April 30, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: Miss Saigon

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On two bravura sequences which reveal what a musical can do with history, and one definite limitation.

I haven’t had the chance to see a lot of musicals live (Rent is the most notable exception, and remains to this day one of my favorite experiences of live art in any genre/medium), but I did see and enjoy Miss Saigon on Broadway in the mid-1990s. I can’t say I have particularly specific memories of much of it these three decades down the road, but one moment definitely still stands out (as it did at the time as well): the end of Act I, when an actual helicopter (or what sure seemed like one to those of us in the audience) lands on stage at the culmination of a dream sequence about the evacuation from U.S. troops and personnel from South Vietnam in 1975. That was without doubt the most extreme and chaotic thing I’ve seen in a live performance, and I’d say those tones were exactly right for a depiction of what had to be a profoundly chaotic situation on the ground, for the evacuees to be sure but even more so for all those being left behind (like the musical’s heroine Kim, in whose dream about the moment the audience is located).

Nothing else in Miss Saigon was as striking as that helicopter moment, but the second Act does feature its own bravura sequence, one depicting a victory parade of North Vietnamese forces and leaders through the streets of Saigon (juxtaposed with significant and eventually tragic developments for the musical’s South Vietnamese main characters, including Kim and her young son). I don’t remember this moment as clearly by any means, but I do recall a very full stage with its own chaotic cacophony of tones—the celebratory mode of the parade, mixed feelings on behalf of its South Vietnamese audience overall, and an unfolding violent encounter for Kim and those close to her. And that too to my mind captures the multiple layers of the aftermath of the war in South Vietnam and Vietnam as a whole, the varied and contradictory emotions among different communities and even within individuals in such a place and time. Too much of our focus in the U.S. has been on the war and its aftermath from our perspective (understandably, but nonetheless), so there’s a great deal to be said for the musical’s extended focus on Vietnam after the evacuation and fall of Saigon.

A number of late 20^th and early 21^st century musicals have been adaptations of earlier works (Rent is an update of Puccini’s La Bohéme, for example), so it’s not particularly surprising that Miss Saigon was too, in this case an adaptation of another Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly (1904). But I would say that fact reveals a significant problem with Miss Saigon, and not just the obvious that Puccini’s turn of the 20^th century vision of Asia (through his titular Japanese heroine and the opera’s settings alike) is quite outdated at best and Orientalist at worst. After all, even if it weren’t, it’s set in Japan around 1900, not Vietnam in 1975, and there’s simply no way that an adaptation of a work about the former could ever be as specific to the histories of the latter as would be ideal for any work of historical fiction. I don’t know that a central goal of Miss Saigon is doing complex justice to those histories necessarily—but given how much better we still need to remember the end and aftermath of the Vietnam War, I’m glad for the ways this musical can help us do so, and frustrated by its storytelling limitations.  

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?

April 29, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: First Blood

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On what an iconic film speech gets wrong about the end of the war, and what it gets very right.

I’ve written a few times previously in this space about First Blood (1982), and specifically about John Rambo’s final speech to his Vietnam War Colonel about his experiences during and after that conflict. I’d ask you to check out both that prior post and that clip of Rambo’s speech (if you don’t already know it), and then come on back for a couple more thoughts.

Welcome back! One frustrating part of Rambo’s speech is his reference to the myth of spitting protesters, which as I discuss at length in that hyperlinked post (quoting Jerry Lembcke’s excellent book The Spitting Image) seems pretty clearly to have been invented long after the fact (around the time of First Blood, in fact). But in terms of the end of the war, I think his angry assertion that “I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win!” is equally inaccurate and dangerous. I have to imagine that he’s referring to ideas like that of the controversial General Curtis LeMay, who wanted to “bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.” I don’t think many (if any) military strategists or historians believe such actions would have “won” the war, but rather would have just caused infinitely more death and destruction while turning the Vietnamese people even more fully against the United States. And in any case, to my mind the Vietnam War’s trajectory and ending weren’t in the slightest about what “somebody” would or wouldn’t “let” the U.S. forces do—and defining the war as such both removes all agency from the Vietnamese and suggests that mass death and destruction would have been preferable.

So I don’t think Rambo’s final speech gets the end of the war right, and I think it likewise gives into mythic us-vs.-them depictions of anti-war protesters. But one thing this scene (and certainly Stallone’s excellent performance in it) captures quite powerfully is the PTSD that so many returning Vietnam vets suffered from, the impact of their experiences and memories on their (already challenging and fraught) lives back on the homefront. The speech’s tearful final lines, including such phrases as “I can’t get it out of my head,” “sometimes I wake up and I dunno where I am,” and “I dream of it every day for seven years,” puts a profoundly human face and voice to those veterans’ issues—and the fact that that face and voice belong to the badass physician specimen and warrior-type that was the young Sylvester Stallone only adds to our recognition that these challenges can and did happen to everyone. While the end of the Vietnam War meant many things, here in the U.S. that’s what it truly meant, what all these vets brought home with them—and First Blood gets that note very right.

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?

April 28, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: The Mayaguez Incident

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On how a maritime crisis turned military conflict can be connected to the war’s end, and how it should be separated from it.

Each of the other posts in this week’s series will focus on a cultural work—two films, a musical, and a song, although not in that order so you’ll have to keep reading I suppose!—that depicts the historical events around the end of the Vietnam War, but today’s subject was a very real historical event in its own right. On May 12^th, 1975, the American merchant ship the SS Mayaguez was seized in disputed Southeast Asian waters by forces of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian junta that had taken control of that nation’s government less than a month before (toppling the US-supported Khmer Republic in the process). The U.S. Marines mounted a rescue operation, retook the ship, and besieged the nearby island of Koh Tang where the hostages were wrongly believed to be held, but were met with intense resistance by Khmer Rouge forces. After extensive and destructive battles with the Khmer Rouge that left dozens of Americans dead and many more wounded, the Marines were evacuated on May 15; the Khmer Rouge would themselves release the unharmed hostages.

While the initial seizure of the ship didn’t necessarily have to do with the end of the Vietnam War a couple weeks before (the Mayaguez was apparently much closer to Cambodian/Khmer-controlled waters than it should have been), it’s impossible to say that the timing of the incident overall was coincidental. In his book The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (2002), historian Ralph Wetterhahn traces just how focused President Gerald Ford and his National Security Council were on perceptions of the U.S. military and America as a whole in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal of troops from not only South Vietnam, but also Cambodia (which had been its own evacuation operation but one closely tied to the Vietnam evacuation). In his book The Mayaguez Crisis, Mission Command, and Civil-Military Relations (2018), military historian Christopher Lamb quotes Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as arguing, “this will be seen as a test case,” and adding, “I think a violent response is in order.” There can be no doubt that the administration saw the incident as a chance to rewrite the narrative of the Vietnam War’s conclusion—nor that the rescue’s failures would instead amplify those images.

If that’s how the Mayaguez incident was perceived in its own moment, it certainly has to be part of how we remember this history. But the main reason why I wanted to include this real historical event in a weeklong series focused on cultural texts is that I think it’s important to add that this vision of the Mayaguez is likewise a narrative frame, rather than an intrinsic layer to the events themselves. While the U.S. had attacked Cambodia in the course of the Vietnam War (illegally attacked, I should add), the two nations were of course in actuality entirely distinct, and moreover the Khmer Rouge saw the North Vietnamese (as of April 1975 just the Vietnamese) regime as an enemy (and the two nations would in fact go to war a few years later, contributing to the end of the Khmer Rouge’s rule). Moreover, while it’s questionable at best whether the North Vietnamese regime were “the bad guys” in the Vietnam War (I’d personally put Henry Kissinger at the top of that list), the Khmer Rouge were quite simply one of the most brutal regimes of the 20^th century, making the U.S. conflict with them quite distinct from the morass that was the Vietnam War. All reminders that our narratives for historical events are often, if not always, just that.

Next portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight? 

April 26-27, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter

[125 years ago this weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to this special birthday post on Richter himself!]

On what’s expected in Richter’s bio, what’s a good bit less so, and what to make of the combo.

Many of the details in Charles Richter’s (1900-1985) biography read like you would expect for a famous scientist overall and a prominent earthquake scientist in particular: grew up in Southern California and attended Stanford as an undergrad and Cal Tech as a grad student; after a brief stint at the Carnegie Institute for Science in DC returned to California to work at the new Seismology Laboratory in Pasadena under the renowned German-American seismologist Beno Gutenberg; while together there the pair of them collaborated in 1932 on a new standard scale to measure earthquakes (with Richter apparently the lead developer, given that the scale was and remains named after him specifically); and then a few years later, in 1937, Richter returned to Cal Tech and taught and researched there for the rest of his career. Impressive to be sure, but not a note different from what we might have drafted with only the knowledge that he was a seismologist who gave his name to a groundbreaking (last time this week, I promise) scientific measurement.

That might still be true of this more quirky detail from his Linda Hall Library bio (authored by History Professor and Hall Library Consultant William B. Ashworth Jr.): “in 1966, when he was 66, he saw his first Star Trek episode and was hooked; he became an ardent Trekkie and kept careful notes on every one of the 79 original episodes of Star Trek that aired between 1966 and 1969.” Not exactly rocket science (sorry, sorry) to imagine that a scientist would be fascinated by this innovative and quite scientific (as such things go) sci fi show. But that same paragraph opens this way: “Since the first full-scale biography of Richter appeared a few years ago, Richter is now known for a few other things besides his scale. He and his wife Linda were ardent nudists in the 1930s and 40s, when nudist camps were a brand-new American phenomenon. Richter also seems to have had a secret passion for his biological sister, Margaret.” “So Richter was clearly not your typical seismologist,” the paragraph concludes, in what I’d have to call an understatement.

I’m not sharing those latter details in an attempt to be salacious, I promise (and indeed, I’d say going to nudist camps with your wife isn’t particularly salacious; the sister detail is of course different, and I won’t pretend to know anything more than what I’ve shared). In part it’s that I learned them while researching this post, and I couldn’t imagine not including them once I had done so. But I’d say they and Richter’s bio overall prompts an interesting AmericanStudies kind of question: what are our rights and/or our responsibilities when it comes to personal details for public figures, particularly those who have passed away? Neither the nudism nor the potential incest have the slightest bit to do with why we know Richter’s name; but if knowing his name makes us want to learn about the man, then we’re likely to find such details, or at least personal details that go far beyond whatever the public starting points might be. I’m not going to come up with an answer to all of this in my last couple lines here, but I’ll just add this: public figures are also complicated private humans, like every last one of us, and that’s a lesson well worth learning every chance we get.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?

April 25, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Movies

[125 years ago this coming weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]

On takeaways from three blockbuster films about catastrophic quakes.

1)      Earthquake (1974): I wrote in this post about the long history of disaster films (one of the most enduring genres of blockbusters, in fact), and there’s never been a moment more full of such movies than the 1970s. Indeed, production on Earthquake was rushed in order to try to beat a competing disaster film, The Towering Inferno, into theaters, and Earthquake did come out about a month before Inferno so mission accomplished there. But what really makes Earthquake stand out is its use of a groundbreaking (bad pun once again intended) theatrical technology, “Sensurround,” in order to help audiences truly feel the titular disaster. Given that the film features a scene (available at the first hyperlink above) set in a movie theatre during the earthquake, I can imagine that the blurring of art and reality would have gotten real complicated for at least Southern California audiences.

2)      The Great Los Angeles Earthquake (1990): In his review of this film (which he calls The Big One, an alternate title), Washington Post critic Tom Shales explicitly connected it to the 1974 film, noting that, “bad as it is, [it] does seem an improvement over the 1974 theatrical release Earthquake, which also fantasized the destruction of L.A.” But what interests me most about the 1990 film is that it was made-for-TV, and yet clearly intended to be just as much of a blockbuster as that prior theatrical release—the 1990 film cost more than $9 million, was made over a three-year period, included sequences filmed at the same Universal Studios lot where Earthquake had been filmed, and so on. There’s been a lot written in recent years, quite rightly, about the shift from film to TV (including in how films themselves get distributed and viewed), but this blockbuster TV movie from 1990 reminds us that that process has been a multi-decade one to be sure.

3)      San Andreas (2015): Hollywood was far from done with big-screen blockbuster disaster movies, of course, as reflected by this 2015 film about a catastrophic quake that hits the San Francisco Bay Area, starring blockbuster big guy Dwayne Johnson himself (among many others in an over-stuffed cast as is typical for the genre). I don’t know that there’s too much more to say about this particular film, but I’d note that, to my knowledge, there hasn’t yet been a feature film made about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, a real-life disaster that was (as I wrote in Monday’s post) as full of compelling stories as any imaginary one could be. I know that period pieces can be trickier, and generally are a distinct genre from disaster films—but if we’re gonna keep telling these stories, we might as well engage with the real ones.

Richter post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?

April 24, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Haiti in 2010

[125 years ago this coming weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]

On two distinct but interconnected ways to AmericanStudy a Caribbean catastrophe.

First things first (and I know I offer this disclaimer often when I write about global events and issues, but I think it bears repeating each and every time): the horrific earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010 is a specific event and history, our understandings of and engagements with which must be centered on that island nation and its people. The hundreds of thousands of Haitians killed and millions more uprooted, the hundreds of thousands of destroyed or severely damaged homes and other buildings (including the National Palace), the urgent and still in many ways ongoing humanitarian crises that resulted from all those and many more effects; these tragedies have to be framed and responded to as centrally and fundamentally Haitian, and nothing I say on an AmericanStudies blog is meant to redirect or minimize that attention.

Yet of course the United States is linked to the rest of the world, and in some specific cases it’s even more clearly and significantly connected in ways that demand we also engage such global stories in terms of what they help us see in ourselves. I’m not sure there’s any other nation of which that’s more true than Haiti: from its early 19^th century Revolution and the both inspiring and fraught effects of that event in the Early Republic U.S.; to the striking number of 20^th century moments in which the U.S. directly intervened in Haitian politics, including an extended (nearly two-decade, in fact) occupation early in the century and an ambiguous but unquestionable influence on a coup at the turn of the next century; the United States and Haiti have played as prominent a role in each other’s histories over the last couple centuries as any two Western Hemisphere nations. When the U.S. helped spearhead relief and recovery efforts after the quake, particularly the January 22^nd “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon, that role has to be understood as in some way connected to these longstanding relationships—whether a continuation of US interventions, guilt for that history, or some combination of the two and other factors as well.

But that’s not the only way to AmericanStudy the U.S.’s role in the earthquake’s aftermath, and I would say it’s at least as meaningful to understand this moment as part of a humanitarian foreign policy alternative to those histories of global intervention and realpolitik influence. No American political leader embodied that humanitarian perspective better than President Jimmy Carter (RIP), and Carter was of course still doing that humanitarian work long after his presidency, including in Haiti with those affected by the earthquake. And while that humanitarian perspective and role can and should be extended anywhere in the world, it’s perhaps especially meaningful in a Western Hemisphere context—given the U.S.’s history of interventions and interference, but also and maybe even more importantly given the concept of creolization, of the ways in which we can even more fully parallel the histories, communities, and identities of nations like the U.S. and Haiti. In at least some ways, that is, the 2010 earthquake hit us as well.

Last quake tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?

April 23, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: The Indian Ocean in 2004

[125 years ago this coming weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]

On three cultural works that can help us remember one of the most devastating natural disasters in recorded human history.

1)      Paint the Sky with Stars (2005): This poetry collection, edited by British author Stephen Robert Kuta, brought together the voices of those directly affected by the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami alongside many other poets and artists. All proceeds from the book’s publication went to the Tsunami Relief Fund, making it a worthwhile project to support in any case. But I would add that, while some of the poems do represent a frustratingly external (ie, Western) view of the tragedy, many were indeed authored by folks from the countries most affected, offering a vital view into those communities and experiences.

2)      “12/26” (2006): Speaking of complicatedly Western perspectives, the idea of a white American singer-songwriter writing a song which features (in part) the point of view of a non-white young woman whose family and community were destroyed by the tsunami is, to say the least, a fraught starting point. But I think Kimya Dawson walked that line pretty effectively, balancing that distinct perspective with her own point of view, details of the tragedy and its effects with critiques of the US government and response, first-hand experiences with second-hand but still related issues, and more. I was glad to learn about this song while researching this post, and plan to return to it.

3)      The Impossible (2012): A Hollywood film featuring two current mega-stars (Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) and a young actor who would soon become one (Tom Holland in his first on-screen role) was bound to come down on a particular side of that aforementioned cultural line, and there’s no doubt that a good bit of this film focuses on the experiences of the white tourist family at its center. But as I remember it (I saw it not long after it came out), it did both depict the tsunami with striking realism and portray its effects on local communities with depth and pathos—and since the film likely wouldn’t have been made without the initial star power, it’s fair to say that it represents at least a better-case scenario for how global cultural works can engage with this tragic quake and its aftermaths.

Next quake tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?

April 22, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Three Other California Quakes

[125 years ago this coming weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]

On one striking detail about each of three quakes that followed the 1906 disaster on which I focused in yesterday’s post.

1)      San Fernando in 1971: Perhaps the worst quake to hit California since 1906, this hugely destructive disaster was also (as that hyperlinked website highlights at length) strikingly productive, resulting in a number of new policies, laws, and research programs that substantially improved the state’s infrastructure and disaster readiness. I’d point in particular to the Earthquake Clearinghouse, a groundbreaking resource (bad pun intended, but also it really was and is) that has become a model for how multiple scientists and organizations can share information and ideas.

2)      The Bay Area in 1989: No amount of preparation or readiness could prevent earthquakes from occurring, of course, and the next major one would hit the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area (the first major quake in that region since 1906) in October 1989. Like the 1906 quake, this one’s epicenter was on the San Andreas fault, which to my understanding remains the most fragile site for such disasters to this day. But for this AmericanStudier, as I’m sure for many Americans then and since, what made this quake truly stand out was its impact on the World Series, the first and to date only that featured the two Bay Area teams—and which was delayed for a week due to the quake.

3)      Northridge in 1994: To come full circle to my first item, this catastrophic Southern California quake was particularly ironic because it came four years after the California Legislature passed  the Seismic Hazards Mapping Act of 1990. As with most bureaucratic processes, the actual such mapping had proceeded slowly, and likely had not been able to take much effect by the time of this January 1994 quake (which would be, perhaps unrelatedly but perhaps not, the costliest earthquake in US history). In any case, this disaster certainly sped up the mapping and zoning processes, and in the decades since Northridge a great deal of Southern California and the state overall have been assessed and developed to make them safer before the next big one.

Next quake tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?

April 21, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: San Francisco in 1906

[125 years ago this coming weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]

On two distinct, equally inspiring communal responses to one of our most destructive disasters.

The April 18^th, 1906 earthquake that struck the coast of Northern California, with a particular locus of the San Francisco Bay Area, was itself a particularly destructive one, measuring 7.8 on the Richter Scale and hitting the maximum level of Mercalli intensity of XI (both of those measures were developed in the 1930s, and so have been applied retroactively to estimate the quake’s force and effects). But it was the fires that developed throughout the city in the quake’s aftermath—some started by firefighters themselves while dynamiting buildings to create firebreaks; others supposedly started by homeowners seeking insurance payouts; but most simply the effects of a natural disaster on a largely wooden city—that produced the most widespread destruction; by the times those fires died down several days later, an estimated 80% of San Francisco had been destroyed. Well more than half of the city’s population of 410,000 were left homeless by the quake and fires, with refugee camps in areas such as the Presidio and Golden Gate Park still in operation two years later. Although the relatively new technology of photography and the very new technology of film allowed the quake’s effects to be catalogued more overtly than for any prior disaster, amplifying the destruction’s public visibility, by any measure and with or without such records the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was one of America’s most horrific natural disasters.

No amount of inspiring responses to that tragedy can ameliorate its horrors and destructions, and I don’t intend for the next two paragraphs to do so. Yet in the aftermath of the earthquake, San Francisco communities did respond to it in a couple of distinct but equally compelling and inspiring ways. In the quake’s immediate aftermath, the city’s residents began to set up emergency procedures and services with striking speed and effectiveness, a process documented and celebrated by none other than William James. The pioneering American psychologist and scholar was teaching at nearby Stanford at the time, and, after waking up to the earthquake, managed to journey into San Francisco later that day and to observe at length the city’s and community’s ongoing responses to the quake. He detailed those observations in Chapter IX, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in 1911 book Memories and Studies, describing what he saw as “a temper of helpfulness beyond the counting” and noting that, while “there will doubtless be a crop of nervous wrecks before the weeks and months are over, … meanwhile the commonest men [used in a gender-neutral way, I believe], simply because they are men, will go on, singly and collectively, showing this admirable fortitude of temper.” While not all American disasters have produced that same communal spirit (as we’ll see later in the week’s series), it does represent a consistent historical thread, and James’s observations ring true across many such moments.

The other inspiring response to the earthquake came from a more specific San Francisco community, and represented an opportunity to challenge a discriminatory and unjust law. By 1906 the Chinese Exclusion Act and its many subsequent extensions had been in operation for a quarter century, leading to both the detention and exclusion of Chinese arrivals and numerous hardships for existing Chinese American families and communities (such as San Francisco’s century-old Chinatown). When the 1906 fires destroyed numerous public birth records, members of those Chinese and Chinese American communities saw a chance to resist and circumvent those laws, and the concept of the “paper sons” was born. Current Chinese American men and families would produce fraudulent birth documents, whether for children born in China or to be sold or given to other unrelated young men, in order to claim them as having been born in America and thus U.S. citizens (itself certainly a fraught category for this community, but one to which, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1898’s United States vs. Wong Kim Ark decision, the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship still applied). Despite its unequivocal horrors and losses, then, the 1906 earthquake allowed for the city’s and nation’s Chinese American community to continue and grow despite the Exclusion era’s xenophobic limitations, a positive and inspiring outcome to be sure.

Next quake tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?

April 19-20, 2025: Kyle Railton’s Guest Post on the OJ Simpson Trial

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to this repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Hey everyone, my name is Kyle Railton and I am an upcoming senior in high school. As you can tell by my last name, I am the son of the legendary professor Ben Railton, and writing for my dad’s blog has been on my bucket list for a while, so it is an honor to get the chance! I have been semi-interested in the O.J. Simpson trial for some time, hearing occasional things about how he was guilty, the lawyers messed up, the gloves, etc., but I only became very invested in the past year, when I began a school project about the case. It was in my American Legal Studies class, and I chose to read The Run of His Life, the book by Jeffery Toobin, which quickly fascinated me about every aspect of the case: the media, lawyers, drama, and especially the defendant–O.J. Simpson.  

As I continued to learn more about the case, a couple of parts of the case bothered me the most. I will preface this by stating that I do believe that O.J. committed the crime, despite the mistakes from the prosecution and the alternate theories proposed by the dream team. Firstly, I believe that the trial did not deliver justice, as America’s justice system is supposed to do, implied by the name. One of the main focuses of the American Legal elective I took this past school year was to study what justice was, and how courts are expected to promote justice through application of the law. However, I saw this entire case, specifically the outcome, as not proper justice, because many external factors influenced the not guilty verdict. For example, the media played a crucial role since the discovery of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, negatively affecting and manipulating perceptions of the trial to the public, even before the jury was selected. Many people saw the police as “mistreating” O.J. Simpson when rather the LAPD had treated O.J. Simpson like royalty many times in the past, and he was close with many officers. Additionally, race was almost certainly a deciding factor in the case, which was exacerbated by the media and constant coverage of the case. While it is obvious that Mark Furhman was extremely racist–a nazi even–and the LAPD has a horrific history of racial prejudice and police brutality, these facts had nothing to do with O.J. Simpson’s case. As mentioned in Toobin’s book, they were specifically used as the “race card” to get Simpson free. The reason I see this as a massive injustice is because there is lots of racial profiling in the court system and police forces across America, but this case was not an instance of racist police officers framing an African American man. Now, it is completely understandable why many would believe that the LAPD framed O.J., but this use of the “race card” only opens the world up to criticism when actual racist incidents come, as they too often do because then Americans claim that it is just another use of the “race card.” I remember a hilarious quote from a show I watched with my family based on the O.J. trial, which goes something like, “O.J. Simpson is the first defendant to get acquitted because he is Black!” Race has never been a black-and-white subject in America, and while it is unfortunately impossible to change the past and convict O.J. Simpson, it is possible to build and grow as a nation, which starts with learning from the history of America’s complicated justice system. 

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any responses I can pass along to Kyle!

April 18, 2025: Kyle Contexts: Chinchillas

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Three ways to contextualize my son’s favorite animal (and one of the cutest out there, just objectively, you know it’s true).

1)      Exotic pets: I wrote a good bit in that post on ostrich racing on both exotic pets overall and my sons’ interest in them in particular (focusing there on alpacas, another favorite of the boys’ and one featured at my wedding!). I certainly get critiques of exotic animal fads, such as the pot-bellied pigs a few decades back who ended up being left at shelters or just abandoned altogether far too often. But in truth, chinchillas are not radically different from many other rodents frequently kept as pets, from guinea pigs to hamsters to gerbils and more. Yes, they require a bit of specialized care, but every animal is unique in its needs. And the benefits more than speak for themselves.

2)      Fur is murder: Most of the chinchillas in the world these days are indeed kept as pets, as both of the chinchilla species in the wild have become extremely endangered. There are a few reasons, but by far the most significant is hunting for their fur, which has been prized for items like coats for a long time. (Even Jay-Z references chinchilla fur as the gold standard in his rap verse on his wife Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.”) I’d like to think that we’ve all realized here in 2025 that fur is indeed murder, but just in case not: the only place chinchilla fur should be found is on chinchillas.

3)      Animal Adventures: Young Kyle had been a fan of chinchillas for a while before he had the chance to meet one in person, but when he did it took things to a whole ‘nother level. That was thanks to the folks at this local animal rescue business, and specifically to their featured exhibit at the awesome Kimball Farms in Westford, MA. When they let Kyle take part in a performance and hold a chinchilla on his head (as well as in his arms, natch), my younger son’s fondness for not just this particular animal, but all cute animals, was truly cemented—and despite his thoroughly mature 18 year old self, that fondness remains, one of so many things I love about him.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!

April 17, 2025: Kyle Contexts: Track & Field Fighters

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

In honor of a track career which has faced way more than its share of setbacks (from all of which Kyle has bounced back and then some), quick hits on five moments when track & field stars fought the good fight.

1)      Jim Thorpe: Being a Native American athlete brought up on a reservation who became known as the greatest American athlete of the 20^th century would be more than enough to earn Jim Thorpe a spot on this list, as would his genuine successes at more than a few distinct sports. But for a post on track & field fielders, I’ll highlight the story—hard to confirm, but I’m very willing to believe it—that the reason Thorpe is wearing two different shoes in pictures from the 1912 Olympics is that his were stolen and so he found two mismatched ones in the trash and wore them when he set hugely longstanding records in the decathlon.

2)      Babe Didrikson Zaharias: I wrote about Zaharias’s Olympic track & field achievements at the 1932 Games (when she was known as Babe Didrikson), among many other inspiring layers to her sports successes, in that hyperlinked post. Her fight was against the kind of sexism that led sportswriter Joe Williams to write, as I noted in that post, that “it would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up, and waited for the phone to ring.” Don’t hold your breath, Joe.

3)      Jesse Owens: I don’t know that I can detail Owens’s track & field fights, triumphs, and tragedies any more clearly than I did in that hyperlinked Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. Check it out and c’mon back!

4)      Mexico City: Like many other commentators have over the last decade, in that hyperlinked post I linked Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s 1968 Black Power protest to Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 anthem protests. But while I stand by that comparison, it’s important that we not minimize how much more danger Smith and Carlos were putting themselves in—Kaepernick has faced countless consequences for his courageous stand, but in 1968 (as throughout the decade) African American leaders were being murdered left and right by white supremacist domestic terrorists. There are few braver protests in our history.

5)      Caster Semenya: Semenya’s story is far more multilayered than I can do justice to in this brief space, but the simple and crucial fact is this: due to aspects of her specific human body, ones that are no different from Michael Phelps’s extra-long wingspan or any number of other quirks possessed by great athletes, Semenya has been targeted time and again by both transphobic hate and official sanctions. That she has consistently fought back and continued to compete and to do so at the highest level makes her a fighter any track & field athlete, and any human for that matter, should be inspired by.

Last context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!

April 16, 2025: Kyle Contexts: Musical Crossovers

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Kyle is a big fan of Kane Brown (whom he and his brother recently got to see in concert!), and also has a personal playlist that moves smoothly between hard-core rap, hip hop, and country, so I wanted to dedicate this post to highlighting a handful of examples of historic musical crossovers:

1)      Popera Performances: Perhaps the most striking crossover genre is popera, a form that combines one of the oldest enduring forms of musical performance with one of its most overtly contemporary. That hyperlinked last.fm page highlights many of the individual artists who have embodied this combinatory cultural medium, but I would also note that many popera performances feature duets between artists in each respective genre. Either way, popera represents what’s possible when genres truly crossover.

2)      Anthrax and Rap: At a very, very different place on the crossover spectrum is Anthrax, a heavy metal band who had been profoundly influenced by rap & hip hop, incorporated those genres into their own music, and then produced pioneering collaborations such as their song with rap legends Public Enemy. Much is (rightly) made of Aerosmith and Run-DMC’s collab, but that a remix of an exiting song, while Anthrax’s multilayered crossovers and collabs were original and to my mind even more groundbreaking.

3)      Jones Jazzes Up Pop: These next two are just individual artists whose music crosses generic boundaries. Jazz and pop have been crossing over since at least Louis Armstrong (and we could say since Scott Joplin himself), but in the 21^st century no artist embodies that crossover combination better than Norah Jones. Through nine studio albums and a great deal more, Jones have brought the worlds and audiences of jazz and pop together in groundbreaking ways, creating profoundly American music in the process.

4)      Lil Nas Xplodes: It’s not a hierarchy nor a competition, but I’d say that a crossover between hip hop and country is even more profoundly American (or at least more rare), though. We’ve seen a variety of such crossover artists as well as songs in recent years, with Kane Brown himself high on the list. But no hip hop-country crossover artist and song achieved more success, nor as I wrote in the hyperlinked post at the start of this entry generated more controversy, than did Lil Nas X and “Old Town Road.” And honestly, if he’s making white racists mad, he’s doing exactly what crossovers should do.

5)      Parton Rocks Out: This is a simpler one—I just really love that country (and American, and universal) legend Dolly Parton recently released an album of rock and roll originals and covers, and by all counts it is phenomenal. Not sure it’ll end up on Kyle’s playlist, but it’s definitely on mine!

Next context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!

April 15, 2025: Kyle Contexts: The ACLU

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Three significant stages in the evolution of the nation’s preeminent civil rights organization (and one with which my blossoming future lawyer and/or activist of a younger son has connected in multiple ways over the last few years):

1)      1910s and 20s Origins: The ACLU evolved out of another organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which was founded during World War I (or the Great War, as it was then known) to defend anti-war speech and conscientious objectors among other causes. The official co-founders were Crystal Eastman and Roger Nash Baldwin, but original members also included such luminaries as Jane Addams, Helen Keller, Felix Frankfurter, and the dissenting anti-war Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. Its WWI activisms certainly put the NLCB (which Baldwin renamed the ACLU in 1920 when he became its sole director) on the map, but it was its central role in the Scopes Trial (about which I blogged a few weeks ago) which truly launched the organization into national prominence.

2)      Japanese incarceration: I wrote at length in my book We the People about the role that Baldwin and the ACLU played in the early opposition to the Japanese incarceration policy, leading up to their key role in all of the major court cases opposing that policy, from the unsuccessful but influential Korematsu v. United States to the successful and even more influential Ex parte Endo. While in hindsight it might be easy to see those efforts as right (although these days I’m not at all sure that’d be a shared perspective), it’s important to note that Japanese incarceration was quite popular in its era, supported by a significant majority of Americans, and indeed seen by many as part of the war effort, making opposition to it potentially treasonous as well as unpopular. But the ACLU pursued that opposition nonetheless, to my mind one of the most courageous organizational actions of the 20^th century.

3)      Loving v. Virginia: A couple decades later, the ACLU took another unpopular and courageous stand, if perhaps one that also reflected a changing society that was coming around to the organization’s civil liberties and rights emphases. When young Black woman Mildred Jeter Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help staying together with her white husband Richard Loving despite Virginia’s laws prohibiting their marriage, Kennedy referred the couple to the ACLU, who represented them in their landmark Supreme Court case. Given that I grew up in Virginia and that my sons are the product of an interracial marriage, it’s fair to say that this item represents a truly multilayered context for Kyle!

Next context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!

April 14, 2025: Kyle Contexts: Younger Siblings

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Kyle is a younger sibling to a very impressive older brother, a situation which it seems to me often leads the younger sibling to carve out their own identity and future very fully (and certainly has for Kyle). Here are a few prior posts where I highlighted such badass sibling duos and dynamics:

1)      Henry and William James

2)      Serena and Venus Williams

3)      Angelina and Sarah Grimké

Next context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!

April 12-13, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Fellow GatsbyStudiers

[On April 10^th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have my problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and important novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’ve highlighted a handful of them, leading up to this weekend post featuring fellow GatsbyStudiers!]

Four great public scholarly takes on Fitzgerald’s novel, and a request for more!

1)      Matthew Teutsch: My friend and online collaborator Matthew has written about Fitzgerald’s novel multiple times, but I particularly enjoyed the chance to read this multi-part account (part two is linked at the bottom) of his excellent Fulbright lecture on the book (and not because he engages so thoughtfully with my own takes, although I sure do appreciate that).

2)      Stephanie Powell Watts: In that lecture Matthew also engages with Watts’s take on the book in this LitHub piece, which remains one of the single most thoughtful intersections of autobiography and analysis I’ve ever encountered. A must-read!

3)      Wesley Morris: Morris’s intro to the 2021 Modern Library edition of the novel, reprinted by The Paris Review at that hyperlink, is also a must-read (honestly all four of these pieces are for anyone who wants to engage with Fitzgerald’s novel beyond its own stunning prose). I particularly like that he doesn’t take for granted our reading of the book—yes, it’s often assigned by teachers, including me, but we should still think long and hard about why we read it, as Morris models so thoughtfully here.

4)      Jillian Cantor: I tried to engage with Daisy Buchanan a lot and Myrtle Wilson a bit in my earlier posts this week, but there’s still much more to say about women in Fitzgerald’s novel, and Cantor’s LitHub piece says a great deal very powerfully.

5)      Add your suggestions (including your own work) here!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts, yours or others’?