AmericanStudies: August 2025

August 18: University of Michigan Studying: Founding Histories: With my younger son Kyle off to the University of Michigan, this year’s post-birthday series focused on Wolverine contexts, starting with three foundational moments.

August 19: University of Michigan Studying: Three Presidents: The series continues with takeaways from the terms of three 19^th century presidents.

August 20: University of Michigan Studying: Football: Three early moments that chart the rise of a perennial pigskin powerhouse, as the series studies on.

August 21: University of Michigan Studying: Famous Alums: Five famous Michigan alums, in honor of my future one.

August 22: University of Michigan Studying: Uncle Peter: The series concludes with a quick tribute to my prior connection to Michigan.

August 23-24: University of Michigan Studying: Kyle’s Plans: And a special weekend follow-up on three of the many things I’m excited about during Kyle’s time at Michigan!

August 25: Alien Nation: Roswell: For the 30^th anniversary of Fox’s Alien Autopsy, a series on our fascination with aliens kicks off with the longstanding & problematic sides to one of our most enduring conspiracy theories.

August 26: Alien Nation: E.T. and Aliens: The series continues with friendly & hostile extraterrestrials, and the real bad guys in each case.

August 27: Alien Nation: Close Encounters and Contact: Two superficially similar films that feature distinct portrayals of both aliens & America, as the series probes on.

August 28: Alien Nation: Alien Autopsy: On the 30^th anniversary of its first airing, two cultural contexts for a historic hoax.

August 29: Alien Nation: Recent Revelations: The series concludes with how we can make sense of the dramatic rise of “UFO” sightings in recent years.

Fall semester previews start Monday,

Ben

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

Friday, August 29, 2025

August 29, 2025: Alien Nation: Recent Revelations

[30 years ago this week, the pseudo-documentary film Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility of alien life, leading up to this post on recent revelations!]

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

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

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

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

August Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Thursday, August 28, 2025

August 28, 2025: Alien Nation: Alien Autopsy

On two cultural contexts for a historic hoax.

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

That final phrase is a telling one, as I would say that Alien Autopsy has a good bit in common with another 1990s film, Oliver Stone’s JFK. At the end of that hyperlinked post I mentioned the most striking and to my mind most frustrating aspect of Stone’s film, his blending of actual archival footage with “re-created” (fictionalized) scenes, all of it presented in black-and-white so it’s incredibly difficult for audiences to tell what’s what. That’s not identical by any means to Alien Autopsy, which to my knowledge has no archival footage at all. But Santilli did subsequently describe his fictionalized filmmaking as an attempt to “re-create” actual but lost such footage, and certainly his film, like Stone’s, is trying to convince audiences that the fictional film is just as “real” as any archive. And moreover, I would argue that in both cases audiences were very willing to go along with the filmmakers (Stone’s film made more than 5 times its budget at the box office, success not dissimilar to the high ratings for Santilli’s work), due directly to the widespread existing interest in the conspiracy theories (JFK and Roswell, respectively) that they were tapping into.

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

Last aliens tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

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

On two superficially similar films that feature very distinct portrayals of both America and aliens.

Two of the most prominent cinematic representations of alien encounters feature similar title images of those encounters: Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997). Spielberg was a kind of mentor to Zemeckis, executive producing the younger director’s first two films (both released in the three years after Close Encounters), and so it’s quite possible that Contact (released almost exactly 20 years after Close Encounters) was partially intended as a tribute to the earlier film (although its title is drawn from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel on which it’s based). And the two films do follow a fundamentally similar structure when it comes to those alien encounters [SPOILERS for the two films here and in the rest of this post]: opening with a partial and uncertain such encounter and then following a group of characters attempting to connect more definitively with these aliens and, in the film’s culminating scenes, able to do so more definitively.

Yet when it comes to both those main characters and the aliens they encounter, Close Encounters and Contact differ in striking and significant ways. Spielberg’s film focuses on ordinary Americans, working-class protagonists (Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary is an electrical lineman and Melinda Dillon’s Jillian Guiler a working single mother) who are unexpectedly drawn into and fundamentally changed by the alien encounters and the broader universe they open up. Zemeckis’ film, on the other hand, focuses on scientists and parallel figures (Jodie Foster’s Dr. Ellie Arroway works for the SETI observatory and Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss is a spiritual leader with a lifelong obsession with theories of alien life) who have long been concerned with the question of aliens and alien encounters by the time the film opens. That difference doesn’t simply mean that the two films portray quite distinct strata of American society (although they certainly do). It also means that they depict the question of alien encounters through very different perspectives and tones—for Spielberg’s characters, these are shockingly strange questions that reveal a universe they had never known and entirely shift their identities as a result; while for Zemeckis’, these are questions toward which their whole lives have been trending and the answers to which will determine whether their identities have been meaningful or ultimately misguided.

Perhaps relatedly, the two films also portray the aliens themselves in very distinct ways. Close Encounter’s aliens look very much like our most common images of extraterrestrials—oddly shaped heads atop thin necks, very long fingers, and so on—and communicate in a language of their own, one featuring hand gestures as well as the film’s famous musical notes (courtesy of Spielberg’s favorite composer John Williams, natch). In Contact, on the other hand, we never really see the aliens, which is precisely the point: when Foster finally makes contact, the alien she meets chooses to take the form of her late father in order to connect with her more individually and intimately. Although we are meant to understand that he is indeed an alien (rather than simply a hallucination of Foster’s, as many of her peers believe), this choice nonetheless makes Contact’s alien encounter far more thematically focused on Foster’s character and identity than on the aliens themselves; while Dreyfuss in particular does become similarly obsessed with aliens in Close Encounters (eventually leaving with them at the film’s conclusion), their depiction nonetheless draws our attention to their striking form rather than simply his character. One more significant difference between these two cinematic representations of alien America.

Next aliens tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

August 26, 2025: Alien Nation: E.T. and Aliens

On friendly and hostile extraterrestrials, and the real bad guys in any case.

In the shape of his head, E.T. (star of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film of the same name) looks a tiny bit like a distant cousin of the mother alien (the “bitch,” that is) from James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). But that slight comparison is about the only possible way in which these two summer blockbusters aren’t wholly distinct from one another. E.T. is perhaps Spielberg’s most kid-centered film, from its youthful protagonists to its product placements for Reese’s Pieces and the good ol’ Speak and Spell, its drunken slapstick to its underlying theme of growing up in a single-parent household. While Aliens has to be one of the most adult, hard-R-rated summer blockbusters ever, featuring one nightmare-inducing, graphically violent and horrifying sequence and image after the next (to say nothing of the Space Marines’ extremely salty repartee).

E.T. and Aliens aren’t just at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their ratings and intended audiences, however. They also embody two entirely different perspectives on the question not of whether there is life other than our own in the universe (both films agree that there is), but of what attitude toward Earth and humanity those extraterrestials might hold. The summer blockbuster Independence Day (1994), about which I blogged here, explicitly engages with these contrasting perspectives, featuring a number of characters who believe the aliens might come in peace before their true, hostile intentions are revealed. Because of its status as a sequel to a film in which the alien creature could not be more hostile and destructive to humans, Aliens can dispense with the debate and move immediately into the story of how its human characters will combat the extraterrestrial threats. And by tying his extraterrestrial’s first entrance into the film to the creature’s love of Reese’s Pieces, Spielberg similarly signals from the start that his alien will be friendly to—indeed, overtly parallel to—his young protagonist Elliot.

E.T. isn’t without antagonists, though—but they’re of the human variety, the community of threatening scientists and government officials who seek to capture and (if necessary) kill E.T. to learn his secrets (and who in the original film carry guns, not walkie talkies, in that pursuit). And in that sense, E.T. and Aliens aren’t quite as far apart as they might seem—because in the latter film’s major reveal (SPOILER alert), it turns out that Paul Reiser’s corporate scientist Carter Burke is far more overt of a villain than the aliens, who are after all only fighting for their own survival (rather than driven by greed and manipulation, and a willingness to sacrifice anyone who gets in their way, as Burke and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation for which he works are revealed to be). If there’s one thing on which such disparate summer blockbusters can apparently agree, it’s that the powers that be—whether corporate or governmental—represent a far greater threat, to humans and extraterrestrials alike, than any alien invaders.

Next aliens tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Monday, August 25, 2025

August 25, 2025: Alien Nation: Roswell

On the longstanding, contemporary, and problematic sides to an otherworldly theory.

Despite spending his whole life in Europe (nearly all of it in his native France), pioneering author Jules Verne seems to have understood quite well a longstanding American tendency: our obsession with space, and our ability to use that alien world as an escape when things are especially difficult or fearful here at home. Verne set his groundbreaking science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1870) in a post-Civil War America, one in which the adventurers of the Baltimore Gun Club hope to create a vehicle that can take them away from this troubled place and toward that extraterrestrial body. 150 years later, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s groundbreaking science fiction film Interstellar (2014) represents the latest version of this trend, using space travel and the possibilities of escape to other worlds as an alternative to climate change and inevitable destruction here on Earth.

No historical moment better encapsulated this trend than the first decades of the Cold War. There’s a reason why President John F. Kennedy emphasized in a 1962 speech a successful American journey to the moon as a central goal for the decade—while that ambition was partly based on the practical fears of Soviet space domination inspired by Sputnik and the Space Race, I would argue that it also gave the nation yet another way to focus on the heavens as an escape from such terrestrial fears and concerns. Fifteen years prior to Kennedy’s speech, in the first years of the Cold War, a routine incident—the crash of an Air Force surveillance balloon near Roswell, New Mexico—had produced an even more elaborate escapist space fantasy, the suspicions and stories of a covered-up alien landing that would become one of the nation’s most extended and enduring conspiracy theories. From TV shows like the X-Files and Roswell (1999-2002) to a central sequence in the film Independence Day (1996), the Roswell theory has become a staple of American popular culture, a shorthand for both the belief in extraterrestrials and this broader fascination with the mysteries of space.

That fascination seems silly and harmless at its worst, and (as with the very successful culmination of Kennedy’s and NASA’s 60s goals) productive and meaningful at its best. But NASA’s successes notwithstanding, I would argue that there is a more problematic side to the escapist space fantasies exemplified by the Roswell theory (besides the suspicious anti-government rhetoric it can engender and amplify, which is a recurring theme across many conspiracy theories). As he has done so often, Don Henley nicely summed up my thoughts on the matter, in the song “They’re Not Here, They’re Not Coming” from his album Inside Job (2000). Henley notes that such theories of alien encounters “carry our highest hopes and our darkest fears,” but recognizes them for the escapist fantasies that they are: “Now you long to be delivered from this world of pain and strife/That’s a sorry substitution for a spiritual life.” That last line is a bit more preachy than I would like, but I would agree with Henley’s concluding recommendation for what we must do instead, now more than ever: “Turn your hopes back homeward/Hold your children, dry their tears.”

Next aliens tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Saturday, August 23, 2025

August 23-24, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Kyle’s Plans

[Later this week, we’ll be moving my younger son Kyle into his first-year dorm at Michigan. So this week, through proud Dad tears, I’ve shared a handful of UMichigan contexts, leading up to this special post on some of Kyle’s plans there!]

As this post drops, we will likely be moving Kyle into his first-year dorm at the University of Michigan (the exact move-in timing will vary a bit, but you get the idea!). One of my very favorite things ever was just how much my older son Aidan’s first year at Vanderbilt took me by surprise, featuring so many moments and experiences that I never could have predicted. I hope and believe that the same will be true for Kyle, so I don’t want to spend too much time here in the prediction business; but here are three quick things I’m excited for nonetheless:

1) Pre-law: Kyle’s professional future is of course entirely up in the air, and he’ll be hugely successful at whatever he eventually figures out. But I can’t lie, I’ve been imagining my passionately argumentative younger son as a lawyer for a long time, and I’m excited to see how he finds the worlds of both Political Science (his incoming Major) and Pre-Law (the advising track he’s starting on). You know I’ll keep y’all posted!

2) Football: I included football in this week’s series not only because it’s been such a defining part of Michigan sports and culture for 150 years, but also because one of the most surprising and best elements of Aidan’s first year was his connection to the Vanderbilt community through their sports successes. Everyone at Michigan talks about the first time they entered “The Big House” with 110,000 of their closest friends, and you best believe I’m stoked to hear about Kyle’s first such experience!

3) Community: That’s one definite way he’ll start to find and build community at Michigan. But I’m even more excited for the ways I can’t predict or even imagine yet. Last summer, Kyle took part in an ACLU summer institute in DC, and he ended up forming a boy band with fellow attendees—the called themselves The Bamboo Boys and performed an incredible a cappella rendition of “I Want It That Way” for their fellow students. Whatever the future holds for Kyle, I hope it includes many more such communal connections!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Advice you’d give Kyle as he starts his Michigan journey?

Friday, August 22, 2025

August 22, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Uncle Peter

[Later this week, we’ll be moving my younger son Kyle into his first-year dorm at Michigan. So this week, through proud Dad tears, I’ll share a handful of UMichigan contexts, leading up to a special post on some of Kyle’s plans there!]

I couldn’t dedicate a weeklong series to the University of Michigan without highlighting my other favorite member of its community, my uncle Peter Railton. Peter is just 15 months younger than his oldest brother, my late Dad Steve Railton (they also have two younger siblings, my uncle Mark and aunt Janet), and so for me he will always be first and foremost a wonderful reminder of so much of what I love about my Dad as well. But Peter is also one of our most important philosophers, not only academically but also in our public conversations—never more so than in his justifiably famous 2015 Dewey Lecture on his lifelong struggle with depression. I’m honored to call him my uncle, and very excited that Kyle will be joining him in the Michigan community!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Thursday, August 21, 2025

August 21, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Famous Alums

In alphabetical order, here are five particularly notable entries among the university’s countless famous alumni:

1) Clarence Darrow: As that article notes, Darrow didn’t complete his degree from the law school, as he was apparently already ready after just one year (1877-78) to pass the bar and get to work. But even a one-year association with the early 20^th century’s most famous and influential lawyer is worth highlighting, I’d say.

2) Gerald Ford (class of 1934): Considering how many presidents attended Ivy League institutions (spoiler: a whole lot of them), it’s pretty cool for one of the nation’s oldest public universities to call a president an alum. But it’s even cooler that he was also a football star there, named the team’s MVP in his senior season during which he started at the crucial position of center in every game.

3) Tom Hayden (class of 1961): At the other end of the political spectrum in the 1960s and 70s was Tom Hayden, who co-founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while a student at Michigan, authored the hugely influential Port Huron Statement that served as a manifesto for the student activist movement around the country, and went on to marry Jane Fonda (!) among many other achievements (yes, I called that an achievement).

4) Dorothy McFadden Hoover: Like Darrow, Dorothy McFadden Hoover started but didn’t finish a graduate degree program at Michigan (in her case, a PhD in Physics). But that was because she was hired by the U.S. Weather Bureau for a hugely important position in the groundbreaking Joint Numerical Weather Prediction unit, one of countless striking moments the life and career of a woman who was born the granddaughter of enslaved people and went on to serve as one of NASA’s “human computers” and to become the first Black woman to achieve the rank of Aeronautical Research Scientist.

5) Jesmyn Ward (MFA class of 2005): I’ve written about Jesmyn Ward, one of my couple favorite 21^st century American authors, multiple times in this space, but I didn’t realize she was a Michigan alum (from its graduate MFA program) until researching this post. We all know who my favorite alum is always gonna be, but Ward definitely occupies the coveted #2 spot!

Last MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

August 20, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Football

Three moments that help chart the rise of a perennial pigskin powerhouse.

1) Pond’s score: One of the many innovations of President Angell (for much more on whom see yesterday’s post) was to bring football to the university, and in May 1879 the team played its first intercollegiate game, against Wisconsin’s Racine College. Hosted at Chicago’s White Stocking Park, the groundbreaking contest was, according to the Chicago Tribune, “the first rugby-football game to be played west of the Alleghenies.” Civil engineering major and future architect Irving Kane Pond scored the team’s first touchdown (and the game’s only one, as Michigan triumphed 1-0) on a long running play, and the crowd—already die-hards, it seems—responded with cheers of “Pond Forever.”

2) Birthing a rivalry: As that Tribune quote indicates, Michigan was instrumental in extending this new collegiate (and budding professional) sport beyond its Northeastern origins, and it likewise helped spread the sport to other colleges in the area. Perhaps the most striking such moment took place in 1887: traveling to another game in Chicago (this one apparently against a high school team—the pickings remained pretty slim in the 1880s), the Michigan team made a stop in South Bend, Indiana, and introduced football to students at the University of Notre Dame. Apparently they learned fast, as in November of that same year Michigan played its first game against the Fighting Irish (winning 8-0, natch), inaugurating one of the sport’s oldest and most fierce rivalries.

3) A happy hire: In 1899 Michigan football went 8-2, and in 1900 they were 7-2-1; those might seem like perfectly acceptable records, but only if you didn’t know Michigan fans. After the 1900 season, the university’s first athletic director Charles Baird wrote to one of the nation’s most famous young coaches, Fielding Yost, noting that “Our people are greatly roused up over the defeats of the past two years” and offering Yost (then the head coach at Stanford) a job. Fortunately for Michigan, Yost accepted, and the results speak for themselves: by the 1902 season Michigan was outscoring its opponents 644-12 en route to an 11-0 record, and the New York Times would write of one of its victories (a 128-0 trouncing of the University of Buffalo) that it was “one of the most remarkable ever made in the history of football in the important colleges.” Let’s just say that the fans haven’t been satisfied with much less ever since.

Next MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

August 19, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Three Presidents

On takeaways from the tenures of the three 19^th century university presidents.

1) Henry Philip Tappan (pres from 1852-1863): Although there had technically been university presidents since the 1817 founding (as I discussed in yesterday’s post), until 1851 the university was under control of the territorial/state legislature and so those leaders had very little actual power. But an April 1851 act gave the university independence and established a presidential position selected by the regents, and the first such independent president was the philosopher and educational innovator Henry Philip Tappan. Known as “John the Baptist of the age of the American university,” Tappan took a huge number of influential actions during his decade as president, from establishing a law school to constructing an observatory, adding BS degrees to organizing a Glee Club and student newspaper. As the first hyperlinked article above illustrates, he was also divisive due to his lack of overt religion, which eventually led to his forced resignation in 1863; but by that time every aspect of the university bore his imprint.

2) Erastus Otis Haven (pres from 1863-1869): The university’s second independent president had followed a very winding path before assuming that role: Erastus Otis Haven had been a seminary principal and Methodist minister before serving as a professor and chair of Latin and English at Michigan in the early 1850s; in 1856 he left the university and moved to Massachusetts, where he edited the Methodist newspaper Zion’s Herald, served in the State Senate, and worked as Harvard University overseer; but when Tappan resigned he was coaxed back to become Michigan’s second president. The ongoing Civil War and other challenges led to significant funding difficulties at the state level, however, and Haven only served for a half-dozen years before he resigned in 1869 to become president of Northwestern, a private Methodist university. The fate of this groundbreaking public institution seemed at that moment very uncertain.

3) James Burrill Angell (pres from 1871-1909): Enter then-University of Vermont President and longtime educator, reformer, and diplomat James Burrill Angell. While Angell would positively affect every aspect of the university during his nearly four decades as president, nowhere was his influence more clear and important than in its international presence. That meant much more than just the university’s standing and reputation (although his changes affected those to be sure): appointed Minister to China in 1880, Angell helped bring a number of Chinese students to the university; named Envoy Extraordinary to Turkey in 1897, he built a relationship with that nation; and so on. Even those nations with which he did not have a direct diplomatic connection became connected to the university during Angell’s tenure, such as the 80 Japanese students who came to study law around the turn of the century. Angell retired in 1909 but lived his remaining seven years in the President’s House, a testament to this most influential University of Michigan President.

Next MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Monday, August 18, 2025

August 18, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Founding Histories

Three interesting and telling moments in the early history of a groundbreaking public university.

1) A Crucial Conversation: The oldest institution of higher ed in Michigan was the brainchild of a number of early 19^th century figures, including the territory’s acting governor William Woodbridge, but at the top of the list was Augustus Brevoort Woodward, an emigrant from New York who had become the first Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory. Woodward believed that knowledge could be categorized and thus taught more easily to others, and in 1814 he exchanged correspondence with a famous friend who had a similar perspective (and in-development plans for his own public university): former President Thomas Jefferson. As a result of both that conversation and his own evolving perspective, Woodward coined a new term, Catholepistemiad, a blend of Greek and Latin words by which he meant “School of Universal Knowledge.”

2) An 1817 Act: His role as Chief Justice meant that Woodward could put that idea into legislative action, and in late August 1817 he did so, crafting a territorial act that formally created the University of Michigania, featuring thirteen distinct professorships (what he called didaxiim) that embodied Woodward’s goal of universal knowledge. The law also named the university’s first president (the Methodist minister, abolitionist, and educator John Monteith) and vice president (the French Catholic priest and educational pioneer Gabriel Richard), a pairing that nicely connected this new institution to key communities in the territory. In late September 1817 the cornerstone for the first building was laid, at the intersection of Detroit’s Bates and Congress Streets, and less than a year later the university was in operation.

3) A Distinct Campus: For twenty years the University of Michigan was located in Detroit, but by the 1830s it was struggling to survive. So when Michigan Territory was admitted to the union as a state in January 1837, the time was ripe for a change, and fortunately one was very much in the offing: the small but growing town of Ann Arbor (located about forty miles west of Detroit) had proposed that the university relocate, and the university’s regents met and accepted the invitation. The move allowed the university to develop a much more distinct and comprehensive campus than had been possible in the bigger city, and to reinforce that goal, the talented and innovative young architect Alexander Jackson Davis drafted a plan to build a number of buildings in his Gothic Revival style. In 1841, the University of Michigan opened its first Ann Arbor building, Mason Hall, and the rest is history.

Next MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Sunday, August 17, 2025

August 17, 2025: Birthday Bests: 2024-2025

[On August 15^th, this AmericanStudier celebrated his 48^th birthday. So as I do each year, I’ve featured a series sharing some of my favorite posts from each year on the blog, leading up to this new post with 48 favorites from the last year. And as ever, you couldn’t give me a better present than to say hi and tell me a bit about what brings you to the blog, what you’ve found or enjoyed here, your own AmericanStudies thoughts, or anything else!]

Here they are, 48 favorite posts from my 15^th year (!) of AmericanStudying:

1) August 19: NashvilleStudying: Three Origin Points: A son at Vanderbilt gave me the opportunity to learn a lot more about his new home city, starting with this post.

2) August 30: American Catholics: Carlo Acutis: I couldn’t resist ending a series on American Catholics with this nominee for sainthood who “became very angry when he encountered young people who trod on lizards.”

3) September 6: Fall Semester Previews: Aidan at Vanderbilt!: If you thought I’d resist including any and every post featuring my sons in this birthday list, well, hi, I’m Ben.

4) September 12: Classic TV Studying: Lassie: I learned a lot about the classic canine for this post, including the batshit crazy details in the third section (seriously, check ‘em out!).

5) September 18: Summer Reads: The Cold Millions: Sharing my summer pleasure reads was almost as much fun as reading ‘em, including Jess Walter’s powerful historical novel.

6) September 27: MrBeast and 21^st Century Folk Heroes: Like a lot of my blog posts over the last year+, this one, concluding a series on folk figures from American history and culture, was directly inspired by conversations with my wife!

7) October 1: 19^th Century Baseball: Henry Chadwick: It was really fun to complement my new podcast with a series on 19^th century baseball, including this pioneering figure.

8) October 5-6: My New Podcast!: And here’s a post on that podcast in progress (at that point), which is now complete and you can check out here!

9) October 12-13: Contested Holidays: Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day: I really like when the blog can reflect how my ideas have evolved, which we can see clearly in the comparison of this post to the 2015 Talking Points Memo column I cite.

10) October 19-20: An AmericanStudier Tribute to the Phone: Not the most analytical post in my series on famous phone calls in American history and culture, but a very heartfelt one!

11) October 26-27: A PrisonStudying Reading List: I always enjoy the chance to highlight the work of fellow AmericanStudiers, as I did in this conclusion to a PrisonStudying series.

12) November 1: The Politics of Horror: Recent Films: Not my favorite HorrorStudying series of the year (that would be the Sinners series in July), but a fun Halloween series that concluded with these recent additions to the pantheon.

13) November 9-10: 2024 Election Reflections: I really didn’t want to write this post, any more than I wanted to wake up on Wednesday November 6^th. But la lucha continua, my friends.

14) November 11: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Foregrounding Favorites: I could really highlight any post from my anniversary series, and hope you’ll check them all out!

15) November 25: Podcast Thanks: A Serendipitous Conversation: Ditto for this series on my gratitude to lots of folks for helping make my first podcast happen.

16) December 7-8: McCarthy’s America: 21^st Century Echoes: I drafted this post before the election, and it aired well before Trump 2.0 began, but let’s just say it hasn’t become less relevant in the months since.

17) December 9: Hawaiian Histories: Three Shifts: I love how much I still learn from researching and writing this blog. A major case in point here!

18) December 25: 2024 in Review: The Celtics: The 2025 Playoffs didn’t go nearly as well for the Celtics, and next season looks precarious to boot. Which makes it that much more important to lean into and reflect on the best that sports can give us, together.

19) December 30: 2025 Anniversaries: King Philip’s War: 2025 has been a big year for historic anniversaries, but I stand by my argument that we need to remember this moment and figure at least as well as we do the Revolution’s.

20) January 6: Great Society Laws: Civil and Voting Rights: There’s no way I could have imagined, when I drafted and published this series on the Great Society’s 60^th anniversary, how fully every one of these laws would be under assault in 2025. Makes it that much more important to AmericanStudy them!

21) January 18-19: Spring Semester Previews: My Scholarly Work and You: I’d still love y’all’s input on what’s next for me, including a second season of my podcast and more.

22) January 22: Misread Quotes: The Constitution: Am I suggesting we need a refresher course in the Constitution here in 2025? Yes, yes I am.

23) January 30: Musical Activism: Artists United Against Apartheid: If you had “Fighting against South African white supremacy” on your “Becomes Relevant Again in 2025” Bingo Card, congrats to you, and sorry to all of us.

24) February 8-9: Inspiring Sports Stories: Aidan and Kyle Railton: What did I say about any and every chance to share posts highlighting the boys?!

25) February 15-16: One More Love Letter to the Big Easy: Following up my wife and my January trip to New Orleans with this series was a very fun way to reflect on both the visit and my favorite American city.

26) February 17: Places I Love and Hate: Cville: It’s impossible to separate our best from our worst here in 2025, so this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series felt very apt.

27) February 28: AlaskaStudying: McKinley or Denali?: What’s in a name? A lot, as this post hopefully helps us recognize and analyze.

28) Marcy 7: Hockey Histories: Team Trans: There’s a lot of noise about trans athletes these days, most of it deeply misinformed. Here’s a chance to be better informed about an actual community of trans athletes.

29) March 15-16: Reflections of a College Dad: You knew I had to end a Spring Break series with some thoughts on my first year as a College Dad!

30) March 21: ScopesStudying: “Part Man, Part Monkey”: I already loved this post on my wife’s favorite Bruce song, and then a student used it to put me and Bruce in conversation as part of their first-year writing research analysis paper!

31) March 28: Patriotic Speeches: Alexander Vindman: When I shared this post on Bluesky, Vindman read and responded thoughtfully and gratefully, which was definitely a public scholarly highlight of the year for me.

32) April 1: Foolish Texts: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: Writing about a British rock anthem in an AmericanStudies blog series is exactly the kind of thing that helps keep this blog fresh, at least for me (and hopefully for y’all too!).

33) April 10: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s American Dreams: I really enjoyed revisiting Fitzgerald’s novel for its 100^th anniversary, including this post on its most famous themes.

34) April 14: Kyle Contexts: Younger Siblings: You know I could have included this whole series inspired by my younger son’s 18^th birthday, and I hope you’ll read them all in tribute to my awesome not-so-young man!

35) April 26-27: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter: Look, I could try to tell you the crazy places this post on Mr. Earthquakes goes, but you really gotta read it for yourself.

36) May 1: Ending the Vietnam War: “Galveston Bay”: I will never pass up a chance to write about one of my favorite, and definitely one of the most underrated, Bruce songs!

37) May 10-11: A Works Progress Administration for the 21^st Century: Is it crazy to argue for a new WPA, here on its 90^th anniversary and amidst unprecedented attacks on federal workers and the federal government (from within)? Then call me crazy, ‘cause I did it.

38) May 16: Spring Semester Reflections: Student Tributes to Dad: I dedicated my whole Spring reflections series to my late Dad, and especially loved the chance to share these tributes from former students of his.

39) May 20: Malcolm X’s 100^th: An Opera: Did you know that three African American brothers collaborated on a Malcolm X opera in the 1980s? Me neither until I researched and wrote this post!

40) June 2: GraduationStudying: George Moses Horton’s Poem: I really enjoyed planning and writing every post in this special series for my younger son’s high school graduation, but this poem by one of our most inspiring literary figures was especially fun to examine.

41) June 11: Revolutionary War Figures: The “Black Regiment”: Speaking of African American figures and histories, I didn’t know about this Revolutionary War unit until I highlighted them for a series inspired by the Continental Army’s anniversary.

42) June 27: Sound in Film: Meaningful Music: Any chance I get to highlight the amazing Film- and AmericanStudies work of Vaughn Joy, I’m going to take it!

43) July 5-6: Keeping the Critical Patriotic Conversations Going!: I’d really love the chance to talk with any and all audiences about my most recent book and the contested history of American patriotism, and y’all can help make that happen!

44) July 11: Rock-y Groundbreakers: Women Who Rock: This whole series on early rock ‘n rollers was a lot of fun, but I was really glad to have the chance to highlight not only these rocking women, but the equally badass women who wrote about them.

45) July 15: AmericanStudying Sinners: Hoodoo: Sinners is our favorite film we’ve seen this year, and this whole weeklong series made me love it even more.

46) July 23: The U.S. Postal System: Stamps: So many great trivia answers in this post on a small but crucial aspect of the USPS on the service’s 250^th birthday.

47) July 26-27: A Tribute to the U.S. Postal Service: Will that vital federal resource endure this catastrophic administration? I made the case here for why it should and must.

48) July 31: Echoes of Bad Presidents: Andrew Johnson: And speaking of this catastrophic administration, my series on how our worst presidents echo in this moment featured this post on our very worst on the 100^th anniversary of his passing.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

My New Book!

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