Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 437

September 14, 2011: The Transnational Turn

Of the many trends and developments that have taken place in the broad and diffuse field of AmericanStudies over the last couple decades, none has been more prominent than the turn to the transnational: to emphases of 21st century international interconnectedness and interdependence, certainly, but also and more strikingly to arguments and ideas and narratives that connect American history and culture and literature and identity to other nations and communities at more or less each and every moment of our existence. Rejecting wholesale the still present and often still prominent arguments for American exceptionalism, these transnational scholarly frames seek instead to make plain just how much America has always been part of, and often in these perspectives defined by, broader circuits and links, from the web of the burgeoning 17th century slave trade to migrant labor in the early 21st century, the fad for authentic Chinese dishware in 18th century homes to the influence of Eastern spiritualities and philosophies on the Transcendentalists, and countless more.

All of those specific connections are really interesting and compelling to me, and I find worries about what's lost if we move away from an America-specific scholarly focus to be almost exactly opposite to what I'd say is a particularly salient contribution of such scholarship: to make plain just how much America has always included such transnational presences and influences. But in this post I want to make the case as well for a different, and admittedly much more potentially troubling or false, kind of transnational AmericanStudies: transnational comparisons, engagements with histories or voices or texts from other nations that can interestingly inform American narratives and identities.  As I say, I understand the limits and even dangers of such comparisons, which are roughly like cross-historical comparisons (ie, "The Abolitionists are just like Pro-Lifers!"; "The Clinton impeachment really echoes what happened with Andrew Johnson!") but with probably even more need for contextual specifics and distinctions. Yet if we don't try to argue for equivalencies, but rather simply look closely at the other history or text in question and then consider how it might speak to our American narratives, I think we allow our range of possible AmericanStudies texts and focal points to expand very helpfully.My case in point today is the late 20th century Australian rock band Midnight Oil, and specifically the band's best and (to my mind) most America-illuminating album, Diesel and Dust (1987). Like all of Oil's music—and like its frontman and creative genius Peter Garrett's whole life for that matter, as he left the band in order to run successfully for Parliament—Diesel is grounded very clearly in specific Australian issues and images, in this case the intertwined stories of the land itself and of the Aboriginal peoples who have inhabited it for many thousands of years. Since, as the album also captures on many levels, the arrival of British settlers (many of them convicts) and colonialists profoundly and often destructively impacted and has continued to impact those Aborigines, it's easy enough to make the direct comparisons to the experiences and identities of Native Americans. But in the album's best songs, and especially in the singular, beautiful, and haunting "The Dead Heart," it's the multi-level combination of content and form that is most powerful and most potentially illuminating, as Garrett writes (with great sensitivity and success) and the band sings harmonies in the first-person voices of the Aborigines themselves. I wrote in a long-ago post about the striking 19th century novel Ploughed Under, a text in which a European-American author (William Justin Harsha) created a fictional first-person Native American voice; despite its many flaws, the novel remains significant as one of the only American works (in any medium) to take that bold and empathetic step. Which is to say, we could stand to learn a good deal from the power that the narrative choice of a song like "The Dead Heart" conveys and captures.Diesel and Midnight Oil are well worth our time on their own terms, and I'm certainly not arguing that American connections make non-American artists or works better or more important than they'd otherwise be. But if an album is great and can also add to our AmericanStudies narratives and ideas, well, listening to it is a transnational turn that everybody can get behind. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Three complex and important takes—by three very prominent scholars—on the transnational turn in AmericanStudies: http://www.theasa.net/project_eas_online/page/project_eas_online_eas_featured_article/
2)      "The Dead Heart": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHNR3y9www
3)      OPEN: Any non-American works or artists with interesting AmericanStudies connections you'd highlight?

September 13, 2011: Great American Hypocrites

My post's title echoes the title of one of Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald's recent books, a work that focuses explicitly on hypocrisies at the core of the contemporary Republican Party. But while I certainly agree with Greenwald's premise and his specific examples, and similarly feel that hypocrisy has become a core ingredient of an entire political platform in a way that it has perhaps never before been (see the current GOP presidential frontrunner, Rick Perry, a man who, among numerous other such hypocrisies, threatened to secede from America and now accuses Obama of lacking sufficient patriotism, has attacked the stimulus vociferously at every stage while making sure to get and use every cent of its allocated money for Texas, and so on), I would also emphasize just how strong a role hypocrisy has played in American narratives throughout our existence. That argument could go back, for example, to the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which depicted a Native American begging prospective arrivals to "Come over and help us": the seal reveals not only a core hypocrisy in the Puritans' perspectives, since (as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation and many others documents demonstrate) the local Native tribes quickly (well before this seal's creation) and thoroughly became the Puritans' greatest perceived obstacle to overcome on the path to building their city on a hill; but also another and more subtle hypocrisy in their experiences, since without the early aid of local Native Americans such as Squanto (as Bradford does admit, to his credit) the Plymouth colony (and thus likely the Puritan settlements that followed it) would almost certainly have failed.

I could probably maintain a daily blog on such American hypocrisies and not run out of examples any time soon, but since this is more of a one-off I wanted to focus on a figure whose public and personal lives and identities perhaps most fully embody (in every sense) these national hypocrisies: Roy Cohn (1927-1986). Cohn rose to prominence in political and public life as one of Senator Joseph McCarthy's nastiest attack dogs, a lawyer who seemingly thrived on ferreting out hidden and secret (and, as ever in the McCarthy era, dubious at best) details of the lives of government employees and other McCarthy targets and helping expose them for a paranoid and fearful nation. As was generally the case in the anti-Communist witch hunts, Cohn was never averse to directly linking homosexuality and other forms of "deviant" behavior to Communist leanings, since, in this perspective, one kind of secret life was likely to echo and reveal others. It was only decades later, when Cohn was publicly diagnosed in the 1980s with the decade's newest and most threatening disease, AIDS, that the truth of Cohn's own very secret (he had been famously linked to various famous women over the years) gay identity was similarly revealed. While it is of course both unfair and ultimately impossible to speak with any authority about any other individual's sexual and intimate experiences and life, it's perhaps least unfair to do so when that individual has made identifying and attacking the sexual preferences of others part and parcel of his career and legacy—after all, if Cohn believed, as both he and McCarthy stated explicitly on numerous occasions, that being homosexual should disqualify someone from taking part in political life in America, then his own identity as a closeted gay political figure was ideologically as well as personally hypocritical.The truths of both individual identity and communal existence, however, are really more complicated than that, and while it's tempting simply to point out Cohn's hypocrisy, and more saliently to use it to critique the profoundly destructive and illegitimate roots of McCarthyism more broadly, there's significant value in trying to imagine and analyze this very complex and certainly very representative American's life and perspective. By far the best such imagined version of Cohn produced to date, at least to my knowledge, would have to be that created by playwright Tony Kushner in his two-part, Pulitzer-winning, innovative and brilliant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-1993). Kushner's play has a lot to recommend it, including some of the most raw and powerful depictions of AIDS yet produced in any genre or medium, but without question one of its strongest elements is the characterization of Cohn, a vulgar, violent, petty, power-hungry aging lawyer and Washington player who also manages to be funny, charismatic, likeable, and ultimately even sympathetic as he struggles with both the disease that he refuses to admit he has and the ghosts of those (especially Ethel Rosenberg) to whose destruction he contributed so centrally. In a play full of interesting characters and show-stopping moments, Cohn is perhaps the linchpin and certainly the anti-hero and villain and star, and I can't think of a better description of national hypocrisies more generally.While I earnestly hope we can find our way back to a politics that isn't quite so dominated by hypocritical positions and narratives, it's hard to imagine an America devoid entirely of Roy Cohns. And perhaps, Kushner's play intimates—despite the destructiveness that comes with such figures—we wouldn't want to. More tomorrow,BenPS. Four links to start with:1)      Brief piece on, and image of, the Mass Bay seal: http://www.irwinator.com/126/wdoc36.htm
2)      Pretty amazing 1988 Life story on Cohn's death and legacy: http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/life/905W-000-035.html
3)      Great, great moment from Al Pacino's performance as Cohn in the HBO miniseries adaptation of Kushner's play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98fBiOVEcyI
4)      OPEN: Any especially hypocritical figures or moments or narratives you'd highlight?

September 12, 2011: The Neverending Story?

I've already written in this space about the firebombing of Dresden, and through that horrific and largely forgotten (here in America at least) event about the ways in which event the most "good" of wars can bring out the worst in us, as a nation and as humans. The same can of course be said for another, more extended, more explicitly chosen and intended, and perhaps even more horrific home front policy during World War II: the internment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans. And if we go further back, to the war about which I wrote last week—the Civil War—we can find plenty of equally troubling and terrifying such wartime excesses, none more so than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus for the duration of the war: a policy that applied not only in Confederate states, but throughout the nation; that targeted not only Confederate soldiers or those citizens actively fighting against the Union, but also those who "discouraged volunteer enlistments," among other activities.

Compared to most of the other excesses and horrors in American history, though, those wartime ones were consistently ameliorated by one key fact: when the wars in question ended, so too did nearly all of the excesses. Habeas corpus was restored after the Civil War; the US stopped bombing European and Japanese cities after peace treaties were signed with those nations; the interned Japanese Americans were freed and allowed to return home; and so on. Such definite endpoints don't of course make up for or erase the horrors that have come before, nor do they mean that the aftermaths and effects of the excesses don't linger for decades or longer still (as any visitor to 21st century Dresden can attest), but nonetheless, a horrible and brutal past policy or action beats the heck out of a horrible and brutal continuing one. Moreover, these briefer wartime excesses are at least somewhat easier to recognize as the horrors they are than long-term and so more ingrained policies—as evidenced by the US government's formal apology and reparations for the internment, only forty years after the war's end, compared by the complete official silence on the century of institutional and legal support for segregation (in a wide variety of arenas) that followed the end of slavery.
I have plenty of problems with the way the US government specifically and Americans more broadly have responded to 9/11—with what has sometimes come to be called the 9/12 mindset—but certainly at the very top of the list would be the concept of the "war on terror." Such a war would seem to be a parallel to other non-declared government wars—the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime—but in fact, both as the Bush administration intended the phrase and as it has been deployed and hardened over the last decade, the war on terror has been treated quite exactly like a full-blown, declared, shooting war. That means, again not surprisingly to anyone with a knowledge of American and human history, a whole range of excesses and horrors, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to the murders of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, from warrantless wiretapping and the darker corners of the Patriot Act to torture and extraordinary rendition to CIA black sites, and much else besides. But in this case, because the war is one that may well never end, so too is it difficult to imagine an end to the wartime excesses—if anything, the last few years seem simply to have added new and just as horrifying ones to the mix, including drone strikes and the idea that the president has the authority to assassinate American citizens with alleged terrorist affiliations.
To put it another way: Roosevelt responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by terming December 7th, 1941 a "day that will live in infamy," but when the war with Japan ended three and a half years later, much of that antipathy was forgiven; but when Americans say about 9/11 that "everything changed" and that we will "never forget," the phrases seem more darkly and troublingly prophetic than we could ever have realized. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The text of Lincoln's suspension: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/historicdocuments/a/lincolnhabeas.htm
2)      An eloquent op-ed on the war on terror by former Carter cabinet officer Zbigniew Brzezinski: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301613.html
3)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 10-11, 2011: Rising to the Occasion

There are the obvious high-pressure professions, the surgeons and pilots, the cops and firefighters, the bomb defusers and Formula One drivers, the work worlds where the slightest split-second error is entirely unacceptable and quite possibly fatal. Then there are the less obvious but to my mind just as high-pressure gigs, a list at the top of which I'd have to put school bus drivers—seriously, would you want to drive a bunch of non-seat-belted and likely chaotic and distracting kids around in a giant unwieldy monstrosity, knowing that an error might well result in the worst possible thing that could happen for dozens of families? And at the very opposite end of the pressure spectrum, by all appearances and certainly in many genuine ways, are those of us who work with words, whose greatest error might be to settle for (to reference Twain's famous distinction) the lightning bug rather than the lightning.Writers don't face split-second or life-altering pressure, and I'd be a jackass—any time, but doubly so in a September 11th memorial post—to suggest otherwise. But there are other kinds of pressure, of course, and one that intersects with the idea of tragic events is the pressure to rise to such an occasion, to produce words that somehow do justice to, adequately capture and remember and mourn and celebrate, all of what the event is and means. It's for this precise reason, to go back to something that my colleague Irene referenced in her very insightful comment on Tuesday's Civil War post, that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has lasted as fully and centrally as it has in our collective national memory: tasked with responding not only to the Civil War's most pivotal and in many ways most extended and destructive battle, but also to the horrors and yet the necessity of the war itself, all while not eliding in the slightest the roughly fifty thousand Americans who had lost their lives in the battle, Lincoln delivered, and then some. That he did so with the utmost brevity, while not a requirement for rising to an occasion, certainly demonstrates just how fully Lincoln found each and every perfect word, and not one more than he needed.Lincoln wasn't President on September 11th, 2001—which might be the most significant understatement I'll ever write, but this isn't the post for politics so I'll leave it at that—so it has been left up to others, among them writers and artists across many genres and media, to try to rise to that tragic and terrible day's occasion. It will likely come as a surprise to precisely no one—at least no one already familiar with this blog or me—that to my mind Bruce Springsteen has come the closest to rising to the challenge. His 2002 album The Rising comprises nothing short of fifteen separate yet interwoven, distinct yet cumulative, contradictory yet complementary, and all necessary and so damn right responses to the attacks, and more exactly to their personal and familial, emotional and psychological, individual and communal resonances and effects. It's entirely possible to listen to and get a lot out of any of the songs by themselves—and I've linked my personal favorite below—but it was with the album as a whole that I believe Bruce most explicitly rose to the occasion. I know there are plenty of other possible nominees—Salon.com has featured a series of articles on works of art responding to or inspired by the attacks—and there's likely much to be said for a diverse and complex 21st century America's need for many such risings. But Bruce is a great place to start.I thought for a good while about what I might include in this post; certainly there would be darker and just as vital potential themes, including those I highlighted in this post. You could even say I felt some serious pressure, although neither my purpose nor of course my role here comes anywhere close to Lincoln's or Bruce's. But ultimately, this blog is about not one American occasion but all of them, and my goal not to meet one challenge but to pose a continual series of them, to my own understandings and narratives and histories, and to all of ours. After all, it's precisely through such challenges that we just might, as a nation, rise to our most ideal identity and future. More next week,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Info on the great Library of Congress exhibition on Lincoln's Address: http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/gettysburgaddress/Pages/default.aspx
2)      Probably my favorite Rising song, "Mary's Place": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qA1RDvo9LY&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL4372E0A6723B860A
3)      OPEN: Any texts or words that have you'd say have risen to the occasion (any occasion)?

September 9, 2011: Triple Play

I realized yesterday that I had the perfect way to follow the last two posts and round out this trio on AmericanStudies and rock music: "Galveston Bay" (1995), a Bruce Springsteen song from the same album as "The Ghost of Tom Joad" that also happens to be my second favorite song about (if in a very different way from Joel's) the Vietnam War. "Galveston" has spoken deeply to me since the first time I heard it, sitting in my freshman year dorm room listening to The Ghost of Tom Joad album, but I'll freely admit that I wasn't nearly ready then to appreciate two of its most perfect elements: its quiet but crucial portrayal of how its dual protagonists, two incredibly different men in many ways, are linked by their defining love for their children; and its (spoiler alert) surprising and optimistic and hugely powerful ending, one that (to reference my third book in progress) is entirely earned by the song's thorough willingness to engage with the darker American histories and realities from which that endpoint departs.Also doesn't hurt that this is perhaps the most fully AmericanStudies of all of Bruce's songs, at least in its ability to touch on pretty much every significant disciplinary question of the last few decades: race and ethnicity; transnational and international and comparative national identities; region and place; multigenerational family heritage; work and class; domestic terror and the reactionary backlash against post-1960s social and demographic shifts; America's foundational passion for violence and its connections to masculine ideals; the role of the legal system in aiding and furthering social progress on many of these issues; and of course the lingering effects and impacts of Vietnam (among others!). And in case that makes it sound like a textbook or something, it's also a deeply moving dual narrative of two men's stories, of lives that tragically but then much more hopefully interweave and intersect in an America that has long been seen as defined by only one of them but that, the song and this AmericanStudier argue, is finally being recognized as constituted very fully out of both, and even more so out of the worst and the best of their intersections.Okay, that's enough from me, just go listen to it if you would, and please feel free to share your thoughts (even if you don't love it quite as much as me) in the comments. More this weekend, a September 11th-inspired post,BenPS. Two links to start with:1)      "Galveston Bay": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shEFYVaobZM2)      OPEN: Responses? And any suggestions for future musical AmericanStudies posts?

September 8, 2011: My Bad, Piano Man

I feel like I semi-insulted Billy Joel in yesterday's post; the truth is that however you feel about the Piano Man—and I run a bit hot and cold, maybe because I find all of the music he wrote about Christie Brinkley (and man there was a lot of it) pretty thoroughly unappealing, not to mention bitterly ironic of course—the guy has written some of the most interesting AmericanStudying songs of the last few decades. To make amends, here are five of the best, in ascending order of impressive AmericanStudiousness:1)      "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989): Joel apparently wanted to be a history teacher at some point in his life, and this song certainly can be read as an attempt to teach four decades of American history (or at least to inspire an interested listener to research the many, many references to those decades contained within it). I don't know that it ultimately adds up to much, other than an impressive ability to rhyme various historical figures and events, but it's definitely a lot of fun to try to figure out all the references, and their variety certainly reveal an AmericanStudies-like mixture of disciplines, genres, texts, levels of culture, and more.2)      "Captain Jack" (1973): The least explicitly or overtly historical of these five by far, yet I can't help but feel that the song's second-person protagonist represents a kind of bastard child of the drug and counter-cultures of the 60s and the self-centered amoralities of the 70s, a young man trying to figure out what core ideas like identity and family mean at the intersection of those worlds. If that's true, then without question his story reflects a tragic and cynical take on its moment—but that too could be seen as a post-60s afterburn, contributing perhaps to the malaise that would soon characterize the 70s in America.3)       "The Downeaster Alexa" (1989): It's true that Alexa is the same of Joel and Brinkley's daughter, but I can let that slide in this case, since Joel gives her name to the fishing boat of his fictional and very nicely-captured fisherman speaker. Having seen first-hand, over the course of many summers on Martha's Vineyard, the significant decline of the fishing industry in America (or at least of independent/small fisherman in that region), I can testify to the accuracy of Joel's depiction of this complex late 20th-century trend. John Mellencamp gets justifiable props for his portrayals of the collapse of independent farming in songs like "Blood on the Scarecrow," but Joel's right there with him.4)      "Allentown" (1982): As this and the next song illustrate, 1982's The Nylon Curtain marked the pinnacle of Joel's AmericanStudiousness. "Allentown" is probably the more famous of the two, both because it's a lot shorter and more radio-friendly and (I imagine) because of the horrifically cheesy 80s video (to which I will not link below; search at your own peril). But while I slightly prefer the next song, "Allentown" has much to recommend it, especially its second-generation blue collar speaker's righteous indignation at what has happened—or, to put it more actively, what has been done—to his city and family's livelihood, at who has done it, and at what they've asked of these factory families in return.1)      "Goodnight Saigon" (1982): I don't think there's a better song about the Vietnam War. And yes, I'm even including Bruce and "Born in the U.S.A." in that conversation. Maybe I'm just a sucker for epics, and man does this song qualify—seven minutes, starts and ends with the sounds of a peaceful summer day being overtaken by helicopter rotors, has a full chorus supporting the key lines, etc. But those epic qualities are matched by lines that capture, both in the tiniest details and in the more crucial and terrifying moments, the life for a Vietnam serviceman better than any other song I know.In short, if and when we're all in the mood for a melody about America, we won't go wrong asking the Piano Man to sing us one. More tomorrow,BenPS. Six links to start with:1)      "Fire," with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-y1-eXjJ_g2)      "Jack": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xxugNQUtpE&feature=related3)      "Alexa," with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6qBaaEMlRA4)      "Allentown," with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV2jvngnvqg5)      "Saigon," with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZiVhVC5My8&feature=related6)      OPEN: Any great AmericanStudies pop songs you'd highlight?

September 7, 2011: All the Rage

Maybe it's just because the phrase "angry young man" flows so smoothly off the tongue of, well, more mellow older men, but I think that our cultural images of angry and aggressive protest music pigeonhole it very definitely as a feature of youth. Billy Joel might not be the go-to authority for discussions of protest music, but I think his song "Shades of Grey" (1993) captures perfectly an older man's inability and unwillingness to embrace the angrier and more righteous attitudes of his youth; see for example the second verse: "Once there were trenches and walls / And one point of every view / Fight 'til the other man falls / Kill him before he kills you / These days the edges are blurred / I'm old and tired of war / I hear the other man's words / I'm not that sure anymore." Given the explicitly warlike or at least violent metaphors adopted by many emblematic angry young bands—The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Rage Against the Machine—Joel's maturing rejection of war seems particularly salient.Any long-time reader of this blog will know that I agree with Joel, not only in his rejection of militancy and desire to hear the words of others, but also with his song's overarching embrace of complexity over certainty, shades of grey over black and white, simplified narratives. Yet I believe that to equate anger with militancy or even certainty, and thus to dismiss it as a function of overconfident and overaggressive youth, is both to patronize protest music and to miss much of what makes it meaningful and appealing for any demographic. Certainly there are angry protest songs that bury the value and effectiveness of their ideas in their extreme and over-the-top emotions and rhetoric; The Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," with its definitions of that monarch as a "fascist regime" who "ain't no human being," would to my mind illustrative that kind of hyperbolic rhetoric. But it could be argued that the Pistols and punk music in general were in any case less interested in protesting than in shocking, less in challenging social or cultural narratives than in pissing off everybody over a certain age, making them and their genre indeed a music of youth—and leaving open the possibility that angry protest music can still transcend such hyperbolic youthful rhetoric and appeals.I've come to that perspective more fully over the last couple of years, and have done so at least in part through a (belated but still relevant) discovery of none other than Rage Against the Machine. For whatever reason—the extremely aggressive music, the martial imagery of their videos and of a record title like The Battle of Los Angeles (1999), the band name itself—I had always thought of them as angry young men par excellence. Lead singer and main lyricist Zack de la Rocha was indeed only 22 when the band released their self-titled first album (1992), but guitarist Tom Morello was 27, and it seems to me that their music from the outset combined youthful passion with a more experienced worldview, a combination that only deepened over their subsequent two albums (Evil Empire [1996] and Battle). When the band broke up in 2000 to pursue separate projects, it might have seemed that they were in fact moving on from more youthful pursuits—but their 2007 reunion, and a series of concerts over the next few years, have proven that, even if the band never records new music together (and to this point they have not announced any plans to record), the songs from those earlier albums (including the three at the links below) both sound entirely appropriate coming from older men and continue to speak to American and world realities just as fully as they ever did (if not even more so—much of Rage's 1990s music uncannily foreshadows the worst excesses of the Bush administration).I'm still more likely to turn to Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad" (1995) or Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) than to Rage when I'm in the mood for a protest song; what can I say, the harmonic will always say "protest" to me, and it's pretty hard to make a harmonica sound really angry. But I won't ever again dismiss Rage or their ilk as angry young men—angry yes, and justifiably so, but angry with all the complexity and maturity that Billy Joel could hope for. More tomorrow,BenPS. Four links to start with: 1)      "Know Your Enemy" (1992), with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hJiE8CpgJg2)      "Bulls on Parade" (1996), with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UZdXe-1NQo3)      "Wake Up" (1999), with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkp7tkeu22I&feature=related4)      OPEN: Any protest artists or songs you'd recommend?

September 6, 2011: The Great War and Modern Bloggers

Due in part to the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War (and in part to great work that's been ongoing for many years and is just being aired more widely because of blogs), there are a wide and rich variety of online conversations about the war happening these days. Many of those conversations, such as the ones featured at the New York Times' hugely engrossing Disunion blog, are grounded very fully and impressively in the historical details and sources; some, such as those about whether the war's principal cause was indeed slavery (a question that is answered demonstrably and unquestionably in every major primary source related to the war), are instead entirely about contemporary political perspectives and debates (to my mind, anyone arguing that the Civil War was principally about something other than slavery, particularly states' rights, is doing so entirely because of contemporary political issues). But a few, and for me often the most complex and interesting, of the conversations straddle that line, extending both back into the historical contexts and forward into some of our most divisive and important present debates.Two of the most interesting, and two very much interconnected, such conversations have, not surprisingly, taken place at two of the best blogs (historically engaged or otherwise) I know. At his Atlantic.com blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates has led and linked to an evolving series of discussions and debates over the question of whether the Civil War was or was not tragic. Coates, focusing on the war as a final, necessary, and ultimately uplifting stage in the multi-century fight for the emancipation of African American slaves, has argued that the war was in no way tragic; many of his respondents and fellow bloggers have taken more mixed positions similar to what I would say is my own, positions perhaps best summed up by a (probably apocryphal but very effective) line delivered about the battle of Antietam by Massachusetts Governor John Andrew in the film Glory: "a great and a terrible day." But no matter what position one takes on this question, it seems to me that it's impossible to separate it entirely from subsequent historical and national issues, from Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement up to the Obama Presidency and the (at times) overtly Neo-Confederate responses it has provoked. That doesn't mean that the debates are necessarily a-historical, though—quite the opposite in fact, as Coates in particular has proved time and again (here as elsewhere) that the more historically grounded arguments contextualize and enrich the present debates in every case.In recent days Coates has linked quite a bit to another blogger, Kevin Levin, an AmericanStudier and Civil War historian whose CWMemory blog hosts (in the posts and in the comment threads) some of the very best of these ongoing Civil War debates. The specific subject of these links has been a second and, again, very much interconnected conversation: the question of whether African Americans fought for the Confederacy in any significant numbers, along with parallel questions such as whether they did so entirely as slaves or were ever acknowledged as soldiers. While (as Levin's recent posts note) hugely prominent AmericanStudiers such as Henry Louis Gates and John Stauffer have begun to argue for the affirmative positions, Levin, Coates, and many other historians (and, based on much less archival research to be sure, I as well) continue to believe that the vast majority of the individuals and organizations making this case are (like the Sons of Confederate Veterans) explicitly interested at least as much in contemporary narratives about race and region as they are in revising Civil War historiography. As Levin and Coates have noted, it is far from coincidental that many of those arguing for the existence of black Confederates use that argument to further their claims that the war was not and could not have been about slavery—for, these arguments go, why would African Americans fight for such a cause? Yet in this case the historical contexts and the present debates do often part ways, for a historically grounded argument would have to note that, even if African Americans did occasionally fight for the Confederacy, they did so explicitly as slaves rather than soldiers, making their service much, much more likely to be coerced than volunteered.I have only touched the tip of the iceberg for any of these questions, and can't recommend strongly enough the Disunion, Coates, and Levin blogs (and the many similarly rich scholars and perspectives that appear in their links and comments). Yet even if we leave aside the complex Civil War-specific questions, I believe that all of these debates illustrate one of my most overarching and central points and purposes here—that narratives about our history are necessarily and crucially also and always narratives about our identity and thus our present and future, and that the more we include knowledgeable and scholarly (in the broadest and best sense) voices in those conversations, the better served we'll all be. More tomorrow,BenPS. Four links to start with:1)      The Disunion blog: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/2)      One of many great Coates posts on the tragedy question: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/08/tragic/244044/3)      Ditto for Levin on black Confederates: http://cwmemory.com/2011/09/04/dear-professor-gates/4)      OPEN: Any Civil War histories, questions, or conversations of especial interest to you?

September 5, 2011: Labor Day Special

In honor of Labor Day I'm taking the day off from blogging—but in the spirit of what this holiday should entail, a genuine effort to remember and engage with the complex and crucial histories of work and the labor movement in this country, here are a handful of posts where I've tried to provide such engagement:December 21: What It's Like: On work, art, and empathy in Rebecca Harding Davis's novella Life in the Iron-Mills (1861).December 24: A Human and Yet Holy Day: On Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.January 6: Workers Write: On the images of young female mill workers in two very different but interestingly complementary 19th century texts, Herman Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (1855) and The Lowell Offering (1840-1845).January 10: Anarchy in the USA: On the presence and absence of anarchists and revolutionaries in American history in general and social movements like labor in particular.June 7: Public Art: Diego Rivera's controversial, partially Marxist Rockefeller Center mural was one of the inspirations for this post on the complexities of public art.More tomorrow,BenPS. Any texts or histories related to work or the labor movement that you'd highlight?

September 3-4, 2011 [Tribute Post 22]: New Colleagues

There are lots of reasons why I like the start of a new semester, most of them connected to the sense of possibility that comes with those first days of class, with meeting a group of students for the first time and looking at the schedule as an entirely open shared future and entering all the names in the grade book and cracking the course books for the first time and etc. But the start of a fall semester also comes with a parallel but broader sense of new possibilities for a department and a university, for the communities to which we're all returning and from which we've had those few months (mostly) away to forget the petty annoyances of May and remember their strengths and why we're lucky to be a part of them. There are many such strengths, but in my seven years at Fitchburg State I have found that one of the strongest is the constant infusion of impressive new colleagues into our community. I certainly felt that way already about the group with whom I entered, a group that included my English colleague Ian Williams, about whom I blogged here. The following year saw the arrival of a new American historian, Christine Dee, with whom I've had the pleasure to work at length on the creation of and first courses in a new AmericanStudies program at FSU. A couple years later we were able to bring three great new folks into the English department: Frank Mabee, Carl Martin (now of Norwich University in Vermont, but not before he brought a ton to the department and FSU during his two years with us), and Joe Moser. Last year we added another wonderful English colleague, Kisha Tracy, and another American historian and AmerianStudies buddy, Kate Jewell. And this past week I had the chance to meet, and once again be instantly impressed by and excited to work with, our three newest English colleagues: Anna Consalvo, Layne Craig, and Steve Edwards. It's difficult for me, when I think about the incredible diversity and yet thoroughly consistent quality of this group of recent additions—to say nothing of the even more substantial diversity and yet still superlative quality of the community to which they, and six years ago I, came—not to get frustrated at both the many ways (including but not limited to financial) in which our society doesn't support public higher education as well as it should and the concurrent many narratives about the weaknesses or poor traits of academics. But of course I can think of one group of people who absolutely know better, who know full well just how impressive the community of FSU faculty is: the students who are fortunate enough to work with all of these folks. And this isn't a time of year for frustrations, it's a time to imagine just how much great work that community can do in the coming semester and year, in and out of the classrooms .Thanks to those newest additions, the horizon got a bit further and higher still.More next week,BenPS. Plenty of links in the post itself this time. But what (or who) are you excited about right now?