Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 91

November 17, 2022: Public Art: The Harriet Wilson Statue

[On November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, DC. So for its 40thanniversary, I’ll AmericanStudy the Wall and four other unique examples of public art. Share your thoughts on these & any other public art projects you’d highlight!]

On how a wonderful recent statue corrects a wrong and makes the case for right (and writing).

I previously wrote about Fern Cunningham’s Harriet Wilson Memorial Sculpture in this post on southern New Hampshire’s phenomenal Black Heritage Trail. Check it out and then come on back for some additional thoughts, please.

Welcome back! Some of the most persistent historical myths I’ve encountered among students up here in Massachusetts/New England (and I have to believe they’re nationwide) is that the state, region, and even the entire North were less racist (if not overtly anti-racist), more anti-slavery, generally more enlightened on such issues than their Southern counterparts. There are all sorts of ways to challenge those myths, including remembering histories like those of Revolutionary-era enslaved people and the 1830s near-lynching of William Lloyd Garrison on the streets of Boston (or, y’know, the late 20thcenturies histories of virulent Bostonian racism). But the stories of individuals can often resonate more intimately and deeply than those of broader historical communities and issues, and there are few individuals whose story more powerfully reveals the layers of racism and prejudice in early 19th century New England than that of Harriet Wilson. This striking statue, like the Harriet Wilson Project that funded it, can help American audiences, including but not at all limited to students, connect to and learn those individual and collective stories.

While Harriet Wilson was certainly victimized by those attitudes and issues, however, she was most definitely not a victim. That was true of her inspiring life, and it was even more true of the most impressive part of that life: her writing and publication of her autobiographical novel Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). That groundbreaking book is one of those that every American student should be exposed to, and an element of her story that the statue foregrounds powerfully through both the key detail of the book in Wilson’s hand (which I think purposefully parallels the child she holds with her other hand—these were her two creations and legacies) and the single word description of Wilson as “Author” on the base. I know it’s the Lit Prof bias in me showing, but I’d say we need more public art of American authors, and there’s no existing statue that I’d point to as a better model than the Harriet Wilson Memorial Sculpture.

Last public art tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other public art projects you’d highlight?

November 16, 2022: Public Art: Two Midwestern Statues

[On November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, DC. So for its 40thanniversary, I’ll AmericanStudy the Wall and four other unique examples of public art. Share your thoughts on these & any other public art projects you’d highlight!]

On the inspiring messages and missing histories of two linked statues.

Sculptor Marshall Fredericks(1908-1998) lived for much of the 20th century, and for much of the century’s second half was the nation’s preeminent creator of public statues and monuments. He created his first such public sculpture, the Levi L. Barbour Memorial Fountain on Detroit’s Belle Isle, in the 1930s, but it was after his time in the Air Force during World War II that Fredericks completed the majority of his numerous, prominent public projects. These include Christ on the Cross at the Indian River (Michigan) Catholic Shrine; The Freedom of the Human Spirit for the 1964 New York World’s Fair (now relocated to near the US Tennis Association’s Arthur Ashe Stadium); the Man and the Expanding Universe Fountain at the US State Department’s Washington, DC headquarters; and the two Midwestern statues on which I’ll focus for the remainder of this post: the Spirit of Detroit at the city’s Coleman A. Young Municipal Center; and the Cleveland War Memorial Fountain: Peace Arising from the Flames of War (also known as the Fountain of Eternal Life).

Both of these beautiful public statues/memorials feature inspiring, spiritual messages that clearly reflect Fredericks’ perspective and voice. Spirit of Detroit, dedicated in 1958, features a plaque that reads, “The artist expresses the concept that God, through the spirit of man is manifested in the family, the noblest human relationship”; in his left and right hands the figure holds symbolic representations of God and the human family, respectively. The War Memorial Fountain, dedicated six years later in 1964, features a central figure escaping the flames of war and reaching for peace, and surrounds him with (per Fredericks’ own statements about the statue) symbolic representations of an interconnected world: a bronze sphere that (like the sphere in the left hand of Spirit) reflects spiritual beliefs and stories; and four granite carvings that embody the world’s civilizations. These overarching messages and ideas would be important and inspiring in any setting, but certainly especially were in the depths of the Cold War, the strife and divisions of the 1960s, and other historical and cultural contexts of that post-war period.

There’s nothing wrong with public memorials and art that present such overarching messages and themes, such universe images and ideals. Yet at the same time, my favorite public statues/memorials, like the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, link broader themes to specific, local histories and conversations, and on that level I’m not sure these two Fredericks statues quite succeed. The War Memorial did include on its framing rim a tribute to the 4000 Greater Clevelanders who gave their lives in WWII and the Korean War (and has since been expanded to include casualties and veterans of other wars as well), which is a definite and important local connection. But outside of those names (and of course every city sent its own soldiers to those and other wars), I would say that both statues could be moved to other sites or cities and have precisely the same messages and themes, largely unaffected by the different contexts. For a war memorial perhaps that’s fitting, as war implicates and affects us all, and task of remembering and mourning is a truly shared one. But for a statue named Spirit of Detroit, I would argue that at least a bit more specific engagement with that particular city’s histories and stories, community and identity, would be a positive addition, one that could complement the inspiring overarching messages and present viewers with a sense of this unique American space at the same time.

Next public art tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other public art projects you’d highlight?

November 15, 2022: Public Art: The Shaw Memorial

[On November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, DC. So for its 40thanniversary, I’ll AmericanStudy the Wall and four other unique examples of public art. Share your thoughts on these & any other public art projects you’d highlight!]

On a historically, culturally, and symbolically crucial statue and monument.

Thanks to Glory, one of the best American historical films of all time, I don’t think there’s too much danger of us leaving the 54thMassachusetts, Robert Gould Shaw, or African American Civil War soldiers out of our national narratives. It’s true that we largely had done so up until the film’s 1989 release, and certainly also true that it’s not necessarily ideal to get our history straight from a Hollywood film (although having read the letters of both Shaw and an African American soldier from the regiment, I can say that this particular film does a very good job of representing that history with complexity and sophistication while still going for the big emotional notes for sure; I look forward to Kevin Levin’s forthcoming Shaw bio for a lot more such contexts). But nonetheless, on a blog devoted first and foremost to American things that we should better remember, the 54th and Shaw probably don’t need as much of a spot as many of my topics.

Yet as impressive and inspiring as the events surrounding the 54thwere—from the formation of the regiment to its climactic moments at South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, and everywhere in between—I would argue that some of the most inspiring moments to come out of those events happened between twenty and thirty years later, with the development and creation of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Boston Common memorial to the regiment and to Shaw (begun in 1884 and unveiled in 1897). The inspiration, then and now, came first from Shaw’s family, who rejected Saint-Gaudens’ initial plans for an equestrian statue of just Shaw and argued instead (echoing Shaw’s father’s insistence that his son remain buried near Fort Wagner with his African American soldiers, rather than being exhumed and moved to a Boston-area cemetery) for a statue that included regimental members as well as their Colonel. And it is a serious understatement to say that Saint-Gaudens ran with that inspiration; he decided to use African American models on which to base his sculptures, becoming (it seems) the first white sculptor to do so for any monument or memorial, and as a result created a memorial that is both grand and intimate, heroic and deeply human.

The first time I saw the Shaw Memorial was as part of a History and Literature seminar in my freshman year of college, and I remember both one of the professors and all of my peers arguing that in it Shaw on horseback was still privileged above (literally and figuratively) the African American soldiers. And I guess I can see that argument (which echoes in part this important book by historian Kirk Savage, perhaps the foremost American scholar of this week’s subject), although Shaw was a Colonel and would have ridden into battle on a horse, so I’d read that detail more as a part of Saint-Gaudens’ attempt at accuracy (especially given the care with which he sculpted those individual African American soldiers). But in any case, the Memorial as a whole, like the process that produced it, and like the men and moment that it captures, represents one of the very best things in our collective history and identity, the collaborative efforts of a multi-generational, multi-racial, and multi-vocal community across decades and in the face of some of the most brutal and tragic events we’ve ever witnessed.

Next public art tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other public art projects you’d highlight?

November 14, 2022: Public Art: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

[On November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, DC. So for its 40thanniversary, I’ll AmericanStudy the Wall and four other unique examples of public art. Share your thoughts on these & any other public art projects you’d highlight!]

On two levels to why the controversial memorial is so important.

Collective memory has always been a serious issue when it comes to Vietnam veterans. As early as the late 1970s and early 1980s, that sizeable American community was seemingly being forgottenand ignored, most especially when it came to our governmental and societal unwillingness to address and help with their far too frequent struggles with issues like illness, mental health, homelessness, and more. Fictional Vietnam vet John Rambo’s moving final speech in First Blood (1982) highlights both those issues and this perception of a forgotten community very fully and powerfully. But that’s also an illustration of another layer to the collective memory problem: as pop culture texts started to push back and offer representations of Vietnam vets, they were just that, pop culture representations. Sometimes they were more thoughtful (I’m a big fan of Bruce Springsteen’s, shockingly), sometimes they were less so (what happened to John Rambo across that first film’s many, increasingly silly sequels, for example), but they were always cultural characters, not the lived experiences and identities of actual Vietnam vets (with occasional exceptions like Born on the 4th of July).

But in the same year that First Blood was in theaters, indeed just three weeks after that film’s October 22nd release, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled on the National Mall. Some veterans and politicians argued that the talented college student’s proposed design (which won a nationwide competition) was too depressing and/or didn’t pay sufficient tribute to the veterans, leading to the addition of Frederick Hart’s statue The Three Soldiers two years later. But I would argue precisely the opposite: I don’t know of any war memorial that pays more focused and specific tribute to soldiers themselves (rather than the broader ideas or shared myths about and behind the war in question, for example). The choice to include the names of every U.S. soldier who had been killed or gone missing in the combat, nearly 58,000 at the time (and the ), was to my mind an absolutely stunning way to focus visitors’ attention on not only that particular, tragic group, but also the more than 2.5 million U.S. servicemen and women who took part in the conflict. That is, seeing each and every one of these names likewise reminds us of all the other names, and makes it far more difficult to forget the service, sacrifices, struggles, and stories of all those veterans.

There’s another layer to that significance as well. I imagine I’ve written before in this space about one of my greatest frustrations with 21st century political rhetoric: the way the phrase “support the troops” has been coopted to mean “support our wars,” even though all too often (if not indeed inevitably) war means mostly very bad things for the troops. (This 2015 James Fallows column made that case very potently.) Far too much of the time, the answer to that from those who (like me) are generally opposed to wars has been to separate from these narratives overall, making it far more difficult for us to express any support for our troops in the process. But the Vietnam Veterans Memorial represents a perfect expression of a third way—a piece of public art that, it seems to me and others, does as a “gash on the landscape” offer a critique of the war itself; and yet one that at precisely the same time expresses the moving support for all of the troops, past and present, about which I wrote in the last paragraph. If that’s true, that would make this not only our best war memorial, but one of the most important pieces of public art in our history.

Next public art tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other public art projects you’d highlight?

November 12-13, 2022: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: My Reflections

[AmericanStudier turns 12 this week! There have been a lot of things that have kept me blogging for the last dozen years, but at the top of the list are all the ways it has connected me to others. That especially means the wonderful Guest Posts I’ve been able to share, more and more in recent years, so this week I’ve shared the 25 most recent such Guest Posts (you can find more at this Guest Posts tab). Leading up to this special post on how I see AmericanStudier here in 2022!]

In some central ways, my life is quite similar today to what it was in November 2010, just a good bit further on down the road: my sons were 4 and 3, while today they’re 16 and 15; I was starting my 6th year at Fitchburg State, while this Fall I’m beginning my 18th; I was working on book two, while right now I’m looking to find a home for book seven; and so on. But there have also been some significant changes, and none bigger than my moves into online writing and public scholarship (a decade-long process and evolution that I talked a lot about in my episode of the wonderful Drafting the Past podcast). Those moves have involved lots of different sites and spaces, with meaningful shifts in and between each of them; but there from the start, important and influential not only in beginning that process but at each and every stage since, and still right here we find AmericanStudier.

That paragraph might read like some sort of conclusion, or at least like I’m preparing to make a change. To be clear, neither of those things are true: I still love working on this blog, sharing it with y’all, and (especially, as I hope the week’s posts made clear) featuring so many other voices on it, and I don’t have any plans to stop or even decrease the quantity. Indeed, the only thing I’d say I definitively hope will happen over the next year will be something that has already begun in the last few months: a continued uptick in how many Guest Posts I’m able to share. Perhaps this is a pipe dream, but I’d love to get to a point where every weekend features a Guest Post, or at least that I have the chance to run 2-3 Guest Posts every month (as has been the case over the last few months). I don’t have too much more to say about that, other than, y’know, reach out if you want to be part of it!

When I make the case for why all scholars should consider blogging and online writing (and I’ve made that a case a lot over the last 12 years, including at length in that aforementioned podcast episode), there are all sorts of factors I point to, from keeping our scholarly work going during busy academic years to making connections and networking to finding starting points for book projects. But I don’t know that I’ve said enough what I want to say here: it’s really fun! There’s no way I’d still be doing this 12 years later if I wasn’t getting a ton of enjoyment out of it, and I sure am; it’s one of my favorite things I get to do, and that includes not just writing the posts (which now happens in batches as I’ve discussed before) but rereading and sharing them each and every day. I know our job is a job, and I’m not trying to minimize those elements of it (especially for the far too many folks in this profession who don’t have the job stability I’m so lucky to have found). But we have to be able to find pleasure in this work too, and for me, there’s no part of my career that has given me more enjoyment than public scholarly blogging. I can’t wait to see where the next dozen years take me, and I’m pretty sure AmericanStudier will be there every step of the way.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whether you’re a brand-new reader or have been in these blogging streets for years, and most especially if you have ideas for Guest Posts, I’d love to hear from you, in comments or by email!

November 11, 2022: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts V

[AmericanStudier turns 12 this week! There have been a lot of things that have kept me blogging for the last dozen years, but at the top of the list are all the ways it has connected me to others. That especially means the wonderful Guest Posts I’ve been able to share, more and more in recent years, so this week I’ll share the 25 most recent such Guest Posts (you can find more at this Guest Posts tab). I’d love to hear your ideas for the next 25, in comments or by email!]

1)      Kent Rose’s Guest Post on How I Got to Nelson Algren

2)      Ariella Archer’s Guest Post on My Scary Thoughts: The Evolution of Three Horror Subgenres

3)      Jeff Renye’s Guest Post on “As Above, So Below”: The Desire to Believe and Forbidden Knowledge in The X-Files

4)      Joe Moser’s Guest Post on Steve McQueen and 12 Years a Slave

5)      Akeia Benard’s Guest Post on the New Bedford Whaling Museum  

Special anniversary post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Ideas for Guest Posts of your own? You know what to do!

November 10, 2022: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts IV

[AmericanStudier turns 12 this week! There have been a lot of things that have kept me blogging for the last dozen years, but at the top of the list are all the ways it has connected me to others. That especially means the wonderful Guest Posts I’ve been able to share, more and more in recent years, so this week I’ll share the 25 most recent such Guest Posts (you can find more at this Guest Posts tab). I’d love to hear your ideas for the next 25, in comments or by email!]

1)      Kate Jewell’s Guest Post on A Love Letter to College Radio

2)      Adam Golub’s Guest Post on Creativity and American Studies

3)      Emily Hamilton-Honey’s Hope-full Guest Post

4)      Laura Franey’s Guest Post on The Keepers

5)      Robin Field’s Guest Post on Toni Morrison & the Rape Novel

Last 5 Guest Posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Ideas for Guest Posts of your own? You know what to do!

November 9, 2022: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts III

[AmericanStudier turns 12 this week! There have been a lot of things that have kept me blogging for the last dozen years, but at the top of the list are all the ways it has connected me to others. That especially means the wonderful Guest Posts I’ve been able to share, more and more in recent years, so this week I’ll share the 25 most recent such Guest Posts (you can find more at this Guest Posts tab). I’d love to hear your ideas for the next 25, in comments or by email!]

1)      Emily Lauer’s Guest Post on Afrofuturism in Museums

2)      Tanya Roth’s Guest Post on “The Real Miss America”

3)      Hettie Williams’ Guest Post on Black Women in America

4)      Sarah Satkowski’s Guest Post on T.C. Boyle

5)      Victoria Scavo’s Guest Post on Gender Roles in Italian American Culture & Literature  

Next 5 Guest Posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Ideas for Guest Posts of your own? You know what to do!

November 8, 2022: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts II

[AmericanStudier turns 12 this week! There have been a lot of things that have kept me blogging for the last dozen years, but at the top of the list are all the ways it has connected me to others. That especially means the wonderful Guest Posts I’ve been able to share, more and more in recent years, so this week I’ll share the 25 most recent such Guest Posts (you can find more at this Guest Posts tab). I’d love to hear your ideas for the next 25, in comments or by email!]

1)      Sarah Stook’s Guest Post on America the Ancient

2)      Hettie Williams’ Guest Post on Beyoncé’s Renaissance

3)      Sydney Kruszka’s Guest Post on Why We Should All Read Maus

4)      Tiffany Chenault’s Guest Post on Boston Marathon RECAP

5)      Kurtis Kendall’s Guest Post on Athlete Activism

Next 5 Guest Posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Ideas for Guest Posts of your own? You know what to do!

November 7, 2022: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts I

[AmericanStudier turns 12 this week! There have been a lot of things that have kept me blogging for the last dozen years, but at the top of the list are all the ways it has connected me to others. That especially means the wonderful Guest Posts I’ve been able to share, more and more in recent years, so this week I’ll share the 25 most recent such Guest Posts (you can find more at this Guest Posts tab). I’d love to hear your ideas for the next 25, in comments or by email!]

1)      Tiffany Wayne’s Guest Post on The Jewel City: Suffrageat the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition

2)      Aidan Railton’s Guest Post on Strava

3)      Anita Siraki’s Guest Post on Interview with the Vampire

4)      Kelly Marino’s Guest Post on The “American Queen”: “Sweetheart” Bracelets, Jewelry Trends, and the World Wars

5)      Michael Walters’ Guest Post on Chaos, Order and Progress, in the First North American Nation

Next 5 Guest Posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Ideas for Guest Posts of your own? You know what to do!

PPS. Since I scheduled this post I was able to share another great Guest Post this past weekend! Here's Anya Jabour's Guest Post on Legionnaire's Disease.