Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 84

February 11-12, 2023: Football (and Sports) Studiers

[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to this special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]

In no particular order, here are a bunch of amazing public scholarly SportsStudiers you should all be reading and following:

Lou Moore

Tracie Canada

Kate Aguilar

Zach Bigalke

Derrick White

Dave Zirin

Everybody at Sport in American History

& everybody at the End of Sports podcast

Also, I put out the word on Twitter for other nominations:

Kate Aguilar writes, "I love this piece by Carl Suddler (among other works he has done on sport)," and adds, "Also, Sam White, (who is included among the great minds doing End of Sport), and Letisha Brown. I am following all of their insight on sport and play daily."

Valentine’s series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scholars, or other Football figures or communities, you’d highlight?

February 10, 2023: Football Figures: Michael Sam and Carl Nassib

[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]

On a striking and significant change, and why there still needs to be more.

I thought I had written in this space at some point about Michael Sam, the defensive lineman who in 2014 became the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team when the (then) St. Louis Rams selected him in the 7th round of the draft. I’m not finding such a prior post, but I can certainly say that I thought a lot at that time about Sam and his journey and challenges, all of which continued across a fraught and ultimately unsuccessful first year in the NFL, an even more challenging time with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League, and a long hiatus from professional football for mental health reasons. (Apparently he’s now back in the game with the Barcelona Dragons of the European League of Football, serving as both a player and a coach for the team, which was nice to learn while researching this post.) While Sam’s struggles to make it in professional football are certainly due in part to football-related issues, there’s no doubt that those mental health reasons were largely due to this groundbreaking personal journey—and I can’t help but believe that that journey, and more exactly the backlash and prejudice he faced during it, made it more difficult for him to do the necessary football things to make and stay on the Rams or any NFL team.

All of which makes the current and ongoing story of NFL defensive lineman Carl Nassib that much more striking and inspiring. The two players’ personal and football journeys have at least one significant difference: selected by the Cleveland Browns in the 3rdround of the 2016 draft, Nassib had thus already been in the league for five full (and quite successful) seasons when, as part of the June 2021 Pride Month celebrations, he came out as gay on his Instagram account. Yet nonetheless, I believe that both the far more positive (or at least much less overtly negative and hateful, but I would stress the genuinely supportive notes so many players have struck) responses to Nassib’s coming out and the ways in which he has been able to continue his NFL career (and even move to a new team) with seemingly no issues reflect a striking change over this last decade. That’s a change in part in football culture, one no doubt influenced by Sam. And of course it’s also a change in American culture and society more broadly, one illustrated not only by the kinds of pop culture shifts I wrote about in this post, but also by these drastically different receptions to two openly gay NFL players within a period of just a few years.

That’s a very good thing—but as with any social progress, it’s far from the end of the story. Recent polling and studies indicate that something like 7% of Americans identify as LGBTQ; there are 1696 active players in the NFL at any given team (53 active players on each of the 32 teams), which if the percentage holds would mean that somewhere around 118 of those players would be gay or bisexual. I’m willing to grant that the culture of football (at every level it’s played) might dissuade many LGBTQ young men from becoming or staying part of it; but even so, it seems quite difficult to believe that there is only one gay player among the league’s current 1700. And the same is certainly the case with all the other major sports leagues, which as of this writing—and with the very definite exception of the WNBA, which features many LGBTQ players—have precisely one openly gay player each. As that last hyperlinked article notes, one is more than zero, so the change reflected by Nassib has been wider and is worth celebrating—but there’s plenty further to go, and I look forward to the time when a professional athlete coming out is entirely un-newsworthy.

Special tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?

February 9, 2023: Football Figures: Andrew Luck

[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]

On a specific and a broader way to contextualize a shocking retirement.

Early last December, ESPN’s website ran a phenomenal deep-dive story from writer Seth Wickersham on Andrew Luck’s stunningly abrupt August 2019 retirement from professional football. The story’s at the first hyperlink above and is well worth checking out in full; so in lieu of a first full paragraph for this post, do that if you would and then come on back here for a couple takeaways.

Welcome back! In specific football terms, I’d say that the through-line of Luck’s repeated pattern of injuries, recoveries and rehabs, and the psychological and emotional costs of that process is a telling window into what professional football does to those who play it, beyond even the somewhat more familiar now stories of concussions and their effects. Watching, discussing, and sharing football with my sons has been one of my very favorite things, not just over the last decade or so but really of my whole life, and so the thought of giving it up is hugely painful. But they’re thoughtful and responsible enough young men that we can and do talk about the sport’s harsher realities as part of those conversations, and Luck’s story (literally and figuratively) reminds us that those realities touch every football player, even those who seem particularly blessed in their experiences of the sport (which, as that story and Luck acknowledge, seemed to be the case for him).

More broadly, I’d say the Luck story is one of the best illustrations I’ve ever encountered of the great quote often linked to (and of course tragically embodied by) comedian and actor Robin Williams (although who actually said it firstis a very open and perhaps unanswerable question it seems): “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” The emphasis is often and understandably placed on “you know nothing about”—that even when someone seems to be doing great by every possible measure, they can and likely are still facing demons of one kind or another (something I’ve thought a lot about since reading Bruce Springsteen’s memoir). But in an era when all of us (and I’m fully including myself in this critique) are so quick to attack folks for any number of reasons, from the most significant and serious to the seemingly small or momentary, it would be worth trying to remember the “everyone” part of the quote as well. I’m not saying that struggles excuse any and all actions or behaviors—see Ye for a case in point of when and how they most definitely do not—but would nonetheless note that Andrew Luck reminds us that struggles of one kind or another are, indeed, a ubiquitous part of the human condition, now as ever.

Last football figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?

February 8, 2023: Football Figures: Texas

[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]

On a few different ways to AmericanStudy football’s place in the Lone Star State.

High school football has apparently been huge in Texas for a good long while, but the last couple decades have seen some high-profile cultural representations of Texas high school football and thus brought it to more mainstream attention. The trends goes back at least to the films Varsity Blues (1999) and Friday Night Lights (2004), although it can be taken back nearly a decade earlier to the best-selling 1990 Buzz Bissinger book on which the latter was based. And it certainly achieved another level of popular prominence during the five-season run of the cult favorite and award-winning televison show, also titled Friday Night Lights (2006-2011). In their own ways, each of these cultural texts reveals the appeal of big-time high school football: combining the thrill of sports played at a high level with the universal and complex realities of teenage and family life, the possibility of heroism (there’s a reason why “My Hero” was the theme song of Varsity Blues) with the realities and challenges of everyday existence.

So I get why high school football strikes a chord, and thus why stories of the state where it’s particularly huge are compelling for American audiences. But Texas high school football is also emblematic of a significant national problem with priorities: that we’ve come to support educational athletics (at the high school and collegiate levels) more and more at the same time that we’re defunding and cutting and generally failing to support education in every other way. There are plenty of details and stories that symbolize those (at least) mixed-up educational priorities, but I’ve never encountered a more striking one than the $60 million high school football stadium at Allen High in Texas. No, that’s not a typo—this venue for high school athletics—for one high school sport—cost $60 million in public funds, money that, to quote that ESPN.com story, the school district “know[s] full well it will never recoup.” Frankly, the public funding element, aggravating as it is (although the bond measure did receive 60% approval—they do love their high school football in Texas, apparently), isn’t even the issue here—even if the $60 million were all private donations, I would say exactly the same thing: take the money, thank everybody very much, and then build a $5 million dollar stadium and use the remaining $55 million for public high schools throughout the state. Maybe that’s not legal, but it’s sure as hell logical.

So I get the allure of Texas high school football, and am at the same time very frustrated by what it means in our contemporary society and moment. There’s at least one more American layer to this onion, though, and it’s probably the most complicated and double-edged of them all. On the one hand, high school football, like all sports but perhaps more than most (and certainly more than professional sports), has the potential to bring a community together, to offer unifying hope and possibility even in particularly dark and difficult times (such as ours). Yet on the other hand, while high school sports can seem to offer such hope and possibility for the individuals who take part in them, I would argue that in many (indeed, most) individual cases those things are alluring, promises of potential futures that will never come true and can instead keep the individual from focus on his or her more definite and significant next steps. (Cf. Hoop Dreams.) So is Texas high school football a source of hope or an illusion of it? Does it serve important communal and national purposes, or does it distract and take away from what we should be doing and focusing on? As is so often the case with the questions I focus on here, the answer, confusingly but critically, is yes on all counts.

Next football figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?

February 7, 2023: Football Figures: Jim Brown and Barry Sanders

[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]

On the parallel yet very distinct ways in which two of all-time greats left the game—and the American resonances of each.

When Jim Brown unexpectedly retired in the summer of 1966, after nine seasons with the Cleveland Browns, he left football as the undisputed greatest running back in the league’s history, with numerous league records (including the career yardage mark) under his belt. Thirty-three years later, in the summer of 1999, Barry Sanders announcement his just as unexpected retirement; in his ten seasons with the Detroit Lions, Sanders had threatened numerous records of his own (he retired less than 1500 yards behind the all-time mark), and had struck many observers as the greatest running back since Brown. Yet despite these similarities, the circumstances of the players’ retirements were also hugely different: Brown retired due to conflicts with his burgeoning acting career, which he would pursue for the next few decades, remaining in the public eye throughout; Sanders refused to discuss the reasons for his retirement, and largely disappeared from the spotlight thereafter.

It’s impossible, and probably irresponsible, to speculate at length about the reasons why anyone makes the choices in his or her life, and I don’t pretend to have any special knowledge about either of these particular men or cases. But given the particular circumstances and details that we do know of each, I would say that Brown came to feel that he was bigger or more multi-faceted than the sport, and no longer wanted to be contained by its limits (such as the training camp restrictions from Browns owner Art Modell that specifically precipitated his retirement); and that Sanders, on the other hand, seems to have felt that the sport and its various attendant effects and issues were bigger or more draining than he was willing to deal with. I’m sure that there were multiple factors in each case, and I don’t mean to critique either man in any way; instead, I highlight these particular frames as they have interesting resonances with other talented American figures.

When it comes to Sanders, I can think of various famous Americans who seem to have suddenly decided (while still at their prime) that the demands of their respective worlds were intolerable and to have withdrawn from those worlds; perhaps the most extreme example would have to be J.D. Salinger. After the mega-success of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Salinger withdrew entirely from public life and mostly from publishing; his last published story appeared in 1965, 45 years before his 2010 death. Brown, on the other hand, reminds me of those talented but fickle Americans who abandon established success in one field to pursue an entirely different one, perhaps to prove to the world or themselves that they can do so; the most common contemporary moves seem to be between the worlds of acting and music, but perhaps even more complicatedly and compellingly American are those celebrities who decide to pursue a career in politics and public service, particularly those who do so at the height of success. If The Rock had chosen to run for president, he’d have been simply one of the latest in that long and interesting American line.

Next football figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?

February 6, 2023: Football Figures: Pudge Heffelfinger

[For this year’s annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to focus on some football figures & communities. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of our best current public scholarly SportsStudiers!]

I couldn’t feature a series on football figures without sharing my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columnon the first professional football player, the amazingly nicknamed (and really just named) William “Pudge” Heffelfinger. So in lieu of a post here, check out that above hyperlinked column if you would, thanks!

Next football figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Football figures or communities you’d highlight?

February 4-5, 2023: January 2023 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

January 2: 2023 Anniversaries: 1773 and the Tea Party: My annual anniversaries series kicks off with the 250th anniversary of a few key 1773 moments.

January 3: 2023 Anniversaries: 1823 and the Monroe Doctrine: The series continues with the limits and possibilities of James Monroe’s signature policy on its 200thanniversary.

January 4: 2023 Anniversaries: 1873 Inventions: From blue jeans and barbed wire to obscenity laws, the 150th anniversary of three influential inventions as the series commemorates on.

January 5: 2023 Anniversaries: 1923 and Hollywood: The Hollywood sign, Disney Studios, and overt and enduring symbols of cultural hegemony.

January 6: 2023 Anniversaries: 1973 in Music: The series concludes with a handful of groundbreaking albums that together tell the story of a year.

January 7: 2023 Predictions: As the New Year got underway, a trio of things I’m looking forward to in 2023!

January 7-8: Einav Rabinovitch-Fox’s Guest Post on Senatorial Fashion: My latest great Guest Post, and first of 2023, on Senator John Fetterman and fashion in the big chamber.

January 9: Five Years of Considering History: The First Few Columns: For the 5thanniversary of my Saturday Evening Postcolumn, a series of reflections kicks off with how the first few columns set the stage for what has followed.

January 10: Five Years of Considering History: June 2018: The series continues with a pair of columns that reflect how I’ve been able to connect to multiple sides of my life and work.

January 11: Five Years of Considering History: Cville: The vital opportunity the column has afforded me to write about my hometown, as the series reflects on.

January 12: Five Years of Considering History: Early American Lit and Lives: A column that illustrates how I’ve had the chance to venture far afield from my usual subjects and ideas.

January 13: Five Years of Considering History: The Mexican American Series: The series concludes with a trio of interconnected columns of which I’m particularly proud.

January 14-15: Five Years of Considering History: Two Tributes and a Request: A special weekend post paying tribute to two meaningful voices and asking for your voices as the column and I move forward!

January 16: Spring 2023 Previews: Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy: My Spring semester previews series kicks off with a new author and text I’m excited to teach in this long-time favorite class.

January 17: Spring 2023 Previews: The American Novel to 1950: The series continues with a novel that just plain makes me happy to read and teach.

January 18: Spring 2023 Previews: Grad Class on Multi-Ethnic American Lit: How a new Grad class offers me the chance to finally teach a favorite early 20thcentury novel, as the series teaches on.

January 19: Spring 2023 Previews: First-Year Writing II: The limits and benefits of using contemporary multi-media texts in a first-year writing course.

January 20: Spring 2023 Previews: Short Stories for ALFA: The series concludes with my long-overdue return to literature-focused adult learning courses.

January 21-22: My New Book Project: A special weekend semi-update on my new book project that’s also a request for ideas and suggestions for possible homes!

January 23: AbortionStudying: Roe v. Wade: On the 50th anniversary of the Roe decision, an abortion studying series kicks off with four key figures from that pivotal court case.

January 24: AbortionStudying: Sarah Grosvenor: The series continues with two important contexts for a famous and tragic colonial-era case.

January 25: AbortionStudying: The Eleventh Virgin: What an autobiographical novel helps us see about history and politics alike, as the series debates on.

January 26: AbortionStudying: Dirty Dancing: Finally I get to write about Dirty Dancing in this space, as an alternative to how pop culture texts often present abortion.

January 27: AbortionStudying: George Tiller: The series concludes with two important takeaways from a horrific act of domestic terrorist violence.

January 28-29: AbortionStudying: Dobbs and Everything After: A special weekend post on three ongoing aftermaths of a disastrous June 2022 Supreme Court decision.

January 30: Travel Stories: Around the World in Eighty Days: For the 150thanniversary of the English publication of Verne’s novel, a series on travel writing kicks off with American influences on and from that classic story.

January 31: Travel Stories: Sarah Kemble Knight: The series continues with what a unique travel narrative helps us see about the early 18th century.

February 1: Travel Stories: Thoreau’s Cape Cod: Two complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s posthumously-published, often-overlooked book, as the series travels on.

February 2: Travel Stories: The Boston Cosmopolitans: Two positive effects of an elite community’s international travels.

February 3: Travel Stories: Until September and Americans in Paris: The series concludes with two enduring roles of Parisian escapes in the American imagination.

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

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

February 3, 2023: Travel Stories: Until September and Americans in Paris

[January 30th marks the 150th anniversary of the English-language publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that book and other travel stories!]

On two enduring roles of Parisian escapes in the American imagination.

Until September (1984), likely best known as the film that offered director Richard Marquand a serious change of pace one year after Return of the Jedi (1983), tells the story of an American traveler to Paris (played by Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Karen Allen) who misses her return flight to the States and finds herself stranded in the city (until September, natch) while she awaits a new travel visa. As you would expect, her story takes an unexpected turn, one driven by a chance encounter with a wealthy, married French banker (played by French actor and comedian Thierry Lhermitte). Despite their best intentions, the two fall under the spell of the City of Lights (or perhaps the more practical magic of a romantic comedy plot), and find themselves embarking on a love affair, with each character changing quite a bit as a result of this new, unfamiliar relationship.

If that sounds quite a bit like the plotline of the Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline romantic comedy French Kiss (1995), I’d say that’s true and far from a coincidence (although the fact that French Kiss was directed by another Star Wars veteran, Lawrence Kasdan, likely is coincidental). In both films, a buttoned-up American (yes, Ryan is living in Canada at the start of French Kiss, but she’s still Meg Ryan so she’s an American!) finds an unexpected and beneficial escape from her everyday life in a romantic relationship that feels distinctly Parisian, not only because it’s with a Frenchman (although oui) but also because of the very nature of the city and its imagery and mythos. A very similar story, with the genders reversed, plays out in the recent Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris (2011), in which screenwriter Owen Wilson escapes from his relationship with his stereotypically materialistic American fiancé (Rachel McAdams) by literally time traveling back into Paris’s most romanticized era and culture (the artistic and cultural world of the Roaring 20s).

Such Parisian escapes go far back in the American imagination, as traced with particular clarity by historian David McCullough in his book The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011). But at the same time, I would differentiate McCullough’s subjects (who are mostly artists and writers) and Wilson’s character (who is also a writer and joins an artistic community through his time travels) from the characters played by Allen and Ryan. Wilson’s writer traveled to Paris because he loved its iconic, mythologized identity, as did many of McCullough’s travelers; for them, the escape was expected, and the life-changing effects it produced sought-out and hoped-for. Whereas for Allen and Ryan’s characters, Paris and the romances and changes they found there were entirely unexpected and unplanned, indeed represented a drastic shift in their lives and journeys. There’s romance in both kinds of escapes, but something particularly romantic about a life-altering place that takes us by surprise.

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Travel stories or writing you’d highlight?

February 2, 2023: Travel Stories: The Boston Cosmopolitans

[January 30th marks the 150th anniversary of the English-language publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that book and other travel stories!]

On two positive effects of an elite community’s international travels.

I’ve written a couple times in this space about my undergraduate senior thesis advisor Mark Rennella and his first book, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters, 1865-1915 (2008). A central goal of Mark’s in that project, as I wrote about in the first hyperlinked post above, was to reclaim the late 19th century figures known as the Boston Cosmopolitans from critiques of them as elitist and out of touch, as emblematic of the Gilded Age’s worst excesses and inequalities. Certainly their propensity for the international travel highlighted in Mark’s subtitle could be seen as exemplifying those latter trends, given how rare it was for most Americans in the era to have the chance to travel abroad (obviously lots of Americans arrived from abroad in the era, but that’s a very different kind of journey, and of course generally took place in very different travel conditions as well). But while the ability to travel abroad might indeed reflect positions of privilege, the experiences and effects of that international travel could nonetheless be positive ones for not only these travelers but American communities and histories overall. Mark makes that case convincingly throughout his book; here I’ll highlight two such positive effects.

For one thing, their encounters with international settings allowed these travelers to think about, and at times critique, American culture and society from new angles. Two particularly famous examples of this are Henry Adams’s chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)” in his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1907); and the entirety of Henry James’s travel book The American Scene (1907), written upon the occasion of James’s 1904-5 return to the U.S. after nearly three decades living in Europe. But no single moment better reflects this contrast in settings and perspectives, and the opportunities for it provided by international travel, than Harvard Professor and social reformer Charles Eliot Norton’s encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson on an 1873 steamship voyage from England to the US. As Norton described their conversations in a letter to a friend, Emerson at this late point in his life (he was 70 at the time, while Norton was 45) maintained his “inveterate and persistent optimism,” an element of his distinctly American Transcendental philosophy. Whereas Norton, inspired at least in part by his encounters with European cultures and histories, argued that such optimism “is dangerous doctrine for a people,” as it is “at the root of … much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths.”

These international travelers didn’t just gain new perspectives on American identities and philosophies, however; they also influenced and changed American society through what they brought back with them. The most striking example of such effects was offered by my favorite Boston Cosmopolitan, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose entire Gardner Museum could be accurately described as an American construction assembled out of and atop European and international foundations and intended to allow many fellow Americans to experience those cross-cultural influences as well. But while art and culture were certainly prominent areas where the Cosmopolitans brought their international influences back to the US, they likewise did so in more directly activist arenas, as illustrated by such fellow Gilded Age New Englanders as Edward Bellamy (for whom a year in Hawaii in his late 20s influenced his developing socialist ideas) and Richard Henry Dana III (whose Massachusetts political reforms were inspired in part by European practices). In these and other ways, the evolution of Massachusetts and America in this period was importantly affected by the experiences and lessons of these cosmopolitan travelers.

Last travel story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Travel stories or writing you’d highlight?

February 1, 2023: Travel Stories: Thoreau’s Cape Cod

[January 30th marks the 150th anniversary of the English-language publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that book and other travel stories!]

On two complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s often-overlooked Cape Cod (1865).

Between 1849 and 1857, Henry David Thoreau traveled four times to Cape Cod (no quick or easy journey for any Concord resident in those days, much less one who preferred walking to the train). He was as taken by the place as have been so many of its visitors, and eventually compiled his observations and reflections on those journeys into a single book manuscript, treating the four trips as one symbolic meta-visit to the Cape. Not yet published upon his untimely death in 1862, the book was released in 1865, but has I would argue been largely forgotten in the century and a half since; when the Thoreau canon is expanded beyond Walden and “Civil Disobedience” to include his travel writing, the choice is often A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). A Week, like all those works, deserves our attention to be sure, but there’s a case to be made that Cape Cod offers two significant contributions of its own to our collective memories.

For one thing, it gives us a far different Thoreau. As was known even to his contemporary Concordians and has become clearer and clearer ever since, the Thoreau of Walden and the like was a carefully constructed persona, an imagined version of the self created in order to model a perspective and identity for those neighbors he was hoping to wake up. Whereas I very much agree with Thoreau scholar Henry Beston (in his Introduction to an edition of the book) that in Cape Cod we find “Thoreau as a human being,” and more exactly “what he was at the time, a Concord Yankee gone traveling.” He was also one of our keenest observers of and writers about nature, both scientific (particularly as a botanist) and human—and while he included those observations in all his works, the lack of an overt moral or social purpose to Cape Cod allows them to take center stage in a particularly compelling and successful way. Cape Codmay not be as immediate or authentic as Thoreau in his Journals, but it’s a far more concise work and one written with audience engagement in mind, and thus it complements his other published books with a more intimate glimpse into Thoreau than we otherwise get from them.

Moreover, Cape Cod also offers an important glimpse into both the natural landscapes and human communities of the region prior to its full development as a tourist getaway. In Chapter IV, for example, Thoreau finds himself on a Wellfleet beach that would become part of the Cape Cod National Seashore (on which more tomorrow): “In short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible--we never saw one from the beach--and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery, as their footsteps in the sand.” And in the very next chapter, he ventures inland to converse with one of the most finely observed human subjects in all his writing, “The Wellfleet Oysterman.” Taken together, these two chapters give us a striking glimpse into Cape Cod in the mid-19thcentury, a world quite apart from Concord and the rest of Massachusetts, and one captured with the unique precision and power of which Thoreau was capable.

Next travel story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Travel stories or writing you’d highlight?