Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 439

August 20-21, 2011: Legends of the Fall

I don't meant to rush you and what I'm sure will be another couple weeks of beaches and pools, lemonades and iced teas, baseball games and bbqs, but I'm thinking today about the fall; maybe that's because we'll be in Virginia for the last week of August (more on that trip and what it means for this blog coming on Monday), and when we get back it'll be only one more day until my fall semester begins. In any case, here are five things I'm excited about as the fall approaches:1)      The November release of a French collection of essays on Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1998), including a essay by this AmericanStudier. Apparently Roth's novel is on the current required American lit reading list for French students, and so an enterprising young French scholar, Velichka Ivanova, decided to edit the first French collection on the novel. She was kind enough to ask me if I could revise a portion of an earlier article that focuses on the book, and that's my contribution to the volume. Not sure if I'll have to start wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes once I get translated into Francais, but I'll keep you posted.2)      Stepping up my contributions to the work toward the creation of the American Writers Museum, and specifically my help on the NEH proposal for a traveling exhibition on immigrant literature that will help get that Museum off and running. The AWM is the brainchild of a retired Irish American engineer, Malcolm O'Hagan, and has garnered the support and efforts of a huge number of impressive scholars and librarians, museum administrators and public officials, and many others; I'm honored and incredibly excited to be on board as a scholarly advisor. With a January deadline for revisions to the traveling exhibit proposal, the fall promises to include lots of conference calls, rewrites, bibliographies, and co-writing. Can't wait!3)      The New England American Studies Association conference. I've bombarded you with enough info about this conference, and the corresponding pre-conference blog; if for some reason you've managed to stay blissfully ignorant of their existence or details, I'll direct you to the links at #3 below. The conference will hopefully be a great time for all concerned, but for me—as I'm sure is always the case for the NEASA President in his or her one year of service—that weekend is going to mean the culmination of a year's worth of hard work and almost two years of brainstorming and idealizing. Kind of like a wedding, only I very much hope that the attention is spread much more fully around all of our attendees, not least 'cause there's no way I'm wearing a tux.4)      A new semester at Fitchburg State, and especially my first time teaching our English Department's senior capstone course. This course brings together English majors from across our four tracks—Literature, Secondary Ed/Licensure, Professional Writing, and Theater—and asks them to reflect on their time in the department, to assemble a senior portfolio of their best work, to talk to each other about their respective tracks, and to consider what's next in their lives (professionally and otherwise). I fully expect that these two sections will be different from any other course I've ever taught, and that, however much I plan and prep, I have no real idea what they will entail once they're underway. Sounds good to me!5)      Kindergarten! For my older son, that is. (And pre-K for my younger son, who would rightfully demand to be included here.) The rest of these items generally make me feel a combination of excited and stressed, with an emphasis on the former for sure. This one makes me feel both old (and bittersweet) and young (and nervous/excited) again, if that makes any sense. And if all of the other items are ultimately more about other people's experiences—the collection's readers, the Museum's attendees, the conference's participants, the Capstone's students—this one of course is entirely about my son's next step into, the next season of, his own developing world and life. Bring on the fall! More this coming week, including Monday's transition into my Virginia week,BenPS. Six links to start with:1)      Some info on the Roth book: http://rothsociety.org/?page_id=33&paged=22)      The AWM: http://www.americanwritersmuseum.org/3)      NEASA: http://neasa.org/; and the blog: http://neasaconference.blogspot.com 4)      My home away from home: http://fitchburgstate.edu/english/5)      My son's new home away from home: http://mitchell.needham.k12.ma.us/main/6)      OPEN: What are you looking forward to this fall?

August 19, 2011: Writing Wrongs

One of the charges that can, with a good deal of accuracy, be leveled against many of the late 19th century's numerous and important social movements is that they tended to exclude and even to discriminate against each other—against, that is, the beneficiaries of their fellow social movements. So, for example, the National Women's Suffrage Association (the suffrage movement's most prominent late 19th century organization) not only did not include African American women, but made overtly racist appeals to white Southerners in order to bolster its ranks and cause. Similarly, many of the era's most prominent labor unions, including the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor, often relied upon anti-black (esp. the AFL) and anti-immigrant (esp. the Knights) appeals to make their case for the needs of the particular communities of European American workers they mostly served. The practical and political rationales for these exclusions and appeals are clear and understandable, but it's also easy to see how these kinds of circular firing squads among similarly progressive movements could be as practically and politically counterproductive as they are philosophically troubling, not least because it might lead the organizations to expend their energies (and receive attention for) attacking equally disenfranchised fellow Americans.Perhaps social and political movements have to make such frustrating decisions; at the very least they certainly have no choice but to engage with such complex and far from ideal realities. On the other hand, works of fiction—and particularly novels within another of the late 19th century's most significant developments, social realism—enjoy a significantly less limiting relationship to social and political realities. The best works of social realism must indeed acknowledge and engage with those realities, among others (including psychological ones), and must perhaps even create fictional characters and communities that are as constrained by those realities as their real-life contemporaries were. But in their overarching visions and constructed worlds, such novels can at the same time imagine broader and more inclusive communities, can bring together not only the Americans most affected by their chosen thematic focal points but also other Americans—both as characters within the texts and as audiences meeting and responding to them through the works—for whom the stakes of these social questions are of course ultimately just as present and salient as well. Moreover, any individual author can deal with multiple such social issues and themes across his or her works, an opportunity exemplified by the diverse and impressive career of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911).Phelps (Ward was her married name but most scholars refer to her by her maiden name) was best known in her era for a best-selling, career-spanning trilogy of spiritual novels about Christianity, Heaven, and mourning: The Gates Ajar (1868), Beyond the Gates (1883), and Within the Gates (1901). But she was a passionate advocate for numerous social movements, especially women's rights (she famously advocated that women burn their corsets) but also temperance, anti-poverty efforts, and animal rights (among others). And because she published more than twenty novels and dozens of stories in the course of her long career, she was able to explore each of those issues, and particularly those interconnected with women's rights and experiences in America, with an incredible degree of breadth and depth. To highlight just three brief examples of this diversity, complexity, and quality: Phelps contributed, in 1882's Doctor Zay, one of the best of the "woman doctor" novels about which I blogged here; her The Story of Avis (1877) creates in its titular protagonist (a very talented painter) one of America's most detailed and powerful portrayals of the challenges of marriage and family for professional women, while also featuring numerous other distinct and equally nuanced female characters; and in the same year that The Gates Ajar launched her national career she published the short story "The Tenth of January" (1868), a gripping and terrifying rendition of an 1859 Lawrence (MA) mill fire in which dozens of young female mill workers were killed.The social and political issues to which these texts connect are, again, as real and complex as those with which the suffragists and labor leaders engaged. And if the texts are freed from the responsibility of resolving the practical questions that such issues entail, that does not, to my mind, make them any less powerful and important as engagements with those issues; what they are, instead, are a concurrent and crucial collection of voices and sources, combining literary and historical value to produce a body of work which no AmericanStudier should ignore. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The Story of Avis: http://books.google.com/books?id=-8EVp8Xm9F4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false2)      "The Tenth of January": http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1730.pdf3)      OPEN: Any authors of works you'd recommend as great at portraying complex social issues?

 

August 18, 2011: Why We're Here, Tea Party Edition

There are two entirely distinct, and in some ways even opposed, ways to interpret the name "Tea Party" (for the contemporary political organization, not the thing in Boston Harbor). The more "official," or at least more widely disseminated and accepted, narrative is that the organization represents a grassroots, non- or widely bi-partisan rebellion against taxation, spending, and other forms of government interference; evidence for this narrative would include TEA serving as an acronym for Taxed Enough Already, the first organized protests occurring on or around April 15th (Tax Day) of 2009, and a variety of other symbolic statements of libertarian resistance to government. In this narrative, the organization's likewise symbolic use of a historical event (that Harbor thing) is meant as a direct parallel, another occasion on which put-upon citizens, fed up with taxation and government interference in their lives, rebelled and helped begin a revolution (hence the references, for example, to Tea Party favorite Scott Brown's senatorial victory in Massachusetts as "The Scott Heard 'Round the World"). That vision of the historical Tea Party is certainly over-simplified, neglecting for example the event's substantial component of mob violence, but the real historical problem here is to my mind significantly deeper and more subtle. As historian Jill Lepore (among others) has thoroughly documented, the Tea Party has depended on Founding-era symbols and rhetoric for far more than just its name, has in fact utilized Revolutionary reenactors and costumes, Founders' quotes and perspectives, and any and all other references to this historical era in constructing many of its overarching narratives, positions, and events. These historical references have often been, like the libertarian impulses, narrated as something bipartisan, broadly American, nationally shared: a desire to respect the Constitution, to live up to the ideals of Washington and Jefferson, to be the city on a hill, and so on. But I would argue precisely the opposite, that it is in their historical vision that the Tea Partiers reveal most explicitly their profoundly conservative and extreme perspective, an embrace of the traditional, Christian historical narrative that is as full-throated and mythologized as any our national discourse has ever witnessed.I have believed that to be the case of the majority of Tea Partiers since the movement's origins, but a recently released, five-year-long study of American political attitudes by two political scientists—many of the relevant results of which are discussed in the article at the first link—goes a long way toward quantifying that belief. Of the study's many findings that could be marshaled in support of my prior paragraph's last sentence, I will quote just the most salient one: "Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics." I would take that statement one step further and argue, based on virtually every relevant statement and utterance and fact (such as the hugely prominent role that Glenn Beck and his favorite American "historian" David Barton, on whom see for example here, here, and here, have played in the Tea Party's rise), that Tea Partiers believe that religion, and more specifically of course Christianity, played precisely such a prominent role in our government at its origin, just as they believe that America was from its origins centrally defined by white, Anglo, Christian, English-speaking inhabitants. This historical vision, encapsulated succinctly and thoroughly in the battle cry "I want my country back!," is to my mind the most overarching narrative at the heart of the Tea Party's identity and aims.The real problem here is not that our media narratives of the Tea Party have tended to minimize this historical emphasis in favor of the small government one; it's that as wrong as the Tea Partiers are about many of their economic beliefs (such as that Obama has raised all of their taxes), they are more profoundly mistaken still about American identity, both on the specific issue of religion and government and on the broader questions of our communal composition. I dedicated my whole second book to making that case, and so the seven "Book Posts" here (available under that category to the right), as well as these two "Meta-Posts," elaborate my contrasting take on American identity. Here I'll just stress that, of all the reasons to counter the Tea Party's influence on American politics and culture, this historical one might just be the most serious and crucial. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      A New York Times article on the study: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/crashing-the-tea-party.html?_r=1&hp2)      Gordon Wood's review of Lepore's book The Whites of Their Eyes; Wood takes a more favorable view of the Tea Party's use of history than do I, or at least treats it as one among many such uses more than I would: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/no-thanks-memories/?pagination=false3)      OPEN: What do you think?

August 17, 2011 [Special]: Vote Early and Often!

Well, I think you can only vote once, but  ... this blog is nominated for a CBS Boston Most Valuable Blogger Award for 2011 (under the Miscellaneous category). If you get a chance and want to vote for me, here's the link:

http://boston.blogger.cbslocal.com/most-valuable-blogger/vote/misc/

Thanks!

Ben

August 17, 2011: Cotton Mather's Invisible Tragedy

Is the title of my second contribution to the Boston.com Salem History Time column, as part of a series on the witch trials:

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/salem/2011/08/history_time_cotton_mathers_in.html

Thanks as ever to Maggi Smith-Dalton, the series' editor and all around impressive AmericanStudier, for the opportunity. Part 2, also on Mather, will be next Wednesday! More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any thoughts on the witch trials, Mather, good men doing nothing in the face of evil, or anything else?

August 16, 2011: Me Too!

I wanted to follow up yesterday's best-of-so-far post by making one thing very clear: I'm far from immune to the tendencies toward simplifying and mythologizing national narratives on which I often focus here, and so am just as much the audience for these posts as I am the author of them. To illustrate that point, here (in no particular order) are a few additional favorite posts to date, ones where my own narratives and perspective were explicitly part of what I was challenging:1)      Lee and Longstreet: Growing up in Virginia, I was not only a Civil War buff, but also admittedly more a fan of the Confederate generals than the Union ones. (Stonewall Jackson vs. McClellan? Not even a contest.) Even into adulthood, I've bought into much of the deification of Robert E. Lee. But as I wrote here, that deification is both problematic and has come at the expense of a much more fully inspiring Confederate general, James Longstreet.2)      Eisenhower: I've made no secret in this space of my progressive and liberal political perspective, and it can be tough not to bring that same perspective to my historical and AmericanStudies analyses. But it's very important not to do so, at least not in any overarching or limiting way, as I hope this post on things to admire and emulate in Eisenhower's policies and ideas makes clear.3)      Robert Penn Warren and Segregation: Robert Penn Warren is on my short list of favorite and most inspiring American authors, and so it's tempting to find ways to rationalize or excuse even his more troubling moments (such as his contribution to the polemical and conservative Southern collection I'll Take My Stand). But forcing myself to remember and engage with that moment is both important and, as I wrote here, ultimately even more inspiring.4)      Colonial Williamsburg and Historical Propaganda: I love reenactments of all kinds, including historic sites like Colonial Williamsburg that drop visitors directly into a reenacted past world. Learning about the 20th century and in many ways propagandistic purposes behind the creation and development of CW doesn't diminish that love, necessarily—but it does remind me that reenactments, like any other historical narratives, are not free of such complicating and challenging contexts.5)      The West Wing, the Rosenbergs, and the Head and Heart : One of my favorite West Wing episodes and one of my favorite Don Henley songs work together to help me think through how one's personal perspective and beliefs can influence what we understand about the past, and the necessity of admitting and working to move beyond those influences.In case it might ever seem as if I've got all the answers, these five posts, like many others and (I hope) the blog as a whole, illustrate just how fully my own understanding and analyses and perspective continue to develop and grow. We're in this together! More tomorrow,BenPS. Any simplifying narratives or perspectives of your own that you've had to confront or challenge?

August 15, 2011: Birthday Best

In honor of this AmericanStudier's 34th birthday, here (from oldest to most recent) are 34 of my favorite posts from the first year for this newest addition to the Railton family (forgive the self-indulgence, but it is my birthday, and for newer readers to this blog this might be a good reminder of some of my work over these last 9 months or so):1)      The Wilmington Massacre and The Marrow of Tradition: My first full post, but also my first stab at two of this blog's central purposes: narrating largely forgotten histories; and recommending texts we should all read.2)      Pine Ridge, the American Indian Movement, and Apted's Films: Ditto to those purposes, but also a post in which I interwove history, politics, identity, and different media in, I hope, a pretty exemplary American Studies way.3)      The Shaw Memorial: I'll freely admit that my first handful of posts were also just dedicated to texts and figures and moments and histories that I love—but the Memorial, like Chesnutt's novel and Thunderheart in those first two links, is also a deeply inspiring work of American art.4)      The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Most Amazing Baseball Game Ever: Probably my favorite post to date, maybe because it tells my favorite American story.5)      Ely Parker: The post in which I came up with my idea for Ben's American Hall of Inspiration; I know many of my posts can be pretty depressing, but hopefully the Hall can be a way for me to keep coming back to Americans whose stories and legacies are anything but.6)      My Colleague Ian Williams' Work with Incarcerated Americans: The first post where I made clear that we don't need to look into our national history to find truly inspiring Americans and efforts. 7)      Rush Limbaugh's Thanksgiving Nonsense: My first request, and the first post to engage directly with the kinds of false American histories being advanced by the contemporary right.8)      The Pledge of Allegiance: Another central purpose for this blog is to complicate, and at times directly challenge and seek to change, some of our most accepted national and historical narratives. This is one of the most important such challenges.9)      Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Rap: If you're going to be an AmericanStudier, you have to be willing to analyze even those media and genres on which you're far from an expert, and hopefully find interesting and valuable things to say in the process. 10)   Chinatown and the History of LA : At the same time, the best AmericanStudiers likewise have to be able to analyze their very favorite things (like this 1974 film, for me), and find ways to link them to broader American narratives and histories.11)   The Statue of Liberty: Our national narratives about Lady Liberty are at least as ingrained as those about the Pledge of Allegiance—and just about as inaccurate.12)   Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" and Parenting: Maybe the first post in which I really admitted my personal and intimate stakes in the topics I'm discussing here, and another of those texts everybody should read to boot.13)   Dorothea Dix and Mental Health Reform: When it comes to a number of the people on whom I've focused here, I didn't know nearly enough myself at the start of my research—making the posts as valuable for me as I could hope them to be for any other reader. This is one of those.14)   Ben Franklin and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments: As with many dominant narratives, those Americans who argue most loudy in favor of limiting immigration usually do so in large part through false, or at best greatly oversimplified and partial, versions of our past.  15)   Divorce in American History: Some of our narratives about the past and present seem so obvious as to be beyond dispute: such as the idea that divorce has become more common and more accepted in our contemporary society. Maybe, but as with every topic I've discussed here, the reality is a good bit more complicated.16)   My Mom's Guest Post on Margaret Wise Brown: The first of the many great guest posts I've been fortunate enough to feature here; I won't link to the others, as you can and should find them by clicking the "Guest Posts" category on the right. And please—whether I've asked you specifically or not—feel free to contribute your own guest post down the road!17)   JFK, Tucson, and the Rhetoric and Reality of Political Violence: The first post in which I deviated from my planned schedule to respond directly to a current event—something I've incorporated very fully into this blog in the months since.18)   Tribute Post to Professor Alan Heimert: I'd say the same about the tribute posts that I did for the guest posts—both that they exemplify how fortunate I've been (in this case in the many amazing people and influences I've known) and that you should read them all (at the "Tribute Posts" category on the right). 19)   Martin Luther King: How do we remember the real, hugely complicated, and to my mind even more inspiring man, rather than the mythic ideal we've created of him? A pretty key AmericanStudies question, one worth asking of every truly inspiring American.20)   Angel Island and Sui Sin Far's "In the Land of the Free": Immigration has been, I believe, my first frequent theme here, perhaps because, as this post illustrates, it can connect us so fully to so many of the darkest, richest, most powerful and significant national places and events, texts and histories.21)   Dresden and Slaughterhouse Five: One of the events we Americans have worked most hard to forget, and one of the novels that most beautifully and compelling argues for the need to remember and retell every story.22)   Valentine's Day Lessons: Maybe my least analytical post, and also one of my favorites. It ain't all academic, y'know.23)   Tori Amos, Lara Logan, and Stories of Rape: One of the greatest songs I've ever heard helps me respond to one of the year's most horrific stories.24)   Peter Gomes and Faith: A tribute to one of the most inspiring Americans I've ever met, and some thoughts on the particularly complicated and important American theme he embodies for me.25)   The Treaty of Tripoli and the Founders on Church and State: Sometimes our historical narratives are a lot more complicated than we think. And sometimes they're just a lot simpler. Sorry, David Barton and Glenn Beck, but there's literally no doubt of what the Founders felt about the separation of church and state the idea of America as a "Christian nation."26)   Newt Gingrich, Definitions of America, and Why We're Here: The first of many posts (such as all those included in the "Book Posts" category on the right) in which I bring the ideas at the heart of my second book into my responses to AmericanStudies narratives and myths.27)   Du Bois, Affirmative Action, and Obama: Donald Trump quickly and thoroughly revealed himself to be a racist jackass, but the core reasons for much of the opposition to affirmative action are both more widespread and more worth responding to than Trump's buffoonery. 28)   Illegal Immigrants, Our Current Deportation Policies, and Empathy: What does deportation really mean and entail, who is affected, and at what human cost? 29)   Tribute to My Grandfather Art Railton: The saddest Railton event of the year leads me to reflect on the many inspiring qualities of my grandfather's life, identity, and especially perspective.30)   My Clearest Immigration Post: Cutting through some of the complexities and stating things as plainly as possible, in response to Sarah Palin's historical falsehoods. Repeated and renamed with even more force here. 31)   Paul Revere, Longfellow, and Wikipedia: Another Sarah Palin-inspired post, this time on her revisions to the Paul Revere story and the question of what is "common knowledge" and what purposes it serves in our communal conversations.32)   "Us vs. them" narratives, Muslim Americans, and Illegal Immigrants: The first of a couple posts to consider these particularly frustrating and divisive national narratives. The second, which also followed up my Norwegian terrorism response (linked below), is here. 33)   Abraham Cahan: The many impressive genres and writings of this turn of the century Jewish American, and why AmericanStudiers should work to push down boundaries between disciplines as much as possible.34)   Terrorism, Norway, and Rhetoric: One of the latest and most important iterations of my using a current event to drive some American analyses—and likewise an illustration of just how fully interconnected international and American events and histories are.
That's it for now! Thanks for all the readings and responses, and more tomorrow,BenPS. As I've asked before, any topics or figures or texts or issues you'd like me to feature here?

August 13-14, 2011 [Tribute Post 21]: Ezra Jack Keats

Given how significant a percentage of my daily life—and an even higher percentage of my reading time, over the last five years at least—is dedicated to children's books, it feels overdue for me to dedicate a full post here to them as well. My Mom Ilene Railton did so way back in the first Guest Post, on Margaret Wise Brown and Goodnight Moon (1947); I also spent a paragraph analyzing the family dynamics of The Cat in the Hat here, and discussed one of my all-time favorite chapter books, David and the Phoenix, as part of the Valentine's post here. Each of those books and their authors would certainly qualify for a tribute post; my Mom's post in fact focused on Brown's hugely innovative theories and styles, and the same could of course be said of Dr. Seuss's literary creations, as well as those of numerous other children's authors (my short list would include Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books, and Marjorie Weinmann Sharmat's Nate the Great series). But I'm not sure any American children's author is more tribute-worthy than Ezra Jack Keats (1916-1983). Keats' early life and career read like a newsreel of American culture and identity in the early 20th century: born in Brooklyn to Polish American immigrants, he won a nationwide artistic contest in high school with a Depression-era painting of the unemployed; after graduation he went to work for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a mural painter, then turned to providing illustrations for the exploding new comic books industry; he served in the army during World War II, designing camouflage; spent a year in Paris, where he produced many paintings that were later exhibited there and in the States; and then returned to America to illustrate many of the era's most prominent magazines, including Reader's Digest and Playboy. His first jobs as a children's book illustrator were just another facet of this expanding career—in fact he was offered the first such job after a publisher saw another illustration of his—and as of the end of the 1950s, despite the clear facts of his artistic talent and resume, there was no apparent evidence that Keats had anything especially unique to offer the world of American children's literature.Keats' first authored as well as illustrated children's book, My Dog is Lost (1960), instantly proved that perception false. The book featured as its protagonist a young Puerto Rican boy, a recent immigrant who speaks only Spanish, as he travels New York City in search of his lost dog; during his journey he meets numerous other city dwellers and communities. My Dog's introduction of a multicultural and multiethnic urban world, without sacrificing a bit of story or beauty or audience appeal, set the stage for a long career in which Keats continued to strike that balance, most especially in the many books featuring the African American protagonist Peter; introduced in 1963's Caldecott Winning The Snowy Day, Peter would reappear in many more books and grow from a young boy to a teenager on New York's streets. His world and experiences and stories were recognizably specific to his race and urban setting and time period, but were also always universal and human and full of the wonder and mystery and humor that defines the best children's books. More than, I believe, any other single American author (in any genre), Keats helped bring the nation's burgeoning post-1960 multicultural identity into the mainstream, not with polemics or arguments, but with beautiful illustrations and engaging stories of city life and childhood. My boys don't like The Snowy Day any more than they like many other favorites, but that's precisely my point—it's one great children's book among many, yet one that stands out (in its own era and to an extent even in ours) for the community and world it creates. Well worth a tribute, I'd say. More next week, including my first-ever Ben's Birthday Post on Monday,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The official website of both Keats and the great Ezra Jack Keats Foundation: http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/2)      Interesting YouTube fan video about Keats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ytUze3SMIE3)      OPEN: Any children's authors or books you'd highlight?

August 12, 2011: Click Through

We're concluding week two at the New England American Studies Association's Pre-Conference blog (http://neasaconference.blogspot.com) today, and we've already had a ton of interesting posts and ideas from conference presenters and participants. One thing we could use more of, though, are views, comments, and thoughts from other interested AmericanStudiers. So, in lieu of reading a post of mine, can I ask you to click over there (http://neasaconference.blogspot.com), read at least one of the really interesting posts, and, if you have anything to add, please do so in the comments! Thanks very much, and more this weekend,BenPS. That link one more time: http://neasaconference.blogspot.com.

August 11, 2011: Born This Day

On August 11th, 1833, Robert Ingersoll was born in upstate New York, the son of a prominent local Abolitionist preacher. Like many of the inspiring 19th century Americans about whom I've written here, Ingersoll certainly qualifies as a Renaissance American: a practicing lawyer for his whole adult life, Ingersoll also raised and commanded his own Union Army regiment (the 11th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry) which saw action at Shiloh, served as the Republican Attorney General of Illinois after the war, became one of the era's most famous orators (his "Plumed Knight" speech, advocating for the 1876 presidential nomination of James Blaine, remains well-known today), and befriended Walt Whitman. But Ingersoll was perhaps best known, and is most inspiring to this AmericanStudier, as a vocal and eloquent defender of religious agnosticism (he came to be known as "The Great Agnostic") in a period when such views (at least when made overt) usually spelled political disaster. As he often did, Whitman put Ingersoll's inspiring qualities best (in an interview with journalist Horace Traubel): "He lives, embodies, the individuality I preach. I see in Bob the noblest specimen—American-flavored—pure out of the soil, spreading, giving, demanding light."On August 11th, 1921, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York (not far from Ingersoll's birthplace of Dresden), the son of an Alabama A&M professor of agriculture (in an era when African American college professors were still pretty rare). Haley enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1939 and served not only throughout World War II but for the next twenty years, and only began writing professionally after his retirement at the end of the 1950s. That writing career can be divided into three distinct stages, with each both contributing significantly to our national narratives and in its own way controversial. He conducted the first interviews for Playboy in the early 1960s, and over the course of the decade interviewed such luminaries as Miles Davis (the first subject), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Ali. A series of conversations with Malcolm X led to Haley's first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which remains to this day both one of America's most important texts and one of its most ambiguously authored ones (it was published after Malcolm's assassination and has always been dogged by questions of how much was truly Malcolm's voice and how much Haley's authorly license). For the next decade Haley researched his family's and American history, culminating in the publication of Roots (1976), which even before the groundbreaking TV miniseries represented one of the century's most successful books. It too has been dogged by controversy, particularly about the authenticity and accuracy of Haley's family details and discoveries; but even if the book's stories were proven literally fictional, it would remain no less compelling and powerful as an autobiographical and historical novel of slavery and race in America.On August 11th, 1933, Jerry Falwell was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of a local businessman and bootlegger (and agnostic!). Although he founded and began serving as pastor of Lynchburg's Thomas Road Baptist Church at the age of 22, it was really in the 1970s that Falwell helped originate and greatly influenced three of the most significant religious, political, and cultural shifts of late 20th century America: gradually turning that local church into one of the nation's first mega-churches; founding Liberty University (in 1971), perhaps the first Christian institution of higher learning to gain national prominence (and certainly one at the forefront of the rise in Christian education as part of a pushback against multiculturalism); and founding the Moral Majority (in 1979), one of the organizations that most fully contributed to the shift in evangelical and fundamentalist Christian Americans' perspectives and goals toward explicit political activism and power. There's no question that many of the most significant American political developments of the last three decades were heavily influenced by Falwell and his cohort, from the election of Ronald Reagan to the many-faceted campaign to destroy Bill Clinton, and certainly to the presidency and policies of George W. Bush. It's fair to say that Falwell might be best known, however, for controversies of his own: his unsuccessful lawsuits against Hustler magazine and Larry Flynt, his "outing" of the "gay" Teletubby Tinky Winky, his horrific post-9/11 attempts to blame the tragedy on gay and other culturally liberal Americans. Given how divisive and heated the cultural wars have become, thanks in no small measure to Falwell's own efforts, it would be perfectly appropriate if heated controversies did indeed constitute his truest legacy.On August 11th, 1948, Stephen Railton was born in Elgin, Illinois, the son of a World War II veteran and Popular Mechanics automotive journalist (about whom more here and here) and an equally impressive college-educated homemaker. Like Ingersoll, Steve Railton can give a great lecture (as generations of University of Virginia students will attest); like Haley, he can research and write a great book (see here and here); unlike Falwell, he's a deeply accepting and progressive-in-the-best-sense thinker and person. And I wouldn't be here, literally and in every other way, without him. Happy birthday, Dad! More tomorrow,BenPS. Four links to start with:1)      Online version of one of Ingersoll's collections of lectures: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30208/30208-h/30208-h.htm2)      Info on the 30th anniversary edition of Roots: http://www.rootsthebook.com/3)      Falwell obituary and timeline from NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101884274)      OPEN: Any birthday wishes you want me to send along?