Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 433
November 2, 2011
November 2, 2011: Storybook Weddings
Perhaps these posts reveal more about my psyche than you'd like to know, but I had to follow up yesterday's with five more American women to whom I'd say "I do"—this time, five particularly impressive fictional characters:
1) Phoebe Pyncheon, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851): Country cousin Phoebe has a bit of the "too good to be true" thing going on, but not entirely—she does grow darker and more complex as the novel progresses, and becomes in the process a heroine who can both embody and yet transcend some her family's and the novel's most powerful histories and identities.
2) Janet Miller, from Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901): A mixed-race beauty whose understanding and forgiveness are linchpins of this amazing novel's plot and themes, Janet is also a great mother and can deliver a devastating verbal takedown when the situation calls for it.
3) Ántonia Shimerda, from Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918): Jim Burden, Cather's novelist-narrator, admits that what he writes is his version of Ántonia, and later adds that she's pretty much his ideal woman. So sure, he's biased. But if you can read through this text and not fall in love with Ántonia in your own right, well, to quote Monica Geller (a somewhat less impressive but funny fictional character), you're dead inside.
4) Anne Stanton, from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946): Jack Burden (no relation to Jim) does just about everything a man can do to escape Anne, and the histories and truths she might force him to recognize, confront, and incorporate into his own identity. That he fails so completely, and ends up (spoiler alert) married both to Anne and to "the awful responsibility of time," makes for one of American literature's hardest-earnest and most genuinely happy endings.
5) Ts'eh, from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977): It's possible that this woman is just a dream, or a mythological apparition, or a spirit guide. She's also married to a hunter who is himself either such a spiritual figure or, y'know, is her husband. Doesn't matter at all—I love her just as much as Silko's Tayo does. And since that love is a profoundly cleansing and healing one, that's fine by me.
More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Once again, links within those entries. So any fictional characters you'd commit to for life?
1) Phoebe Pyncheon, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851): Country cousin Phoebe has a bit of the "too good to be true" thing going on, but not entirely—she does grow darker and more complex as the novel progresses, and becomes in the process a heroine who can both embody and yet transcend some her family's and the novel's most powerful histories and identities.
2) Janet Miller, from Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901): A mixed-race beauty whose understanding and forgiveness are linchpins of this amazing novel's plot and themes, Janet is also a great mother and can deliver a devastating verbal takedown when the situation calls for it.
3) Ántonia Shimerda, from Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918): Jim Burden, Cather's novelist-narrator, admits that what he writes is his version of Ántonia, and later adds that she's pretty much his ideal woman. So sure, he's biased. But if you can read through this text and not fall in love with Ántonia in your own right, well, to quote Monica Geller (a somewhat less impressive but funny fictional character), you're dead inside.
4) Anne Stanton, from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946): Jack Burden (no relation to Jim) does just about everything a man can do to escape Anne, and the histories and truths she might force him to recognize, confront, and incorporate into his own identity. That he fails so completely, and ends up (spoiler alert) married both to Anne and to "the awful responsibility of time," makes for one of American literature's hardest-earnest and most genuinely happy endings.
5) Ts'eh, from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977): It's possible that this woman is just a dream, or a mythological apparition, or a spirit guide. She's also married to a hunter who is himself either such a spiritual figure or, y'know, is her husband. Doesn't matter at all—I love her just as much as Silko's Tayo does. And since that love is a profoundly cleansing and healing one, that's fine by me.
More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Once again, links within those entries. So any fictional characters you'd commit to for life?
November 1, 2011
November 1, 2011: AmericanStudier, I Married Her
Today is my wife's birthday, and in honor of that special occasion and more special woman, here, in chronological order, are five other American women about whom I've blogged in this space and whom I'd have been happy (and very fortunate) to marry if a) I hadn't met my wife and b) I had lived in a different time period (among other obstacles, sure):
1) Phillis Wheatley: Poetic genius who transcended slavery (yes, a relatively benign version of it, but still, slavery) to write some of the Revolutionary era's most defining literary works. All, by the way, before she was 20. If that's not AmericanStudies hot, I don't know what is.
2) Fanny Fern: Funny, sarcastic, self-deprecating, smart as a whip, willing and able to wear the pants in a relationship (literally, as in her hilarious and biting article in response to the criminal charges faced by a woman who had dressed in men's clothing), and, yes, the highest-paid newspaper columnist of her era. I know, I would have stood no shot. But an AmericanStudier can dream.
3) Sarah Piatt: Equally adept at capturing the first moments of courtship or the trials and triumphs of parenting, able to write deceptively simple verses for kids and wide audiences or hugely complex works that demand extended readings, married to a fellow poet with whom I guarantee she shared some powerful and passionate works that the rest of us AmericanStudiers can only imagine … yup, works for me.
4) Eleanor Roosevelt: I tend to think that political marriages provide Hollywood marriages with some serious competition in the "these two should not be getting married" sweepstakes. But FDR and Eleanor, whatever their personal struggles and conflicts, have to be the exception to that rule, 'cause they so clearly allowed each other to do more and better and more impressive work for their country than would have been possible solo. But while Franklin's positions and power might well have given Eleanor more exposure and opportunity, I also think she'd have spent her life doing exactly that work no matter what. Gotta love that.
5) Gloria Anzaldúa: Ay caramba, que bella escritura! Me gusta sus palabras. Me gusta mucho. That's some seriously mediocre Spanish, but I know she'd appreciate the effort. A woman and writer of corazón and cranium in equal and equally impressive measure.
Fortunately for me—and, you might add, for those amazing American women as well—I've already found the perfect partner in that AmericanStudies project pictured above. Happy birthday! More tomorrow,Ben
PS. Links in those posts, so here I'll just ask: any amazing Americans (of either gender) to whom you'd gladly say "I do"?
1) Phillis Wheatley: Poetic genius who transcended slavery (yes, a relatively benign version of it, but still, slavery) to write some of the Revolutionary era's most defining literary works. All, by the way, before she was 20. If that's not AmericanStudies hot, I don't know what is.
2) Fanny Fern: Funny, sarcastic, self-deprecating, smart as a whip, willing and able to wear the pants in a relationship (literally, as in her hilarious and biting article in response to the criminal charges faced by a woman who had dressed in men's clothing), and, yes, the highest-paid newspaper columnist of her era. I know, I would have stood no shot. But an AmericanStudier can dream.
3) Sarah Piatt: Equally adept at capturing the first moments of courtship or the trials and triumphs of parenting, able to write deceptively simple verses for kids and wide audiences or hugely complex works that demand extended readings, married to a fellow poet with whom I guarantee she shared some powerful and passionate works that the rest of us AmericanStudiers can only imagine … yup, works for me.
4) Eleanor Roosevelt: I tend to think that political marriages provide Hollywood marriages with some serious competition in the "these two should not be getting married" sweepstakes. But FDR and Eleanor, whatever their personal struggles and conflicts, have to be the exception to that rule, 'cause they so clearly allowed each other to do more and better and more impressive work for their country than would have been possible solo. But while Franklin's positions and power might well have given Eleanor more exposure and opportunity, I also think she'd have spent her life doing exactly that work no matter what. Gotta love that.
5) Gloria Anzaldúa: Ay caramba, que bella escritura! Me gusta sus palabras. Me gusta mucho. That's some seriously mediocre Spanish, but I know she'd appreciate the effort. A woman and writer of corazón and cranium in equal and equally impressive measure.
Fortunately for me—and, you might add, for those amazing American women as well—I've already found the perfect partner in that AmericanStudies project pictured above. Happy birthday! More tomorrow,Ben
PS. Links in those posts, so here I'll just ask: any amazing Americans (of either gender) to whom you'd gladly say "I do"?
October 31, 2011
October 31, 2011: October Recap
October 1-2: American Wedding: My sister's wedding inspires some thoughts, both personal and AmericanStudies.
October 3: Join Us, Pleas: The first of a week's worth of posts on or around the upcoming (now just four days away!) New England American Studies Association conference—this one just extends a couple invitations.October 4: NEASA Follow Ups: The second of the week's NEASA-inspired posts, this one with additional information and links on the conference and its speakers and participants.
October 5: Of Plimoth Plantation: The third of the week's NEASA-inspired posts, on three AmericanStudies goals and elements of the living history museum at Plimoth Plantation.October 6: Native Voices: The fourth of the week's NEASA-inspired posts, on some of the complex and crucial AmericanStudies questions surrounding Native American writing and scholarship.
October 7-9 [Link-Tastic Post 3]: NEASA Conference: The fifth and final NEASA-inspired post brings together some key conference-related links.October 10: Columbus Days: A Columbus Day special, highlighting six prior posts in which I tried to capture some of the complexities of the exploration and settlement era.
October 11: Remembering an Iconoclastic Genius: While thinking about Steve Jobs in order to write a couple posts inspired by his passing, I came across the story of the death of another, even more unquestionably impressive and inspiring American, Professor Derrick Bell.October 12: The Messy, Troubling, Democratizing Machine: The first Jobs-inspired post, on the duality of the machine and the garden in American history, culture, and identity.
October 13: Gospel Musings: The second Jobs-inspired post, on the Gilded Age's robber barons and their Gospel of Wealth narrative. October 14: Gilded Age Addendum: A follow up to the Gilded Age post, focused on the self-made man narrative and its continuing contemporary presence and salience.
October 15-16: Information, Please: As part of my ongoing work on a proposal (for an American Writers Musuem traveling exhibition) focused on contemporary immigrant American authors, a request (which still stands!) for suggestions for interesting such writers.October 17: Finding the Right Plath: A week of posts on authors for whom our dominant narratives are over-simplified or even inaccurate begins with a case for re-reading Sylvia Plath.
October 18: Uncle Re-read: The week continues with a post on Song of the South (to which we shouldn't necessarily return) and Joel Chandler Harris (to whose works we should).October 19: The Importance of Reading Ernest: As the week rolls on, I admit that Ernest Hemingway wasn't the nicest of guys but make the case for reading his fiction nonetheless.
October 20: The Wright Readings: The week's final new post argues that Richard Wright's two best books remain as resonant and vital for AmericanStudiers as any American works.October 21: Out of His Hands [Repeat]: A repeated post rounds out the week by noting that Jonathan Edwards was a lot more than just a fire-and-brimstone preacher.
October 22-23 [Tribute Post 24]: A New Favorite Songwriter: Civil War historian and blogger Kevin Levin points me to an amazing song about African American Union troops and its (anonymous but impressive) songwriter.October 24: Every Day I Write the Book? (or the Website?): Pondering my next options for this blog and its work, and asking for your input as I continue to do so.
October 25 [Scholarly Review 6]: An Exemplary Voice: First of four posts on exemplary digital AmericanStudies scholarship, this one on the "Voice of the Shuttle" digital archive.October 26 [Scholarly Review 7]: How Great is This Valley?: Second digital scholarship post, on the "Valley of the Shadow" Civil War history site.
October 27 [Scholarly Review 8]: Cross Purposes: Third digital scholarship post, on the Virginia AmericanStudies program's "Xroads" site.October 28 [Link-Tastic Post 4]: Literary Links: Fourth digital scholarship post, on Donna Campbell's thorough and helpful collection of American literary links.
October 29-30: Boo(ks)!: Halloween special, on five of the scariest works in American literary history.More tomorrow,
BenPS. Any topics, themes, events, figures, texts, or other subjects you'd love to see here as we move into November? Just let me know!
October 3: Join Us, Pleas: The first of a week's worth of posts on or around the upcoming (now just four days away!) New England American Studies Association conference—this one just extends a couple invitations.October 4: NEASA Follow Ups: The second of the week's NEASA-inspired posts, this one with additional information and links on the conference and its speakers and participants.
October 5: Of Plimoth Plantation: The third of the week's NEASA-inspired posts, on three AmericanStudies goals and elements of the living history museum at Plimoth Plantation.October 6: Native Voices: The fourth of the week's NEASA-inspired posts, on some of the complex and crucial AmericanStudies questions surrounding Native American writing and scholarship.
October 7-9 [Link-Tastic Post 3]: NEASA Conference: The fifth and final NEASA-inspired post brings together some key conference-related links.October 10: Columbus Days: A Columbus Day special, highlighting six prior posts in which I tried to capture some of the complexities of the exploration and settlement era.
October 11: Remembering an Iconoclastic Genius: While thinking about Steve Jobs in order to write a couple posts inspired by his passing, I came across the story of the death of another, even more unquestionably impressive and inspiring American, Professor Derrick Bell.October 12: The Messy, Troubling, Democratizing Machine: The first Jobs-inspired post, on the duality of the machine and the garden in American history, culture, and identity.
October 13: Gospel Musings: The second Jobs-inspired post, on the Gilded Age's robber barons and their Gospel of Wealth narrative. October 14: Gilded Age Addendum: A follow up to the Gilded Age post, focused on the self-made man narrative and its continuing contemporary presence and salience.
October 15-16: Information, Please: As part of my ongoing work on a proposal (for an American Writers Musuem traveling exhibition) focused on contemporary immigrant American authors, a request (which still stands!) for suggestions for interesting such writers.October 17: Finding the Right Plath: A week of posts on authors for whom our dominant narratives are over-simplified or even inaccurate begins with a case for re-reading Sylvia Plath.
October 18: Uncle Re-read: The week continues with a post on Song of the South (to which we shouldn't necessarily return) and Joel Chandler Harris (to whose works we should).October 19: The Importance of Reading Ernest: As the week rolls on, I admit that Ernest Hemingway wasn't the nicest of guys but make the case for reading his fiction nonetheless.
October 20: The Wright Readings: The week's final new post argues that Richard Wright's two best books remain as resonant and vital for AmericanStudiers as any American works.October 21: Out of His Hands [Repeat]: A repeated post rounds out the week by noting that Jonathan Edwards was a lot more than just a fire-and-brimstone preacher.
October 22-23 [Tribute Post 24]: A New Favorite Songwriter: Civil War historian and blogger Kevin Levin points me to an amazing song about African American Union troops and its (anonymous but impressive) songwriter.October 24: Every Day I Write the Book? (or the Website?): Pondering my next options for this blog and its work, and asking for your input as I continue to do so.
October 25 [Scholarly Review 6]: An Exemplary Voice: First of four posts on exemplary digital AmericanStudies scholarship, this one on the "Voice of the Shuttle" digital archive.October 26 [Scholarly Review 7]: How Great is This Valley?: Second digital scholarship post, on the "Valley of the Shadow" Civil War history site.
October 27 [Scholarly Review 8]: Cross Purposes: Third digital scholarship post, on the Virginia AmericanStudies program's "Xroads" site.October 28 [Link-Tastic Post 4]: Literary Links: Fourth digital scholarship post, on Donna Campbell's thorough and helpful collection of American literary links.
October 29-30: Boo(ks)!: Halloween special, on five of the scariest works in American literary history.More tomorrow,
BenPS. Any topics, themes, events, figures, texts, or other subjects you'd love to see here as we move into November? Just let me know!
October 29, 2011
October 29-30, 2011: Boo(ks)!
Since Monday will be the October Recap, this weekend's the time for a holiday post, on five of the scariest works of or moments in American literature (in chronological order):
1) Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown's novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.
2) Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story's scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.
3) Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" (1948): I don't think there's anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson's story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I've read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I'd say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.
4) Ray Bradbury, "The Veldt" (1950; don't know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it's worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury's story, the better. Suffice it to say it's a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has sailed for me.
5) Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000; not an online version, but my prior blog post): As I wrote in that earlier post, Danielewksi's novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don't believe it's possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.
More Monday, that October recap,
Ben
PS. Any scary stories you'd highlight?
1) Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown's novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.
2) Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story's scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.
3) Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" (1948): I don't think there's anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson's story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I've read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I'd say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.
4) Ray Bradbury, "The Veldt" (1950; don't know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it's worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury's story, the better. Suffice it to say it's a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has sailed for me.
5) Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000; not an online version, but my prior blog post): As I wrote in that earlier post, Danielewksi's novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don't believe it's possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.
More Monday, that October recap,
Ben
PS. Any scary stories you'd highlight?
October 28, 2011
October 28, 2011 [Link-tastic Post 4]: Literary Links
Ceding the authority in this last digital-scholarship-focused day to a very impressive page of American literary links, maintained by Professor Donna Campbell of Washington State University:
http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/sites.htmThanks for the great work, Dr. Campbell! More this weekend,
BenPS. Any scholarly websites you'd add into this week's mix?
http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/sites.htmThanks for the great work, Dr. Campbell! More this weekend,
BenPS. Any scholarly websites you'd add into this week's mix?
October 27, 2011
October 27, 2011 [Scholarly Review 8]: Cross Purposes
[As a part of my own thoughts toward next steps and extended versions of this blog, but also as a way to highlight some of the amazing models for digital scholarship that are already out there, I'm going to focus this week on impressive scholarly sites. That would be in addition to the two sites of Stephen Railton's and the site of Kevin Levin's that I've already featured in this space. This is the third in that series.]
I know it's going to make me seem like a total homer for University of Virginia sites, but there's no way around it: I can't spend a week focusing on exemplary digital AmericanStudies scholarship and not include the UVa AmericanStudies program's longtime, flagship site, "Xroads" (pronounced, as I read it anyway, "Crossroads"). "Xroads," which began in the same mid-1990s foundational moment as my prior two focal sites (1994 in this case) and continued to evolve and grow for at least the next decade, has always been first and foremost designed as a resource for undergraduate students in and around AmericanStudies; and while there would be lots of reasons to include it in this week's conversations, I think it's particularly great at illustrating a couple of key ways in which digital AmericanStudies scholarship can make both undergraduate work and teaching to undergraduates simpler, stronger, and more sourced and supported.For one thing, there are the hypertexts. "Xroads" has long been surpassed in the sheer quantity and range of available hypertexts by an archive like Project Gutenberg, which sometimes seems as if it includes a hypertext version of every text published before 1900; so if you're looking to find a particular author or work, there are definitely better options. But for an AmericanStudier, there's just something really compelling about a list of hypertexts that features, in sequence: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, T.G. Steward's A Charleston Love Story (Steward is a pretty amazing dude, about whom more in a subsequent post; the link to that hypertext is apparently broken, but still, part of the sequence), and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Each of those has a good deal to offer AmericanStudies students on its own terms, but I think there'd be something to be said for asking students to find ways to link any three of them together—and the very interdisciplinary, AmericanStudies-centered hypertext list at "Xroads" is really just a whole set of such assignments and conversations waiting to happen.
And so, for another thing, is everything else on the site. Having team-taught (with a few different historian colleagues) a few semesters of an Introduction to American Studies course (on the 1980s) at Fitchburg State, I can say with no hesitation that the best AmericanStudies days in a class are the ones where a bunch of different texts and media and methodologies bump up against each other and influence each other and produce unexpected ideas and conversations as a result—the day when a Cosby episode and two rap songs come into contact with a Toni Morrison short story and a Spike Lee clip and some statistics about the cocaine epidemic and urban poverty; the conversation that moves from Betty Friedan and historical details about birth control to Cyndi Lauper and Working Girl, with stops at second wave feminism and Audre Lorde along the way. The "Xroads" section on the 1930s is a very direct parallel to those kinds of interdisciplinary, multimedia, layered and contextual and interconnected AmericanStudies approaches to a historical and cultural moment, and is one of the best such concise, online intros to AmericanStudies I've ever found. And on a more diffuse but just as valuable level, the whole of the site exemplifies such a scholarly approach: you can get, with a click or two in each case, from a virtual tour of the national Capitol building to a hyperlink-filled essay on Southern identities and myths, realities and images; from galleries about the works of Alexander Wilson, American ornithologist to a feature on Henry Luce's 1937 newsreel The March of Time. There's plenty more to discover on the site, including, under the "Yellow Pages" headings, very thorough (at least as of the late 2000s) lists of resources and links within different scholarly categories—and all of it geared quite directly toward bringing out the best in our student AmericanStudiers. Not a bad central purpose, I'd say. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) "Xroads": http://xroads.virginia.edu/
2) The Hypertexts section: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hypertex.html
3) OPEN: Still repeating, with one more day to go: any nominations for sites I should include and/or that we should all know about?
I know it's going to make me seem like a total homer for University of Virginia sites, but there's no way around it: I can't spend a week focusing on exemplary digital AmericanStudies scholarship and not include the UVa AmericanStudies program's longtime, flagship site, "Xroads" (pronounced, as I read it anyway, "Crossroads"). "Xroads," which began in the same mid-1990s foundational moment as my prior two focal sites (1994 in this case) and continued to evolve and grow for at least the next decade, has always been first and foremost designed as a resource for undergraduate students in and around AmericanStudies; and while there would be lots of reasons to include it in this week's conversations, I think it's particularly great at illustrating a couple of key ways in which digital AmericanStudies scholarship can make both undergraduate work and teaching to undergraduates simpler, stronger, and more sourced and supported.For one thing, there are the hypertexts. "Xroads" has long been surpassed in the sheer quantity and range of available hypertexts by an archive like Project Gutenberg, which sometimes seems as if it includes a hypertext version of every text published before 1900; so if you're looking to find a particular author or work, there are definitely better options. But for an AmericanStudier, there's just something really compelling about a list of hypertexts that features, in sequence: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, T.G. Steward's A Charleston Love Story (Steward is a pretty amazing dude, about whom more in a subsequent post; the link to that hypertext is apparently broken, but still, part of the sequence), and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Each of those has a good deal to offer AmericanStudies students on its own terms, but I think there'd be something to be said for asking students to find ways to link any three of them together—and the very interdisciplinary, AmericanStudies-centered hypertext list at "Xroads" is really just a whole set of such assignments and conversations waiting to happen.
And so, for another thing, is everything else on the site. Having team-taught (with a few different historian colleagues) a few semesters of an Introduction to American Studies course (on the 1980s) at Fitchburg State, I can say with no hesitation that the best AmericanStudies days in a class are the ones where a bunch of different texts and media and methodologies bump up against each other and influence each other and produce unexpected ideas and conversations as a result—the day when a Cosby episode and two rap songs come into contact with a Toni Morrison short story and a Spike Lee clip and some statistics about the cocaine epidemic and urban poverty; the conversation that moves from Betty Friedan and historical details about birth control to Cyndi Lauper and Working Girl, with stops at second wave feminism and Audre Lorde along the way. The "Xroads" section on the 1930s is a very direct parallel to those kinds of interdisciplinary, multimedia, layered and contextual and interconnected AmericanStudies approaches to a historical and cultural moment, and is one of the best such concise, online intros to AmericanStudies I've ever found. And on a more diffuse but just as valuable level, the whole of the site exemplifies such a scholarly approach: you can get, with a click or two in each case, from a virtual tour of the national Capitol building to a hyperlink-filled essay on Southern identities and myths, realities and images; from galleries about the works of Alexander Wilson, American ornithologist to a feature on Henry Luce's 1937 newsreel The March of Time. There's plenty more to discover on the site, including, under the "Yellow Pages" headings, very thorough (at least as of the late 2000s) lists of resources and links within different scholarly categories—and all of it geared quite directly toward bringing out the best in our student AmericanStudiers. Not a bad central purpose, I'd say. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) "Xroads": http://xroads.virginia.edu/
2) The Hypertexts section: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hypertex.html
3) OPEN: Still repeating, with one more day to go: any nominations for sites I should include and/or that we should all know about?
October 26, 2011
October 26, 2011 [Scholarly Review 7]: How Great Is This Valley?
[As a part of my own thoughts toward next steps and extended versions of this blog, but also as a way to highlight some of the amazing models for digital scholarship that are already out there, I'm going to focus this week on impressive scholarly sites. That would be in addition to the two sites of Stephen Railton's and the site of Kevin Levin's that I've already featured in this space. This is the second in that series.]
Yesterday's focal point website, "Voice of the Shuttle," is great at least in part because it utilizes, amplifies, and makes more productive and meaningful work that, realistically speaking, only the web could and can do—database and archive construction that would have taken decades and more moving trucks than spring training if it were to happen in the real world, made accessible to and searchable by scholars and researchers from around the world, able to be individualized and continually updated and to evolve as the web and the sources and the scholarship and conversations likewise evolve. To my mind, there's obviously a great deal to be said for using new technologies in those new ways, and the plans to parallel "Voice" to new online concepts such as playlists and social networking are perfect examples of how such evolving technologies and ideas can be wedded to genuine, practical, and beneficial scholarly purposes and work.But as I wrote in that above-linked post about my Dad's websites, there's at least as much value in finding ways for the web's resources and strengths to help us do the things that scholars and teachers have always tried to do; and today's focal web site, "The Valley of the Shadow," exemplifies that approach. "Valley" actually predates even "Voice," and coincidentally originated just down the hall (or maybe up a flight of stairs) from the room where that young AmericanStudier about whom I wrote yesterday was doing his first web-browsing; it was the brainchild of then-University of Virginia historian (now President of the University of Richmond) Ed Ayers, who developed it over the next decade and a half with a team of colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students, and tech wizards (one reason why both Ayers' site and my Dad's ones are so strong is the presence at Virginia of institutions like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Virginia Center for Digital History). "Valley" represents, as the intro page at the link below illustrates, an attempt to capture one of the most crucial and yet complex and often vexed subjects for any American historian: the voices and experiences of Americans from particular communities and time periods, in this case two Shenandoah Valley towns (one in Pennsylvania, one in Virginia) before, during, and after the Civil War.
I could spend many more paragraphs than this one and fail to capture the incredible breadth, depth, and compelling interest and power of what Ayers and the "Valley" scholars and historians were able to find and include on the site; the truth is that the site's work and its unique and engaging structure speak for themselves, and I encourage you to check it out. In terms of that structure, I would highlight one more way in which the site takes some of what historians are most interested in doing and uses the web to amplify these questions: the different categories of primary sources framed on the site's main page are both treated as distinct and complicated individual texts, ones with which any reader and historian must grapple on their own terms; while the overarching structure puts those different categories in multiple relationships to each other, both within each time period (the ways church records and census and tax records can reveal different sides to these communities during the pre-war years, for example) and across the three periods (the identities captured and created in letters and diaries from each period, for another). If American historians are consistently working to find and analyze voices and experiences, they're also consistently thinking about the kinds of sources they have, what contexts are necessary to approach each source, and how they can read them on their own and in conversation with other sources. The site doesn't answer those questions for any individual user; quite the opposite, it allows every researcher to begin asking and answering his or her own version of them.Take a look, I guarantee (or your money back!) you'll learn something. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) "Valley": http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/
2) BackStory, a Virginia radio program on American history for which Ayers is one of main the contributors: http://backstoryradio.org/
3) OPEN: To repeat yesterday's, any nominations for sites I should include and/or that we should all know about?
Yesterday's focal point website, "Voice of the Shuttle," is great at least in part because it utilizes, amplifies, and makes more productive and meaningful work that, realistically speaking, only the web could and can do—database and archive construction that would have taken decades and more moving trucks than spring training if it were to happen in the real world, made accessible to and searchable by scholars and researchers from around the world, able to be individualized and continually updated and to evolve as the web and the sources and the scholarship and conversations likewise evolve. To my mind, there's obviously a great deal to be said for using new technologies in those new ways, and the plans to parallel "Voice" to new online concepts such as playlists and social networking are perfect examples of how such evolving technologies and ideas can be wedded to genuine, practical, and beneficial scholarly purposes and work.But as I wrote in that above-linked post about my Dad's websites, there's at least as much value in finding ways for the web's resources and strengths to help us do the things that scholars and teachers have always tried to do; and today's focal web site, "The Valley of the Shadow," exemplifies that approach. "Valley" actually predates even "Voice," and coincidentally originated just down the hall (or maybe up a flight of stairs) from the room where that young AmericanStudier about whom I wrote yesterday was doing his first web-browsing; it was the brainchild of then-University of Virginia historian (now President of the University of Richmond) Ed Ayers, who developed it over the next decade and a half with a team of colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students, and tech wizards (one reason why both Ayers' site and my Dad's ones are so strong is the presence at Virginia of institutions like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Virginia Center for Digital History). "Valley" represents, as the intro page at the link below illustrates, an attempt to capture one of the most crucial and yet complex and often vexed subjects for any American historian: the voices and experiences of Americans from particular communities and time periods, in this case two Shenandoah Valley towns (one in Pennsylvania, one in Virginia) before, during, and after the Civil War.
I could spend many more paragraphs than this one and fail to capture the incredible breadth, depth, and compelling interest and power of what Ayers and the "Valley" scholars and historians were able to find and include on the site; the truth is that the site's work and its unique and engaging structure speak for themselves, and I encourage you to check it out. In terms of that structure, I would highlight one more way in which the site takes some of what historians are most interested in doing and uses the web to amplify these questions: the different categories of primary sources framed on the site's main page are both treated as distinct and complicated individual texts, ones with which any reader and historian must grapple on their own terms; while the overarching structure puts those different categories in multiple relationships to each other, both within each time period (the ways church records and census and tax records can reveal different sides to these communities during the pre-war years, for example) and across the three periods (the identities captured and created in letters and diaries from each period, for another). If American historians are consistently working to find and analyze voices and experiences, they're also consistently thinking about the kinds of sources they have, what contexts are necessary to approach each source, and how they can read them on their own and in conversation with other sources. The site doesn't answer those questions for any individual user; quite the opposite, it allows every researcher to begin asking and answering his or her own version of them.Take a look, I guarantee (or your money back!) you'll learn something. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) "Valley": http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/
2) BackStory, a Virginia radio program on American history for which Ayers is one of main the contributors: http://backstoryradio.org/
3) OPEN: To repeat yesterday's, any nominations for sites I should include and/or that we should all know about?
October 25, 2011
October 25, 2011 [Scholarly Review 6]: An Exemplary Voice
[As a part of my own thoughts toward next steps and extended versions of this blog, but also as a way to highlight some of the amazing models for digital scholarship that are already out there, I'm going to focus this week on impressive scholarly sites. This is the first in that series.]
For those of us who've grown up with the world-wide web, who (to get very specific and autobiographical for a second) can still remember going to our Dad's office in the early 1990s and accessing what was (as I remember it) a long alphabetical list of web documents and conversations, it can be pretty difficult to cast our minds back with any depth or analytical rigor to the state of the internet circa 1994. Moreover, so few specific web resources (or even general types of websites, for that matter) have been around for that long that such analytical historicizing can feel interesting but largely irrelevant to the state of the internet in 2011.Yet one of the best resources for digital scholarship, the University of California Santa Barbara-housed website "VoS: Voice of the Shuttle," has, in fact, been in existence since that distant year; and both the site's consistent goals and its impressive evolution model what digital scholarship can be and do.Since its origins "Voice" has presented itself not as a venue for scholarly writing or argument per se, but rather as an analytical database, one of the first online scholarly archives (if not indeed the first such archive). Librarians, archivists, and scholars have been posting, uploading, scanning, retyping, and otherwise putting manuscripts and primary sources online for as long as there's been an internet; the issues were thus from the beginning ones of awareness and access, of letting other scholars and researchers know what was out there and giving them the tools for both finding and utilizing those online materials. In its earliest iterations (a 1999 version of which you can find at the second link below) "Voice" did have an overt scholarly perspective and lens, a women's studies approach alluded to in its title (a reference both to Greek mythology and to modern literary theory) and made explicit in most of its first subjects and focal points. But while it was certainly possible to focus on and engage with that scholarly perspective in using the site, it was also equally possible—and, I would argue, more the site's central goal—to find your way into and through the resources linked there; the title's ultimate meaning, in this argument, was simply that the site gave an online voice to a much broader number of literary and cultural figures (of both genders and in every other conceivable category of identity) than would have been possible without the site's archival work.
Thanks in no small measure to the pioneering work of sites like "Voice," there are now literally hundreds of scholarly archives, including many housed through huge institutions or organizations such as the Library of Congress, Project Muse, JSTOR, and various university libraries. Recognizing that abundance, the editors and scholars behind "Voice" have done something that might be common in the digital world generally but I have found pretty rare in the world of digital scholarship: radically and successfully adjust their site's identity and goals without losing its originating purpose and identity. As the current site, available at the first link, makes clear, those revisions are still a work in progress; but the new "Voice" already features a much more interactive and multi-directional scholarly database, one that connects primary and secondary sources through both numerous categories and through the particular frames of a given researcher and starting point. The site will also offer databases and archives for resources more specific to conversations about teaching, publishing, conferences, and a variety of other parallel academic and scholarly questions. And the new site's more open-ended qualities will eventually be exemplified by the opportunity for individual and linked groups of users to customize their own sets of links and resources, turning the site into an example of social networking on a scholarly and research-driven level.But as with all of this week's focal points, don't take my word for it—check out "Voice" for yourself! I think you'll be impressed, and maybe even find some resources you didn't know about; I know I have. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) "Voice": http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp
2) 1999 version of "Voice," as captured through the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19991128221800/http://vos.ucsb.edu/
3) OPEN: Any nominations for sites I should include and/or that we should all know about?
For those of us who've grown up with the world-wide web, who (to get very specific and autobiographical for a second) can still remember going to our Dad's office in the early 1990s and accessing what was (as I remember it) a long alphabetical list of web documents and conversations, it can be pretty difficult to cast our minds back with any depth or analytical rigor to the state of the internet circa 1994. Moreover, so few specific web resources (or even general types of websites, for that matter) have been around for that long that such analytical historicizing can feel interesting but largely irrelevant to the state of the internet in 2011.Yet one of the best resources for digital scholarship, the University of California Santa Barbara-housed website "VoS: Voice of the Shuttle," has, in fact, been in existence since that distant year; and both the site's consistent goals and its impressive evolution model what digital scholarship can be and do.Since its origins "Voice" has presented itself not as a venue for scholarly writing or argument per se, but rather as an analytical database, one of the first online scholarly archives (if not indeed the first such archive). Librarians, archivists, and scholars have been posting, uploading, scanning, retyping, and otherwise putting manuscripts and primary sources online for as long as there's been an internet; the issues were thus from the beginning ones of awareness and access, of letting other scholars and researchers know what was out there and giving them the tools for both finding and utilizing those online materials. In its earliest iterations (a 1999 version of which you can find at the second link below) "Voice" did have an overt scholarly perspective and lens, a women's studies approach alluded to in its title (a reference both to Greek mythology and to modern literary theory) and made explicit in most of its first subjects and focal points. But while it was certainly possible to focus on and engage with that scholarly perspective in using the site, it was also equally possible—and, I would argue, more the site's central goal—to find your way into and through the resources linked there; the title's ultimate meaning, in this argument, was simply that the site gave an online voice to a much broader number of literary and cultural figures (of both genders and in every other conceivable category of identity) than would have been possible without the site's archival work.
Thanks in no small measure to the pioneering work of sites like "Voice," there are now literally hundreds of scholarly archives, including many housed through huge institutions or organizations such as the Library of Congress, Project Muse, JSTOR, and various university libraries. Recognizing that abundance, the editors and scholars behind "Voice" have done something that might be common in the digital world generally but I have found pretty rare in the world of digital scholarship: radically and successfully adjust their site's identity and goals without losing its originating purpose and identity. As the current site, available at the first link, makes clear, those revisions are still a work in progress; but the new "Voice" already features a much more interactive and multi-directional scholarly database, one that connects primary and secondary sources through both numerous categories and through the particular frames of a given researcher and starting point. The site will also offer databases and archives for resources more specific to conversations about teaching, publishing, conferences, and a variety of other parallel academic and scholarly questions. And the new site's more open-ended qualities will eventually be exemplified by the opportunity for individual and linked groups of users to customize their own sets of links and resources, turning the site into an example of social networking on a scholarly and research-driven level.But as with all of this week's focal points, don't take my word for it—check out "Voice" for yourself! I think you'll be impressed, and maybe even find some resources you didn't know about; I know I have. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) "Voice": http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp
2) 1999 version of "Voice," as captured through the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19991128221800/http://vos.ucsb.edu/
3) OPEN: Any nominations for sites I should include and/or that we should all know about?
October 24, 2011
October 24, 2011: Every Day I Write the Book? (or the Website?)
With the NEASA conference (less than two weeks away now—still time to register through www.neasa.org, or at least check out the pre-conference blogging!) and the American Writers Museum work taking up a good bit of my time these days, and teaching and all other things Fitchburg State taking up a good bit more, and those two junior AmericanStudiers (pictured) taking up, well, all the rest, to say that I haven't had a lot of time to focus on longer-term projects, and specifically on my book plans, would be an understatement. But while any significant work on my ongoing third book manuscript—about which I blogged here—is going to have to wait until the summer, I've been thinking a lot as well lately about ways to bring some of the work I've done in this space to new audiences and venues; specifically, I've been considering two main options: an e-book, with extended and more hypertext-y versions of these posts, perhaps organized around a year of AmericanStudies reading; or a website, with different categories of archived posts, a range of possible links and multimedia sections, and space for readers to add their voices and ideas.
I can see some immediate arguments for each of these two: the e-book would reflect what I see as the relatively in-depth nature of these pieces and the experience of reading them, while still allowing for readers to connect to the different links (and even more in a hypertext-y style), to move between different posts more smoothly, and otherwise to build their own reading experience while being guided by some of my main ideas; whereas the website would be a more fully interactive and reader-driven project, one through which individual readers could certainly connect to and read at length particular posts, but which would make multimedia and multitextual and multivocal conversations a lot more fully possible and present. The website would of course be free, which has plenty of obvious and real benefits; but working on the e-book would force me to think actively about how I turn this blog's work into something more focused and marketable and thus, I believe, allow me to work on connecting it to new audiences and conversations. This choice is not necessarily either-or, of course, but on the other hand I don't necessarily want to spend a ton of time working on one of these options if I'm eventually (and perhaps more ultimately) going to create the other one.Obviously this process and decision is mine to wrestle with, and I apologize if this is getting a bit too inside baseball. But I wanted to write a post about this possible next steps, not only to allow me to figure out some of these ideas by writing about them, but also and more importantly because I'd greatly value any and all feedback my readers and fellow AmericanStudiers might have: not only because you're a smart bunch, but also because of course you'd be great models for potential readers and responders to either or both of those next versions of this blog, and so I'd be especially interested to hear what sounds like it would be the most interesting, engage you all the most, or otherwise what you'd say in response to these two ideas. So please feel free to express your perspective in comments, or to email me your thoughts (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu).
More tomorrow, back to our regularly scheduled programming,Ben
PS. No links, but I suppose I do have two more questions: are there any e-books that you have found particularly good at engaging you as a reader? And any scholarly (broadly defined!) websites that have done the same?
I can see some immediate arguments for each of these two: the e-book would reflect what I see as the relatively in-depth nature of these pieces and the experience of reading them, while still allowing for readers to connect to the different links (and even more in a hypertext-y style), to move between different posts more smoothly, and otherwise to build their own reading experience while being guided by some of my main ideas; whereas the website would be a more fully interactive and reader-driven project, one through which individual readers could certainly connect to and read at length particular posts, but which would make multimedia and multitextual and multivocal conversations a lot more fully possible and present. The website would of course be free, which has plenty of obvious and real benefits; but working on the e-book would force me to think actively about how I turn this blog's work into something more focused and marketable and thus, I believe, allow me to work on connecting it to new audiences and conversations. This choice is not necessarily either-or, of course, but on the other hand I don't necessarily want to spend a ton of time working on one of these options if I'm eventually (and perhaps more ultimately) going to create the other one.Obviously this process and decision is mine to wrestle with, and I apologize if this is getting a bit too inside baseball. But I wanted to write a post about this possible next steps, not only to allow me to figure out some of these ideas by writing about them, but also and more importantly because I'd greatly value any and all feedback my readers and fellow AmericanStudiers might have: not only because you're a smart bunch, but also because of course you'd be great models for potential readers and responders to either or both of those next versions of this blog, and so I'd be especially interested to hear what sounds like it would be the most interesting, engage you all the most, or otherwise what you'd say in response to these two ideas. So please feel free to express your perspective in comments, or to email me your thoughts (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu).
More tomorrow, back to our regularly scheduled programming,Ben
PS. No links, but I suppose I do have two more questions: are there any e-books that you have found particularly good at engaging you as a reader? And any scholarly (broadly defined!) websites that have done the same?
October 22, 2011
October 22-23, 2011 [Tribute post 24]: A New Favorite Songwriter
This is also one of my Guest Posts of Sorts, as this song was found and is highlighted in a blog post by Kevin Levin, about whose great Civil War Memory site I blogged here. I'll let him do the honor of introducing you, as he just introduced me, to this amazing text and the inspiring anonymous African American Union soldier who composed it (likely intending it, as the first commenter on Levin's post noted, to be sung to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic":
http://cwmemory.com/2011/10/21/a-negro-volunteer-song/America can get you down sometimes—or, to be more precise about my point, it can get me down sometimes. But it is, as I hope this blog has helped to highlight in all sorts of posts and ways, also a continual source of inspiration, and this is most definitely my latest exemplification of that possibility and power.
More next week,Ben
PS. Any inspiring American texts, people, events, ideas, stuff you'd highlight?
http://cwmemory.com/2011/10/21/a-negro-volunteer-song/America can get you down sometimes—or, to be more precise about my point, it can get me down sometimes. But it is, as I hope this blog has helped to highlight in all sorts of posts and ways, also a continual source of inspiration, and this is most definitely my latest exemplification of that possibility and power.
More next week,Ben
PS. Any inspiring American texts, people, events, ideas, stuff you'd highlight?
Benjamin A. Railton's Blog
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