Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 7

September 6-7, 2025: A Preview of My Podcast’s 2nd Season

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’veoffered some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to this weekend updateon my plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

At thistime last September, I was about to drop theSecond Inning of my podcast The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball,Bigotry, and the Battle for America. As I highlighted throughout last year’sThanksgivingblog series, working on that podcast was one of my favorite scholarlyprojects across my career, and I’ve been thinking ever since about whether andhow I mightcreate a second season. I’m now definitely planning to do so (likely in my upcomingSpring semester sabbatical), and have decided to focus on a particularly uniqueand important baseball history—the stadiumbuilt at the World War II Japanese incarceration camp at Manzanar, and thegames that have been played there, both in the 1940s and at the rebuiltstadium last year. To say that these incarceration camps have become morerelevant in 2025 than I ever imagined possible is to understate the case, andthat makes this baseball stadium and its histories equally timely, both as areminder of the worst of what we’re capable of and as an inspiring glimpse intohow the best of America endures even at these lowest points. I’m excited todive into those histories and stories, and will keep you all posted as Season 2approaches!

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 5, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: The Boys in College!

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

Last Fall,I ended my Fall semester preview series with apost sharing my excitement about my older son Aidan’s first semester incollege. He had a great Fall, and a great first year overall, which makes methat much more excited for this Fall when we’re doubling up the excitement:Aidan will be starting his second year atVanderbilt; and my younger son Kyle will be starting his own first year atMichigan. In a very special SaturdayEvening Post Considering History columnthis past June, I reflected on just how much I’ve learned about Americanhistory and stories from the boys’ academic experiences, and I ended that post witha Native American poet and artist (Tommy Pico)about whom I learned from one of Aidan’s first-year classes. I’m sure therewill be a lot more such lessons across both boys’ semester and years, and Ilook forward to sharing some of them with y’all here!

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 4, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II Online

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

When itcomes an online-only section of American Lit II, I’m not able to do the kindsof community-building conversations that are part of the in-person sections andabout one of which I wrote in yesterday’s post. Even after more than a decadeteaching these online courses, I can’t pretend that I’ve fully figured out howto build community in this alternate space, and I don’t imagine I will ever getto the point where it feels like the equivalent of an in-person classroom(which is why I am committed to only teaching these online courses as a smallpart of my overall workload). But one thing I greatly respect about the FSUstudents who take these online classes is that they take very seriously my requirementthat they respond to one of their classmate’s Blackboard posts each week. Iknow that requirement can seem like busy work and lead to very boilerplateresponses (“Good points, I agree,” that sort of thing), but across the boardour FSU students push past that default and offer much more thoughtfulengagement with each other’s work. As a result, I really look forward toreading their responses each week, making for a continuing positive moment allsemester!

Lastsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 3, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II in Person

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

I’mteaching sections of my American Literature II survey class both in-person andonline this semester, and so for these next two posts wanted to highlight aspecific type of moment that is unique to each of those particular settings.For the in-person section, one thing I have kept consistent across my 20 yearsof teaching this course at FSU has been how we end the semester: with a coupledays where the students share their own chosen authors/artists, people andworks that have been important to their identities and perspectives. We do thisin part because we’ve gotten up to the present moment in our readings, and ofcourse all of us are also part of this present moment; and in part because it’sa great way to learn a bit more about each of us before we end our time andwork together. But a very nice ancillary benefit is that I also tend to learnabout at least a couple authors/artists I hadn’t heard of before, and that’s agreat reminder of how much I still have to learn, here in year 21 andthroughout my career!

Nextsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 2, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

At a lotof colleges/universities, the more senior faculty members don’t tend to teachintroductory-level courses like First-Year Writing. But while this class doesbring with it a ton more papers and thus grading than upper-level lit courses orthe like, I am being 100% genuine when I tell you that I’m so, so glad I get toteach at least one first-year writing section every semester (and will have twothis Fall). For lots of reasons, including the chance to meet and work withsome of our new students every year (and, yes, possibly recruit some to beEnglish Majors and/or Minors!). But also because these classes bring with themsome of my favorite units and assignments—such as the third Unit and fourthPaper in my FYW I class, where students practice the skills of close reading byanalyzing a song of their choice. Every time I learnabout at least a couple artists I didn’t know previously, and as anancillary but not unimportant benefit I also get to help students realize thatthey do enjoy poetry, just in the form that the vast majority of us experiencein our lives.

Nextsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

September 1, 2025: Fall Semester Previews: Honors Lit

[Thisweek, I start my 21st year at Fitchburg State! So as usual, I’lloffer some previews of the semester ahead, this time focusing on individualmoments I’m looking forward to in each class. Leading up to a weekend update onmy plans for season 2 of my podcast!]

It’s beena few years since I had the chance to teach my Honors Literature Seminar onAmerica in the Gilded Age, so I’m very excited for every moment in this longstandingfavorite course offered for our phenomenal community of Honors Program students(many of whom I taught in my Spring2025 Honors First-Year Writing section). But since I’m drafting this seriesin mid-June, with the Los Angeles protests unfolding as I write, I’m particularlylooking forward to beginning the class with our first long text, Helen HuntJackson’s Ramona.Besides being a multilayered historical novel that teaches really well, Jackson’snovel reminds us that Southern California (like all of America, but in particularlystriking ways) has always been incredibly diverse, and that those who want to “return”to a homogeneous white America are quite simply fantasists.

Nextsemester preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo y’all have coming up?

August 30-31, 2025: August 2025 Recap

[A Recapof the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

August3: Birthday Bests: 2010-2011: My annual birthday series kicks off with 34favorites from my first year of AmericanStudying!

August4: Birthday Bests: 2011-2012: 35 from year two!

August5: Birthday Bests: 2012-2013: 36 from year three!

August6: Birthday Bests: 2013-2014: 37 from year four!

August7: Birthday Bests: 2014-2015: 38 from year five!

August8: Birthday Bests: 2015-2016: 39 from year six!

August9: Birthday Bests: 2016-2017: 40 from year seven!

August10: Birthday Bests: 2017-2018: 41 from year eight!

August11: Birthday Bests: 2018-2019: 42 from year nine!

August12: Birthday Bests: 2019-2020: 43 from year ten!

August13: Birthday Bests: 2020-2021: 44 from year eleven!

August14: Birthday Bests: 2021-2022: 45 from year twelve!

August15: Birthday Bests: 2022-2023: 46 from year thirteen!

August16: Birthday Bests: 2023-2024: 47 from year fourteen!

August17: Birthday Bests: 2024-2025: And the newest birthday post, 48 favoritesfrom the past, fifteenth year of AmericanStudying!

August18: University of Michigan Studying: Founding Histories: With my youngerson Kyle off to the University of Michigan, this year’s post-birthday seriesfocused on Wolverine contexts, starting with three foundational moments.

August19: University of Michigan Studying: Three Presidents: The series continueswith takeaways from the terms of three 19th century presidents.

August20: University of Michigan Studying: Football: Three early moments thatchart the rise of a perennial pigskin powerhouse, as the series studies on.

August21: University of Michigan Studying: Famous Alums: Five famous Michiganalums, in honor of my future one.

August22: University of Michigan Studying: Uncle Peter: The series concludes witha quick tribute to my prior connection to Michigan.

August23-24: University of Michigan Studying: Kyle’s Plans: And a special weekendfollow-up on three of the many things I’m excited about during Kyle’s time atMichigan!

August25: Alien Nation: Roswell: For the 30th anniversary of Fox’s AlienAutopsy, a series on our fascination with aliens kicks off with thelongstanding & problematic sides to one of our most enduring conspiracytheories.

August26: Alien Nation: E.T. and Aliens: The series continues with friendly &hostile extraterrestrials, and the real bad guys in each case.

August27: Alien Nation: Close Encounters and Contact: Two superficially similarfilms that feature distinct portrayals of both aliens & America, as theseries probes on.

August28: Alien Nation: Alien Autopsy: On the 30th anniversary of itsfirst airing, two cultural contexts for a historic hoax.

August29: Alien Nation: Recent Revelations: The series concludes with how we canmake sense of the dramatic rise of “UFO” sightings in recent years.

Fallsemester previews start Monday,

Ben

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

August 29, 2025: Alien Nation: Recent Revelations

[30 yearsago this week, the pseudo-documentaryfilm Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy thatmoment and others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility ofalien life, leading up to this post on recent revelations!]

On how tomake sense of the dramatic rise in reputable “UFO” sightings in recent years.

Firstthings first: what crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 was apparently anAirForce high-altitude balloon (part of the top-secret but now declassified ColdWar Project Mogul), not an alien spaceship. I haven’t studied in depth allthe other “UFO” sightings across the centuries that are highlighted on thisWikipedia page, but I’m willing to bet that every one has a similarlymundane (or at least earthbound, as I suppose a top secret Cold War balloonproject is pretty interesting in its own right) explanation. To wit: inDecember 2024 there were a ton of reportedUFO sightings across the Northeastern U.S., and from what I can tell theywere almost certainly all drones,perhaps even private-use ones that people had gotten as holiday presents andwere trying out.

In manyways, that paragraph might seem to be an argument for fewer “UFO” sightings inthe 2020s, since we now know a lot more about the various (temporarily)unidentified flying objects, past and present, natural and human-produced, thatwe could potentially misidentify as alien ones. But somehow, our increasedawareness of those realities has been complemented by an increase in the numberof alleged UFO sightingsin recent years—and, even more strikingly, an amplification of the U.S.government’s willingness to take such sightings seriously, as it did forexample with numerous “drone”sightings between 2019 and 2020. As that latter date indicates, thepandemic was a particularly prominent moment for such reports, and that’s alogical enough explanation to be sure—but not one that’s close tocomprehensive when it comes to alleged sightings over many more years than justthe Covid ones.

So whileideas and images of alien arrival aren’t at all new, as I hope this whole serieshas made clear, they do seem to be on the rise here in the 2020s. And while Idon’t think we can attribute that to the pandemic (at least not as an originpoint, since for example that 2019 rash of sightings predated Covid), I wouldargue that our broader sense of imminent, ifnot indeed ongoing, apocalypse has a lot to do with why we seem to beseeing aliens everywhere. In part I mean that it would be helpful, psychologicallyanyway, to be able to blame the strong sense that the world might be ending onextra-terrestrial causes, as so many of our pop culture texts across thecenturies have already done. But I also and especially mean that, when we seemso incapable here on our shared planet of doing what’s necessary to save it, itsure would be nice for a deux ex machina to come on down and help out. “Take usto your leader?” Nah, little green dudes, y’all better lead the way.

AugustRecap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

August 28, 2025: Alien Nation: Alien Autopsy

[30 yearsago this week, the pseudo-documentaryfilm Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy thatmoment and others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility ofalien life, leading up to a post on recent revelations!]

On two culturalcontexts for a historic hoax.

30 yearsago today, Fox broadcast for the first time Alien Autopsy: Fact orFiction? The hour-long special, hosted by Star Trek: The NextGeneration actor Jonathan Frakes, got such high ratings that it would be re-broadcasttwo additional times, to even bigger audiences. In my bracketed series introabove I called the film a “pseudo-documentary,” but the truth is that it wasentirely staged, its footage fully fabricated, as its creator, the British filmand record producer ,would finally admit 11 years later (although Santilli has continued to claimthat the film was based on real events from Roswell). Its “aliens” were plastercasts filled with garbage and raspberry jam; its “laboratory” was a cheap setconstructed in a living room; its “experts” were either paid actors or hadtheir interviews severely edited and their perspectives badly misrepresented.But despite all that, the ratings were through the roof as I noted above, and Time magazine noted that the film wasbeing viewed “with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since the Zapruderfilm.”

That finalphrase is a telling one, as I would say that Alien Autopsy has a goodbit in common with another 1990s film, OliverStone’s JFK. At the end of that hyperlinked post I mentioned themost striking and to my mind most frustrating aspect of Stone’s film, his blendingof actual archival footage with “re-created” (fictionalized) scenes, all of itpresented in black-and-white so it’s incredibly difficult for audiences to tellwhat’s what. That’s not identical by any means to Alien Autopsy, whichto my knowledge has no archival footage at all. But Santilli did subsequentlydescribe his fictionalized filmmaking as an attempt to “re-create” actual butlost such footage, and certainly his film, like Stone’s, is trying to convinceaudiences that the fictional film is just as “real” as any archive. Andmoreover, I would argue that in both cases audiences were very willing to goalong with the filmmakers (Stone’s film made more than 5 times its budget atthe box office, success not dissimilar to the high ratings for Santilli’s work),due directly to the widespread existing interest in the conspiracy theories(JFK and Roswell, respectively) that they were tapping into.

I would also contextualizeAlien Autopsy with a second, much older and quite distinct, cultural work,however: OrsonWelles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.To my knowledge Welles did not hope to pass off his fictional storytelling as “real”in the same way as Santilli and Stone, but as is well known audiencesdid respond to the broadcast that way, which makes for an interesting twiston my points in the last paragraph: a reminder that it’s not only up to artistswhether and how reality and fiction get blurry, that audiences have a significantsay in that process as well. And the terrified responses to Welles’s broadcastalso remind us that audience interest in aliens is driven by both hope andfear, as nicely engaged by Don Henley at the end of the first verse of the songI quoted earlier in this week’s series, “They’re Not Here, They’reNot Coming” (2000): “Anxious eyes turned upward/Clutching souvenirs/Carryingour highest hopes/And our darkest fears.”

Lastaliens tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

August 27, 2025: Alien Nation: Close Encounters and Contact

[30 yearsago this week, the pseudo-documentaryfilm Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that momentand others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility of alienlife, leading up to a post on recent revelations!]

On twosuperficially similar films that feature very distinct portrayals of bothAmerica and aliens.

Two of themost prominent cinematic representations of alien encounters feature similartitle images of those encounters: Steven Spielberg’s CloseEncounters of the Third Kind (1977) andRobert Zemeckis’ Contact(1997).Spielberg was a kind of mentor to Zemeckis,executive producing the younger director’s first two films (both released inthe three years after Close Encounters),and so it’s quite possible that Contact(released almost exactly 20 years after CloseEncounters) was partially intended as a tribute to the earlier film(although its title is drawn from Carl Sagan’s1985 novel on which it’s based). And the two films do follow a fundamentallysimilar structure when it comes to those alien encounters [SPOILERS for the twofilms here and in the rest of this post]: opening with a partial and uncertainsuch encounter and then following a group of characters attempting to connectmore definitively with these aliens and, in the film’s culminating scenes, ableto do so more definitively.

Yet whenit comes to both those main characters and the aliens they encounter, Close Encounters and Contact differ in striking andsignificant ways. Spielberg’s film focuses on ordinary Americans, working-classprotagonists (RichardDreyfuss’s Roy Neary is an electrical lineman and Melinda Dillon’s Jillian Guiler aworking single mother) who are unexpectedly drawn into and fundamentallychanged by the alien encounters and the broader universe they open up.Zemeckis’ film, on the other hand, focuses on scientists and parallel figures (Jodie Foster’s Dr. Ellie Arroway works forthe SETI observatory and Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss is aspiritual leader with a lifelong obsession with theories of alien life) whohave long been concerned with the question of aliens and alien encounters bythe time the film opens. That difference doesn’t simply mean that the two filmsportray quite distinct strata of American society (although they certainly do).It also means that they depict the question of alien encounters through verydifferent perspectives and tones—for Spielberg’s characters, these areshockingly strange questions that reveal a universe they had never known and entirelyshift their identities as a result; while for Zemeckis’, these are questionstoward which their whole lives have been trending and the answers to which willdetermine whether their identities have been meaningful or ultimatelymisguided.

Perhapsrelatedly, the two films also portray the aliens themselves in very distinctways. Close Encounter’s alienslookvery much like our most common images of extraterrestrials—oddly shaped headsatop thin necks, very long fingers, and so on—and communicate in a language oftheir own, one featuring hand gestures as well as the film’s famous musical notes (courtesyof Spielberg’s favorite composer John Williams, natch). InContact, on the other hand, we neverreally see the aliens, which is precisely the point: when Foster finally makescontact, the alien she meets chooses to take the form of her late father in orderto connect with her more individually and intimately. Although we are meant tounderstand that he is indeed an alien (rather than simply a hallucination ofFoster’s, as many of her peers believe), this choice nonetheless makes Contact’s alien encounter far morethematically focused on Foster’s character and identity than on the aliensthemselves; while Dreyfuss in particular does become similarly obsessed withaliens in Close Encounters(eventually leaving with them at the film’s conclusion), their depictionnonetheless draws our attention to their striking form rather than simply hischaracter. One more significant difference between these two cinematicrepresentations of alien America.

Next alienstomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?