July 31, 2025: Echoes of Bad Presidents: Andrew Johnson

[On July 31, 1875, Andrew Johnson died. Johnson is one of our worst presidents, which means he also reminds me a lot of our current and very worst one. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy echoes of some of our worst presidents in Trump 2.0!]

On how our worst prior president both does and doesn’t echo our very worst one.

In this August 2018 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column I made the case for some of the many reasons to define Andrew Johnson as the worst president in American history. Once again I’d ask you to check out that prior piece and then come on back for further thoughts.

Welcome back! As I hope every detail of that column made very clear (even if I didn’t say it overtly, which is my Post editor’s preference and one I respect), impeachment proceedings are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the links between Johnson’s historic awfulness and Trump’s strong competition with him for the crown of worst president ever. Moreover, it’s my understanding that Trump doesn’t drink, which makes his nonsensical rambling speeches even more striking than those of the (apparently, at least occasionally) inebriated Johnson. Also, Johnson’s final public remarks (during his brief time as a Senator before his death from a stroke 150 years ago today) were an extremist, white supremacist attack on his successor, President Ulysses S. Grant, and who among us can imagine Trump going out any other way?

As that Senate service indicates, Johnson didn’t go quietly into that good night when he lost his reelection bid to Grant in 1868. But he also didn’t run for president again, limiting the catastrophic damage of his historically awful presidency to one term (and an abbreviated one at that, since he took office in April 1865 when Lincoln was assassinated). I’ve written elsewhere in this space about what we lost when we were denied a second Lincoln term and got Andrew Johnson instead, so it’s only fair to note what we were spared when Grant helped his departed friend Abe out and made sure we only got one Johnson term. Unfortunately, neither Joe Biden nor anyone else were able to do the same when it came to a second Trump term, and so here, 150 years after the death of our other worst president, we fucking are.

Last baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 30, 2025: Echoes of Bad Presidents: William McKinley

[On July 31, 1875, Andrew Johnson died. Johnson is one of our worst presidents, which means he also reminds me a lot of our current and very worst one. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy echoes of some of our worst presidents in Trump 2.0!]

On how tariffs reflect multiple layers of bad presidents, past and present.

Once again, I’ll ask you to start this post by checking out a prior one: this November 2015 post on William McKinley’s badnesses. Take a look if you would, and then come on back.

Welcome back! As I traced in that post, much of the worst of McKinley’s presidency can be connected to his full embrace of imperialism, whether in the Philippines (and everywhere else the Spanish-American War was fought) or in Hawaii. Such global imperial goals were relatively new for the US in the era, at least as official federal foreign policy, and it’s impossible to separate them from another central emphasis of McKinley’s administration: tariffs. McKinley had been a champion of that restrictive type of trade and economic measure since his authorship of the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 while serving in the House of Representatives, and he brought that perspective with him to the White House in 1897, dubbing himself “a tariff man, standing on a tariff platform.”  

As that last hyperlinked article notes, that phrase could easily have been uttered by our current president about his own, even more extreme reliance on tariffs here in the opening months of his second term (a perspective Trump overtly linked to McKinley in his second inaugural address). Which is particularly ironic and telling given that in the past Trump has criticized imperialist ventures like the 2^nd Iraq War and made the case for less U.S. involvement in the world beyond our borders. This time around, from noises about annexing Canada and Greenland to plans to retake the Panama Canal, Trump has revealed himself to be a full-throated imperialist, and his extremist tariff policies have to be seen as part of that larger project, just as they were for William McKinley 125 years ago. Shortly before his assassination, however, McKinley dramatically changed his tune on tariffs. Hard to imagine this even worse president doing the same.

Next baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 29, 2025: Echoes of Bad Presidents: James Buchanan

[On July 31, 1875, Andrew Johnson died. Johnson is one of our worst presidents, which means he also reminds me a lot of our current and very worst one. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy echoes of some of our worst presidents in Trump 2.0!]

On one more obvious and one more subtle echo of Buchanan in 2025.

I imagine each first paragraph this week will be a request to check out a prior post, and that’s true today. Please take a look at this October 2022 post on Buchanan’s badness if you would, and then come on back for more.

Welcome back! I don’t actually believe (other than in my darkest, doomscrollingest moments, anyway) that the U.S. is headed for a second Civil War here in 2025, but that’s not because we don’t have the kinds of violent conflicts and divisions that could produce (or, pace Jeff Sharlet, are already producing) such an internal schism; I just don’t think most of us have the stomach for actual warfare (a good thing, to be clear). And in any case, I do believe that in such periods of heightened and potentially violent internal conflict our leaders can either work to unite us or lean way, way into the divisions; James Buchanan frustratingly and tragically chose the latter, and from his extremist first term to his Big Lie electoral conspiracies to every part of his unfolding, even more extremist second term, Trump has done so even more fully and destructively still.

The coming Civil War wasn’t really the focus of that prior post of mine, though. Instead, I made the case there, as I did throughout my recent podcast (in the post I called it my next book, but it became the podcast instead), for resisting and challenging narratives of historical inevitability, especially when it comes to our worst histories. I’ve seen a lot of responses to Trump 2.0 along the lines of “Stop saying ‘This isn’t who we are.’ This is who we’ve always been,” and I understand and to a degree share that desire to push past naïve idealism and recognize our foundational and enduring worst characteristics and histories. But if we see our worst as simply inevitable, it becomes almost impossible to keep on, much less to find our way to any hope and optimism. There will always be presidents who embody our worst, from James Buchanan to Donald Trump. Which makes it that much more important for all of us who believe in our best to resist seeing them and their ilk as inevitable.

Next baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 28, 2025: Echoes of Bad Presidents: Andrew Jackson

[On July 31, 1875, Andrew Johnson died. Johnson is one of our worst presidents, which means he also reminds me a lot of our current and very worst one. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy echoes of some of our worst presidents in Trump 2.0!]

On how I compared Trump to Jackson in 2017, and how I’d extend the comparisons today.

First, I’ll ask you to check out this March 2017 post on the comparison, and then come on back for my thoughts here in July 2025.

Welcome back! In that post I argued that one striking similarity between the two presidents and men is “thin skins and violent tempers,” and for Trump 2.0 I would extend that comparison in a particular and extremely consequential way: Jackson’s successful 1828 presidential campaign was motivated (both for him and his extremist supporters) by perceived grievances about the 1824 election; and of course Trump and MAGA’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election played a significant role in the 2024 one. These electoral grievances have only made even clearer the central role that self-fulfilling narratives of victimization play for both Trump and his extremist base: from “DEI hires” to “trans athletes” to “invading” immigrants who are intended to “replace” white Americans, virtually every core MAGA belief is driven by a sense that they are under threat, and that Trump is their champion in those fights. I have to imagine that an infamous dueler like Jackson was perceived in similar ways by his supporters.

In that prior post I also sought to distinguish Jackson from Trump based on the former’s at least somewhat more genuine emphasis on “the common man.” While I do believe Jackson cared more about that community than does Trump (whose embrace of billionaires in this new administration only drives home whom he sees as his true base), I didn’t say there nearly as clearly as I should have that Jackson meant only “the common white man.” From his slaveowning and “Indian killer” days to his defining Indian Removal policy, Jackson was unquestionably white supremacist in both his personal and political actions, motivated by a vision of the United States as essentially and enduringly white in its identity and ideals. Perhaps the late 1820s was too early for a slogan like “Make America Great Again,” but I have no doubt Jackson would have signed onto that mythic patriotic project—and even less doubt that one of the most central goals of Trump 2.0 is an extension of the Indian Removal project to every non-white American.

Next baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 26-27, 2025: A Tribute to the U.S. Postal Service

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ve AmericanStudied that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to this weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

Back in March, around the 90^th anniversary of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA), I focused a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the many federal workers whom that program created and supported, and most especially on their enduring legacies for all Americans. That moment represented one of the biggest amplifications of the federal workforce in our history, while the U.S. Postal Service is very much the opposite: a community of dedicated federal workers that has endured for 250 years, doing its work in every moment, no matter what else has been unfolding (forget rain or hail or snow, I’m talking depressions and wars and natural disasters). And, even more impressively and importantly still, doing so for every corner of this ginormous country, from the heart of our most crowded cities to the quietest roads in our most rural spaces. Hell, for a long time Alaskan mail carriers used sled dogs to deliver the mail! The recent spate of attacks on federal workers, led by the Trump administration and its DOGE extremists, has reflected just how fully and frustratingly we take that community of workers’ efforts and legacies for granted, and I don’t think that’s anywhere more obvious than with postal workers. May we better remember and appreciate this longstanding, enduring, and crucial community of workers!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 25, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Cultural Representations

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On takeaways from four prominent cultural representations of the USPS (in addition to the obvious best one, the Snail in the Frog & Toad story "The Letter,” although he is more of a commissioned mail carrier than a federal employee).

1)      “Please Mr. Postman” (1961): First of all, I’m obviously talking about The Marvelettes’s original; no offense to The Carpenters, whose 1975 version is fine too, but it would be mail fraud (and at least a little bit racist) not to go to the source. Second, I really like how this song captures (as does the Frog & Toad story, come to think of it) one of the best parts of the USPS, a pleasure that kids today might not know: the anxious excitement of waiting for an expected but uncertain (at least in timing, but possibly at all, as seems to be the case with this song’s situation) mail delivery. I also like that the last verse concludes with “deliver the letter, the sooner, the better,” a quote which also appears in…

2)      Dear Mr. Henshaw (1984): … Beverly Cleary’s Newbery Medal-winning YA novel. If anyone ever tries to argue that epistolary novels are either a) from the distant literary past or b) generally not successful, please point them to Henshaw, which uses letters as well as any literary text I’ve ever read. While in some definite ways Cleary’s youthful protagonist Leigh Botts is writing to and for himself (the famous author Mr. Henshaw to whom he is writing doesn’t write back more than a couple times, and the structure evolves into a diary as the book goes along), Dear Mr. Henshaw nonetheless reflects how the mail can connect us to other people and worlds in ways that can be very helpful, if not indeed necessary, for navigating our own lives and stories.

3)      Newman from Seinfeld (1989-1998): As that particular hyperlinked clip illustrates succinctly, Wayne Knight’s mailman neighbor and nemesis of Jerry Seinfeld’s character on the iconic sitcom was generally portrayed as an over-the-top villain, one for whom the mail was (when it was mentioned at all) largely a mechanism for his sinister plots. But I really enjoyed this moment, when Newman was given a bit more complex humanity through his righteous rant about why so many postal workers “go postal.” I have to think the writer of that particular speech either had worked as a mail carrier (or other postal employee) or was close to someone who had, and in any case I love that the “show about nothing” featured a moment that was so much about something real and important.

4)      Dear God (1996): Full disclosure: I haven’t seen this film, and based on the reviews I don’t imagine I ever will (my favorite line, from James Berardinelli: “At least after seeing this movie, I understand where the title came from—starting about thirty minutes into this interminable, unfunny feature, I began looking at my watch and thinking, ‘Dear God, is this ever going to end?’”). But I do believe its premise—Greg Kinnear’s convicted con artist Tom Turner works at the post office’s dead letter office for his court-ordered community service and begins responding to letters sent to God—opens up two other layers of the USPS: the very idea of “dead letters,” and specifically of what happens to all the mail sent to God and Santa and so on; and the question of whether and how the postal service can become part of our identities and communities far beyond mail delivery. More on that in my special weekend post!

That tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 24, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Mailed Threats

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On one moment when the mail was falsely perceived as threatening, other moments when it genuinely was, and how we can put them in conversation.

I highlighted the pernicious and profoundly un-American Espionage and Sedition Acts as part of this July 2020 post, but didn’t specifically address there a main way that those totalitarian acts were enforced: through monitoring and censorship of the mail. In Chapter Five of my book Of Thee I Sing I write about one such example from 1917: “The Postmaster General refused to mail copies of The Jeffersonian, a newsletter published by the Southern populist and anti-war activist Tom Watson; when Watson fought back in court a federal judge called the publication and its pacifist sentiments ‘poison.’” Even if we agree with that assessment of Watson’s particular political perspective and points—and obviously I very much do not agree—this action of the USPS would in any case, at least to my mind, represent a striking and significant overreach, the use of perceived, ideological “threats” to abdicate its core responsibility to deliver American mail.

I used scare quotes around “threats” deliberately there, not only because I don’t believe The Jeffersonian comprised a threat of any kind, but also and especially because we do have definitive, recent historical examples of the mail posing a threat to Americans: “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s multi-decade domestic terrorist attacks largely conducted through the use of mail bombs; and the four anthrax-laced letters that were sent (apparently by government scientist and embittered anthrax vaccine developer Dr. Bruce Ivins, although Ivins took his own life in 2008 before the investigation could fully conclude) to journalists and government officials in October 2001. In the concluding couplet of the beautiful song “You’re Missing” from his post-9/11 album The Rising (2002) Bruce Springsteen expresses the mindset of collective anxiety created by such threatening acts of postal terrorism quite succinctly and powerfully: “God’s drifting in heaven, devil’s in the mailbox/I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.”

The most straightforward, and certainly the most accurate, way to put those two paragraphs in conversation is to note that the existence of mail bombs and anthrax-laced letters makes clear just how non-threatening a newsletter is in comparison (even, again, if said newsletter contained ideas that I disagreed with). Unless a mailing’s content is far more blatantly and unquestionably illegal—child pornography, for example—it simply should not be the case that the USPS refuses to mail something on ideological grounds. But I would take the contrast a significant step further—one of the best things about the USPS (as I’ll discuss more in my weekend tribute post) is the ways it can connect Americans across this incredibly large and disparate nation of ours; and yet of course, as with anything American including (if not especially) our best things, that element can also connect and all too often has been connected to our worst characteristics and impulses, of which domestic terrorism is frustratingly exemplary. The best and worst of America, in our mail.

Last USPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 23, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Stamps

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On six telling stamps that help trace the history of this essential postal element.

1)      Franklin and Washington (1847): Nearly 75 years after the founding of the USPS, the system began using federally-issued postage stamps (privately-produced stamps had been available for some time). As highlighted by Monday’s post, Ben Franklin makes a lot of sense for one of those first federal stamps; and George Washington, well, is George Washington. In any case, those were the first two, and we’ve been stuck with stamps ever since.

2)      Queen Isabella (1893): You could win a lot of trivia contests by betting your friends that they can’t guess the first woman to appear on a USPS stamp—and you could give them quite a few guesses at that. (One of their guesses might be Martha Washington, and she was indeed the first American woman to appear, in 1902.) Part of the iconic 1892-93 Columbian anniversary celebrations that also gave us the Chicago Exposition and the Pledge of Allegiance, the Isabella stamp is quite the surprising pioneer.

3)      Booker T. Washington (1940): Washington was the first African American to dine publicly at the White House, and it only took four more decades (that’s sarcasm, to be clear) for him to become the first African American to appear on a USPS stamp. (Indeed, only one other African American, George Washington Carver, got a stamp of his own for another 25+ years.) With the nation just emerging from the Great Depression, Washington is a particularly telling choice, one focused on economic and educational emphases rather than (for example) civil rights.

4)      Liberty Bell (2007): I could keep going with other first figures, but I do think that the “Forever” stamp represented a particularly important innovation, if not indeed the most significant USPS change since the first stamps 160 years prior. And clearly many other folks agree, as the initial Liberty Bell “Forever” stamp debuted on April 12, 2007 and by July of that year the USPS had sold 1.2 billion (that’s not a typo, billion with a “b”) of them.

5)      Repeal of the Stamp Act (2016): This one is a suggestion from my wife, and really just a damn funny (in the ironic, wry smile way) fact: that for the 250^th anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act, the USPS issued, you guessed it, a stamp. What else do I need to say?

Next USPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 22, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: The Pony Express

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On three figures who helped shape the short-lived but enduringly iconic Western mail route.

1)      Alexander Majors: The Pony Express was founded by a trio of Missouri businessmen, co-owners of a freight and drayage company: William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell. But it was Majors who brought his distinct identity and perspective most fully to the enterprise: he was deeply religious, and required every Pony Express rider to carry a special-edition Bible and sign an oath “before the Great and Living God” that they would “under no circumstances, use profane language, … drink no intoxicating liquors,” and so on. Given the stereotypes of the Wild West and its occupants, images to which I would argue our cultural collective memories of the Pony Express have often been connected, this founding fact reminds us that histories are always distinct from the mythos.

2)      Johnson William “Billy” Richardson: The identity of the first Pony Express rider is disputed by historians, with Johnny Fry the other most likely candidate. By even if he wasn’t the definitive “first,” Billy Richardson was unquestionably one of the handful of riders who inaugurated the Westbound route (from Missouri to California) in April 1860, after a formal ceremony in St. Joseph, Missouri which featured speeches by Russell and Majors along with St. Joseph Mayor M. Jeff Thompson. Moreover, Richardson rode for the Express for its entire 18 months of operation, and then, coincidentally but symbolically, passed away from pneumonia just a few months after the Express went out of business in late 1861. He was buried at Fort Laramie, a Pony Express station in Wyoming, one more telling connection between this foundational rider and the route’s iconography.

3)      William F. Cody: That hyperlinked Wyoming History article traces two equally true yet also directly contradictory facts: William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody is without question the most famous Pony Express rider; and yet Cody never rode for the Pony Express. As with so much of Cody’s mythos, and of course the Wild West mythos overall, this particular myth was very much self-constructed, with Cody frequently telling and retelling the story of an iconic Pony Express ride he undertook at the tender age of 14. And that story became an enduring one in the legacies of both Cody and the Pony Express, as illustrated by author Elmer Sherwood’s 1940 children’s biography Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express. Perhaps including Cody in this post will mean that the fictitious association continues, but I don’t think we can AmericanStudy the Pony Express without including such defining and enduring myths.

Next USPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 21, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Ben Franklin

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On innovations from three stages in the career of the first Postmaster General of the US.

1)      Postmaster of Philadelphia: In 1737, when Franklin was only 30 years old, he was appointed postmaster of his adopted home city of Philadelphia. In his Autobiography he freely admitted that he took the job largely to support his own newspaper, the Gazette, writing, “tho’ the salary was small, it facilitated the correspondence that improv’d my newspaper, increased the number demanded, as well as the advertisements to be inserted, so that it came to afford me a considerable income.” But even if Franklin was mercenary about this new role, he was too much of an inventor not to innovate in it as well, and his most lasting such innovation was printing in the newspaper lists of people who had letters waiting for them at the post office, a practice that many other papers would take up for decades to come.

2)      Joint Postmaster General for the Crown: After a decade and a half in this role, Franklin was apparently ready to move up, and when Postmaster General for the Crown Elliott Benger became ill in 1753, Franklin lobbied for the role. Eventually he and Virginia’s William Hunter were chosen as Joint Postmasters for the Crown, a role that Franklin would hold for the next two decades. He would bring a number of his Philly innovations to that national role, including the aforementioned printed newspaper lists (which he instructed postmasters around the country to do); but would also add new ones, such as implementing nighttime service that led to far faster mail delivery. Ever the successful businessman, Franklin had the British Crown Post registering its first profit by 1760.  

3)      Postmaster General of the US: In 1774, the British government dismissed Franklin from his role for being too sympathetic to the colonies; but as they so often did, things worked out fine for Ben, as just a year afterward he was part of the Second Continental Congress and, on July 26^th, 1775, was appointed by that body to be the first Postmaster General of the newly created United States Postal Service. In that role, overseeing all post offices “from Falmouth in New England to Savannah in Georgia,” Franklin truly nationalized the postal service for the first time, building on these prior experiences with both a city’s and a royal postal system but helping create the federally organized institution that has endured to this day (and hopefully will continue, on which see the weekend post).

Next USPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

July 19-20, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Other Scholars on the Film

[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. This week I’ve AmericanStudied different contexts for this phenomenal work, leading up to this weekend post sharing great pieces from fellow SinnersStudiers!]

As you would expect, there have been tons of thoughtful and important responses to Sinners, from FilmStudiers and AmericanStudiers alike. Here, in no particular order, are a handful of them—please share more in comments!

One of my two favorite current reviewers, Outlaw Vern

Bluesky thoughts from my other favorite reviewer, Vaughn Joy

Richard Newby for The Hollywood Reporter (as also shared by Vaughn)

Kahlil Greene for his History Can’t Hide newsletter

And finally, make sure to check out Jemar Tisby and Keisha N. Blain’s vital Sinners syllabus for the AAIHS’s Black Perspectives blog

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Sinners responses, including your own, that you’d add?

July 18, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Interracial Romance

[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: I tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completely be able to for the rest of the week (and in fact will be spoiling a good bit in today’s post). If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do so and then come back to read this series!]

On another important layer to the film’s mid-credits scene, and why I love it so much.

First things first: the most beautiful romance in Sinners, and the one that produced the other closest nominee (alongside the mid-credits scene, as I discussed yesterday and to which I’ll return in a moment) for my favorite scene in the film (one located right at the conclusion, and one that I’m not going to spoil), is between Wonmi Mosaku’s Annie and Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke (one of the two twins Jordan plays). Maybe I’m biased because both that romance and that stunning climactic scene also connect incredibly movingly and importantly to their shared experience of parenting, at its most tragic but also and especially at its most enduring and defining. But in any case, Annie and Smoke are one of the most moving and inspiring couples I’ve seen on screen in years, and I didn’t want to share a post about romance in Sinners without paying tribute to them (and once more to Mosaku’s captivating performance, as I did in Tuesday’s post as well).

But Sinners features other romances too—indeed, the subject of every post in this week’s series could be connected to a couple—and one that grows in depth and significance across the course of the film is that between Michael B. Jordan’s Stack (the other twin) and Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary. What seems at the start of the film to be just a pair of resentful exes (if exes with a very complicated personal and familial history, as Mary’s mother had basically raised the twins after their own parents passed), and then evolves into a lustful and ultimately destructive reunion, becomes (again, SPOILERS aplenty here) in the mid-credits scene a literally eternal romance, with both Stack and Mary now vampires who are together in the 1990s (and dressed appropriately, in a very funny visual gag) and seemingly will be able to stay together for all time (unless someone stakes them or they get caught out in the sun, anyway). I wrote in Monday’s post about how Coogler complicates his vampire villains, and this final depiction of vampires in the film does so even more fully, as I would argue we have to be excited that this couple have been able to get and stay together, and that’s thanks to head vamp Remmick.  

But their shared vampirism is not the aspect of Stack and Mary’s identities that makes me love this scene and romance so much. The pair are an interracial couple, and not just in the obvious sense—Mary (apparently like Steinfeld herself) is herself 1/8^th African American (an identity category known for a long time in American history and culture as an “octoroon”), making this pair even more fully multiracial and cross-cultural than they might appear. I don’t imagine that Coogler was thinking specifically of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! when he wrote that aspect of the character, but that’s one of our most prominent cultural depictions of this identity category, and moreover I would put Sinners alongside Absalom on the short list of cultural works that deal most powerfully with intersecting themes of race, region, history, art, memory, and more. And of course multiracial identities and interracial romances aren’t just the stuff of American literature and film and culture—they are at the heart of our collective histories, including if not especially our legal and political ones. Just one more way in which the stunning Sinners is a must-watch for all AmericanStudiers.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 17, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: The Blues

[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: I tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completely be able to for the rest of the week (and in fact will be spoiling a good bit in today’s post). If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do so and then come back to read this series!]

On two stunning scenes that embody the best of a foundational musical genre.

In lieu of a full first paragraph of my own, I want to share three prior posts where I’ve featured student work on the Blues and American literature and culture. Most especially that includes FSU English Studies alum Sandra Hamilton’s great Guest Post on the Blues. But I’ve also highlighted excellent student papers inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” in two different semester reflection posts, here and here. Hope you’ll check out those posts featuring our awesome FSU students, and then come on back for two layers to how Sinners BluesStudies.

Welcome back! By far the most famous scene in Sinners—and justifiably so, as it’s one of the most stunning cinematic sequences I’ve ever seen—is the central moment (that’s only a snippet of it, but it’ll give you a sense) when main character Sammie (talented young musician and songwriter Miles Caton, making his film debut) performs his original Blues song “I Lied to You,” and the juke joint transforms to become a home to musical performances from past and future, many different cultures, countless communities. It’s a performance and sequence so red-hot that it literally burns down the juke joint (well, I guess it metaphorically does as the building remains standing after, but audiences watch it burn down at the scene’s climax), but it’s also something much more powerful still: the most evocative depiction I’ve ever encountered of the ways that music connects us, across space and time, across culture and community, across identities and stories, across all that can divide us. As I briefly mentioned in Monday’s post, the film’s vampires seem to want something similar with their music; but the truth is, their performances don’t come close to capturing these goals in comparison with Sammie’s.

And then there’s the film’s hugely important mid-credits scene (significant SPOILERS in what follows—if you haven’t seen the film, stop reading, go see it, and stay for the credits!). In it the film jumps ahead 60 years to show us an elderly Sammie (now played by Blues legend Buddy Guy), who has survived, successfully pursued his dreams of musical stardom, and apparently opened his own Blues joint, named after a significant love interest from the film and in which we see him reconnecting with multiple layers of his past. I think this was my favorite scene in the film (a competitive list to be sure), and the main reason is that it embodies something very specific about both the Blues and African American art: the way that they so often express hope not in spite of, but directly through, our hardest and most painful histories and stories, personal and collective alike. I was reminded in that moment of my favorite sequence of lines from Hughes’s “The Weary Blues”: “Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool/He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool./Sweet Blues!/Coming from a black man’s soul.” Sinners is about many things, as I hope this whole series illustrates, but at its heart it seeks to embody (and does quite beautifully) something very similar to what Hughes expresses there.

Last SinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 16, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: The Mississippi Chinese

[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: I tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in Monday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completely be able to for the rest of the week. If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do so and then come back to read this series!]

On a 1970s book and 2010s article that help contextualize one of the film’s most unique families.

In 1971, the late, great historian and educator James Loewen (whom I was profoundly proud to call a mentor and friend after I landed him for the 2011 NEASA Conference keynote lecture) published his first book, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White. A revision of his Harvard Sociology doctoral dissertation, if one no doubt significantly expanded after Loewen began teaching at Mississippi’s historically black Tougaloo College, The Mississippi Chinese utilizes both extensive interviews with current members of this sizeable but often overlooked Mississippi community and historical documentation of that community’s post-Civil War origins and growth over the subsequent century. Although the exclusion of the community’s children from segregated white schools was deemed Constitutional by the Supreme Court in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), Loewen makes a compelling case that this community were and are, his title suggests, complicatedly located between the state and region’s two most prominent racialized categories.

Loewen’s book focuses on the Mississippi Chinese’s historical and sociological realities, while the award-winning 2012 Philological Quarterly article “The Foreigner in Yoknapatawpha: Rethinking Race in the Global South,” authored by my college friend and blog Guest Poster Heidi Kim, is most interested in representations of this community, especially in the fictions of Mississippi’s favorite literary son William Faulkner. As Heidi describes her argument in that above hyperlinked summary, she both notes “Faulkner’s extension of racial hysteria over miscegenation to include” the Mississippi Chinese but also, and importantly, finds in his works “the possibility of eventual social intermixture and inclusion in his American South.” Which makes her argument at least roughly parallel to Loewen’s (if of course informed by four decades’ worth of further research into this community and its contexts) in seeing this community as part of its larger Mississippi setting and society, yet also reflecting, in cultural works as well as in historical and sociological realities, the possibility of something distinct within that world.  

It's a very nerdy thing to say, I realize, but nothing made me more excited while watching Sinners (a competitive category I assure you) than realizing that Coogler had included the Mississippi Chinese among his central characters, with the family of Grace Chow (Li Jun Li), her husband Bo (Yao), and their teenage daughter Lisa (Helena Hu). As that hyperlinked Variety article highlights, Coogler has familial connections to this community through his multiracial wife Zinzi Evans, reminding us that, whatever the Supreme Court and other racist entities might argue, all of these American communities are deeply intertwined in our history and present alike. But in his representation of these Mississippi Chinese characters, and especially in a long establishing shot early in the film that takes audiences between the family’s two parallel grocery stores located on the Black and white sides of Clarksdale’s main street, Coogler also reveals his awareness of the community’s in-between status—and creates another cultural work that, like Faulkner’s, illustrates while also ultimately complicating that vision of the unique community known as the Mississippi Chinese.  

Next SinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 15, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Hoodoo

[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]

[NOTE: I tried to mostly avoid SPOILERS in yesterday’s post, but I don’t think I’ll completely be able to for the rest of the week. If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, please do so and then come back to read this series!]

On two literary predecessors to our favorite character (and one of the most fascinating story elements) in the film.

In the pivotal Chapter X of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass writes about an influential encounter with a fellow enslaved man named Sandy Jenkins. The teenaged Douglass has gotten on the wrong side of a particularly violent enslaver and infamous “slave-breaker” named Covey, and has temporarily run away from the plantation rather than risk a horrific whipping. Sandy, clearly a hoodoo practitioner although Douglass does not use the word nor define Sandy as spiritual in any overarching way, gives Douglass “a certain root” which will protect him from whippings of any kind. Although Douglass doubts its powers, he follows Sandy’s advice and is never again whipped by Covey, although his own violent resistance to the man must be accounted as part of the shift as well. That ambiguity leads Douglass to write that “I was half inclined to think the root to be something more than I at first had taken it to be,” and in any case he seemingly keeps it with him, perhaps recognizing that whatever his own beliefs, slavery is a world in which broader and more powerful forces than any individual are in play.

Half a century after Douglass published his narrative, the African American author Charles Chesnutt developed that last idea much more fully in his wonderful short story cycle The Conjure Woman (1899). I said a lot about what makes that book so complex and powerful in this post on its first story, “The Goophered Grapevine” (originally published in The Atlantic in 1887). As I discussed in that post, for Chesnutt conjure (a parallel term/concept to hoodoo) is largely symbolic, on two interconnected levels: for the enslaved people in the stories recounted by the storyteller character Uncle Julius, people for whom conjure reflects both the horrific and the potentially resistant and even liberatory realities of their lives and world; and for Julius himself, who weaves his conjure tales in order to achieve goals in his own present, post-Civil War life. Which is to say, Chesnutt uses the genre of the conjure tale much like he does the genre of plantation fiction—capitalizing on audience expectations, those of Julius’s white audience inside the stories and Chesnutt’s (largely) white readers for them, to offer a powerful counter-narrative to dominant American perceptions of slavery, race, history, and more.

Toward the end of yesterday’s post, I mentioned that Wonmi Mosaku’s Annie was my wife’s and my favorite character in Sinners. There are lots of layers that make the character and performance so great, including an incredibly beautiful final scene that I will most definitely not spoil here. But a big part of it is that Annie is a hoodoo practitioner, an element of both her identity and the world that her husband Smoke (one of the two Michael B. Jordan twins) initially dismisses (emphasizing instead money and power as the world’s fundamental forces) but that eventually becomes crucial for everyone’s survival once the vampires start doing their thing. Annie’s knowledge of “haints” and how to fight them certainly fits with the symbolic and social sides of hoodoo/conjure that we see in Chesnutt’s stories, just as we can read Coogler’s vampires metaphorically to be sure. But at the same time, these layers to Annie’s character are presented matter-of-factly and accepted as such by those around her, reminding us that, like Sandy Jenkins, hoodoo practitioners remained an important part of Black Southern communities for centuries. I was so impressed and moved to see this conjure woman in Coogler’s historical film.

Next SinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 14, 2025: AmericanStudying Sinners: Coogler’s Career

[A couple months back, my wife and I were blown away by one of the best films either of us has seen in a long while: Ryan Coogler’s stunning Sinners. I hope you’ve all had a chance to check it out already, and if not, that you’ll do so right now and then come back to read this weeklong series of posts inspired by different layers to this phenomenal work!]

On how Coogler’s prior (great) films foreshadowed this masterpiece.

Back in March 2018, I ended a weeklong series on Black Panther (2018) with a special weekend post on Coogler’s film career up to that excellent superhero film. I’ll be following up and expanding on those thoughts in my next two paragraphs, so would ask you to check out that prior post if you would and then come on back for more CooglerStudying.

Welcome back! One of the most clear throughlines in Coogler’s career has been his ability to make genre films that are also much, much more, and that’s definitely true of the ways Sinners is and is not a vampire horror flick. One of the most impressive aspects of Black Panther, for example, is that its villain, Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger, is as multilayered and nuanced and even sympathetic as its comic book hero. It took some extended conversation after our viewing for my wife and I to get to this point, and then I read Outlaw Vern’s phenomenal review where he expounded on the perspective even further, but I would now say that the villainous head vampire Remmick in Sinners is an equally complex and even in some ways sympathetic bad guy, and at the very least that he has as much of a case as Killmonger did, both about his own past/heritage and about the world he’s trying to create (if, in both cases, through way more violent means than would be ideal). At the very least, both Black Panther and Sinners feature antagonists who directly and consistently threaten our heroes and yet aren’t easily hated and certainly can’t be dismissed, which is quite the genre achievement.

Another throughline, and one I discussed a good bit in that prior post as well, is Coogler’s ability to create wonderful, multilayered female characters within largely male-centered genres and stories (whether superhero films or boxing/sports movies or even the gritty realism of Fruitvale Station). And despite those excellent prior characters, I think it’s very safe to say that a Coogler film has never featured a more stunning female character than Wonmi Mosaku’s Annie. I’ll be talking more about layers of her character and role in the film in tomorrow’s post, so here I’ll just say that in a film featuring not one but two Michael B. Jordan performances, a Hailee Steinfeld performance, a Delroy Lindo performance, and a deservedly-acclaimed performance from the young musician Miles Caton, it’s Mosaku who is the film’s beating heart. Sounds like a Ryan Coogler joint to me!

Next SinnersStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 12-13, 2025: Crowd-sourced Rock Responses

[On July 6, 1925, Bill Haley was born. So for that centennial I’ve shared blog posts on Haley and other rock ‘n roll pioneers, leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post featuring recent rock recs!]

First, responses to this week’s posts:

In response to my Chuck Berry & Little Richard post, Jessica Parr shared on Bluesky, “Love Chuck Berry and that whole era. My late father DJ’ed school dances in the late 1950s, and had a pretty extensive vinyl collection. Grew up listening to it with him. That and blues.”

In response to my Holly & Valens post, Dan R. Morris commented, “So I did a story on this as well. I was thinking Valens hasn't gotten as much acclaim in anything because he wasn't around very long. How did you become entrenched in someone's heart with one or two songs? I feel like that's when you decide you like the band and you get their next album.”

Next, a couple prior posts with recent rock recs of my own:

The Killers, and especially their “The Land of the Free”

Gary Clark Jr., and especially his “This Land”

and Midnight Oil, and especially their Resist.

I’d love some additional recs from other RockStudiers, y’all!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What recent rock would you recommend for the weekend post?

July 11, 2025: Rock-y Groundbreakers: Women Who Rock

[On July 6, 1925, Bill Haley was born. So for that centennial I’ll share blog posts on Haley and other rock ‘n roll pioneers, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post featuring recent rock recs!]

Four of the many women who helped launch the rock revolution, as highlighted in great pieces by women journalists and historians:

1)      Sister Rosetta Tharpe

2)      Ruth Brown

3)      Memphis Minnie

4)      Carol Kaye

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what recent rock would you recommend for the weekend post?

July 10, 2025: Rock-y Groundbreakers: Fats Domino

[On July 6, 1925, Bill Haley was born. So for that centennial I’ll share blog posts on Haley and other rock ‘n roll pioneers, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post featuring recent rock recs!]

On a few iconic moments in the career of a pioneering, legendary rock ‘n roller.

1)      “The Fat Man”: Domino’s first hit under his debut recording contract with Lew Chudd’s Imperial Records, co-written with his frequent producer and collaborator (and an influential artist in his own right) Dave Bartholomew and recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studios on Rampart Street, wasn’t just the first rock record to sell a million copies (although it did hit that groundbreaking number by 1951). It also embodies rock’s profoundly cross-cultural origins, on so many levels: from Domino’s own French Creole heritage (his first language was Louisiana Creole) to Matassa’s multi-generational Italian American New Orleans legacy, from Chudd’s childhood in Toronto and Harlem as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants to African American artist Bartholomew’s time in the US Army Ground Forces Band (an integrated band despite the army’s segregation in the era) during WWII. It took all those individuals and all those legacies to make “Fat Man” and get American rock music rolling.

2)      “The King”: Over the next couple decades Domino would record many more hit records and albums, with “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955) and “Blueberry Hill” (1956) the two biggest smashes. A February 1957 Ebony magazine feature dubbed him (on the cover no less) the “King of Rock ‘n Roll.” But it was an offhand line from another “King,” more than a decade later, that most potently reflects Domino’s status and influence. On July 31, 1969, Domino attended Elvis Presley’s first concert at the Las Vegas International Hotel; during a post-concert press conference, a reporter referred to Presley as “The King,” and he responded by pointing at Domino and noting, “No, that’s the real king of rock and roll.” At the same event Elvis took an iconic picture with Domino, calling him “one of my influences from way back.” I’ll have a bit more to say about Elvis and his influence in a couple days; but regardless of any other factors, this recognition for Domino from one of the most famous American rockers in history illustrates just how iconic Fats was within (and beyond) the industry.

3)      Katrina: Domino was known to be one of the most humble and grounded rock stars, and he and his wife Rosemary continued to live in their home in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward throughout the late 20^th century and into the first decade of the 21^st. Because of Rosemary’s ailing health they did not evacuate in the days before Hurricane Katrina hit the city, and in the storm’s chaotic aftermath their home was flooded and Domino and Rosemary were feared dead for a couple long days. But it turned out they had been rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter, and in 2006 and 2007 Domino made triumphant returns to the city and the music world: first with his 2006 album Alive and Kickin’, the proceeds from which benefitted Tipitina’s Foundation; and then with his last public performance (and first in many years), a legendary May 19, 2007 concert at Tipitina’s. If there had been any doubt that Domino represented New Orleans just as much and as well as he does rock ‘n roll, these culminating iconic moments laid them forever to rest.

Last groundbreaker tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What recent rock would you recommend for the weekend post?