century images of family.December 15: The Scorn of a Preacher Man: William Apess' life and writing, and what a critical spiritual perspective can tell us about American history and identity.December 16: Pointed Sister: The contemporary relevance of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie.December 17: The Propaganda of History: The contemporary and political origins of Colonial Williamsburg.December 18: Mixology: Edouard Glissant and the Caribbean world's transnational connections to the United States.December 19: What the Head Makes Cloudy: The West Wing, McCarthyism, and the difficult but important task of pushing past all of our simplifying historical narratives.December 20: The Real King: A post on Martin Luther King that was accidentally but appropriately moved to January 17th!December 21: What It's Like: Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills and the crucial role of empathy in our literary and national conversations.December 22: A Snowball's Chance: Affliction, A Simple Plan, and the winter of our American Dreams.December 23: The Pen and the Sword: Frederic Remington's Cuban dispatches and the role of art in fomenting (and perhaps even causing) war.December 24: A Human and Yet Holy Day: The role of religion in American history and narratives, and the inspiring Catholic life and work of Dorothy Day.December 25: The Season for Misgivings: An AmericanStudier and literary critic's take on three of our most popular but at their heart most troubling holiday tunes.December 26: A Hard Story is Good to Find: Flannery O'Connor's mastery of two different but equally effective types of short stories.December 27: Is Our Children Learning?: Renaissance American John Dewey's particularly impressive and inspiring work on behalf of early childhood and democratic education.December 28: Early to Bed, Early to Rise, and Watch Out for Those Germans!: Why we should remember and engage with Ben Franklin's anti-German xenophobia.December 29: Re-viewing the Classics: Birth of a Nation, two cinematic responses to its racist depiction of American history and identity, and what it would mean to put them in conversation.December 30: Divorced from Reality: Complicating some of our most widely shared and accepted narratives about divorce, marriage, and changes in American society.December 31: Five for Five: On the occasion of my older son's fifth birthday, five plans for 2011 on the blog [I'll leave it up to you whether they've been successful!].

January 2011 Recap

January 1: No Day but Today: Tony Kushner, Philadelphia, Rent, and how controversial issues enter our national conversations and popular culture.January 2: Off the Trail: The Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Memorials, and how we remember national tragedies.January 3: Rebel Against the Cause:  Lee, Longstreet, and the aftermath and memories of the Civil War.January 4: Passed By: Nella Larsen's brief but impressive literary career.January 5: Kids on the Couch: Good Will Hunting, Ordinary People, and cinematic representations of psychoanalysis.January 6: Workers Write: Herman Melville, The Lowell Offering, and literary work.January 7: Merci Beaucoup: What the American Revolution and its greatest triumphs owe to the French.January 8 [Guest Post 1]: One Hundred Thirty Words: Ilene Railton on Margaret Wise Brown and Goodnight Moon.January 9: Words Will Never Hurt Me?: My first post in response to a current event—Gabrielle Giffords, John F. Kennedy, and extreme political rhetoric and violence.January 10: Anarchy in the USA: Haymarket, the labor movement, and a late 19th century American revolution.January 11: Love, Puritan Style: Revisiting the Puritans through John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity."January 12: Ambitious Cycle: William Faulkner, August Wilson, and ambitious literary failures.January 13: Blue America: John Hiatt and the perils and benefits of biographical analysis.January 14: To Hull and Back: My nomination of Jane Addams for the Hall of American Inspiration.January 15 [Tribute Post 1]: Staying in the Room: A tribute to Professor Alan Heimert, one of my most demanding and inspiring college teachers.January 16: Working on Hope: My first work-in-progress post, on my plans and goals for my third book.January 17: The Real King: An MLK Day repeat of my post on remembering the real, complex, vital King.January 18: Knick of Time: Washington Irving's postmodern History of New York.January 19: Love in Color: Jungle Fever, Mississippi Masala, and pop culture interracial romances.January 20: Honorable Work: Helen Hunt Jackson's multi-genre Native American literary activism.January 21: Touched by an Angel: Angel Island and the untold stories and unheard voices of American history.January 22 [Tribute Post 2]: Getting Through: A tribute to Proal Heartwell, my best and most inspiring high school teacher.January 23: Master Class: My goals, hopes, and fears for a special authors course on Henry James I was about to start teaching.January 24: Outside the Box: On reexamining Thomas Wentworth Higginson's relationship with Emily Dickinson, and more importantly remembering the rest of his inspiring life.January 25: So It Goes?: Slaughterhouse Five and the horrors at the heart of every war.January 26: Repetition, Repetition: The value of getting through Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.January 27: Your Song: My nominee for a new national anthem. January 28: Out of His Hands: Steven King, Jonathan Edwards, and authors who get unfairly pigeon-holed into a certain genre or tone.January 29 [Guest Post 2]: White Growing Pains: Mike Parker on contemporary white America's challenges and fears.January 30: Accounting: On my experiences with accountability, assessment, and other contemporary narratives about higher ed.January 31: Ghost Stories: Three interconnected American perspectives on the Ghost Dance.

February 2011 Recap

February 1: Erased Riots: The end of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York and the New York draft riots.February 2: Stealing Home: A repeat of the November post on the Chinese Exclusion Act and my two favorite American histories/stories.February 3: Ex-tremely Inspiring: Renaissance American James Weldon Johnson, and his complex and interesting novel The Autobiography of a Ex-Colored Man.February 4: Getting Past Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose greatest and oft-anthologized short story shouldn't blind us to her incredibly diverse and impressive body of work.February 5 [Tribute Post 3]: Happy Campers: A tribute to my elementary school history teacher Mr. Kirby and his unique and inspiring historical summer camp.February 6: Fit Audience, Though Few: A response to one of my recently published articles, and some thoughts on writing (at times) for relatively specialized scholarly audiences.February 7: Border Lens: The incredibly complicated histories of the Mexican American border, and the equally complicated book (Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera) that embodies them.February 8: The Fierce Urgency of Nowhere: On largely fictional and triumphalist 1980s wars, cinematic and actual.February 9: Lifting the Embargo: The specific and broad, historical and contemporary, benefits of defining Cuban revolutionary and poet José Martí as a cross-cultural American.February 10: Fanny Packs a Punch: The witty, sarcastic, biting, and yet hugely serious and meaningful writing and career of Fanny Fern.February 11: Alternative Treatments of the Depression: Repeat of a November post on John Dos Passos, Pietro di Donato, and novels of the urban Great Depression.February 12 [Guest Post 3]: Irene's Nominee: Dr. Irene Martyniuk nominates Clara Barton for the Hall of American Inspiration.February 13: Why We're Here: Glenn Beck's Beck University, American "historian" David Barton, and some of my most central goals for this blog and my public scholarship.February 14: Love Lessons: A Valentine's Day special post on the influential and inspiring books (and sons) I have loved.February 15: Null Set: William Apess, John Calhoun, and two 1830s nullification crises.February 16: Half Lives: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, and engaging with the depths of American poverty.February 17: Times Like These: Tori Amos, Lara Logan, and confronting and remembering brutal stories of rape.February 18: Mi Casas Should Be Everybody's Casas: A repeat of the November post on the most inspiring European explorer, Bartolome de las Casas.February 19 [Tribute post 4]: Office, Ours: A tribute to my grad school friend and colleague Jeff Renye, and our shared first teaching experiences.February 20: Grade-ations: On the disadvantages, benefits, and realities of grading student work.February 21: Precedents Day: My modest proposal for how we could celebrate future President's Days.February 22: Coming to Be Family: In America, The Visitor, and the fictional and forced but very significant cross-cultural family relationships created by immigration.February 23: Authentic Voices: William Styron, William Justin Harsha, Sarah Winnemucca, and the question of fictional and "authentic" representations of American voices.February 24: Those Who Wander: John Woolman and the inspiring possibility of wandering with no fixed path or destination and a truly open mind.February 25: War and Peace: Woodrow Wilson, A. Mitchell Palmer, and the contradictions and complexities of American foreign and domestic policy during and after World War I.February 26 [Tribute post 5]: It Takes a Village: A tribute to seven other teachers and mentors who have been influential and inspiring in the course of my education, career, and life.February 27: Time Sensitive: Some thoughts on my evolving plans for and work toward the fall 2011 New England ASA conference [which ended up going amazingly—see the early November follow-up posts!].February 28: Cowboy Update: Nat Love and the myths and realities of the Western frontier.[image error]

March 2011 Recap

March 1: Boo?: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and what horror can do.March 2: Faith: The inspiring life, identity, beliefs, and writings of Reverend Peter Gomes.March 3: Going Green: Frederick Law Olmstead's inspiring career and creations.March 4: Revisiting a Thorny Problem: A repeat of November's post on Robert Penn Warren's worst and best literary engagements with segregation and race.March 5-6 [Tribute post 6]: The World as a Classroom: My first trip to Chicago inspired this tribute to five cities I've visited from which I've learned a great deal.March 7: Birthday Parting: The divisions and communities captured by the July 4th, 1876 events at Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition.March 8: Forrest Chump: Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of American history's genuine villains.March 9: Little Mensches: Jewish American identity and education as represented by Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and my sons.March 10: Who's (Listening to) The Boss?: Famous and frustrating mis-readings of songs by my personal favorite AmericanStudier, Bruce Springsteen.March 11: A Not Tricky Treaty: The Treaty of Tripoli and the clear and overwhelming evidence that the Founders intended the American separation between church and state to be real and absolute.March 12 [Tribute post 7]: The Risk Takers: A tribute to American artists who have taken significant and inspiring risks.March 13: Collaborators Wanted: A request for input on strategies for teaching content, for an article-in-progress; the article has come out but the ideas would still be welcome!March 14: Medicine Women: The "woman doctor novels" of the late 19th century and questions of political and social realism and purposes in fiction.March 15: The Personal is Political: What The Wire, Traffic, Maria Full of Grace, and the war on drugs can teach us about the intersections between people and politics.March 16: The Whole Truth: The incredibly complicated, contradictory, and profoundly American and inspiring life of Sojourner Truth.March 17: Lit of the Irish: A St. Patrick's day special on five seminal books on the Irish American experience.March 18: So It Goes?: A repeat of a January post on Slaughterhouse Five and the unavoidable horrors and atrocities of war.March 19 [Tribute post 8]: Conference Connections: A tribute to six great friends and colleagues I have met through scholarly conferences.March 20: No and Yes: Thoughts on the realities and even inspiring qualities of rejections in an academic career (and probably in most others too).March 21: Engaging Histories: Gore Vidal's American Chronicle and the unique strengths and possibilities of historical fiction (at its best).March 22: Their AIM is True: Repeat of an early November post on the American Indian Movement, the Pine Ridge shootings, and two underrated American films.March 23: My Brother's Keeper?: The war in Libya, Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms," and some unanswerable but pretty important AmericanStudies questions.March 24: A Downside of Public Scholarship: A brief response of mine and a longer one of James Fallows' to the horrific treatment of Professor William Cronon by the Wisconsin GOP.March 25: Reconstituting America: The irresolvable dualities and contradictions of John Brown, and the value of remembering his revision of the Constitution.March 26-27: Student Teachers: An orgy (in the non-sexy sense) of grading reminds me of three AmericanStudies things about which I have learned a great deal from my students.March 28: Case by Case: Phillis Wheatley's most striking and challenging poem, and how a literary critical perspective can strengthen an AmericanStudies analysis of it.March 29: Why We're Here, Still: Two political quotes remind me of the ultimate stakes in how we understand and define American identity, past, present, and future.March 30: The Worst of Times, the Best of Times: William Cronon and the arrival of my second book lead me to consider the worst and best of our contemporary moment and public scholarship's presence and role in it.March 31: No Fooling: A brief and inconsequential (if not downright foolish) prelude to the next day's post. Seriously, there's no reason to read this one!

November 2010 Recap

November 6: A Terribly Singular Event (and a Terrific Novel): The 1898 Wilmington coup and massacre, and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition.November 7: Their AIM is True: The American Indian Movement, the Pine Ridge shootings, and two interconnected and underrated American films.November 8: Memorial Day: The inspiring power of Saint-Gaudens' Robert Gould Shaw Memorial.November 9: Mi Casas Should Be Everybody's Casas: Why Bartolome de las Casas should be the explorer we all remember and celebrate.November 10: Sprawling, Messy, Multi-lingual, and, Yes, Great American Novels: The case for The Grandissimes and The Squatter and the Don.November 11: A Veteran Performance: A Veteran's Day tribute to The Best Years of Our Lives and especially to Harold Russell's amazing work in it.November 12: Stealing Home: Still my favorite post to date, on my favorite tragic yet inspiring, complex and crucial American stories and histories.November 13: The Emergence of the Twain: Mark Twain's turn to overt, contemporary social and political critique in "To the Person Sitting in Darkness."November 14: Declarations of Independence: Slave petitions during, and inspired by, the Revolutionary War.November 15: Deadly Personal: Dead Man Walking, Steve Earle, and how we portray and analyze an issue like the death penalty.November 16: Voices Worth Hearing: The case for my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt.November 17: Another Nominee for the Hall: My nomination of Ely Parker for the Hall of American Inspiration.November 18: Chillingly Good: Why Ross MacDonald's hardboiled mystery novels are way more than just genre fiction.November 19: Alternative Treatments of the Depression: John Dos Passos, Pietro di Donato, and urban novels of the Great Depression.November 20: Revisiting a Thorny Problem: The worst and best of Robert Penn Warren's literary representations of segregation, race, and the South.November 21: The Doctor Is In (Print): William Carlos Williams' medical career and literary influences.November 22: Very Different Pictures: Of Plimoth Plantation, Hope Leslie, and revising the histories and stories of the Pequot War.November 23: Sayles Pitch: John Sayles' most essential (and amazing) American films.November 24: A Thankless Gig (That Really Shouldn't Be): The first of three Thanksgiving posts, this one giving thanks for my colleague Ian Williams' work with prison inmates.November 25: A Thanksgiving Turkey: This second Thanksgiving post takes on Rush Limbaugh.November 26: Child's Plan: This third and final Thanksgiving post remembers Lydia Maria Child.November 27: For Which It Stands?: The complex and significant histories of the Pledge of Allegiance.November 28: The Heart Matters: Carlos Bulosan's unique and powerful America is in the Heart. November 29: Rapped Attention: Public Enemy, N.W.A., and what rap can and does add to our scholarly and national conversations.November 30: Far From Trifling: The dramatic shifts illustrated by the Provincetown Players and Susan Glaspell's Trifles.

December 31, 2011: Other Monthly Recaps

I have just posted the December recap, but I also wanted to direct new readers (and everybody else for whom this might be helpful!) to the other monthly recaps. Five were added throughout the year: July; August; September; October; and November. The other eight, from November 2010 to June 2011, I have just created and will post immediately following this post. Thanks for reading!

December 31, 2011: December Recap

December 1: What's at Stake: Newt Gingrich, Niall Ferguson, and the most crucial 21st century American debate: how we define "American."December 2: Homogenous: Pat Buchanan, Niall Ferguson, and the related and equally significant question of how we understand historical and contemporary diversity in America. (Continued on December 5.)December 3-4: Heidi Kim's Guest Post: My friend and fellow AmericanStudier guest posts about her UNC class's project on Chang and Eng Bunker.December 5: Defining Diversity: A follow up to the December 1 and 2 posts, wherein I elaborate on some of my own central perspectives on American diversity and identity.December 6: So What 1: The first of four posts on how our narratives of particular time periods in American history might change in response to my redefinitions of America (and in conversation with great AmericanStudies scholarship)—this one on cross-cultural relationships in the arrival and exploration era.December 7: So What 2: The second in the series, this one on redefining the Puritans.December 8: So What 3: The third in the series, this one on redefining the Revolution through African American, slave experiences and perspectives of it.December 9: So What 4: The fourth in the series, a guest post of sorts on redefining the Civil War.December 10-11: So What Now?: A follow up to the week's series, on the question of what such redefinitions might mean for our present and future national conversations and identities.December 12: Cross-Culture 1: It's Not Only Rock and Roll: Starting a week of posts on redefining key pop culture moments through a cross-cultural lens, this one on the origins and early history of rock and roll.December 13: Cross-Culture 2: A Striking Voice: On African American influences on Huck Finn.December 14: Cross-Culture 3: A Transnational Force: On the Japanese, and other transnational, influences on and presences in Star Wars.December 15: Cross-Culture 4: Seeing the Light: On the cross-cultural invention of the light bulb (among other crucial late 19th century innovations).December 16: Cross-Culture 5: Not to Mention…: On five other crucially cross-cultural American moments.December 17-18: Anglo, American: Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, and the cross-cultural contributions and transformations of Anglo-American immigrants. December 19: Making My List 1: Memory Days: Starting a week of AmericanStudies holiday wishes, with a wish for an AmericanStudies version of saints' days.December 20: Making My List 2: 30 Rocked: A wish for a series of films in which great American filmmakers reimagine key historical events, figures, and stories.December 21: Making My List 3: Empathy, Please: A wish for empathy in our national conversations and narratives.December 22: Making My List 4: Filter Them From Your Self: A wish for all Americans to have access to and the contexts and skills to analyze the evidence.December 23-25: Making My List 5: One More Wish: A final AmericanStudies holiday wish for you, yours, and all of us.December 26: Year in Review 1: Assassi-Nation: My 2011 year in AmericanStudies review starts with the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.December 27: Year in Review 2: Nuclear Reactions: The year in AmericanStudies review continues with the Japanese nuclear meltdown.December 28: Year in Review 3: The Ends of War: The review continues with the Bin Laden killing.December 29: Year in Review 4: School for Scandal: The review continues with the Penn State child rape scandal.December 30: Year in Review 5: Long-term Occupation: The review concludes with the Occupy Wall Street and subsequent Occupy movements.More monthly recaps (for earlier in the year) coming shortly, and a 2012 teaser tomorrow,Ben12/31 Memory Day nominee: Aidan Railton! Seriously, I have no doubt he'll do very memorable things in his very American life. But in the interim, we also couldn't go wrong with Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian immigrant and high school math teacher whose inspiring work in the East Los Angeles public schools was portrayed so powerfully in the film Stand and Deliver (1988).

December 30, 2011: Year in Review 5: Long-term Occupation

[This week I will be highlighting five of the year's most significant events, and noting some of the ways an AmericanStudier might contextualize and analyze them. This is the fifth and final post in that series.]The fall's most significant political and social news story resonates powerfully across many of our most tumultuous historical moments.If the Penn State scandal came out of nowhere to dominate many of the fall's headlines, the season's other most prominent story, the protests of the Occupy Wall Street and corollary Occupy movements, represented instead a continuation and culmination of many national trends and issues. I considered some of those issues, and their AmericanStudies connections, in back to back October posts on Gilded Ages (then and now): my October 13th post on Robber Barons and the Gospel of Wealth; and my October 14th post on the narrative of the self-made man. No analysis of the Occupy movement specifically or of 21st century issues of inequality, wealth, and competing economic narratives more generally can afford not to engage with all that the late 19th century can tell us about such moments and conversations in American politics and society.The Occupy movement isn't just about its focal themes and subjects, though—it's also a very complex and conflicted but without question significant continuation of national legacies of protest, civil disobedience, passive (yet also sometimes violent) resistance, authoritarian responses, and so on. As I noted in this Thanksgiving-week post, such protests can and in the aftermath of the UC Davis violence did bring out some of the best of American identity and community. But they can also bring out some of our most fundamental and longstanding divisions, as illustrated by the frequent descriptions of the Occupy protesters as (literally) dirty slackers who just need to get a job—descriptions that often echo quite directly such 1960s critiques of the anti-war and hippie movements as Ronald Reagan's nasty and disturbingly bigoted definition of a hippie as someone who "looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah." Even in the Gilded Age, no single event was more polarizing than the 1886 May Day Haymarket protests and bombing, and the public arrest and trial of "anarchists" that followed them.These economic, social, and political fault-lines—and protests that both reflect and deepen such divisions—go back even further than the Gilded Age, however. One of the most significant events of George Washington's presidency, and thus of the era in which the new nation's political and social identity was beginning to coalesce, was Washington's use of military force to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, a complex economic and social protest that echoed the Revolution in many ways; the event also highlighted administration's own parallel fault-line, with Alexander Hamilton advocating for the military response and Thomas Jefferson opposing it. And a century earlier, Bacon's Rebellion likewise illustrated and exacerbated 17th century divisions between landed gentry and indentured servants and slaves (among other communities) in early colonial Virginia. Neither of those rebellions is identical to the Occupy Movement, to the hippies, to the Bonus Army protests about which I blogged in this post, nor to any other moment of social unrest—but I would argue that we cannot understand any one of them outside of the context of this long legacy of American protest.What significant events will 2012 bring? The future is the hardest thing to predict—but I can promise I'll do my part to put them in AmericanStudies contexts and conversations. Two weekend posts—a recap and a 2012 teaser—coming soon,BenPS. Any 2011 events you'd highlight and respond to?12/30 Memory Day nominee: Bo Diddley, one of the most influential 20th century musicians and an artist whose style and works provide through-lines between all of the truly American musical genres (blues, jazz, rock and roll, and more).

December 29, 2011: Year in Review 4: School for Scandal

[This week I will be highlighting five of the year's most significant events, and noting some of the ways an AmericanStudier might contextualize and analyze them. This is the fourth in that series.]The year's (and one of the young century's) most explosive scandal can remind us of some of our most defining national myths.As anyone who wasn't living under a (wifi-free) rock at the time already knows, in the first weeks of November one of the most shocking and horrific scandals in the history of American sports (and perhaps of America period) broke: the Jerry Sandusky/Penn State/child rape scandal. As I wrote in my November 12-13 post, it was hard for me to come up with any words or responses that felt adequate to the horrors at the scandal's core, and six weeks have not made the task any easier. Certainly the scandal can and should be connected directly to our complex, longstanding national obsession with sports: not only because of the current, obscenely significant status and funding of college football (on which my colleague Sean's comment on that blog post focused); but also because for more than a century, at least since the days of Babe Ruth, our national narratives have idolized sports figures in spite of—and perhaps at times because of—their unchecked excesses.Another relatively obvious but equally important side of the scandal is similarly revealing of idealizing national myths. Some of the most shocking images as the scandal unfolded were not in the grand jury testimony (horrific as those details were and are), but in the sight and sounds of Penn State students and community members vociferously defending Joe Paterno, even rioting in support of the coach after he had been fired by the university's trustees. While JoePa's stature in Happy Valley of course has a great deal to do with the aforementioned obsession with sports, it also connects to national narratives that go back at least to the Founding Father image, through references to Lincoln as "Father Abraham," and up to the hagiographies of Ronald Reagan—narratives of the idealization of paternalistic leaders, grandfatherly elders whose calm presences seem immune to, or at least to transcend, the everyday and too often corrupt realities of politics (whether campus or national). Whatever the accuracy of such narratives for specific individuals, the images themselves reveal a level of adoration that does, as Penn State reminded us, make it difficult to grapple with more complex histories and identities.And then there are the kids. As I tried to foreground in that original Penn State-focused post, no response to or analysis of the scandal can or should fail to focus, ultimately, on the young boys whose lives were (allegedly, I suppose I have to write) so tragically altered and in some central sense destroyed by Sandusky and all who facilitated his crimes. While I would never try to minimize the specific, individual horrors of their experiences and those crimes, it is interesting and important, particularly when considering our communal and national responses to events like this, to connect those responses to our many longstanding narratives of childhood innocence in—and at the heart of—America and national myths like the American Dream. And as AmericanStudiers such as Caroline Levander have thoroughly and impressively documented and analyzed, some of our most conflicted social issues have likewise long been debated through the lens of American children. The specific facts and details of the Penn State scandal continue to unfold, and as they do its story will evolve and change; but these AmericanStudies contexts will influence how we understand and respond to the scandal in any case. Last significant 2011 event tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?12/29 Memory Day nominee: Robert Weaver, the first Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the first African American Cabinet member, and one of America's most significant scholars of our urban spaces, communities, challenges, and opportunities.

December 28, 2011: Year in Review 3: The Ends of War

[This week I will be highlighting five of the year's most significant events, and noting some of the ways an AmericanStudier might contextualize and analyze them. This is the third in that series.]The year's most prominent military action would seem to have more than enough complicated contexts in our own era—but nonetheless also and significantly echoes much more longstanding national histories and narratives.In the first days of May, the United States brought it's nearly ten-year, post-9/11 search for Osama Bin Laden to a dramatic and successful close, with the SEAL strike team operation against the Al Qaeda leader's Pakistani mansion that resulted in Bin Laden's death. As I wrote in my May 2nd post, any attempt to analyze Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, or any of the related events of the last decade without engaging with the hugely complex history of American relationships with the man, the organization, and the region will result in inevitably oversimplified and mythologized narratives. And any analysis of his death as representing (in any genuine way) the end of anything must confront the topic of my September 12th post: the perpetual and perhaps permanent nature of the "war on terror" as a very phrase and concept.Yet much of the rhetoric surrounding the death of Bin Laden has also echoed—as in fact has much of the "war on terror" rhetoric, at least from its most vocal proponents and advocates—narratives of war that have been part of American culture since some of its first post-contact conflicts. When William Bradford describes (in Chapter 10 of Of Plymouth Plantation) the                                        1620 moment of "first encounter" (as the Pilgrims "called that place" from then on) between the Pilgrims and one of the local Native American tribes, he frames it explicitly as a conflict with spiritual symbolism and significance: "Thus it pleased God to vanquish their enemies, and give them deliverance." While of course the Puritans viewed most everything through such spiritual lenses, such narratives of national holy wars have been carried forward by many other voices; it was in this vein, for example, that the 1893 Columbian Exposition's national committee chairman J.T. Harris opened the Exposition by framing the continent's post-Columbus history this way: "It remained for the Saxon race to people this new land, to redeem it from barbarism, … and in less than four centuries to make of it the most powerful and prosperous country on which God's sunshine falls."I don't mean to suggest that Bin Laden is no truer of an enemy to the United States than were (say) the Wampanoags to the Pilgrims—but whatever Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's (clear and professed) crimes, an AmericanStudier can and must make note of the overarching national narratives to which our war against them has frequently been linked. And such links were even more overtly (if no less complicatedly) provided by the SEAL team's use of the term "Geronimo" to describe either Bin Laden himself or the mission as a whole (accounts have varied); the term has many possible meanings, including its historical use by World War II-era paratroopers (although that use itself was based on a pretty racist Western film about the Apache chief), but in any case connects to the military's multi-year search for Geronimo in the concluding period of the so-called "Indian Wars."Can the hunt for and death of Bin Laden tell us anything about this American history of wars, or more exactly the narratives and images created around wars? Whatever your answer, that's just the kind of question all AmericanStudiers should consider. Another significant 2011 event tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?12/28 Memory Day nominee: Ilene Railton! But if you insist on a more public figure, I'd nominate Woodrow Wilson—a complicated and conflicted figure and president to be sure, but one whose idea for the League of Nations exemplified some of the ideals for which humankind can and should continue to strive. (And if Wilson's constant political adversary and doppelganger T.R. gets to be on Mount Rushmore, shouldn't Woodrow at least get a Memory Day?!)