October 31, 2025: AmericanStudying a Springsteen “Lost” Album: Inyo & Western Stars

[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]

How we can see Inyo as a vital complement to a great recent album, and why it’s much more than that.

In the beautiful bridge of “Western Stars,” the title track to Bruce Springsteen’s excellent 2019 album of the same name, the unnamed speaker—a former bit player in film Westerns (“Once I was shot by John Wayne, yeah, it was towards the end”) who has been reduced to acting in commercials and living off his semi-fame (“That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks/Set me up and I’ll tell it for you, friend”)—adds an interesting new community into the song’s landscape: “Sundays I take my El Camino, throw my saddle in and go/East to the desert where the charros, they still ride and rope/Our American brothers cross the wire and bring the old ways with them/Tonight the western stars are shining bright again.” As far as I can remember, that’s the album’s only overt reference to Hispanic Americans, and while I wish there more, I really love that in the title track Springsteen not only includes that community, but also rightfully has his white speaker call them “Our American brothers.”

Western Stars is perhaps my wife’s favorite Bruce album (it’s definitely on the short list, anyway), and through revisiting it (and also watching Thom Zimny’s stunning film adaptation) with her I’ve come to appreciate it as well (especially the first half, from “Hitch Hikin’” through “Chasin’ Wild Horses”; I think it loses its way a bit in the second, although I absolutely love the final song, “Moonlight Motel”). But in truth, I think it needed Inyo to fully succeed in its goals of representing the myths and realities, the memories and stories, the conflicts and communities of the American West (all themes with which Bruce has been obsessed for a long time). On Western Stars Springsteen portrays those themes in overarching ways, with largely universal songs that could be depicting characters of any race, ethnicity, culture, etc. (with the exception of that bridge in “Western Stars,” that is); while Inyo both connects those overarching themes to Mexican American and indigenous communities and reminds us that the American West, perhaps more than any other part of this foundationally diverse nation, has always been unbelievably multicultural in the worst and the best ways.

So Western Stars is improved significantly when paired with Inyo; but while I think the latter album also benefits from the pairing, I would want to make the strongest possible argument that Inyo doesn’t need any other album or work to be both great and important. I won’t pretend to have a completely exhaustive knowledge of American cultural history (not yet—I’ve still got time!), but I really don’t know many works by white American artists, in any medium, that portray multilayered Mexican American histories and communities with more depth and thoughtfulness than does this previously unreleased “lost” album from the Boss. To say that that project is even more important in 2025 than it would have been at any prior point in our history is both to state the obvious and to add one more layer to the case for why Inyo is a truly important addition to our cultural landscape.   

October Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?

October 30, 2025: AmericanStudying a Springsteen “Lost” Album: “The Lost Charro” & My Book

[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]

On a more pessimistic and a more optimistic way to read a unique Springsteen song.

Bruce has sung in falsetto on recorded songs a couple times in the past, and occasionally does so in concerts as well, so the moments in the chorus of “The Lost Charro” when his voice moves into that upper vocal register are not necessarily new (if certainly unusual). But I think my BruceStudying credentials are strong enough that when I say I’ve never quite heard Bruce sound like he does in “The Last Charro,” you’ll trust me that the sound of this song is quite unique in the Boss’s canon, and well worth checking out if you haven’t already. Even for someone who is first and foremost (and really throughout and last) a lyrics guy, one of the pleasures I found in the Tracks 2 “lost” albums was the chance to hear Bruce do so much musical experimentation that we wouldn’t generally find in his official body of work—including a country album and one built entirely on hip hop drum loops, for example—and I enjoyed that in “The Lost Charro” as well.

If we turn to the song’s lyrics, I’d argue that it’s one of the most interestingly ambiguous tracks on not just this album but also across the whole of Tracks 2. On its face, the song depicts the gradual but unmistakable tragedy captured in its title: the speaker’s loss of his past identity as a charro (a traditional Mexican horseman), which has been replaced by his present work as a migrant laborer in the Southwest U.S. That narrative builds to the song’s most overt and painful lines, in its final verse: “I’ve traded in my leather for the denim of my campesinos/Godmother, I’ll return home soon you’ll see/And tonight in my dreams…” When the two young Mexican brothers at the center of Springsteen’s earlier, similar song “Sinaloa Cowboys” (1995) prepare to migrate to the U.S., their father says to them, “My sons one thing you will learn/For everything the north gives, it exacts a price in return.” The price those two pay is far more violent and tragic than that of the speaker of “The Lost Charro,” but there’s no doubt he too has paid a price, and it’s a sad one.

But y’all know me well enough to know I’m gonna look for a more critical optimistic way to read even a sad song like this one, and I think we can find one in the title of one of the chapters in my book We the People: “Mexican Americans Have Never Left” (I wanted to add, “Motherfucker,” but I hope and believe it’s implied). One of the most pernicious narratives around immigration in recent decades (a very, very, very competitive list to be sure) is the idea that Mexican immigrants (and really any Hispanic immigrants as framed by this narrative, but the focus is frequently on Mexican arrivals) represent a change, a relatively new community in the United States. Literally nothing could be further from the truth. So yes, the speaker of “The Lost Charro” has seen his identity change, from a more traditional to a more modern one; and yes, more importantly, the modern community he’s part of need to be much better paid and supported and respected. But to my mind his isn’t the story of a shift from Mexico to the U.S., because Mexican Americans have never left. Like most of the songs on Inyo, this unusual Bruce ballad can help us better remember those histories.

Last InyoStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?

October 29, 2025: AmericanStudying a Springsteen “Lost” Album: “The Aztec Dance” y Anzaldúa

[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]

On one importantly specific and one beautifully universal layer to my favorite song on the album.

In this May 2021 post I both highlighted a number of prior posts on Gloria Anzaldúa and her book Borderlands/La Frontera and added some additional thoughts. I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back here for a couple of ways in which Springsteen’s “The Aztec Dance” can be put in conversation with that author and text.

Welcome back! I could spend all day listing things I love about Borderlands/La Frontera, but high on the list would have to be Anzaldúa’s use of language, mythology, perspective/narration, and many other stylistic elements to capture the presence of indigenous history, spirituality, sexuality, and more in her identity as a Mexican American woman. In “The Aztec Dance” Springsteen uses a conversation between two Mexican American female characters to do much the same: when teenage Teresa, wearing a traditional flower crown and performing the titular dance at her “high school gym,” righteously complains to her mother that “Ma they call us greaser, they call us wetback/Here in this land that once was ours,” her mother responds (for the rest of the song’s lyrics) with an extensive descriptive of Aztec culture, community, and history. She concludes by recognizing both what has been lost but what endures in her daughter: “Our city gone and left in ruins, they cry bitter tears in another world/But here in this world, my daughter, they have you.” I don’t think even the great Gloria Anzaldúa could have said it any better.

That’s a powerfully specific layer to this wonderful song, and I don’t want to minimize it in any way. But I also believe that this song, like Anzaldúa’s book as well, is an incredible rumination on universal themes of heritage and memory, loss and persistence, that are present for each and every person, family, and community. That’s probably true everywhere, but it’s unquestionably true here in the United States, a nation defined by both the inspiring cross-cultural transformations I traced in my second book and the tragic discriminations I’ve written about throughout my work. In the best and the worst ways, the story of America can make it difficult for us to hold onto the heritages that pre-date our contemporary American experiences and identities, something I’ve thought about a lot when it comes to my own Eastern European Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side for example. But as Springsteen’s beautiful song, and especially its very moving conclusion, reminds us, those heritages are still with us whether we overtly remember them or not—they are literally and figuratively embodied in the young Americans who carry them forward into our vitally diverse future.

Next InyoStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?

October 28, 2025: AmericanStudying a Springsteen “Lost” Album: “Adelita” & Mexican American Wars

[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]

On one obviously important layer to the album’s most historical song, and a more subtle one.

As I hope this week’s series will clearly illustrate, all of Inyo is about the past in the thematic and thoughtful ways that the best historical fiction (per my definition of the genre, at least) always is. But only one of the songs is explicitly and entirely set during a real historical period and event, and that’s the album’s third track, “Adelita,” the speaker of which, Johnny, is a young man from Texas who finds himself riding with Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolutionaries due to his (the speaker’s) love for the titular revolutionary woman. As he puts it in the opening verse, “I’m far from my home now a Texacan soldier/It’s not for fortune or risk to the battlefield I fight/I fell in love with Adelita with my very soul/We’ll stand in arms this night.” From there, he moves us through a number of historically accurate details about these characters and the setting alike, before concluding with a beautiful series of lines after Adelita’s death: “Tonight, I lay in the mountains with the campesinos/My mind at peace from the vows I’ve made/I know I’ll never see Texas again/Your portrait I carry deep in my breast pocket/My rifle firing into the campana, I ride with you ‘round my heart/Protected from this death by beauty.”

Even amidst this album full of songs about the American Southwest and Hispanic American identities and communities—topics that have deeply interested Bruce since at least 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad album, with which the first Inyo recordings were contemporary—“Adelita” represents a striking new layer. It’s true that the speaker is (we assume) a white man from Texas, but almost every line and detail in the song focuses on its Mexican Revolutionary title character and setting. I’m willing to wager that to almost all white Americans—and probably all Americans who aren’t Mexican American, for that matter—the Mexican Revolution has no specific place in their collective memories, other than (mostly unknowingly) in the form of the folk tune “La Cucaracha” (which predates the Revolution but became popular in Mexico during that time, and these days is sung by American schoolchildren in Spanish classes). Of course this one Springsteen song can’t and shouldn’t take the place of an in-depth history lesson, but it’s nonetheless a creative work from one of the most prominent American artists of the last half-century that brings its audience, like its speaker, into the world of Mexican Revolutionary soldiers and events.

There’s another, even more strikingly revisionist layer to this song’s histories, though. The U.S. had a conflicted relationship to Pancho Villa, but for much of his time leading the Revolution it saw him as an enemy, to the point that President Woodrow Wilson organized a 1916-17 “punitive expedition” that sought to capture Villa. And that wasn’t without cause, as Villa had not only attacked U.S. corporate interests in Mexico, but in March 1916 he and his troops crossed the border and attacked the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17 Americans. (That too wasn’t without cause, however, as Villa was seeking revenge for U.S. backing of his revolutionary opponents.) Those overarching contexts are beyond the focus of Springsteen’s youthful speaker, but they make it even more striking that this young man from Texas is now fighting “side-by-side with Francisco Villa,” and thus quite possibly taking part in the raid on a U.S. community. It might seem that he is thus joining with “the enemy,” but I would argue that his status as a “Texacan soldier” makes him the heir of a long line of Tejanos whose identity bridges these two nations and reminds us of the border’s thorough porousness.

Next InyoStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?

October 27, 2025: AmericanStudying a Springsteen “Lost” Album: “Inyo” & Los Angeles

[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]

On two ways the stunning title track added to my sense of LA histories.

Way back in February 2012, I dedicated a blog post to one of my favorite films, Chinatown (1974), and how it can help us analyze the history and identity of Los Angeles. In lieu of a full first paragraph here I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back for a couple thoughts on how “Inyo” reflects and extends some significant shifts in my thinking since then.

Obviously I’m aware—as anyone who’s seen Chinatown has to be—that the white men who built modern Los Angeles in the early 20^th century were not always beacons of goodness (to put it very mildly). But in that post, I still referred to William Mulholland as simply a “particularly visionary city planner,” and at least implied that his aqueduct project was a straightforward public good. So I really appreciate that Springsteen’s song “Inyo,” the speaker of which first works on the aqueduct and then helps bomb it as part of the 1910s-20s “California water wars,” highlights how that aqueduct and its vital resources were consistently shaped by wealth and power. Moreover, that speaker includes not just class but race and ethnicity in his story, narrating, “My uncle pushed the Paiute from their valley/Cut out his homestead in blood.” Chinatown includes one young Native American kid (probably—it’s hard to say for sure) in its vision of LA, but this moment in Springsteen’s song really adds to those histories.

All of those histories have very much continued into our 21^st century moment, and as my wife and I listened along to “Inyo” I was delighted to find that Springsteen’s speaker brings us up to the present in the song’s stunning final verse: “Tonight the Santa Ana’s drawing west across the Mojave/Blowing fire and dust onto L.A. County windowsills/Bill Mulholland and Fred Eaton are dead in their graves/The Queen of Angels, she remains thirsty still.” Back in this October 2021 post I connected California wildfires to Chinatown through the lens of David Wyatt’s excellent book Five Fires, and of course that unfolding contemporary history has only become more potent and destructive in the four years since. And I really love how Springsteen’s song connects our current crises back to the histories of and battles over water in Los Angeles, one more layer to how fully and beautifully this opening title song sets the stage for the whole of Inyo.

Next InyoStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?

October 25-26, 2025: My Favorite Civil Engineer!

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ve honored the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to this special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

As will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, I’ve had the chance to highlight my older son Aidan’s ongoing personal and pre-professional interest in civil engineering many times, both in this space (which is the case for the prior two hyperlinks as well) and in my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. But I couldn’t end a blog series on a civil engineering project without paying tribute to Aidan, and want in particular to highlight two different ways I’ve learned a lot in recent months from his ongoing experiences:

1)      This past Spring semester, the second in his first year at Vanderbilt, Aidan took a wonderful class on Urban Ecologies. Toward the end of that class, he wrote an amazing paper analyzing multiple layers of the city’s histories through pictures of one particular spot, connecting them through a fascinating and compelling overarching use of the concept of a palimpsest. The paper was entirely successful for its focal assignment, but it also significantly shifted my own perspective on not just the landscapes around us, but on how we can use that palimpsest framing to analyze community and history alike. Which is, I would argue, a profoundly important question for civil engineers as well as for all the rest of us!

2)      Over the summer, Aidan got to continue working on a couple engineering projects with Vanderbilt faculty, grad students, and fellow undergrads; he was able to do that work virtually and thus live with us back in Massachusetts while doing so, and as his Dad I’ll admit that was my favorite part of the experience! My second favorite part was seeing how much he enjoyed and threw himself into the work, which renewed my confidence that he’s in the right major (for now, obviously these things can and often do change). But I also greatly enjoyed seeing the true diversity of engineering projects that this pair reflect: one is focused on testing how smartwatches can measure heat’s effect on the wearer’s body; and the other is a study of traffic patterns at a particular Nashville intersection and what they reveal about transportation in the city more broadly. Canvass White and Ely Parker would approve!  

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 24, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: That Song

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

On a few ways the silly “Erie Canal Song” helps us think about the communal role of folk music.

My wife informs me that she never once sung “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” (also known as the “Erie Canal Song,” “Fifteen Years on the Erie Canal,” and “Mule Named Sal,” among other sobriquets) in school, so maybe my experience here isn’t typical. But all I know is that, as an elementary schoolkid in early 1980s Virginia, I sang that song with my peers enough times that my memories of the experience are still emblazoned on my mind these forty-plus years later (maybe that’s based on just one time singing it, but I sure hope not because I’d really like to save that room for other singular memories if so). And in any case, it’s pretty striking that Tin Pan Alley songwriter Thomas S. Allen’s little ditty about an Erie Canal barge worker and his trusty mule Sal, apparently originally composed in 1905, first recorded by Billy Murray in 1912, and published by Allen and F.B. Haviland Publishing Company in 1913, was still going strong nearly three quarters of a century later and many hundreds of miles away from that titular throughway.

One interesting thing about that timing of the song’s creation is that it came right as the Erie Canal was about to be replaced by the New York State Barge Canal, on which construction began in 1905; similarly, mule barges would be replaced on that new canal by engine-powered one. The song’s original chorus, which features the repeated line “Fifteen years on the Erie Canal” (over the decades it has been gradually changed to “Fifteen miles” instead, and I believe that’s what I sang as a kid) drives home the passage of time, and the early line “We’d better look ‘round for a job old gal” suggests that the speaker knows what has or at least soon will come with that passing time. But at the same time, much of the song is written in the present tense, including that other repeated chorus phrase “low bridge, everybody down,” bringing the audience into the work world of the speaker and Sal. I’d say both of those layers reflect key communal roles for folk music: representing work worlds and experiences, especially for audiences who might not otherwise be aware of them; and expressing nostalgia for bygone folkways, especially right as they’re passing.

The song’s original final verse and chorus add another layer, though: “You’ll soon hear them sing everything about my gal, fifteen years on the Erie Canal/It’s a darned fool ditty ‘bout my darned fool Sal, fifteen years on the Erie Canal/Oh every band will play it soon, darned fool words and darned fool tune!/You’ll hear it sung everywhere you go, from Mexico to Buffalo//Low bridge, everybody down, low bridge, I’ve got the finest mule in town/She’s a perfect, perfect lady, and she blushes like a gal/If she hears you sing about her and the Erie Canal.” I really like this meta-textual addition to the song, as well as Allen’s confident (and accurate) assurance that his song will soon be sung everywhere (although I don’t believe we got to this verse in our classroom version). And I really like thinking about Sal both aware of and being pleased by the fact that she’s the subject of that widespread singing. But those aren’t just delightful little additions, they’re also a compelling moment of self-reflection about how and why we both write and sing folk songs—and as young Ben can attest, when they’re good we sing them for much longer than fifteen years.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 23, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Ely Parker

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

On two ways to think about a Renaissance American’s contributions to the Canal.

First things first: I’ve written about the amazing Ely Parker (1828-1895) many times in this space, including this January post on the Erie Canal but also this one on Parker himself, this brief one begging for a biopic, this one on Ulysses S. Grant’s friends, and likely others I’m not remembering right now. I’d love if you could check out those prior posts, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on the Canal connections in particular.

Welcome back! Ely Parker was such a badass Renaissance dude that he only enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to study civil engineering when the New York Supreme Court refused to accept him to the New York bar as he could not gain U.S. citizenship; all of this, by the way, took place before his 20^th birthday. Despite that professional setback Parker would spend the next couple decades continuing to fight (alongside the activist white lawyer and future New York Attorney General John Martindale) for Seneca land rights, winning a series of important legal victories in the process. But I also have to believe that the proximity of his shift to civil engineering makes clear that he likewise thought of that profession (much like yesterday’s subject Canvass White did) as a way to serve his local communities, and thus that his appointment as the Erie Canal’s resident engineer in Rochester was far from a coincidence (that hyperlinked article makes the same point at great length).

Yet it’s important to note that that’s not the only way we could link Parker’s canal work to his Native American community. As I discussed at length in this post, toward the end of his life Parker both received extensive criticism from fellow Native Americans on and himself expressed doubts about his work as (for example) President Grant’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs. I don’t think for a second that any part of Parker’s career and life can overshadow his lifelong dedication to his communities, most especially his tribal one; but at the same time any 19^th century Native American who worked with the federal government was, to put it simply but not inaccurately, aiding and abetting the enemy. Given what the Erie Canal, like any mammoth public transportation project, meant for many local communities, it’s fair to say that Parker’s connection to it represents another complicated, multilayered side of this fraught, fascinating, foundational figure.

Last Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 22, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Canvass White

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

On two contrasting yet interconnected experiences that the pioneering civil engineer carried with him throughout his short but hugely influential life.

As I briefly mentioned in Monday’s post, in 1817, after he had been working on the Erie Canal for about a year (under the supervision of judge turned chief engineer Benjamin Wright), Canvass White persuaded Governor DeWitt Clinton to support and fund a research trip to England. There he spent more than a year traveling over 2000 miles on foot throughout the country, studying the construction and operation of canals. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that not long after his return home he developed and patented a groundbreaking new way of producing waterproof hydraulic cement from limestone, nor that he then permitted the use of his patented formula only for work on the construction of canal locks. You can’t tell the story of Early Republic America without thinking of the continued English influence, and White clearly had learned across the pond not just how to make the most of one’s home terrain, but also how to do so in service of his fellow countrymen.

That English experience and influence is particularly interesting in White’s case because just a few years before his trip he had been fighting against the English. In the spring of 1814, while he was attending Connecticut’s Fairfield Academy to study mathematics, minerology, and surveying under the legendary Revolutionary-era Dr. Joseph Noyes, White temporarily left school to volunteer for the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. He was commissioned as a lieutenant and led a company of volunteers in the July 1814 assault on and capture of Ontario’s Fort Erie; he was severely wounded during that battle, but after returning home and convalescing did complete his studies and move into his work on the Erie Canal. Yet his war wounds would never entirely heal, and seem to have been the cause of the lifelong ailments that led him to move to Florida in search of a more temperate climate and tragically die very young, in 1834 at the age of just 44.

Those two defining experiences clearly reflect opposed perspectives on England, and thus illustrate that White had a profoundly open mind, to be able, just a few years after that grievous injury, to travel so fully throughout this former foe. But I would also argue that they can and should be interconnected, and not just because White certainly carried both with him for his remaining couple decades of life. To my mind they exemplify a young man who would go to any lengths, literally and figuratively, to do what he believed necessary to work for the good of his community and peers. The Preamble of the Constitution includes “promote the general Welfare” as one of the ways in which “We the People” hope “to form a more perfect Union.” That first phrase can be interpreted in various ways to be sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered a life that included multiple actions so intended within such a short period of time as that of Canvass White.

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 21, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: DeWitt Clinton

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

I highlighted the most famous political layers to DeWitt (and his even more famous uncle George) in Monday’s post, so here are three additional contexts, ones more closely linked to the transportation project that he made possible:

1)      Steam: In 1831, the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad (M&H) built a new steam engine that they named the DeWitt Clinton. Clinton had died in office in 1828, and it made sense for a New York railway company to honor him in this way; moreover, the Erie Canal was seen as a transportation competitor to the railroad, so the locomotive naming could be read as a peace gesture. But it’s also worth noting that, in an era when steam navigation was still new and at least somewhat controversial, Clinton consistently championed the technology as a vital resource for not just transportation (in shipping as well as railroads) but also and especially the public good.

2)      Freemasonry: Clinton was initiated into New York’s “Holland” Masonic lodge when he was just 21 years old, was elected Grand Master of the state’s Grand Lodge 16 years later, and for the last 12 years of his life was the Grand Master of the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar in the U.S., a national organization he helped create. His connection to Freemasonry became a source of potential scandal in 1826, when a man named William Morgan threatened to publish a book exposing the organization’s rituals and subsequently disappeared for good; Governor Clinton issued three proclamations offering rewards for information, but to not avail. Yet without eliding that mysterious and tragic case, I’d add that it seems important to note that one of the greatest champions of our most elaborate civil engineering project was a Mason!

3)      Jesse Hawley: Clinton began his affiliation with the Erie Canal project around 1810, and was a founding member of the Erie Canal Commission organized at that time. But his own interest in the project was due to another and even more compelling figure: Jesse Hawley, a New York flour merchant whose transportation debts (due directly to the lack of affordable operations for traversing the state) led him to spend 20 months in debtors’ prison between 1806 and 1808; and who during that time wrote and published fourteen essays arguing for the canal in the Genesee Messenger under the pseudonym “Hercules.” I love that this huge national project began in many ways with one man writing his way through an unjust prison sentence, and DeWitt Clinton can help us remember him.

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 20, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Starting the Project

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

[NB. This is a reposting of one of my January 2025 historic anniversary posts to set the stage for the rest of the week!]

For the 200^th anniversary of its opening, three figures who helped construct the Erie Canal.

1)      DeWitt Clinton: There’s a whole Early Republic history to be written through the lens of the Clinton family, including George (the fourth Vice President of the US) and his nephew DeWitt (who himself ran for President in 1812, in between stints as a Senator and Governor of New York among other influential roles). The final public act in DeWitt’s life was his two terms as NY Governor, during the second of which he died unexpectedly in February 1828. And no aspect of DeWitt’s time as governor was more significant to him, nor more influential for the state and young nation, than his support for the Erie Canal project (leading to his nickname “Father of the Erie Canal”). He and it met with plenty of opposition, producing such colorful phrases as “Clinton’s Big Ditch.” But as with so many progressive ideas, just about everybody was more than happy to get on board once Clinton’s pet project opened and contributed so potently and positively to the evolving Early Republic.

2)      Canvass White: Prominent political allies are key for any major project of course, but at the end of the day it takes the folks on the ground to make the project a reality. There weren’t really professional civil engineers yet (at least not in America), and so the folks on the ground came from many walks of life: politicians like James Geddes, judges like Benjamin Wright, educators like Nathan Roberts, and amateur inventors and would-be engineers like Canvass White. Just 26 when he began working for Judge Wright as an engineer on the Erie Canal project in 1816, White persuaded Governor Clinton to fund a trip to England to learn more about their canals. He learned so much, and contributed so much to the Erie Canal project over the decade leading up to its opening, that he would be appointed Chief Engineer for multiple subsequent such projects, including the Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Lehigh Canal.

3)      Ely Parker: I’ve written about Parker, one of my favorite Americans, many times in this space, including that hyperlinked post and this one among others. He was born in 1828, so to be clear he didn’t play any role in the original construction of the Erie Canal (he was awesome but not superhuman). But he studied civil engineering at RPI, and when an 1840s extension of the canal was announced, Parker (still only 20 years old at the time) applied for and was appointed as the project’s resident engineer in Rochester. He was also in that same period continuing his lifelong fight for his Seneca Nation’s land rights and claims, which helps us remember both that all construction projects in America intersect with such fraught issues and that figures like Parker have worked to complement rather than oppose these needs.

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?  

October 18-19, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Nintendo Classics

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ve blogged about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to this weekend post on Nintendo classics!]

Life lessons from some of the legendary system’s most iconic games.

1)      Super Mario Bros.: There’s a lot I could go with here: the importance of siblings (for my boys); the need to yeet some turtles (for my wife). But perhaps the wisest lesson from Nintendo’s most enduring game is that we have to descend into the most potentially crappy places if we’re gonna find hidden treasures and save the day.

2)      Double Dragon: From what I can tell, Double Dragon was the first console game to introduce two-player cooperative gameplay; certainly it was one of the most prominent early examples of that trend. I don’t think I really need to say much more about why we need solidarity and support to take down all the bad guys, do I?

3)      The Legend of Zelda: I didn’t play Zelda back in the day (what can I say, I was more of a Gauntlet kid), but one thing I know is that at the start of the game Link has only a shield, and he has to talk with a mysterious old man to gain the sword that will be crucial to his survival. Don’t discount the wisdom of us elders, y’all.

4)      Tecmo Bowl: There are various ways that one of the first football video games pales in comparison to 21^st century classics like Madden. But one of those ways—the fact that individual players like Bo Jackson could become completely overpowered and dominate the game—I kinda dig. You all know I’m a huge fan of teamwork, but sometimes we gotta just do the damn thing ourselves, y’know?

5)      Kirby’s Adventure: No matter how much the world throws at us, we just have to keep our appetite for adventure, taking it what life gives us and turning it into fuel for our continued growth and success. Kirby was a real one.   

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 17, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Video Game Studiers

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

Five of the many books and scholars to read for far more in-depth video game studying:

1)      Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron’s The Video Game Theory Reader (2003): That hyperlink is to the 2009 2^nd edition, which reflects how successful this important early collection, edited by two of the field’s most prominent scholars, was and remains.

2)      Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006): I’m not sure any single scholar has been more significant to the field than Ian Bogost. Bogost is also a game designer, which seems to me to be a relatively common (if also somewhat complicated) overlap for many video game studiers.  

3)      Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2006): As I hope every post in this series has illustrated, I’m very interested in the line between the creative fictions that video games create and the social and cultural realities that they always nonetheless reflect and contribute to. No scholarly work better analyzes that line than does Juul’s book.

4)      Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2011): I likewise hope this series has reflected my strong belief that video games matter, on a variety of levels, across the spectrum from more potentially negative effects to the most positive contributions to our individual and collective experiences and identities. But don’t take my word for it—read Bissell’s thoughtful and fun book!

5)      Garry Crawford’s Video Gamers (2012): Even before Gamergate (which, I agree completely with that hyperlinked Harmeet Kaur piece, foreshadowed much of the worst of our current moment), I found the majority of video gamers significantly less interesting and often much more frustrating than video games. But that’s precisely why I need to push past those feelings to get more analytical about this community (or collection of communities, more exactly), and Crawford’s book offers a great starting point.

Nintendo post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 16, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: GTA

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

Forgive me for focusing this post less on Grand Theft Auto itself and more on broader gaming topics. But to be honest I think the game’s lasting significance lies more in what it has to tell us than in the silly and over-the-top gameplay itself. So to wit, here are three aspects of video games that a focus on GTA can help us discuss:

1)      Their Effects: The elephant in the room when it comes to GTA, and really all violent video games for that matter, is the question of their potential effects on (especially) impressionable young players. From what I can tell, the first GTA featured mostly just cartoonish car violence; it was with the series’ fifth game in particular that the stakes were significantly raised, with players for example having the ability to rob and kill prostitutes after sleeping with them (and, it seems, being rewarded by the game for choosing to do so). I don’t believe that any form of art (which games on, on which more in a moment) can or should be directly correlated with any particular effects on their audiences; it’s nowhere near that simple. But at the same time, it’s worth noting that unlike most other art forms, video games ask their audiences to make many of the choices themselves, and it would be disengenous to suggest that choosing to kill a woman is the same as watching a character do so in a film (for example). So while I don’t believe a game like GTA makes its players more violent, it does at times ask them to act violently in troubling ways that are worth recognizing and critiquing.

2)      They’re Art: Perhaps it’s now widely accepted that video games are an art form; certainly disciplines like Fitchburg State’s groundbreaking Game Design Major have that idea as a key starting point. But I’m not sure that the communal conversations about games tend to incorporate that definition, as it seems to me that they are still often seen more as a combination of toys (and thus more appropriate for children than any other age bracket) and distractions (and thus taken less seriously than other cultural forms and media). Obviously any definition of art is open to interpretation and argument, so I can’t claim with absolute authority that video games are an art form (although I believe very strongly that they are). But I will say that narratives which treat games more dismissively lead directly to less thoughtful and helpful engagements with questions like the ones I raised in point one, to perceptions of games as (for example) simply delivery systems for violence rather than an art form featuring artistic subgenres that include violence as a key element (just as action and horror films do, to name two other such art forms).

3)      They’re Flexible: If we do see video games as an art form (as I do), what differentiates them from most other such forms (other than Choose Your Own Adventure books, I suppose!) is that they are interactive, depending on the choices of their audience members (who of course are far more than just audience members) for how their stories and thus their art are ultimately created. I know that’s a well-known point, but I have a specific and surprising GTA anecdote related to it. When my sons were relatively young, a babysitter took them to his house and let them play one of the GTA games on his gaming system. I was initially horrified when they told me this, but then they described their game play at length, which involved all sorts of driving craziness and silliness (driving into swimming pools, trying to drive off bridges onto moving trains, etc.) and relatedly only self-directed violence (seeing what would happen if they climbed to the top of a tall crane and jumped off, for example). Not exactly the highest form of art, perhaps, but far different from a game focused on killing others. In this case, at least, the game’s flexibility had allowed my sons to make it their own in a silly but also, I would argue, very significant way.

Last GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 15, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Oregon Trail

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On three takeaways from the pioneering educational game.

I used “pioneering” there not just for the Dad Joke-worthy pun (although duh), but also because it highlights the most obvious and important historical issue with The Oregon Trail, one I wrote about in this blog post: the absence of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and really any ethnic American communities from its vision of the West. I didn’t notice that absence at all as a kid enthralled by the game, and that’s precisely the point: Oregon Trail played into stereotypical visions of American pioneers, and indeed like all popular art that traffics in stereotypes it also amplified and further entrenched those limiting images. I’m not suggesting that the game should have focused centrally on Native American communities, nor that a children’s video game had to include graphic depictions of war; every game has the right to choose its own subject and to present it in a way that’s appropriate for its audience. But a game set in the mid-19^th century American West needs at least to include the communities and cultures that are part of that world, and on that question Oregon Trail came up very short.

With that most important thing said, there are also other historical lessons we can learn from what Oregon Trail’s designers did choose to include. Another one that would be easy to miss (and that I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about at all until brainstorming topics for this post) is the deeply solitary nature of the Trail as the game portrays it. I didn’t have a chance to play the game while researching this post, but as I remember it at least the player really doesn’t see any other wagons or people between leaving Independence, Missouri and arriving in Oregon. Perhaps players do encounter waystations for supplies or the like along the way, but I’m thinking here about other travelers, about the idea of wagon trains (which as I understand it were a typical way for families to traverse the Trail). I understand the game’s goal of forcing players to deal with all the myriad challenges themselves, rather than offering them the possibility of relying upon other families for aid—but that choice does seem to reinforce another stereotypical American image, that of “rugged individuals” (rather than what to my mind is a far more shared historical experience, of communal survival).

I don’t want to emphasize only frustrations with the game’s portrayal of its historical subjects, though. After all, there are reasons why Oregon Trail was one of the most successful video games of its era, and indeed why it remains successful today, as it’s one of the only games from my childhood that my sons have also heard of and played. And one of the things I think Oregon Trail does best is capture the profoundly fraught and contingent nature of life (and death) in its mid-19^th century moment. The most famous such element is the constant threat of illness, especially that damn dysentery. But while some such negative outcomes (like getting one of those diseases) were mostly due to chance and bad luck, many others emphasized contingency—how one bad decision could produce disastrous and even fatal outcomes, not only immediately (ie, if you choose to ford a river that’s too deep or wild) but also far down the road (ie, if you purchase the wrong supplies and end up stuck or dead hundreds of miles later). Given hindsight, the past can sometimes feel inevitable or predetermined—but it was of course just as contingent and unfolding as our present and future, and in its specific but significant way Oregon Trail highlighted those realities quite potently.

Next GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 14, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Pac-Man

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On three of the many ways Namco’s smash 1980 launch helped changed the game(s).

1)      Character: Arcade and video games had certainly diversified in the decade or so since the release of yesterday’s subject Pong, with the biggest hits in the years before Pac Man arrived space shooters like Space Invaders and Asteroids. But one thing that no game had quite featured until the little yellow dude was a recognizable and marketable main character, one who could become the mascot and (literal) face of the game and franchise. That focus allowed the game to include another innovation: cutscenes in between levels, brief mini-movies featuring that main character in wacky adventures. It allowed for hugely successful sequels like 1981’s Ms. Pac-Man that would not have been possible without a distinct character at the heart of the franchise. And it paved the way for many of the most popular video games and franchises of all time: the Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, the Angry Birds, and more.

2)      Artificial Intelligence: One of the game’s vital coding innovations was that the enemies—the four cute but deadly “ghosts” (Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, natch) who pursue Pac-Man as he tries to eat all those delicious dots and fruits—were programmed with artificial intelligence and could respond to the player’s moves. I don’t imagine it was the most sophisticated such AI—Ex Machina this wasn’t, that is—but nonetheless, even the idea that every time you played Pac-Man, you could have an entirely different experience depending on your own choices and what effects they had on the ghosts’ behaviors was a profoundly new element to video gaming. I talked in Monday’s post about the flexible and interactive qualities to video games; of course that was somewhat true even with the Pong’s of the world, but adding artificial intelligence in this way (and at any level of complexity) really began to illustrate the possibilities for that kind of player-game interactivity.

3)      Winnability: That artificial intelligence and its promises of constantly evolving gameplay certainly contribute to a sense of Pac-Man as a particularly replayable arcade and video game, one that grossed over $1 billion in quarters (!) in its first year of release. But another important element was Pac-Man’s seeming yet elusive sense of winnabililty; as Atari’s Chris Crawford put it in an 1982 interview with Byte magazine, “An important trait of any game is the illusion of winnability ... The most successful game in this respect is Pac-Man, which appears winnable to most players, yet is never quite winnable.” Indeed, Pac-Man was designed to have no final level, although apparently if a player beats 255 consecutive levels, a bizarrely split-screen and supposedly unbeatable 256^th final level does appear. Even that strange, glitch-like detail, however, would only add to that sense of potential yet also ephemeral winnability, making playing Pac-Man again and again that much more appealing. Which, for nearly forty years now, is just what gamers have done.

Next GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?