Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 66

September 9-10, 2023: Update on My Current Book Project

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ve kicked off the semester with preview posts,this time focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to this update on mycurrent book project!]

I’m notgonna lie, when I planned this series a few months back I was pretty hopefulthat I would have a real update about mycurrent book project to share in the weekend post. The short answer is thatI don’t, as the project continues to seek a home. It does so under a new nameand frame, however, as Two Sandlotshas evolved into The Celestials’ LastGame (same subtitle: Baseball,Bigotry, and the Battle for America). I believe that frame allows me tolean into the 19thcentury baseball stories and histories that are at theheart of this project, while still connecting to all the other social andcultural contexts that make the Celestials and their last game so important(from the ChineseEducational Mission and ChineseExclusion Era to the Workingmen’s Party of California, the 1877 San Franciscomassacre, and much more). I’d really love the chance to share my revisedproposal with interested agents and/or editors, so please feel free to reachout by email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu)with any such interest and/or contacts for me. Thanks in advance!

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews or work in progress you’d share?

PPS.Speaking of baseball histories, I’m very excited to note that I’ll be talkingabout this project at the 9-OnlineVirtual Baseball Conference in October. Please let me know if you’ll bethere too!

September 8, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: Departmental Program Review

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, thistime focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my currentbook project!]

Semestersand academic years are about more than just teaching, of course, and this yearmy English Studies Department will be embarking on a particularly significantproject: our departmental Program Review. We create that review for outsideaccreditors every five years, which can feel pretty quick but is enough time toreally have to rethink where we are, where we want to go, and how we might getthere. A key layer to all those questions are the challenges we’re facing, andfor this Program Review the unavoidable and quite frankly overwhelmingchallenge is that of enrollments: the student of Majors in our department hascontracted quite significantly in the five years since the last Program Review,and represents a clear crisis point here in 2023-24. That trend is far biggerthan one department, and there are many elements to it that we can neithercontrol nor change. But obviously that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage it, northink about the ways we can respond and recruit and reimagine and so on. At thevery least, I believe all of us in the Humanities need to do a far moreconsistent job talking about all the amazing and vital things we do, and allthe ways students and communities can and will benefit from them. Lookingforward to being part of those conversations during this Program Reviewprocess!

Updatepost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 7, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit Online

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, thistime focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my currentbook project!]

EverythingI wrote in yesterday’s post certainly holds true for today’s subject as well—indeed,it’s in my online courses that I’ve seen the most examples of ChatGPT/AI-aidedpapers. (FYI, if you use ChatGPT to write a paper about a text, it will quiteliterally invent characters and plotlines that are not present anywhere in thattext. Just saying!) But along with those newer challenges, I continue to face alongstanding challenge in my asynchronous online lit classes (one of whichI teach every semester, including Am Lit II this Fall): sharing historical andcultural contexts with the students as a secondary but relevant layer to ourprimary texts/readings. I’ve tried Word documents discussing such contexts(asking students to engage them somehow in their weekly Blackboard posts), andI’ve tried short videos of me doing so (ditto), but I’m not convinced that moststudents are taking a real look at them, or at least that they’re trulybecoming part of our conversations. It’s too close to the Fall semester for meto come up with a radically new way of presenting the contexts this timearound, so a combo of documents and short videos it is. But I’m very open toother ideas, for my Spring online course and for the future of my teaching inthis medium.

Lastpreview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 6, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing I

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, thistime focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my currentbook project!]

I don’timagine the First-Year Writing challenge I’m going to highlight here will comeas a surprise to anyone who’s been connected to the news over the last year orso. Few if any subjects have dominated those current events conversations morethan the rapid evolution of AI,and certainly few if any subjects have dominatedhigher ed debates more than ChatGPT and its ilk. For a long time, I saidand meant that I wasn’t interested in those debates—I’ve never wanted to be apoliceman in the classroom, and have always believed in giving students thebenefit of the doubt and then responding if and when there are instances ofplagiarism. All of that’s still unquestionably the case, but alsounquestionable is the ready and attractive availability of such AI programs forstudent writers (and I know from my two high school-age sons how frequentlystudents take advantage of those programs). So I do plan to talk briefly aboutChatGPT on the first day, and mainly to say this: as with literally everythingelse, I hope students will talk to me about it, about when and how they might thinkabout using it, about what it seems to offer as well as its limitations, abouthow we navigate this new layer to our moment. That’s about the only answer tothis challenge that I’ve got, but I can’t imagine a better one.

Nextpreview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 5, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, thistime focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my currentbook project!]

Unlikeyesterday’s focal course, to which I’m returning after a number of years away,our EnglishStudies Capstone class is one I’ve been able to teach almost every year.I’ve tried to continue revising it as I’ve done so, so this section willfeature some returning favorites (like Kevin Gannon’s RadicalHope as our Education Unit shared text) and some new ones (like EricNguyen’s ThingsWe Lost to the Water as our Literature Unit shared text). All of thatfalls entirely under the umbrella of things I’m excited about—but I can’t lie,with each passing year it becomes more of a challenge to teach this particularcourse with my usual, congenital optimism. That’s due not only to all theuncertainties of the future (a subject on which this class focused a greatdeal), but also to thestriking threats to higher education generally and the humanitiesspecifically in the present (another pair of such focal subjects). I’m notgoing to pretend I have any answers to those challenges—not here, and certainlynot with the students—but one thing I’ll say is that I very much look forwardto talking about them with one of my favorite groups of people in the world,Fitchburg State English Majors!

Nextpreview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 4, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: Ethnic American Literature

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, thistime focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my currentbook project!]

The classI’m most excited to teach this Fall is myEthnic American Literature course, which I created more than 15years ago but which I haven’t had the chance to teach in a number of years(other colleagues have done a great job with their own versions of it in theinterim). That means I really haven’t taught the course in our current climate,and certainly not in the specific context of all thecurrent efforts to limit and ban the teaching of subjects like Black historyand so many other identify-focused topics. I plan to foreground those issues onthe first day, not solely or even centrally (there’s a lot else to discuss anddo in this class, much of it to my mind more overarching and important than2023 contexts), but as a key part of why we do what we do in classes like this.I imagine most of the students will agree that it’s even more important to doso in this moment, but as always I’ll be open to the perspectives of each andevery student, as long as they’re respectful of each other and willing to bepart of that evolving conversation.

Nextpreview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews you’d share?

September 2-3, 2023: August 2023 Recap

[A Recapof the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

July31: Sibling Studying: The Marx Brothers and the Stooges: A celebratoryseries on American siblings kicks off with two groups at the heart of mid-20thcentury comedy and culture.

August1: Sibling Studying: The Grimké Sisters: The series continues with a pairof sisters who exemplified the power, courage, and complexity of Americanabolitionism.

August2: Sibling Studying: The Wright Brothers: Three lesser-known stories of thebrothers who changed transportation and the world, as the series rolls on.

August3: Sibling Studying: William and Henry James: The influential and inspiringrelationship between two brothers who echo my own favorite pair of siblings.

August4: Sibling Studying: The Eaton Sisters: The series concludes with twocolumns where I’ve highlighted the amazing Eaton sisters, and one thing I’dadd.

August5-6: Sibling Studying: The Railton Boys: Couldn’t share a SiblingStudyingseries without paying tribute to my favorite pair of brothers!

August7: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011: My annual birthday series of favorite postsfrom across the blog’s nearly 13 years started here…

August8: Birthday Bests: 2011-2012:

August9: Birthday Bests: 2012-2013:

August10: Birthday Bests: 2013-2014:

August11: Birthday Bests: 2014-2015:

August12: Birthday Bests: 2015-2016:

August13: Birthday Bests: 2016-2017:

August14: Birthday Bests: 2017-2018:

August15: Birthday Bests: 2018-2019:

August16: Birthday Bests: 2019-2020:

August17: Birthday Bests: 2020-2021:

August18: Birthday Bests: 2021-2022:

August19-20: Birthday Bests: 2022-2023: … and concluded here with 46 favoriteposts from the last year on the blog!

August21: Cville Places: Barracks Road: For this year’s Cville series, I focusedon symbolic spaces, starting with one that captures the elided but evocativehistories all around us.

August22: Cville Places: Fry’s Spring: The series continues with four stages toone of Cville’s most exemplary sites.

August23: Cville Places: Vinegar Hill: Sharing a Saturday Evening Post column on one of the city’s most tragicspaces, as the series rolls on.

August24: Cville Places: The Jefferson School: What a historic educational placecan tell us about three distinct 20th century eras.

August25: Cville Places: The Paramount Theater: The series concludes with threetelling details about the city’s most historic theater.

August26-27: Cville Places: The Public Schools: A special weekend tribute to someof the many amazing folks I worked with in my own most influential Cvillespace.

August28: Contextualizing the March on Washington: 1941 Origins: For the March’s60th anniversary, a series on key contexts kicks off with 1941origin points.

August29: Contextualizing the March on Washington: 1957 Prelude: The series continueswith how a 1957 march foreshadowed 1963, and how it differed.

August30: Contextualizing the March on Washington: The Big Six: A coupleinspiring elements of the 1963 March’s leadership, and one frustrating one.

August31: Contextualizing the March on Washington: Marian, Mahalia, and Odetta:The 1963 musical performers who dominated the headlines, and three whom weshould better remember.

September1: Contextualizing the March on Washington: Speeches: The series concludeswith three of the March’s many important orations (beyond its most famousone).

FallSemester previews start Monday,

Ben

PS. Topicsyou’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

September 1, 2023: Contextualizing the March on Washington: Speeches

[August 28th marks the60th anniversary of the March onWashington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the single mostimportant events in 20th century American history.So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for and from thatevent—not including MartinLuther King Jr.’s iconic speech, about which I’ve written agood bit already!]

On threeof the March’s many important orations (again, beyond that most famous one).

1)     John Lewis: As I wrotein Wednesday’s post, John Lewis was only 23 years old in August 1963, but thatdidn’t stop him from delivering the March’s second most powerful speech. He wasapparently stopped by fellow organizers from delivering the speech heoriginally wrote (and which he quoted in full in his memoir Walking with the Wind), which farmore directly criticized the Kennedy administration and featured lines like “Wewill march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.”(Some fellow SNCC members like StokelyCarmichael wanted Lewis to deliver the full speech and were very frustratedthat he wasn’t able to.) But even the revised speech featured “greatreservations” about the Civil Rights Bill in its current form as well as suchrhetorical bangers as Lewis’ demand to fellow activists that they “Get in andstay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nationuntil true freedom comes.”

2)     Walter Reuther: UnitedAutomobile Workers President Walter Reuther was one of the white leaders whocame on board when the March’s planning cohort expanded from the Big Six to theBig Ten, and he followed up that role by delivering a stirring speech of hisown. Reuter’s speech included one of my favorite expressions of critical patriotism:“We cannot successfully preachdemocracy in the world unless we first practice democracy at home. Americandemocracy will lack the moral credentials and be both unequal to and unworthyof leading the forces of freedom against the forces of tyranny unless we takebold, affirmative, adequate steps to bridge the moral gap between Americandemocracy's noble promises and its ugly practices in the field of civil rights.”And he delivered it in his trademark fiery oratorical style that, accordingto fellow labor leader Irving Bluestone, led a Black woman in the audiencethat day to call Reuther “the white Martin Luther King.”

3)     Bayard Rustin: The frustratingprejudice toward Rustin (ostensibly as a radical, but mostly as a gay man)about which I wrote on Wednesday was likely responsible for the fact that theMarch’s principal strategist and organizer did not get to deliver a full speechof his own (similarly, JamesBaldwin was denied the chance to speak). But Rustin nonetheless played twovital speaking roles: he readaloud and in full the March’s list of demands to both the federalgovernment and the American people; and he organized and led a tribute to “NegroWomen Fighters for Freedom,” which featured acknowledgments of the work ofDaisy Bates, Diane Nash, Prince Lee, Gloria Richardson (who has since criticized women’srelatively minor roles at the March), and Rosa Parks. Both those women andRustin deserved the chance to speak far more fully than they were able, but weneed to make sure not to replicate that discrimination and instead to highlighttheir vital presence and contributions at this defining Civil Rights Movementmoment.

AugustRecap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

August 31, 2023: Contextualizing the March on Washington: Marian, Mahalia, and Odetta

[August 28th marks the60th anniversary of the March onWashington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the single mostimportant events in 20th century American history.So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for and from thatevent—not including MartinLuther King Jr.’s iconic speech, about which I’ve written agood bit already!]

On the 1963musical performers who dominated headlines, and those we should betterremember.

Inyesterday’s post I highlighted the interracial makeup of the 1963 March’s leadership,and the same was certainly true of its featured musical performers. Joan Baez sang “We ShallOvercome” and “Oh Freedom”; Bob Dylan joined her for“When the Ship Comes In” and then performed his own “Only a Pawn in Their Game”(a controversial choice for this occasion since the song minimizesthe culpability of Medgar Evers’ then-unpunished murderer ByronDe La Beckwith); and Peter,Paul, and Mary performed “If I Had a Hammer” as well as Dylan’s “Blowin’ inthe Wind.” Folk music was a core element of the Civil Rights Movement as it wasevery part of American culture and society in the early 1960s; but at the sametime I have to agree with actor and radical activist Dick Gregory’s critique of the 1963 musicalperformances as dominated a bit more than would have been ideal by thesepopular white artists (perhaps especially since many of their chosen numbers atthe March were African American spirituals or folk songs).

They weren’tthe only 1963 performers, however, and it’s important not to deepen the problemby focusing on them at the expense of the march’s impressive and inspiring Blackartists. One of the most impressive, pioneering and prodigiously talented operasinger MarianAnderson, was actually performing at the Lincoln Memorial for the secondtime. In 1939, Anderson had the chance to perform in DC’s Constitution Hall butthe Daughters of the American Revolution refused to grant permission for her todo so in front of an integrated audience; instead she performed an outdoorconcert at theLincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 2nd, in front of anaudience of 75,000. I don’t know of any 20th century moment thatbetter captures both the worst and best of America than that one, and better rememberingAnderson’s 1963performance (she sang “He’s Got the Whole in His Hands”) can help us likewisebetter remember 1939.

Another1963 performer, Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, was also making a return to thissetting, as she had performedat the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom about which I wrote on Tuesday.Her performance of twohymns, “I’ve Been ‘Buked” and “How I Got Over,” was as stirring as everytime Jackson took any stage. But perhaps the least well-known of the 1963 March’sthree Black women musical artists is the most significant for contextualizing theevent’s musical performances overall. Folk legend OdettaHolmes (who performed simply as Odetta) was called by none other than MLK “theQueen of American Folk Music,” and was a vital influence on contemporaryartists like Baez and Dylan among others. I don’t mean to take anything awayfrom the talents nor the impacts of white artists like them when I say that therespective lack of attention paid to Odetta, then and since, is due entirely toracism and white supremacy. In a way, the responses to the 1963 March—where thewhite artists performed a number of Black spirituals and folk songs, no less—frustratinglyreplicated that trend. But we don’t have to do the same, so I’ll end this postby linking to Odetta’sstirring performance from the 1963 March on Washington.

Last Marchcontext tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

August 30, 2023: Contextualizing the March on Washington: The Big Six

[August 28th marks the60th anniversary of the March onWashington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the single mostimportant events in 20th century American history.So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for and from thatevent—not including MartinLuther King Jr.’s iconic speech, about which I’ve written agood bit already!]

On acouple inspiring elements of the 1963 March’s leadership, and a frustrating one.

In June1963, with plans for the August march beginning to take form, the leaders of multiplecivil rights organizations came together to form a new one: the Council forUnited Civil Rights Leadership. Those leaders, who became known as the “Big Six,”included two men I’ve written about a good bit already this week, A. PhilipRandolph and Martin Luther King Jr., and four others: Congress of Racial Equalityco-founder and President JamesFarmer; NAACP President RoyWilkins; National Urban League Executive Director WhitneyYoung; and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman John Lewis. The Big Sixwould eventually bring four white leaders aboard to form a group known as the “BigTen”: longtime United Automobile Workers President WalterReuther; National Council of Churches Past President Eugene Carson Blake;National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Executive Director MathewAhmann; and American Jewish Congress President Joachim Prinz.

Thepresence and contributions of those white leaders illustrate the fundamentally andinspiringly interracial and cross-cultural nature of the 1963 March on everylevel. But of course we don’t have to look beyond the Big Six to find importantinspiration, and in particular I would highlight their genuinelymulti-generational identities: Randolph was 74 at the time of the march;Wilkins was about to turn 62; Farmer was 43 and Young 42; King was 34; andLewis was 23. Naturally the Civil Rights Movement featured leaders andparticipants from every living generation, but for a group separated by morethan 50 years to work together so closely and successfully is still a strikingand impressive achievement. As JohnLewis later put it, “Somehow, some way, we worked well together. The six ofus, plus the four. We became like brothers.” In thislong-ago post I mentioned the sociological argument that “diversity withincategories far exceeds diversity between categories”; age and generationcomprise significant such diverse factors within a category like “AfricanAmerican,” and clearly they didn’t stop this impressive group from achievingbig things.

They aren’tthe only such diverse identities, however, and when it came to another theMarch’s leadership were much less unified. As I highlighted in Monday’s post,Bayard Rustin had been alongside Randolph throughout the decades of civilrights marches on Washington (planned and actual), and continued to play animportant role in 1963’s. But both Wilkins and Young objected to Rustinserving as an equal planner (which would have made for a Big Seven, of course);they ostensibly did so because of his ties to controversies like communism anddraft resistance, but it seems clear it was Rustin’shomosexuality that was at the heart of the debate. As that hyperlinked articlenotes, Martin Luther King Jr. would likewise sideline Rustin at times due toconcerns over potential responses to his sexuality, so this wasn’t simply aboutthe older generations either. Indeed, the oldest of the Big Six, Randolph, hadlong worked alongside Rustin without these qualms, so we can’t attribute thisattitude to age in any way. It didn’t stop Rustin from working as a crucial strategistand organizer for the 1963 March—but it shouldn’t have been a thing at all, andshouldn’t be absent from our collective memories.

Next Marchcontext tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?