Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 438

September 2, 2011: Not Tortured Enough

In the bridge of Bruce Springsteen's "Long Walk Home" (2007), a beautiful if bleak assessment of American identity at the end of the Bush era, the speaker remembers what his father used to tell him about their home town and nation, an idealistic perspective that culminates in the lines, "You know that flag flying over the courthouse / Means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we'll do, and what we won't." Any in-depth familiarity with the darker side of American history, a side about which of course I've written plenty in this space, reveals that many of the things we have always said we "won't do" have in fact been done, often frequently and with institutional sanction or even support. Yet even if our actions have thus often belied our beliefs and ideals, that doesn't mean that there isn't still significant value to professing the ideals, to having a broadly shared and agreed-upon set of goals for what our country should be at its best.There's plenty of room for debate about what those ideals have included, both overall or in particular historical periods, but to my mind near the top of the list has to be the belief that our government and authorities do not utilize the kinds of tactics seen in brutal dictatorships or police states (or even in the kinds of authoritarian monarchies that were contemporary to the founding era). So, for example, our authorities (both military and domestic) do not torture prisoners, neither as a matter of official policy nor as a matter of unofficial practice. On a broad level, that fundamental ideal helps explain why the Reagan administration signed on to the 1987 UN Convention Against Torture, illustrating what Reagan called in his message to the Senate the US's "clear opposition to torture"; and on a more specific level, this ideal similarly led the US to aggressively pursue war crimes prosecutions against Japanese military interrogators who had tortured American prisoners of war during World War II. As the two articles linked below document at length, the most common torture method utilized by those Japanese torturers was a form of simulated drowning that had been around since at least the Inquisition, and was typically called the "water cure"; it has since come to be known principally, and in recent years here in America infamously, as waterboarding.The fact that American interrogators at Guantanamo (and likely if less admittedly at other prisons and CIA black sites around the world) waterboarded captives in the years after 9/11 is not in dispute; while at times Bush administration officials sought to deny such practices, the published memoirs by both Bush himself and (most recently) his vice president Dick Cheney have not only confirmed but also actively defended them, claiming (against all historical and international precedent) that they do not constitute torture, as well as arguing (against all available general and specific evidence) for their overall utility and their specific informational value in these cases. And those claims and arguments have been echoed and extended by numerous other commentators and politicians. It's difficult to overstate just how fully, then, the conversation on this particular issue and American ideal has changed in the last decade—from a general opposition to torture and a specific willingness to classify waterboarding as a war crime within that category; to debates over whether waterboarding is really so bad and concurrent arguments that perhaps it is worth making it official US practice in any case. Those changes would seem to illustrate Springsteen's point very precisely, but a more cynical take might be that they prove false the idealism at the heart of his lines and song—that, if it's so easy for us to abandon this ideal in favor of pragmatic debates about the utility and efficacy of torture, perhaps the ideal was never really held with any sincerity, was never truly our home.The biggest problem here, that is, might not be that Americans tortured prisoners, nor even that those tortures were authorized and supported at the highest levels of our government. It is, after all, possible if not likely that such horrors have been part of our darker and too often hidden histories for decades if not centuries. The biggest problem might be that, when the histories this time came out into the light, our national debates over them have, far too often, been just plain not tortured enough. More this weekend,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      A professional interrogator details the history of waterboarding, including the post-World War II war crimes trials: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html2)      A more politically charged, but still powerful and informative, history of the practice: http://waterboarding.org/water-based_torture_history_with_pictures3)      OPEN: What do you think?

September 1, 2011: First Questions

It probably seems like the most casual and unimportant aspect of a professor's responsibilities on the first day of class—well behind talking about the course's focal points, beginning the process of learning students' names, going over the syllabus and other materials, and more—but truthfully I have probably put the most consistent thought over the years into coming up with the question that each student can answer briefly when he or she introduces him or herself; such questions, if done right, can both provide engaging and fun moments and yet allow us to get a first, preliminary but important sense of a person's personality and voice. I have found that such questions are generally not as successful if they are too clichéd (something you did over the summer ["work" is too easy of an answer]; a current favorite musical artist or song [ditto with "I listen to everything"]), but that a slightly more unusual question can be really effective, provided I give folks time to think of their answers (by, for example, giving and elaborating a bit on my own sample answers at the start).While one of my most effective first-day questions—name a favorite character from literature, film, TV, cartoons, comics, anime, porn, you name it, and tell us a bit about why you like this character—is not quite relevant enough to this space, two of the others that have worked very well are certainly right up an AmericanStudies alley. In some of my American Lit surveys I have asked students to imagine that an alien has landed and asks them what this "America" place is all about, and then ask them to think of one text—whether something written (in any genre), a work of visual art (painting, sculpture, photo, statue, etc), something in another medium (movie, song, TV show, etc), or another kind of work (building, monument, etc)—that they'd highlight to answer that question (and a bit on why). And in some AmericanStudies courses I've asked students to think about one event or issue or the like that they'd point to as representing an aspect of our time period, the early 2000s (since our intro course focuses on a historical moment, the 1980s). Besides giving us some interesting glimpses into folks' perspectives and interests, these questions can also lead into a bit of informal first-day writing, where the students can elaborate a bit more on their choices and reasons.As I hope I've made very clear many times over, you readers are no more my students than I am your teacher, which is to say not at all—this is a different kind of space, not only because of the absence of requirements and grading and the like but also and more importantly because as I see it we're all absolutely in conversation here, with no hierarchies of knowledge or power or anything else. (I aim for that feel in classes too, but some hierarchies are inevitable in any classroom setting, at least any one where grades are involved.) But with that said, I think both of those questions remain a great way for me to hear a bit about your perspective and interests, about where you're coming from as AmericanStudiers. So if you don't mind, and with anonymous answers entirely fine of course, can you respond to either question (which I'll reiterate momentarily) in comments? I'd sure appreciate it, and it can help get a new semester and set of conversations here off to as great a start as I hope my courses will today.The questions, again: 1) Name a text (in any genre or medium) that you'd highlight as representing "America" in some form or other; or 2) Name an event or issue or the like (again of any type) that you'd highlight as representing our time period (the early 2000s) in any way. Thanks in advance for your thoughts, which I promise will mean just as much to me as those student responses always do. More tomorrow,BenPS. And since all is fair in love, war, and blogging, any other questions you'd direct back at me? (If I had to answer my two, or rather to choose one out of the roughly one zillion possible answers that come to mind for each, I'd say: 1) Charles Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), about which I blogged here; and 2) The post-Palin revisions of Paul Revere's Wikipedia page, about which I blogged here.)

August 31, 2011: August Recap

August 1: What's the Point: Pivoting off an online argument to consider the purposes and potential effects of a blog like thisAugust 2 [Tribute Post 20]: Inspiring Public School Teachers: Matt Damon gets me thinking about my many such inspirations, and public school teachers more generallyAugust 3: Two Talented, Troubling Americans: Speaking of Matt Damon, his two best, and two very American, roles—Tom Ripley and Jason BourneAugust 4: First to Go: What it really means that educational and social programs, like my Mom's Bright Stars program, are usually the first to be sacrificed on the altar of budget cutsAugust 5 [Scholarly Review 4]: Lawrence Rosenwald: On the political and scholarly efforts of a friend and very impressive AmericanStudierAugust 6-7 [Link-Tastic Post 2]: Blogroll: 6 of the blogs that most engage and inspire meAugust 8: Multi-talented: Norman Mailer and the kind of artistic genius that can produce a wide variety of impressive worksAugust 9: Narrating Our Battles: More Norman Mailer, this time The Armies of the Night and the value of narrating historiesAugust 10: Not Yet E-raced: Historical and contemporary realities that reveal the silliness of current narratives of reverse, anti-white racismAugust 11: Born This Day: My Dad's birthday inspires me to highlight three other interesting and important Americans born on August 11thAugust 12: Click Through: A request for reading and responses over at the NEASA pre-conference blog—and since the blog continues, the request holds!August 13-14 [Tribute Post 21]: Ezra Jack Keats: One of our most culturally and artistically significant children's authors—and one of the late 20th century's most important American artists periodAugust 15: Birthday Best: In honor of my 34th birthday, 34 of my favorite posts from this blog's first 9 monthsAugust 16: Me Too!: An important follow-up, using 5 other posts to make clear how much I continue to learn and change in response to these kinds of topics and themesAugust 17: Cotton Mather's Invisible Tragedy: A link to my latest Boston.com Salem "History Time" column, the first of two on Cotton Mather and the witch trials [I also posted separately on August 17th to ask folks to vote for me in the CBS Boston Most Valuable Blogger awards—see the link at right]August 18: Why We're Here, Tea Party Edition: A new study on contemporary political attitudes reveals just how fully the Tea Party subscribes to the Christian narrative of American identity, and reminds me of one of the main goals for my recent scholarly workAugust 19: Writing Wrongs: On social movements, social realistic fiction, and the late 19th century author Elizabeth Stuart PhelpsAugust 20-21: Legends of the Fall: 5 things I'm excited about as my professional and familial life, like our year, moves toward September and autumnAugust 22: Virginia Is For Bloggers: My plan and schedule for blogging during our week in Virginia with the folksAugust 23: Virginia, Cradle of American Studies: Five reasons, one per post-contact century, why Virginia is central to AmericanStudiesAugust 24: Cotton Mather's American Legacy: The link to the second of those Boston.com Mather pieces, this one on his more inspiring legacyAugust 25: Not Just Any John Smith: On one of early Virginia and America's most interesting, and most egotistical, figuresAugust 26: The Indian Princess: Image, reality, and the stories of PocahontasAugust 29: Paying His Bill Forward: Why George Mason shouldn't be a forgotten FounderAugust 30: Elected Representatives: Two recent, and very politically and culturally representative, Virginia senatorial campaignsThat's it! More tomorrow, a special post for the first day of a new semester,BenPS. Any topics, texts, figures, themes, or events you'd like to see in this space?

August 30, 2011: Elected Representatives

Every election for every office, and every accompanying political campaign, has its unique and salient contexts and details, and one of the easiest but most dangerous things an AmericanStudier can do is to use a particular election (most often a presidential one, but this can apply easily to congressional elections as well) as a bellwether for broader national political or cultural trends. Certainly such trends are often part of an election's contexts--no one can dispute, for example, that the rise of the Tea Party influenced virtually every congressional election (and many others besides) in 2010--but they are not necessarily any more important than the candidates' personalities, narratives that become central to a campaign, significant local issues or histories, or any number of other factors.

On the other hand, I do believe that it is both possible and important to identify individual campaigns and candidates, and perhaps especially salient moments in relation to them, as particularly exemplary of certain broader trends. And to that end, I would highlight two Virginia Senatorial campaigns from the last two decades, and more exactly two individual moments during those campaigns, as hugely illustrative of changing political and cultural trends. The first moment was actually a repeated quote from Oliver North, the former Reagan administration official who managed to shed his Iran Contra disgrace and come very close to winning a Senate seat in 1994. North came as close as he did largely because of his very public status as a born-again Christian, a fact he highlighted again and again on the campaign trail by holding aloft a Bible and stating that "we know every word in the Bible is true." While North's marriage of religion to politics was partly personal (whether we read it as entirely sincere, a pragmatic move to distance himself from his criminal past, or some combination of both), it also signaled, as did the 1994 Gingrich revolution more generally, the full emergence onto the national stage of the Christian Conservative wing of the Republican Party, a wing that has in many ways come to dominate that party in the decades since.

The second exemplary moment was quite the opposite of North's repeated and staged line: an off the cuff remark from former Virginia governor and 2006 senatorial candidate George Allen that happened to be videotaped and so became a national and hugely significant story. Allen was holding an event in Southwest Virginia when he noticed S.R. Sidarth, a young man who was working for the Webb campaign (Allen's opponent) by attending and taping Allen's public events; Sidarth is Indian American and visibly dark-skinned, and Allen, seemingly responding to that fact, called the young man "macaca" (a word of ambiguous origin, possibly related to a North African monkey that Allen had seen during his youth in the region, possibly just a nonsensically racist term) and welcomed him "to America and the real Virginia." The subsequent outcry contributed significantly to Allen's eventual narrow loss to Webb, in an election that (like much of the 2006 congressional midterm) can be read as a foreshadowing of Obama's 2008 victory (in which he won Virginia, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had done so in decades). But I would also argue that every aspect of the moment signals not only just how fully multi-ethnic and -cultural identities had come to define 21st century America (Sidarth was born in Virginia to immigrant parents), but also how blatantly racist or fearful responses to such identities would remain part of our discourse but would no longer go unchallenged.

I'm not going to go so far as to claim that as Virginia goes, so goes the nation--much of the state is still significantly more conservative and thus Republican-dominated than the national political landscape. But certainly these individual moments and elections demonstrate how fully the broadest trends can be reflected in, as well as influenced by, elections in one state, including Ole Virginia. More tomorrow, the August recap,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1) A 1995 article that includes North's (and Allen's) contributions to a national conference sponsored by a Religious Right organization:  http://www.publiceye.org/ifas/fw/9501...

2) The video of Allen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r90z0P...

3) OPEN: Any influential political campaigns or moments we should better remember?

August 29, 2011: Paying His Bill Forward

If you were an American Founder who wanted to be remembered by the succeeding few centuries' worth of Americans--and like most humans, the Founders did desire such remembrance, both for understandable psychological reasons and because it would indicate that they had done things for their fledgling nation worth remembering--your best bet was to get elected President. Perhaps Washington would have been well-remembered anyway (although he was a much less successful general than the stories typically indicate), probably Jefferson would have been, and Franklin was unique and impressive enough even without the presidency. But to cite the most clear evidence for my case, John Adams? Really?

Or, to put it another way, why do we remember John Adams so much more vividly than we do George Mason, principal author of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution? Why, for that matter, do we remember James Madison, who worked on the Bill with Mason, so much more fully? (If indeed we do, but I believe that to be the case.) I don't want to overstate the Presidency case, since both Adams and Madison were also (among other noteworthy attributes) married to profoundly impressive and inspirational American women, Abigail and Dolly, with whom they had long and storied relationships; without such a juicy part for Laura Linney as Abigail, the HBO miniseries on John Adams might have been a harder sell. But still, George was himself a very inspirational American--after losing his father at the age of 10, George went to live with his uncle, from whose library he virtually educated himself in the absence of much formal education--and there's similarly no reason to doubt that his own long marriage to Ann (which began when she was 16 and produced twelve children) couldn't yield an interesting colonial romance.

Even if George were entirely devoid of personal interest, however, his contribution to the founding era and our national identity would demand that we remember him more fully and centrally than we currently do. Historians differ on Mason's motivations for insisting on the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution as it went to the states for ratification--some have argued that it was due primarily to his passionate interest in keeping religion separate from our government, while others have made the case that he shared with his fellow Virginian Patrick Henry an abiding distrust of federal government and a concurrent desire to emphasize states' rights--, just as Mason's attitudes toward slavery (both in general and as the Constitution represented the issue) have been similarly debated. But whatever his reasons, it's entirely fair to say that the Bill of Rights represents the most important part of our founding documents, because of all of the innovative and crucial individual rights it guarantees, because of its full presence as a portion devoted entirely to American citizens themselves (rather than their government), and because of how much it exemplifies the principle of amendment on which the whole Constitution was thoroughly based.

Yeah, he never ran for President; in many ways Mason's contributions to America ended with the Bill of Rights, in fact. But on virtually every other level, George Mason was as important as any of the Founders, and his influence has lasted well beyond almost all of them (including, indeed, John Adams). More tomorrow, on two very illustrative recent senatorial campaigns,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1) Mason's draft of the Bill of Rights: http://www.constitution.org/gmason/am...

2) A site with a lot of important contexts and details for the Bill: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/char...

3) OPEN: Any other Founders or influential Americans we should better remember?

August 26, 2011: The Indian Princess

If John Smith is relatively unknown in our communal conversations, Pocahontas, daughter of the Virginia chief Powhatan and Smith's continual partner in the historical narratives, suffers from the opposite problem: she's perhaps the most broadly famous Native American figure in our history. More exactly, compared even to other prominent Native Americans such as Sacagawea, Geronimo, or Sitting Bull, the name Pocahontas immediately conjures up (even for relatively non-historically minded Americans) a set of pretty specific images: sacrificing herself to save Smith, developing a pseudo-romantic relationship with him, eventually marrying another Englishman (John Rolfe) and ending her life in England with him, and so on.

Those images of Pocahontas have been around since Smith's own narrative (as the excerpts from his text at the first link in yesterday's post illustrate), so that in this case, the Disney version of history actually lines up quite closely with the most accepted national narratives (although I don't know that Pocahontas had as good a singing voice as Vanessa Williams in those earlier narratives). As best as scholars can tell from the scanty historical evidence (scanty other than, again, Smith's own somewhat unreliable account), the realities of Pocahontas' life and identity were significantly different, particularly in terms of her relationship with Smith: she was likely very young, something like 13 at the oldest, when they met, and so if she did save him and his fellow Englishmen from execution, it was likely for reasons other than those of romance in any explicit sense. Terrence Malick's film The New World (2005) seemingly attempts to represent those realities more accurately but achieves only mixed results, casting a very young Native American actress (Q'orianka Kilcher) as Pocahontas but still portraying her relationship with Colin Farrell's John Smith in explicitly romanticized ways.

But to my mind, the most interesting and meaningful American truths about Pocahontas don't depend on whether she was 12 or 20 when she met Smith, or whether they loved each other deeply or barely knew each other, or any variation on those questions. The most significant question to me is broader and more complicated still, and is the issue of whether her identity across the centuries of narratives is more stereotyped and limiting or more layered and humanizing, whether she's just an "other" falling for the superior white guy or is in fact an American who has a rich and full an identity as any European American figure. The answer, as with any of our most complicated questions, likely lies somewhere in the middle, and a great illustration of both sides is J.N. Barker's musical melodrama The Indian Princess (1809). Barker's Pocahontas is at once entirely a stereotype and yet a fleshed-out (and not in the Disney sense) heroine, just as his play's Englishmen run the gamut from stereotypical comic relief to complex (at least for an 1809 melodrama) heroes.

We're not likely to stop telling the story of Pocahontas, since it, like all of the most engaging American stories, connects to universal and powerful themes and narratives: love and sacrifice, loss and redemption, past and tradition vs. future and change. But it also, if more subtly, reveals much of what is both worst and best about our shared American identities, within and across ethnic and racial communities, and the more we can remember and retell those elements too, the more meaningful our stories of this Indian Princess will be. More Monday, on the most forgotten Virginian Founding Father,

Ben
PS. Three links to start with:
1) The full text of Barker's play: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29230/...

2) A scene from Malick's film featuring Pocahontas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX5dwh...

3) OPEN: Any historical characters whose images you'd challenge or complicate?

August 25, 2011: Not Just Any John Smith

I don't know how much is generally known these days about John Smith, the first famous (English) Virginian with the deeply nondescript name. If anything, our cultural narratives about him probably depend in large part on the Mel Gibson-voiced character in Disney's Pocahontas (1995), or less famously the Colin Farrell version of him in Terence Malick's The New World (2005), about both of which I'll write more tomorrow. But this is one case where the actual historical figure is to my mind significantly more interesting than any Hollywood versions--and where the figure himself had a great deal to do with creating that interest.

Smith's life would already be pretty interesting in its own right, from his early years as a young soldier for hire (ie, mercenary) in Turkey to his ambiguous presence and role on the Virginia expedition (including of course his famous relationship with Pocahontas, about whom more tomorrow as well), and up to his later travels to New England and perspective on that other most prominent English colony and on English America's fledging identity and prospects more generally. But Smith wasn't content to let the details of his life impress posterity on their own terms, and so produced, in his various autobiographical writings--which always represented themselves as broader histories of Virginia and/or the other colonies, but somehow always came back around to Smith himself first and foremost--some of the most overtly and impressively self-aggrandizing texts in American history.

The portrayal of Smith in those texts certainly contributes to those self-aggrandizing efforts, especially in the passages that deal with his many victories of Native Americans, whether military (as when he single-handedly holds off hundreds of angry Natives) or diplomatic (as when, ostensibly a doomed captive, he wows his captors with his compass and then through sheer charisma impels Pocahontas to save him from his fate). But it's actually an even more fundamental narrative choice that really takes the cake here: Smith writes about himself in the third-person, narrating the adventures of Captain John Smith throughout these texts. It's true that he may have had various co-writers at times, but as best I can tell from the evidence--and as certainly lines up with the images of Smith we again get from the texts--it was Smith's choice to write about himself in this way, to make himself the hero of his own narratives in addition to, and in many ways rather than, the author and narrator of them.

Smith's life and identity have a great deal to tell us about not only the Virginia colony but the early settlement era in general, and so I can't recommend these texts enough for their AmericanStudies value. But does the hilarity factor in reading about, for example, the time that Captain Smith used his Native guide as a human shield while fighting off dozens of attackers, hurt my cause? No, no it doesn't. More tomorrow, on two centuries' of images of Smith's eternal narrative counterpart.

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1) Many links from Smith's autobiographical writings: http://history.hanover.edu/courses/ex...

2) Perhaps another way that Smith will re-enter our communal consciousness: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/ki...

3) OPEN: Any surprisingly funny or engaging historical texts you'd share?

August 24, 2011: Cotton Mather's American Legacy

Part deux of my, well, two-part series on Cotton Mather for the Globe and Boston.com Salem "History Time" column is here:http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/salem/2011/08/history_time_cotton_mathers_am.html 

Thanks once again to Maggi Smith-Dalton, the editor and historian who is both the brains and driving force  behind this column. Check it out, and feel free to post any thoughts or comments here or there! More tomorrow, on the most egomaniacal and one of the most interesting Virginians ever,BenPS. Any particularly complicated Americans you think we should remember more accurately?

August 23, 2011: Virginia, Cradle of AmericanStudies

Yes, that's literally true, as this AmericanStudier was cradled in the warm embrace of Central Virginia throughout his young life. But here are five additional reasons, one per post-contact century, why Virginia exemplifies America at its complex best (I could have easily gone for the worst, but what kind of way would that be to start a vacation?):1)      Bacon's Rebellion (1676): Back in the dark ages when I took high school American history, this late 17th century revolt was portrayed as a distant predecessor to the Revolution; now, as the essay at the first link notes, scholars see it more as a power struggle between equally elite Virginia blue blood types. But whatever the causes or rationales, one thing has always been clear: the rebellion itself represented an unprecedented collaboration between poor whites (many of them indentured servants) and African Americans, illustrating just how racially interconnected this seemingly divided state has always been.2)      Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in 18th Century Virginia (1988): Bacon's Rebellion might seem to be an isolated and extreme situation, but Sobel argues that when it comes to racial interconnectedness, it was anything but; in this book, one of the most exciting and inspiring works of AmericanStudies I've ever read, she lays out in impressive and convincing detail how much these distinct but equally American cultures influenced each other, and how much every aspect of 18th century Virginian life—from architecture to spirituality, work to worldview—was the result of those mutual influences.3)      The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831): The 1831 Southampton slave revolt led by Turner was one of the bloodiest and most divisive moments in the decades before the Civil War, and thus, despite its justifiable causes, would to my mind belong on a worst-of list. The "Confession" apparently narrated by Turner to a local white lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, from the prison where he was awaiting his execution, is no less fraught with racial tensions and conflicts, not least because it's impossible to know just how much of the text's striking voice is really Turner's and how much was altered in some way by Gray. But that complex and confusing authorship does not elide the power nor the pathos of Turner's perspective—and if anything, it yields a text that extends Sobel to illustrate that even for the worst of Virginian history and community it was by this time impossible to separate white from black with any certainty.4)      William Styron, Confessions of Nat Turner (1967): I blogged about Styron's novel, and particularly its striking and hugely controversial first-person narration by a fictionalized Nat Turner, here, and won't restate those thoughts. While I find many of the direct critiques of the novel to be as fictionalized as anything within it, I certainly know of a great many AmericanStudiers whose opinions I deeply respect who feel similarly inclined to criticize the novel on many levels. But for me, as I wrote in that earlier post, the fact that a Virginian novelist chose to write this novel during the 1960s, and even more so the fact that he tried to construct a version of Turner's voice for his narration, is an inspiring and profoundly American move; whatever we think about the novel that resulted, I believe we can and must agree that such cross-cultural sympathies and connections are worth our respect.5)      Governor McDonnell's Apology (2010): As will surprise precisely no one, I wasn't a fan of Republican Governor Robert McDonnell from the jump, and wasn't at all surprised when his April 2010 proclamation in honor of Civil War in Virginia (aka Confederate History) Month made no mention whatsoever of slavery. But I will admit to being both surprised and impressed when, admittedly after a week or so of angry responses and protests, McDonnell issued a revised proclamation apologizing for the elision. Most impressive to me was that McDonnell did not just apologize to "anyone I may have offended" or the like—he explicitly noted that slavery "led to the Civil War" (far from a given in much of the right's recent historical revisionism). Whatever the motives or purposes of this second statement, it was, as former Governor Doug Wilder put it, the right thing to do, and the way that McDonnell did it added at least a bit of important and accurate historical context into what could be seen as simply a political controversy. Can't argue with that!Virginia, here we come, making some new 21st century memories for the next generation of AmericanStudiers! More tomorrow, my next Boston.com piece,BenPS. Six links to start with:1)      National Park Service piece on Bacon's Rebellion: http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/bacons-rebellion.htm2)      Google book of Sobel's text: http://books.google.com/books?id=O4gbrE1sND4C&pg=PA366&lpg=PA366&dq=mechal+sobel+the+world+they+made+together&source=bl&ots=rd_k0MMM3H&sig=8nmAAwDe5_QTjah_lC7O3M0jbAg&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false3)      Full text of The Confessions of Nat Turner (multiple pages): http://www.melanet.com/nat/nat.html4)      Styron and his novel at the century's end: http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9812/styron.html5)      Story on McDonnell's apology: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-04-07/politics/virginia.confederate.history_1_slavery-apology-confederate-history-month?_s=PM:POLITICS6)      OPEN: Any Virginia moments you'd add?

August 22, 2011: Virginia Is For Bloggers

Tomorrow we fly down to Virginia for a week with the parentals, about whom you've heard a good bit—and even from whom you've heard—in this space. To extend this weekend's post, the trip will be a last hurrah of summer in all sorts of ways, and so I fully and happily expect to spend more time at the pool (for example) than blogging. I imagine you'll all find ways to carry on for the week without quite as much AmericanStudies in your lives, although I'm sure it'll be tough. But since I can't quit you, fellow AmericanStudiers—hell, I don't even wish I knew how to quit you—I'll still be checking in more briefly (and most likely more informally) here, and wanted (as much to keep myself on track as for your no doubt insatiable curiosity) to pass along my planned schedule of posts:Tuesday 8/23: Five Reasons Why Virginia is the Cradle of AmericanStudiesWednesday 8/24: My Second Cotton Mather Piece for the Boston.com "History Time" ColumnThursday 8/25: John Smith Was One Cocky DudeFriday 8/26: Images of PocahontasMonday 8/29: Remembering George MasonTuesday 8/30: On Two Bellwether Virginia Senatorial CampaignsWednesday 8/31 (Back in New England): August RecapThat's the plan! More tomorrow,BenPS. What would you blog about your home state/province/town/place?