Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 425

December 27, 2011: Year in Review 2: Nuclear Reactions

[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 second in that series.]The year's worst natural (and then human) disaster can, despite its distance from America, help us analyze a number of national narratives.In mid-March, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake-tsunami combination that had rocked the island nation, the nuclear reactors at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant melted down. The event's central stories are of course the dueling (and ongoing) tales of horrific and destructive catastrophe and stunning sacrifice and recovery, both of which focus as they should on the Japanese people. Yet like every other 21st century world event, Fukushima cannot be, and from its first moments has not been, entirely separated from American issues and narratives; as I wrote in this post, one of the most prominent recent trends in AmericanStudies has been the turn to transnational subjects and analyses, and while those analyses have extended back to every period and aspect of our national history, they have undoubtedly been inspired by our increasingly globalized and interconnected 21st century world. And from Fukushima to the Arab Spring, the Norwegian massacre to the European financial crisis, every significant international story this year has exemplified those interconnections.Even if we turn our AmericanStudies lens more fully to specifically national narratives and histories, Fukushima's echoes still resonate. Almost exactly 22 years earlier, in late March of 1979, the United States experienced its own worst (to date) nuclear incident, at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit 2 power plant. Despite the event's specific causes and details, the national responses to it can certainly help reveal an apocalyptic trend in 1970s American popular culture and narratives; amazingly enough, the meltdown disaster film The China Syndrome (1979) was released just twelve days before the Three Mile Island incident, highlighting how much concerns of nuclear meltdown (along with nuclear war) figured into the period's apocalyptic visions. The 1980s debates over and pop culture representations of nuclear disarmament, Cold War policies and approaches, and the concurrent benefits and dangers of technological advances—all captured in another successful film, the Matthew Broderick computer-nuclear war-vehicle War Games (1983)—can only be understood in the context of Three Mile Island and these related concerns.Such concerns about new technologies predate the nuclear age, however, and could also be connected to the long-standing, even foundational American debates over the ideal or preferred relationship between technology and nature, the machine and the garden (as seminal AmericanStudier Leo Marx put it). As I wrote in this post, one inspired in part by the September death of one of America's most influential technological innovators (Steve Jobs), such debates reveal core and complex national dualities and tensions, ones related not only to nature and technology but also to the individual and the community, leisure and work, and social class and status. If events such as Fukushima highlight the continuing and real dangers at the heart of the uneasy relationship between nature and technology, they also can and must be contextualized as part of these other conversations over how we connect to the world around us (natural, human, and otherwise), and with what goals.Another significant 2011 event tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?12/27 Memory Day nominee: Cyrus Eaton, the hugely successful industrialist who both embodied mid-20th century capitalism and yet went on to advocate for peaceful alternatives to the Cold War and to co-found the Pugwash Conferences, conversations toward such international relationships that would win the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize and continue to this day.

December 26, 2011: Year in Review 1: Assassi-Nation

[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 first in that series.]The shocking act of violence that opened 2011 has many echoes across the American political, cultural, and historical landscape.The early January shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—and concurrent murder of at least nine other people—was I believe the first in which I allowed my planned schedule of posts to be interrupted by a current event and my AmericanStudies response to it. As I wrote in that January 9th post, the shooting can most definitely be contextualized in the long and complex history of assassinations (attempted and successful) in America, and more exactly to the even more complicated and crucial question of what causes such political violence. Although there are the obviously and unequivocally crazy outliers, the Squeaky Frommes and John Hinckleys—the assassins whose motivations seem clearly individual and largely unrelated to their targets—most such violence can and should be linked to political and social trends in the period, and I would say the same about the violence unleashed by Giffords' young shooter Jared Loughner.One prominent such trend in both our own and (as I noted on January 9th) John F. Kennedy's era is a media chorus of hyperbolic, extreme rhetoric. For that reason, I would also connect the Giffords shooting to another of the year's most prominent and tragic events, the murder of 91 Norwegian teenagers attending a summer camp for young political and social leaders. As I wrote in my July 25th post in response to that event, the writings of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian farmer guilty of that shooting, connect him very directly to extremist contemporary media voices and rhetoric; but even when the evidence is not as present or overt as it was in that case, it's part of an AmericanStudier's job to connect trends and patterns across different conversations and issues. Despite their seemingly opposed religious beliefs, for example, we can't understand either Father Coughlin or the resurgent 1920s Ku Klux Klan without considering what both can tell us about extreme and divisive political and social rhetoric and violence in the era. Yet an AmericanStudier must also push beyond the details of a particular time period and consider some of the long-range national narratives and questions to which any individual event might likewise connect. In his trilogy of scholarly books on the mythologies and meanings of the American West, and especially in the trilogy's first work, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), Richard Slotkin builds a complex assessment of core American identities upon (among many other things) a single D.H. Lawrence quote: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." Neither Lawrence nor Slotkin would be surprised by Loughner's acts of violence, and certainly its Arizona setting would seem particularly appropriate to the Wild West mythologies on which Slotkin focuses in his third book, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992).None of those contexts necessarily explain the Giffords shooting—but they do provide some of the many complex connections to which an AmericanStudies analysis of it could turn. Next significant event tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?12/26 Memory Day nominee: Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet whose philosophical and spiritual contributions to American life were at least as complex and inspiring as his literary ones.

December 23-25, 2011: Making My List 5: One More Wish

[This week, as Chanukah begins and Christmas and Kwanzaa get ever closer, I'll be blogging about my AmericanStudies holiday list: my requests (to the AmericanStudies Elves, of course) for five changes I'd love to see in our national narratives and conversations. This is the fifth and final entry in that series.]AmericanStudies Elves, I have plenty more wishes with which I could fill this last post of the week: that W.E.B. Du Bois replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill; that Bartolome de las Casas, Charles Chesnutt, and John Sayles become as famous and as central to our national conversations and definitions as Christopher Columbus, Mark Twain, and Oliver Stone; that any public figure or commentator who expresses even the faintest uncertainty about the birthplace of President Obama be communally and permanently shamed; and many more besides.But tempting as it might be, I don't want to turn this culminating holiday-inspired post into a Festivus-like "airing of grievances." I'd rather cede my week's last words to one of fiction's most inspiring speeches (holiday-related or otherwise), delivered by one of its most exemplary individuals; take it away, Scrooge's nephew Fred (that's part 1 of the amazing George C. Scott version, which is available in full on YouTube; the speech is at about the 5:00 mark of part 1):"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest.  But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round … as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"Whatever you believe, whatever you're celebrating, and wherever and whoever you are, this AmericanStudier and the AmericanStudies Elves wish you a very, very happy holiday season. More next week,BenPS. Any holiday wishes or thoughts you'd like to share?12/23 Memory Day nominee: Madame C.J. Walker, the entrepreneur and activist who both embodies and helps complicate and enrich some of our most fundamental national ideals and narratives (the American Dream, self-made men and women, and more).12/24 Memory Day nominee: Ava Helen Pauling, a leading advocate for peace studies and human rights and the wife and partner of Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling (whom Ava introduced to the field of peace studies, for which he won the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize).12/25 Memory Day nominee: Clara Barton, for more on whom read my colleague and friend Irene's Guest Post!

December 22, 2011: Making My List 4: Filter Them From Your Self

[This week, as Chanukah begins and Christmas and Kwanzaa get ever closer, I'll be blogging about my AmericanStudies holiday list: my requests (to the AmericanStudies Elves, of course) for five changes I'd love to see in our national narratives and conversations. This is the fourth in that series.]AmericanStudies Elves, I would like all Americans to have the chance to interpret the evidence for themselves.At the end of the second section of "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman captures quite precisely a central role for public AmericanStudies scholars. "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems," he claims, and three lines later adds "You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self." Those two images of the poet's relationship to his audience might seem contradictory (which would be okay with Walt, since after all he is large and contains multitudes), but I would argue instead that Whitman is describing a two-step process: he will bring you to some new (perhaps spiritual, but also certainly historical, literary, and cultural) focal points and help you develop a new perspective on and through them; but his ultimate goal in doing so is to make it possible for you to have and strengthen that perspective on your own, through your own understanding and interpretation of those subjects and of the world around you.Those two steps are similarly at the core of my student-centered teaching philosophy: I certainly (and I suppose obviously) think that the texts and voices, the stories and histories, on which my courses focus are worth knowing and engaging with; but my central goal in helping students know about and engage with them is for them to develop their own takes and analyses and voices, not only about those particular focal points but as readers, writers, thinkers, and AmericanStudiers more generally. (See this recent article of mine in a free online journal for a fuller articulation of those two steps in regard to survey courses.) Since a key aim of public scholarship is to make our broader communities and conversations into the best kinds of AmericanStudies classrooms (and more exactly seminars, with all voices equal, valued, and necessary), I would emphasize this same dual role at that level; and so, Elves, I propose that us public AmericanStudies scholars explicitly frame our mission as to give all Americans greater access to, and the kinds of contexts and frames that can help them develop their own perspectives on, our historical, literary, and cultural sources.I don't mean to suggest that we public scholars can't or won't have our own takes on those sources and the questions and issues to which they connect—if anything, we have to make sure that we're open and honest about our takes, and I hope I have consistently been those things in this space. Even the choice of sources and texts is, after all, driven in part by our perspectives. But just as I believe Walt when he hopes that his audience will eventually not need him—or, more exactly, will develop perspectives that are the equals of his in every meaningful sense—I hope that you'll believe that I feel precisely the same way. In fact, I can think of few things more inspiring than (for example) a debate over the causes of the Civil War (and thus over that war's continuing sectional, governmental, racial, and other communal effects and aftermaths) in which all interested and participating Americans have access to the Confederate states' "declaration[s] of secession," Lincoln's first inaugural address, and other related documents. A nation of AmericanStudiers with the opportunity to filter it all for themselves? Elves, let's make it happen. Last, particularly holiday-centric wish list item tomorrow,BenPS. Any evidence you think we should all engage with? 12/22 Memory Day nominee: Arthur Mitchell, the first African American Democratic Congressman and a vocal and impassioned activist against Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and the many associated horrors of the post-bellum South in which he had grown up.

December 21, 2011: Making My List 3: Empathy, Please

[This week, as Chanukah begins and Christmas and Kwanzaa get ever closer, I'll be blogging about my AmericanStudies holiday list: my requests (to the AmericanStudies Elves, of course) for five changes I'd love to see in our national narratives and conversations. This is the third in that series.]AmericanStudies Elves, I'd like to see all Americans work hard at one of the most demanding and most crucial of human skills.I started writing a paragraph here on why I feel empathy can so fully influence and change our perspectives and narratives, got a profound sense of déjà vu, and realized I was replicating almost verbatim the opening paragraph of this post from nearly a year ago; I would connect those sentiments to the ones at the heart of this tribute post on the need for more genuine and meaningful connection across our country's and world's communities and identities. Or my insistence in this post that all arguments about deporting undocumented immigrants feature very prominently the effects of such actions on the families and children of those Americans. Which is to say, no longtime readers of this blog will be surprised by my emphasis on empathy here.What I do find surprising, and frankly disturbing, is the tendency in our national conversations to treat empathy as something unserious or even weak. For evidence of the former, I would point to the frequent mockery of President Clinton's use of the phrase "I feel your pain"; for a more recent illustration of the latter, I would note the controversies that surrounded Supreme Court nominee (and now Justice) Elena Kagan's arguments for empathy as a part of the law and justice. Such narratives seem to indicate an implicit, and at times explicit, belief that empathy might be fine as part of an individual's emotional intelligence, but it has no business in our political and legal arguments. I couldn't disagree more; and so, Elves, I propose a national public scholarly campaign for and conversation about the communal value and significance of empathetic connections to our fellow Americans and citizens of the world.I'm (obviously) a big believer in having shared texts through which to frame such conversations, and fortunately there's a pretty short literary work that would do perfectly here: Sarah Piatt's poem "The Palace-Burner" (1873). Piatt's poem might be about a distant (in every sense) historical event, the Paris Commune of 1871, but it models empathy on at least three still deeply salient levels: in its speaker's efforts to understand and empathize with the poem's explicit subject, the titular palace-burning Communist woman (captured in a newspaper picture); in its dialogic, universally understandable setting, a conversation between a mother and her young son in which both are trying as much to empathize with each other as with the pictured woman; and its ultimately individual meaning, as the speaker builds on those earlier empathetic connections and turns her analysis toward her own perspective and identity. Empathy is, to my mind, crucially concerned with all three levels—connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those to whom we're close, and examining our own identities through those lenses—and Piatt's poem covers them all in 36 amazing lines.I know that asking all Americans to check out a 140-year-old poem might be pure wishful thinking. But Elves, I'd ask that you empathize with me reasons for doing so, and then give it a shot. Next wish list item tomorrow,BenPS. Any works or figures or events that you'd say can help us learn to empathize?12/21 Memory Day nominee: Hermann Muller, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist whose work both greatly changed modern science and medicine and publicly pushed back against some of the 20th century's most odious political theories and leaders.

December 20, 2011: Making My List 2: 30 Rocked

[This week, as Chanukah begins and Christmas and Kwanzaa get ever closer, I'll be blogging about my AmericanStudies holiday list: my requests (to the AmericanStudies Elves, of course) for five changes I'd love to see in our national narratives and conversations. This is the second in that series.]AmericanStudies Elves, I would like to see some of our most talented filmmakers tackle some of our greatest historical stories.In 2009, to celebrate ESPN's thirtieth anniversary, sportswriter Bill Simmons and the network's films division produced a series of thirty documentary films. Entitled 30 for 30 , the series featured thirty talented contemporary filmmakers, with each asked to help create a film focused on one interesting and compelling sports story from over those three decades. As would inevitably be the case, some of the films were more successful than others, both in gaining popular attention and in portraying their focal points and questions (and it's fair to say that the two kinds of success didn't always match up); but throughout its run (which is of course all available on DVD and thus can be a part of sports culture from now on) the series represented a really unique and engaging way to return to and reimagine some very compelling and often largely forgotten stories.When it comes to American histories in general, we've already got a very clear piece of evidence for how film can bring similarly compelling and forgotten stories back into our popular consciousness and narratives: maybe I can't claim that Glory (1989) single-handedly brought the stories of African American soldiers during the Civil War back into our collective memories, but it sure contributed mightily to those efforts (which are ongoing, to be sure). And so, Elves, I propose the concept of a 30 for 30-like American historical series—the History Channel would seem like a logical home, but I'm not picky as long as it stays way away from cable news networks—in which talented American filmmakers focus their creative attentions on particular, compelling, and relatively unremembered or oversimplified events, figures, stories, and the like. The filmmakers and their scholarly advisors would have in each case to decide through what genre and style (and at what length and depth) to tell their stories, among many other open and significant questions; in any case the films would certainly inspire further conversation about and research into these historical subjects.As it happens, we've already got a recent candidate for the first entry in the series: John Sayles' latest film, Amigo (2011), which tells the complex and ultimately tragic story of America's post-Spanish American War imperialist efforts in (and guerrilla warfare with) the Philippines. Fits every part of my proposal for sure: one of our greatest filmmakers tackles one of the histories with which all Americans should be more familiar, and does so (from what I can tell—the film has so far been in very limited release, which only amplifies the need for this kind of series to better distribute and share such works) in the style and voice and perspective that define his cinematic vision. Next up: Scorcese on the Red Scare and the Sacco and Vanzetti case? Ang Lee on the Chinese Exclusion Act and Angel Island? Chris Eyre on the cross-cultural, historically revealing, and inspirational life of Ely Parker? Spike Lee on the Wilmington Coup and Massacre? The possibilities are endless, and endlessly important.A compelling series of films from compelling artists on some of our most compelling American histories? Sound like a pretty great present to me, Elves. An AmericanStudier can dream, anyway. Next wish list item tomorrow,BenPS. Any suggestions for film topics, filmmakers, or the series in other ways? Anybody with Hollywood connections you'd like to utilize to make it happen??12/20 Memory Day nominee: Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers owner whose bold and progressive vision helped make Jackie Robinson the inspiring American figure and story he became.

December 19, 2011: Making My List 1: Memory Days

[This week, as Chanukah begins and Christmas and Kwanzaa get ever closer, I'll be blogging about my AmericanStudies holiday list: my requests (to the AmericanStudies Elves, of course) for five changes I'd love to see in our national narratives and conversations. This is the first in that series.]AmericanStudies Elves, I would like for every day to memorialize and celebrate an inspiring American.In the Roman Catholic community, almost every day is dedicated to a particular saint, allowing for each of these significant and inspiring figures and lives to be remembered in his or her turn. The saints' lives mean and symbolize many different possible things, of course, and so I'm sure that each Catholic, each family, and each church have their particularly significant saints and days, as well as their unique and contextualized ways of remembering and celebrating. Yet the calendar of saints' days nonetheless serves as a broadly communal connecting thread, a manner of linking all Catholics through this shared set of exemplary historical and cultural figures.I understand why we Americans only currently celebrate the birthdays of a few particularly influential presidents and one very unique and impressive Civil Rights leader, and as I argued in both of those posts I think we can and should keep and build on the meanings of those holidays. But the truth, as I hope this blog has frequently demonstrated, is that there are many other inspiring Americans, and most of them are not as already-prominent in our national memories and narratives as the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Kings. And so, AS Elves, I propose that each day Americans memorialize and celebrate one inspiring fellow citizen who was born on that day—no possible such subject, of course, is a saint, and I don't mean to imply that we should sanctify any of these complex historical figures or the issues and events to which they connect; but I do believe that we can and should focus on their best and most inspiring work and meanings, to remember not only the darker historical realities but how Americans have powerfully built upon and yet transcended them.The man I'd like to nominate for today, December 19th, is a particularly good example of what I mean, on two distinct levels. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was born to freed slaves working as sharecroppers in Virginia, as Reconstruction ended and the era that came to be known as the nadir of African American life commenced; but his path took him forward to Harvard (where in 1912 he became one of the first African Americans to receive a Harvard PhD, in History) and back into our past (as he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and the Journal of Negro History , among many other efforts). And Woodson's most lasting legacy directly models my goals here: he is known as the "Father of Black History Month," as his multi-decade advocacy for an educational commemoration of African American histories led in 1926 to February's Negro History Week (the direct precursor to our contemporary Black History Month). So Elves, I ask that today henceforth be known as Carter Woodson Day; I'll briefly highlight another inspiring American at the end of each day's post from now on, and when this blog becomes part of an AmericanStudier website (on which look for more in the new year!), I'll try to create a full calendar and ask for the input from all my fellow AmericanStudies Elves' Helpers. Next wish list item tomorrow,BenPS. Any Americans you think we should definitely include on our calendar?

December 17-18, 2011: Anglo, American

The least obviously cross-cultural American community nonetheless represents one of the oldest cross-culturally influenced parts of our culture, and continues to provide new and powerful cross-cultural voices in our national conversations.By far the most difficult chapter of Redefining American Identity for me to write, and for the same reasons the one I saw and see as the most significant, was Chapter 2, on the captivity experiences and narrative of the 17th century Puritan Mary Rowlandson. Each chapter presented its own unique complexities to be sure; but for every other chapter it felt relatively easy to connect my central thread and argument, that the identities and experiences of these exemplary individuals were thoroughly cross-cultural (thus revealing the defining cross-cultural American identity throughout our history and culture), to the specific text and figure and community on which I was focused. Yet I believed, and still believe, that such a definition of American identity can be genuinely valuable if and only if it can be connected to every American and every community—and thus I likewise believe that it was and is particularly important for me to argue that the culture and community at the heart of many of our traditional national narratives, Anglo-Americans, has always been just as cross-culturally influenced and transformed as every other American community.If I succeed in making that case, there are obvious historical benefits: allowing us to see and understand and analyze Anglo-American communities and identities, from the different Puritan arrivals to the Jamestown settlers and then on down the centuries since, as profoundly similar to and interconnected with both the cultures with which they directly interacted (Native Americans, other European arrivals, African slaves, and so on) and the other immigrant communities and cultures that have come to constitute America. Yet there's also a more contemporary and just as meaningful effect, which is to help us to see how 20th and 21st century British immigrants are just as cross-culturally transformed by their American experiences, and just as influential a part of our evolving cross-cultural identity, as their historical counterparts have always been. How much, for example, would a narrative of America's evolving cross-cultural identity and national conversations in the 1960s and 70s be amplified by a clear sense of the role of Anglo-American immigrant John Lennon within them? I have here two specific, contemporary Anglo-American voices and lives in mind: Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. Hitchens passed away from cancer on Thursday night, and Sullivan's "Daily Dish" blog has throughout the subsequent days hosted a series of tributes (by Sullivan, who was a longtime close friend of Hitchens, and by many others) to Hitchens. The two men are very distinct in a number of ways, and perhaps especially in their respective prose genres—Hitchens made his name through his controversial, combative, and always compelling books and long-form journalistic pieces on dense and difficult topics; while Sullivan is one of our preeminent political and social bloggers, his site featuring dozens of concise but consistently thoughtful pieces and links a day. Yet as my colleague Irene noted in her comment about Hitchens on Friday's post, they are linked by their status as Anglo-American immigrants, bringing to our national conversations an explicitly cross-cultural perspective and an evolving sense of both their own and our national identities. Those conversations, and our nation, are more complicated and richer and, above all, stronger and more American for their Anglo-American voices and presences.More next week,BenPS. Any Anglo-American immigrants or influences you'd highlight?

December 16, 2011: Cross-Culture 5: Not to Mention…

[To follow up and complement last week's posts on how our understanding of historical periods and communities looks very different through a cross-cultural lens, this week I'll focus on five seminal moments in American popular culture for which the same is true. This is the fifth in that series.] A few more quick hits on dominant American cultural icons that also happen to be thoroughly cross-cultural:1)      We probably wouldn't have a Constitution at all, and it and all the other founding documents definitely wouldn't exist in their current form, without the French;2)      The Transcendentalist movement, long defined as the first genuinely American philosophy, was centrally influenced by Eastern (or at least Orientalist) thought and spiritually;3)      Some of the most innovative and important 20th century American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, were directly inspired—not only overall, but in the creation of many of their individual works—by their obsession with Pablo Picasso;4)      The only apples that were native to the Americas were crabapples, so the first English settlers brought their own apples; while apple pie's immigrant status might indeed make it "as American as" anything in this nation, it's pumpkin pie that more uniquely originated here;5)      THIS SPACE FOR RENT: What part of American popular culture has cross-cultural origins or influences or identities that you think we should better appreciate? More this weekend,BenPS. See #5 above!

December 15, 2011: Cross-Culture 4: Seeing the Light

[To follow up and complement last week's posts on how our understanding of historical periods and communities looks very different through a cross-cultural lens, this week I'll focus on five seminal moments in American popular culture for which the same is true. This is the fourth in that series.] [Also: In response to a couple of reader comments, I'm going to be trying out a new style for this week's posts, one with mostly shorter paragraphs for potentially less difficult online reading. If it works—and feel free to weigh in!—I'll try to utilize it for at least some of my posts going forward.]Two of the most significant American inventions—perhaps ever, certainly of the late 19th century renaissance in technological innovation—exist in no small measure thanks to the cross-cultural contributions of one of America's most inspiring men.I understand why we like to think of our inventors as iconoclastic geniuses, understood by few if any of their peers, pursuing their passions in messy labs, and revealing their great accomplishments to an astonished world—it's a compelling narrative, and one that certainly does connect to the genuinely innovative and impressive minds (and often inspiring stories) of American inventors like Alexander Graham Bell (himself a cross-cultural, multi-national immigrant Scottish-Canadian-American) and Thomas Edison (the son of a Canadian immigrant father). Yet one significant meaning of Edison's famous quote about genius being "5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration" is that however individual the inspiration might be, the perspiration is almost always shared by a community working together to achieve particular ends; it was to that end, for example, that Edison designated as "the muckers" the core group of young men who constituted his company's Engineering Division and helped advance (and often, it seems, originate) every one of his inventions and projects. Every one of those muckers has a pretty interesting and compelling American story of his own, but I have to admit being most inspired by Lewis Latimer (1848-1928). Latimer was born in Massachusetts to a pair of runaway slaves, with his father barely escaping a return to slavery and having to hide for many years as a result; he forged a birth certificate at the age of 15 in order to enlist in the Union Navy during the Civil War; and after the war he went to work for patent lawyers in Boston. He quickly worked his way up to the role of head draftsman, and in that capacity worked closely with Bell to draft his successful 1876 patent application for the telephone. When he went to work with Edison eight years later, it was officially to serve as the company's first draftsman; but in the interim Latimer had worked for Hiram Maxim and had in 1881 invented and patented a process for making carbon filaments for the hugely innovative Maxim electric lamp, and so Edison was really hiring Latimer not only for his patent and drafting skills but also for his creative inspirations. Without those inspirations, it's certainly safe to say that Edison's innovations in electricity might have been much less successful; that position is greatly amplified by a reading of Latimer's 1890 treatise Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System . Perhaps Bell and Edison would have come up with and patented their inventions, perhaps the histories of the phone and electricity would be largely the same, without Latimer. But as it turns out, the history and story of these crucial material and popular culture innovations did include this inspiring American, are much more cross-cultural than we might realize—and it doesn't take a genius to recognize the importance of engaging with that history. Last moment tomorrow,BenPS. Any inventions or innovations whose stories we should better know or remember?