Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 428

November 21, 2011: Giving Thanks 1

[This week I'll be highlighting American things for which I'm thankful. Feel free to suggest your own topics in the comments, or send your own guest posts to me by email [brailton@fitchburgstate.edu]. This is the first in the series.]Few works of scholarship have made as much of an impression on me as did John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994). Granted, Demos's book was one of the first I read in college, as part of my introductory History and Literature tutorial (the amazing year-long course with Professors Jay Grossman and John McGreevy about which I blogged here), and the timing certainly contributed to its effects. But what really made Demos' work stand out for me was its innovative and (somewhat) controversial form of narrative history—the book's subject is the early 18th century captivity experience of a prominent young Puritan woman, Eunice Williams (the daughter of minister John Williams, who was taken captive with her but later redeemed back to the Puritan community, and who wrote a personal narrative called The Redeemed Captive about that experience); since Eunice ultimately married into and became a lifelong citizen of the Mohawk tribe which had captured her, Demos complements his historical researches and accounts with imagined passages from Eunice's perspective, sections where he works to fill in the gaps in the historical record with his own, certainly informed but still speculative version of her evolving identity.By far the most compelling work of historical scholarship I've read in the last few years would have to be Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008; that link is to a complementary and very impressive website Jacoby created for the book). I had the opportunity to read Jacoby's book as the chair of the 2009-2010 New England ASA's Lois Rudnick Book Prize Committee, and the committee unanimously agreed on Shadows as the best work of AmericanStudies scholarship pulished by a New England scholar over those two years. But what makes Jacoby's work particularly unique and compelling (far beyond just New England or that time frame) is its innovative and brave structure—the book's subject is the brutal and far too unknown 1871 Camp Grant massacre, in which a mixed force of Anglo, Mexican, and Tohono O'Oodham soldiers decimated an Apache camp made up almost entirely of women and children; each of those four communities and cultures had a long and complex history in the region and the southwestern borderlands more generally, and so Jacoby structures his book through two parts (pre- and post-massacre) comprised of four distinct sections, each working to understand, capture, and narrate (including extended, in-depth use of the distinct languages) the experiences and perspective of one of the cultures in order to portray the many specific, complicated, and humanizing factors behind and influences on what might seem to be simply a horrific and inhuman historical event.On this first day of Thanksgiving Week here at AmericanStudies, I'm very thankful for contemporary, ground-breaking, disciplinary-boundary-and-definition-pushing historians like Demos and Jacoby. There are lots of reasons for my appreciation and gratitude for their work, but I'll highlight one somewhat selfish one—if we're going to argue for a cross-cultural American identity, as of course I very much want us to, such arguments will often depend on a couple of key moves: filling in gaps in our historical record, gaps occasioned by the kinds of identity shifts and experiences at the heart of cross-cultural transformation, gaps that require us to imagine lives outside of our expected or traditional categories; and trying to understand not only the perspectives of the multiple cultures and communities that have always constituted America, but also and most significantly the American community that has been comprised out of the intersections and encounters (too often violent, but crucial in any case) between and across and among our cultures and communities. More conventional or traditional historiography can and will continue to contribute to those efforts, as will scholarship in many other disciplines; but ground-breaking, imaginative, multi-vocal histories like those provided by Demos and Jacoby are to my mind entirely necessary if we are to move forward into these new perspectives and narratives.More tomorrow,BenPS. Links above, so I'll repeat this week's request: any American things you're thankful for? Ideas, and even guest posts, very very welcome!

November 19-20, 2011: Thanks-Fishing

My plan for the coming week here is to highlight things in American history, culture, identity, community, literature, art, and etc. for which I'm thankful—things that make it easier to bear some of the darker and more frustrating and painful aspects of our nation. Obviously I can come up with topics on my own if need be, but I'm thinking that it would be especially nice to pair this with something else for which I'm thankful—you all, readers from around the country and, often, the world. So I wanted to fish for your thanksgiving topics, in one of two possible ways:1)      Just the topic, something that you'd be interested to see me engage with here—'cause any friend of my friends is a friend, so if you're thankful for it, I'm more than happy to learn about it and frame my own thanks as well!2)      Or a guest post, if you'd like to write up your thankfulness yourself. It's been way too long since I've been able to include a guest post here, and I'd love to get back into it—so bring 'em on! (Even if you get me something post-this week, I'll certainly include it down the road.)Thanks! The series starts Monday,Ben

November 18, 2011: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 5

[The best way I can think of to respond to the Penn State situation is to focus for this week's blog posts on a few of the many very impressive voices and ideas my students have shared over the years, to exemplify some of the best about what both college and young people have to offer. This is the fifth and final entry in that series.]Just 'cause I don't want to dwell only in the past—historical fiction love notwithstanding—here are five reasons (connected to the five courses I'm teaching in the spring) I'm expecting more impressive student voices in the near future:1)      Another Turn: My grad class this spring will be our department's required Literary Theory: Practical Applications, which I'll be teaching for the third time. I start the class with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), and explicitly ask for them for the first discussion not to read any of the edition's peripheral materials (biographical, historical, theoretical) and instead only to bring their own ideas about the text. Each of those first two times with the class that discussion has been incredibly fun, and incredibly different in each case, so I'm very excited for the third!2)      I Love the 80s!: The Introduction to AmericanStudies course I helped create here at FSU focuses on the 1980s, as a case study in applying a variety of methodologies, analyzing different kinds of texts and media, working with all sorts of contexts, connecting their own identities (they do a version of the multigenerational family history project I wrote about on Wednesday), and so on. This class is officially team-taught by both English and History faculty, but this semester I didn't get to team-teach it with my History colleague, so I'm doubly excited to get back in there and hear the many interesting and provocative ways the students respond to our cultural, historical, literary, multimedia, and personal topics.3)      Capping it Off: This semester I've had the chance for the first time to teach (two sections of) our departmental Capstone course, which brings together English majors from across our different tracks. There are a variety of purposes: getting them to reflect on their experiences and assemble their senior portfolio; helping model the different sides to our discipline, including texts that represent each track; talking about their future plans and goals and working on material to help them get there. But for me, the best effect has been just to get to know these 33 senior English majors much more fully than I otherwise would have—and I can't wait to meet and hear from the spring's group of 16!4)      (and 5) My fourth and fifth classes are two I've taught a good bit—the second half American literature survey (1865 to the present) and an upper-level course in the American Novel to 1950. I've stocked the syllabi in each case with books and authors that I love, so it's far from a chore for me to come back to these courses for another go. But even more than that, and even more than hearing new batches of student responses to and ideas about these authors and readings, I'm particularly excited to teach the two classes at the same time, and to see how the overlaps and interconnections and conversations across them (and thus the student voices in each) help me to keep figuring out my own voice and ideas.Can't wait! More this weekend,BenPS. Any classes or work or experiences to which you're looking forward right now?

November 17, 2011: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 4

[The best way I can think of to respond to the Penn State situation is to focus for this week's blog posts on a few of the many very impressive voices and ideas my students have shared over the years, to exemplify some of the best about what both college and young people have to offer. This is the fourth in that series.]In the early summer of 2006, at the end of my first year here at Fitchburg State, I had the opportunity to teach for the first time a graduate course (as part of our English Department's Master's program). As I told the 19 students on the last day of class, I had been thinking for many years about precisely that opportunity, and this course represented one of those very rare times when something about which I've thought for years actually lives up to, and even exceeds, my expectations for it (in fact, as I told them, there had only been four other such times—seeing The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time, my first Bruce concert, my wedding day, and the first time my older son smiled at me). Part of the reason for that was undoubtedly the subject matter, both broadly (the course focused on American historical fiction across the last couple centuries) and specifically (the syllabus includes three of my very favorite American novels: The Marrow of Tradition ; Absalom, Absalom! ; and Ceremony ). But, without question, much more central to the course's success were those students.Just about every day and conversation and aspect of the class would provide evidence for that statement, but I'll focus here on two. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I was pretty concerned going into the first day with Absalom (each main text got two days, although the second also included an excerpt from a second novel and a couple short scholarly/theoretical pieces)—Faulkner's novel is, as I wrote in that earlier blog post and as anybody who's read even the first page knows, one of the most dense and demanding and frustrating works of American literature; by 2006 I had read the novel four separate times and even published an article (my first) on it and still came away with plenty of questions and uncertainties and struggles. The students came to class with plenty of those as well, but also with three other, complementary and equally vital things: determination that had allowed them to get through the whole of the novel in only a handful of days (due to the condensed summer schedule), those ongoing confusions notwithstanding; a willingness to keep doing that kind of hard work in our communal conversation; and a whole range of really interesting and effective starting points, specific moments and details and ideas about the novel. What could have been one of the most frustrating class discussions of my career—understandably, and it wouldn't have been their fault if it did—turned into one of the very best, both in its specific developments about the text and in its inspiring example.Then there were the final papers. As I later wrote in the Introduction to our graduate program's biannual journal (for which we collected about 10 of those papers), I assigned the students an impossible task for those papers: coming up with their own definition of American historical fiction, one connected to at least a few of our primary texts and in conversation with at least a couple of our scholarly voices. Sure, I had come up with my own such definition in my dissertation/first book, but I had done so over years and in many stages and after having read hundreds of primary texts and at least as many scholarly ones and etc.; I was asking them to do the same over a few weeks and with four novels (and pieces of four others) and eight scholarly voices in play. And yet they delivered, on two very key levels: their papers were very effectively and convincingly grounded in the texts, in the use and analysis of specifics from the novels and in response to the scholars; and they advanced unique and striking main arguments and definitions, including at least two (a connection of American historical fiction to the land; a thesis about images of history as either an upward or a downward spiral) that have informed my own ideas and perspective ever since.More tomorrow, the last in this series,BenPS. Any scholarly experiences (whether classes, writing, research, or others) that have met or exceeded your expectations or ideals?

November 16, 2011: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 3

[The best way I can think of to respond to the Penn State situation is to focus for this week's blog posts on a few of the many very impressive voices and ideas my students have shared over the years, to exemplify some of the best about what both college and young people have to offer. This is the third in that series.]I wrote yesterday about a moment in my first semester of teaching, during which I utilized a standard course syllabus; for every semester and every course since then, I've created my own syllabus, with every choice (from the texts to the daily schedule to the assignments, and every other element along the way) entirely up to me. But it's one thing to create a new syllabus for an existing course, and certainly another to create an entirely new course—and it wasn't until six years later, in the fall of 2007, that I had the chance to teach for the first time two such new courses (both of which I had created in the prior year).  One, an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy, was the direct result of student interest and inquiries, and so I knew that it'd feature a passionate and involved group of student voices who would insure it would be a successful first semester; but the other, an entirely redesigned course in Ethnic American Literature, was much less of a sure thing.I was uncertain about a couple of aspects of the Ethnic course—including my decision to have us read pairs of works at a time, so we could put them in conversation with one another across generational, generic, or other boundaries—but my central questions revolved around what I'd be asking of the students. In an effort to get the students to put their own identities and experiences in the same conversations with those of the (often) more overtly "ethnic" Americans about whom we'd be reading—something that I had found largely absent when I had taught the existing FSU ethnic lit course in my first semester, not least to be sure because of my own inexperience and inability to get discussions going—I had decided to assign not conventional analytical papers, but instead a semester-long, multi-part, multigenerational family timeline and analytical history. I had first learned about the project from supplemental materials for American Identities , the AmericanStudies textbook created by faculty in the UMass Boston AmericanStudies department, and had immediately felt it would be a great way to get students to research their own families and identities—but, I wondered, could they analyze those topics? Or would they just end up telling interesting but non-analytical stories about them?I had nothing to worry about. It's true that my students had plenty of really interesting stories to tell, and certainly in the first stage or two of the project they did more storytelling than they did analyzing. But that was, it turned out, a great model for how the project can build over the course of the semester—starting to get into the stories and information initially, and then adding in analytical frames and ideas more and more fully as the students move toward the final project's fully analytical history paper. That process also gave the students a chance to figure out ways to put their own family stories and histories in conversation with those present in our shared readings, leading to a number of surprising, striking, and very impressive final project connections. I can still remember at least a handful of individual examples—no small feat given that I've taught two subsequent sections of the course, and that it's been four years!—but none stands out more than the nursing student who analyzed gender identities and roles across the generations in her own Finnish American family (both of her grandmothers had over twenty children; she herself was already engaged but hoping to complete her nursing degree and enter the profession before starting a decidedly smaller family) in conversation with the multigenerational and multicultural women's experiences at the heart of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989). I think she learned a good deal through her work on the project—I know I did!More tomorrow,BenPS. Any multigenerational family stories you'd like to share and perhaps (briefly) analyze?

November 15, 2011: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 2

[The best way I can think of to respond to the Penn State situation is to focus for this week's blog posts on a few of the many very impressive voices and ideas my students have shared over the years, to exemplify some of the best about what both college and young people have to offer. This is the second in that series.]Since yesterday's post focused on a very recent and entirely individual impressive student voice, I thought I'd shift today to a very distant and entirely communal, yet just as impressive and inspiring, set of such voices. I taught my first class, a section of Writing I (called, I believe, Composition 101) at Temple University, in the fall of 2001; I was using a standard syllabus shared by all of us first-time instructors, and after an initial week of introductions, we were scheduled to discuss the first substantive reading of our first unit (a section focused on class, money, success, and related themes), Russell Conwell's early 20th century, hugely popular motivational speech "Acres of Diamonds" (both the text and the audio available at that link; Conwell was Temple's founder) on the first day of the second week.That day was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001; Temple rightly cancelled classes as soon as the details of the morning's terrorist attacks started to become available, so students could check in with their parents, go home, and otherwise make family and home the priorities that they needed to be on that terrifying and chaotic day. But academic semesters and classes, like everything else of great importance, must go on even in the toughest circumstances, and so on Thursday the 13th we were back in class. Conwell was still on our plate, but I have to admit having no idea whether we should talk about it and carry on with our scheduled work; whether we should discuss our reactions to and thoughts on the attacks (every detail of which was still unclear at that time, including who had ordered them or whether there were soon to be more); or whether there was some other option I wasn't seeing or didn't (entirely inexperienced teacher that I was) know. To my credit (I think), I shared my uncertainty with the class right at the outset, and asked them what they wanted to do.Remember that these were first-semester (first-month, even) first-year students, many of them the first member of their family to attend college, dealing with all of those new experiences at the same time that they were dealing with a once-in-a-lifetime national crisis (and, I'm sure, with some seriously freaked-out parents and families back home). A few understandably reciprocated my uncertainty; a few more just as understandably voted that we cancel another class. But the significant majority voted that we do both of my options—that we share our perspectives on the attacks and situation for a few minutes, and then get back to talking about Conwell and the less timely but equally important issues (the American Dream, opportunity, choice vs. luck, and more) to which his speech connects. I still remember the whole hour fifteen just as clearly as I do the morning of September 11th, and much more happily—both discussions were honest and nuanced, multi-vocal and conversational, passionate but friendly, and just plain exemplary on so many levels. I don't want to be melodramatic and say that if the day had gone differently my whole teaching career might have, but there's no question that the semester's tone could have been set much more negatively or unsuccessfully; and it's to my mind far from a coincidence that instead the class remains one of my all-time favorites, with dozens of other moments that still stand out at this decade's distance.More tomorrow,BenPS. Any surprisingly inspiring conversations or moments you'd highlight?

November 14, 2011: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 1

[The best way I can think of to respond to the Penn State situation is to focus for this week's blog posts on a few of the many very impressive voices and ideas my students have shared over the years, to exemplify some of the best about what both college and young people have to offer. This, on a very recent example, is the first in that series.]My first conference paper, delivered in the long-ago summer of 2002 at the close of my second year in graduate school, focused (as did this not-quite-as-long-ago blog post) on Catherine Maria Sedgwick's historical novel Hope Leslie (1827), and more exactly on Sedgwick's complex and partial but also impressive and inspiring efforts to serve as a "historian or poet" for Native American peoples. She does so most fully, as I argued in both that paper and that post, through the extended Chapter IV story told by her character Magawisca—Magawisca is the daughter of a Pequot chief who has become an English ward after the brutal massacre of her tribe during the Pequot War, and she narrates "a very different picture" of that massacre to the English family's young son (and her budding love interest) Everell. While Magawisca and Everell are fictional characters, the massacre was all too well, and Sedgwick both engages throughout the chapter with the existing (Puritan) accounts of the event and provides this powerfully alternative account in a fully realized Pequot voice.I reiterate all of that to illustrate just how long and in how many different arenas (also including two different grad papers and three different courses I've taught) I've thought about and responded to Sedgwick's novel, and to make clear the significance of the following statement: last week a student in my American Literature I course submitted a paper on Chapter IV of Sedgwick's novel (which we had read by itself, in the Norton Anthology of American Literature) that added an entirely new, convincing, and impressively sophisticated reading to all those with which I've engaged (my own and those of other scholars) to date. The paper required them to pair any two of our readings thus far (in three-quarters of the class, from the arrival/exploration and Revolutionary units up to the Early Republic one), and she linked Sedgwick and Magawisca to one of the Cherokee Memorials (about which I blogged here), texts composed by the Cherokee Tribal Council (and especially by one of the Council's and Early Republic's most impressive writers, John Rollin Ridge) and sent to Congress in order to protest Jackson's policy of Indian Removal.The link might seem to be logical enough, but this is at least the fifth time I've used this assignment with this syllabus (meaning at least 130 students have written this paper for me), and she was the first to make the connection. (We discuss the Memorials on the same day as a piece by William Apess, and many students have worked and worked this time with that pairing, often interestingly but thus less strikingly.) But while a unique and compelling pairing is a great place to start, the key is where you go from there—and where she went was an impressively complex thesis and structure, one that moved between the two texts in unexpected and nuanced and entirely successful ways, working closely with moments and elements from both while making broader points about both the Removal period's issues and questions of Native American self-expression; on the latter topic for example her points, while of course brief, were to my mind more appropriately complex than many expressed by the scholars I referenced in this post. The result was a paper that both exemplified the assignment's possibilities and yet fully transcended them, which is about the best-case for any academic work and is the reason why I've asked the student if she'd be willing to present her ideas as part of FSU's spring Undergraduate Research Conference (if she agrees an abstract will eventually be online and I'll link to it here).More tomorrow,BenPS. Any unique and inspiring ideas you've encountered recently?

November 12-13, 2011: There Are No Words

As I've been finishing up the week's post-conference blogs and the Veteran's Day one, I've simultaneously been struggling quite a bit with the question of whether, and if so what, I should write about the Penn State, the Sandusky, the Paterno, no let's call it what it is the child rape scandal that's been exploding over these same days. Despite my increasing willingness in this space to respond to current events (at least compared to the first few months, when I didn't really do so at all), and despite the many significant AmericanStudies issues to which this scandal undoubtedly connects—none more frustrating to an academic AmericanStudier than the power that college football holds over our national and educational narratives; but certainly also issues related to power and privilege that are not at all outside of the Occupy Wall Street conversation; and many more besides—I have to admit that I have consistently found myself in the same place I do at this moment: without words to do justice to the scandal's truly horrific and terrible core.What I've instead mostly been doing in response to the scandal is, I'm sure, what many American parents and teachers and coaches and social workers, and uncles and aunts and grandparents and godparents, have been doing over these days—thinking about my boys, the oldest of whom is only a few years younger than some of Sandusky's victims. I understand that for someone as obviously disturbed as Sandusky young boys represented something entirely different from what they would for any of those other constituencies—but what I remain unable to fathom is how any of the other people involved, all of whom of course knew young boys of their own and many I'm sure have had young sons, managed not to think of the victims in direct relationship to the boys in their own lives. I've argued multiple times in this space for how much would change if we could think about multiple issues through the lens of children—the children of illegal immigrants; children in Afghanistan—and had never thought that I might have to make the same case when it comes to the issue of whether to report a serial abuser and rapist of children. Again, I don't quite have words for the disconnect there.Ironically, my other most frustrated focus over the last couple days has indeed found words of his own: sportswriter Joe Posnanski, a favorite contemporary writer of mine, about whom I've written very enthusiastically in this space. Posnanski is currently living at Penn State, working on a biography of Paterno, and a result has posted a couple of blog entries (one on his main blog, on his Sports Illustrated blog) in response to the scandal. Despite framing both posts through the idea that he doesn't want to write much of anything yet, he has in fact written quite a bit, and much of it, again, has been deeply frustrating to me; both because he seems determined to defend Paterno quite vociferously (and apparently did so even more passionately while speaking to a class on Joe Paterno at Penn State) and because he has bemoaned the state of his own book project. The latter factor is definitely the strongest source of frustration for me: I suppose it's understandable that Posnanski is thinking about his book at a time like this, but what I cannot understand, what I once again have no adequate words to register my disgust with, is the idea that he thinks the state of his book is a worthy topic for a public response to the unfolding scandal. That's all I've got on this. More next week,BenPS. What do you think?

November 11, 2011: Veteran Posts

I've written about war a good bit in this space, and often to be sure in overtly critical ways. But I've also tried on many occasions to engage with some of the more genuinely heroic, and at least more sympathetic, sides to what war is and means for those who serve in it. And to commemorate this Veteran's Day, here are five such posts:1)      Last Year's Veteran's Day Post: For my first Veteran's Day post, I considered one of the most under-rated and powerful American war films, and one of the very best engagements with the post-war experiences of vets: The Best Years of Their Lives (1946).2)      The Shaw Memorial: The Shaw Memorial, like the Civil War experiences of the 54th Massachusetts, the film Glory (1989), and every other element of that amazing story, certainly has a good deal to do with issues of race and community and history in America. But at the end of the day, both Shaw and the 54th's troops are also among the most inspiring American soldiers in our long national story.3)      Chamberlain's Bluff: Joshua Chamberlain would be the first to argue that he wasn't among the most inspiring soldiers, that in fact his Civil War leadership was defined as much by fear and uncertainty as heroism. Maybe, but Chamberlain's human qualities and experiences only amplify the amazing heroism of his crucial Gettsyburg moment, about which I wrote in this post.4)      Eisenhower's Presidency: Dwight Eisenhower was without question an important and impressive military leader—but as I argue in this post, he was also a pretty impressive president and political leader as well, especially in contrast to what us liberals might instinctively believe or argue. Compared especially to the other best-known generals toward presidents—Andrew Jackson and Ulysses Grant—Eisenhower comes out looking pretty good.5)      Albion Tourgée: Like Eisenhower but even more fully, Tourgée is known much more for his post-war activities and identity than for his military service. But it's fair to say both that Tourgée would never have moved to the South after the Civil War if it weren't for his military experiences there and that his profoundly realistic and cynical yet passionate and activist mentality might well have stemmed directly from his time at war.To all who have served, and all with family members or loved ones who did or are serving, Happy Veteran's Day! More this weekend,BenPS. Any inspirational veterans, moments, or texts you'd add to this conversation?

November 10, 2011: Moments That Remain 4

[The 2011 New England American Studies Association conference has come and gone; but while I've come to the inspiring end of that more than year-long road, I can't quite let go. So each day this week I'll briefly highlight one powerful and affecting moment from the conference's full and diverse and profoundly perfect two days. This is the fourth and final post in that series.]When I tried to figure out the fourth and final (for now!) moment from this past weekend's conference on which I wanted to focus, the list quickly grew to include way more than one such moment. Jim Loewen's Saturday keynote address itself already included a number of great moments, particularly in the numerous ways he both modeled and argued for AmericanStudies as a public, practical, applicable, valuable national discipline and set of conversations. But wait, I haven't even written at length about the plenary, and especially about the transitions—the way in which Joan Tavares Avant's passionate arguments about contemporary Wampanoag issues and rights segued into Joe Conforti's personal and scholarly reflections on "encounters with Plymouth," and the similar transitions and shifts and connections across each of the five rich talks (which ended with Cathy Stanton's very provocative and inspiring take on the political and social roles of historic sites, in a talk she has now posted online here). And what about all those individual papers and voices that, even though I didn't get to hear the whole of any one (too busy running around, shockingly), added crucial moments and details and ideas to my memories of the conference conversations and themes?More than I could possibly say, ultimately—and as with any amazing moment in time, much of it present in that moment and present for those of lucky enough to be part of it in ways that can't exactly be recaptured in even the most powerful of prose (much less mine). So I wanted to focus here instead on two ways that I very much hope the conference's conversations will continue, not only in person but in spaces a lot like this one (and thus spaces to which you can contribute, dear reader, wherever you are):1)      The Blog: The pre-conference blog remains up and will I hope continue to remain active—I have already posted Cathy Stanton's post-conference thoughts as well as a link to this blog, and have asked all of the prior posters to feel free and encouraged to add their post-conference takes into the mix there. And I hope that as NEASA's online presence and community continues to grow, the blog will either remain a site for that growth or will at least clearly link to it.2)      The Colloquium: In May 2012 (exact date TBA) NEASA will hold its second Spring Colloquium, this time at The House of the Seven Gables. Just as was the case with last year's first Colloquium, part of the day will be devoted to regional AmericanStudies scholars sharing some of their work in progress or recently published works; but this time we're adding in a set of afternoon conversations, including some on a walking tour, which will focus on issues of public and living history, museums and historic sites, and public AmericanStudies and scholarship in a variety of ways. Stay tuned for more, and join us in Salem if you can!In other words, let's create some more moments that will remain, both digitally and in person! More tomorrow, my second annual Veteran's Day post,BenPS. Any great scholarly experiences that you'd highlight and that we can learn from?