November 28, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Ned Blackhawk

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

On one crucial way a recent book revises our stories, and one small but beautiful way.

Way back in July 2012, I dedicated an entire weeklong blog series to my wonderfully fortuitous rediscovery (in my late grandfather’s library, a moment that now powerfully echoes my time combing through my late father’s books to decide what I want to keep) of the revisionist historian Francis Jennings. As I wrote in the first post in that series, which I’ll ask you to check out if you would (and ideally the rest of the week’s posts as well, but most definitely that first one), Jennings’s groundbreaking book The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) had been a game-changer for me back in grad school (both because of its truly revisionist-in-the-best-senses content, but also because it was written by a white man), and I was delighted by the chance to return to and deepen my appreciation for Jennings.

Early in the second chapter of his magisterial, National Book Award-winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023), Ned Blackhawk approvingly quotes and expands upon a line from The Invasion of America. Which is very appropriate, because I’d say that’s exactly what Blackhawk’s book does—build on the important work of early revisionist historians like Jennings, but also add so, so much more to the story, to our understanding of our collective histories, than has been the case previously. Partly that’s because there’s so much more that he’s able to research and share than was the case 50 years ago, of course; but mostly it’s because of the breadth and depth of his researches and his storytelling alike. I would similarly link Blackhawk’s book to another about which I’ve written in this space, Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993), but once again Blackhawk is able to go so much further than Takaki could, even in his definition of “America” (which for Blackhawk extends thoughtfully and importantly to all of North America and often well beyond).

That’s the significant revision Blackhawk’s book accomplishes. But it also offers so many smaller but still hugely meaningful reframings of our American stories, and I wanted to share one example here. At the start of that second chapter, Blackhawk quotes an early explorer who described Northeast Native peoples as having the capability (but not the tools) to “erect great buildings” that “may have rivaled the ancients.” Two paragraphs later, he expands that idea into a stunning metaphor I’m going to quote in full to end this series: “In Puritan accounts, this region’s Indigenous history possesses nothing remarkable, certainly nothing comparable to classical Europe. Many histories of the United States have taken this same tack, as the Native Northeast seems to provide a familiar past that is easily understood because of its simplicity. Since Puritan settlement in the 1620s, the superiority of Europeans to this world has been proclaimed, fueling construction of ancient edifices of a different kind. Molded not of the region’s alabaster but from ideas of immutable difference, an ideological mortar undergirds study of the Northeast. It was an idea so pervasive that the insights of the first European to venture ashore, who uttered ‘various cries of wonderment’ at what he encountered, are completely overshadowed.”

November Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 27, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Wamsutta James

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

As I’ve done for most of the posts in this week’s series, I’m going to start by asking you to check out two prior pieces of mine:

This Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on Wamsutta (Frank) James and the 1970 speech in which he proposed a National Day of Mourning.

And this blog post where I expanded on that column to further consider why and how we could pair that Day of Mourning with Thanksgiving.

I said a good bit of what I’d want to say today, on this especially fraught Thanksgiving Day, in that blog post in particular. If we can’t find a way to do those multiple things at once—to remember and mourn while we gather and express gratitude, to truly engage with our worst while we still work for our best, to live with both sadness and joy—I genuinely don’t know if we can endure as a nation, at least not one with any community worth the name. And Wamsutta James felt the same, as we see in the moving close of his speech: “We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later, it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.” Bringing past and present together, James reminds us that a National Day of Mourning can still be—indeed, if done right would still be—something celebratory and optimistic. Here on the first Thanksgiving since the loss of my father, I’m as personally as I am professionally grateful for that vision of mourning, of the holiday, and of us all.

Last thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 26, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Sarah Winnemucca

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

As was the case with yesterday’s subject William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca is a figure about whom I’ve had the chance to write a good deal:

As a central part of this We’re History piece on Malheur in Oregon.

As the focus of a chapter in my book Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (2011).

And numerous times on this blog, including here on how reading her autoethnographic book changes our sense of the West, here as a context for one of my favorite TV characters, and here as part of a post on fraught and crucial questions of “authenticity” and identity.

There’s a lot that I love about Winnemucca’s voice, as captured so powerfully in that aforementioned book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). But most of all I love the way she combines self-reflection and humility with pride and confidence, blends her hugely complex individual story with impassioned activism, recognizes the most multilayered realities yet refuses to allow them to stop her work. We can see that with particular clarity in the book’s final final two sentences: “Finding it impossible to do any thing for my people I did not return to Yakima, but after I left Vancouver Barracks I went to my sister in Montana. After my marriage to Mr. Hopkins I visited my people once more at Pyramid Lake Reservation, and they urged me again to come to the East and talk for them, and so I have come.” I’m so grateful that she did!

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 25, 2025: Indigenous Voices: William Apess

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

First, just some of the many pieces I’ve published about Apess:

Countless blog posts, including here on his critical patriotic masterpiece ”Eulogy on King Philip,” here on Apess as an autoethnographic writer, and here on why we should collectively remember him so much more fully.

This for the American Writers Museum blog.

And as part of this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the Mashpee Revolt.

In the middle of those three hyperlinked blog posts, I dedicated my last paragraph to Apess’s stunning sermon “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833). If I were forced to boil Apess down to one thing all Americans should learn, it would be that text, which is quite possibly the most sarcastic and smart, bracing and beautiful, righteously angry and generously graceful—to put it simply, the most human—work in the American literary canon. I could say more, but instead I’ll ask you to read that hyperlinked version (which seems to be working—the hyperlink in my prior blog post had died, as they so often do) and listen to this unique and vital American voice, for whom I will be forever grateful.  

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 24, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

On a moving memoir that’s also much more.

I’ve had a lucky lifelong connection to Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to my grandfather Art Railton’s enduring love for the island and the multigenerational family story that he inaugurated there: first as a 1930s teenager working with his fisherman uncle, then as a 1950s husband and father bringing his own young family on vacation, and finally as a 1970s retiree who became the island’s leading historian. The family has finally had to sell my grandparents’ house, but we were determined to keep the Vineyard connection going in some form this year, and were able to do so in late June thanks to my older son running (and running damn well) in the Chappy Point to Point road race. While we were there, we happened into a gift shop near the Aquinnah Cliffs, and there I learned of a wonderful forthcoming (and now published) book written by the shop owners’ son: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity.

Lee’s book is first and foremost a memoir, the story of growing up part of the island’s longstanding, challenged, and still evolving Aquinnah Wampanoag community (along with other layers to Lee’s multiracial heritage, family, and identity that he includes in the book as well). We can see the power of that personal perspective in this early passage: “In tribal summer camp, I learned our versions of first contact between Wampanoags and the English and the First Thanksgiving. These stories, stripped of the usual patriotic flourishes, made me grow to resent the standard narrative of America’s founding. I proudly announced to my first-grade class that I did not want to be friends with any ‘Europeans’ since they were the ones responsible for the killing of my ancestors. But the contrast between my tribal experience and what my history textbooks said confused me.” Lee’s voice is an intimate and vital one that we should all read, this week and all year long.

But like many of the other indigenous-authored memoirs I’ve discussed in this space, including those by the subjects of the next two posts in this week’s series (William Apess and Sarah Winnemucca), Lee’s book would best be characterized as an autoethnography, as interested in communal stories and identities as in personal ones. Not long after that opening anecdote about Lee’s educational experiences in and out of school, he turns his attention to one of his first such autoethnographic topics: the amazing historical document known as Mittark’s Will. As the last will and testament of a 17^th-century Wampanoag leader, this document is certainly part of Lee’s legacy as a 21^st-century descendant. But it also opens up the historical, contemporary, and profoundly significant lenses on land, community, and power that Lee’s title and subtitle suggest, and that he likewise introduces early on: “Over time, I’ve learned that land is not something that is simply lost forever, but something that Indigenous people across the country have been fighting over—losing, regaining, losing again, and rebuilding—for as long as any of us can remember.”

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 22-23, 2025: AmericanStudying Closeted Gay Celebrities

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of them, leading up to this weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

Quick takeaways from five complex lives (in chronological order of their birth years).

1)      Cary Grant (1904-1986): Every one of the entries in this post will have at least some ambiguity, but none more so than the legendary actor who was born Archibald Leish in Bristol, England, but refashioned himself into one of the mid-century’s true icons. Grant lived with a fellow actor, Randolph Scott, for a dozen years, and by all accounts told multiple friends and family members that he was in love with Scott. But he also was married to five different women across his life. Was he bisexual? Were those marriages all beards? Biographers disagree, but one thing seems clear: Grant’s public persona and private life were nearly as distinct as those of the main character in North By Northwest.

2)      Liberace (1919-1987): In the late 1950s, the legendary pianist and showman successfully sued the British newspaper The Daily Mirror for libel after gossip columnist Cassandra (the pen name for William Connor) strongly implied that he was gay. He would similarly sue and settle with the U.S. gossip magazine Confidential over their frequent such allegations, including a July 1957 cover story “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About the Boy!’” Liberace’s homosexuality is far less ambiguous or disputed than Cary Grant’s, and so the ambiguity here is what we do with such lawsuits—whether we see them for example as expressions of his own tortured inner psyche, or as instead the kinds of media control with which Grant’s agent Henry Willson was so adept.

3)      Montgomery Clift (1920-1966): In this case of this Hollywood screen icon, who passed away tragically young from a heart attack, the ambiguity is interconnected with his most famous professional and personal relationship. Clift and Elizabeth Taylor were very close, starring together in three romantic 1950s films and maintaining a famously tight off-screen friendship (and perhaps more) throughout. So when Taylor said, while being honored at the 2000 GLAAD Media Awards for her LGBTQ+ advocacy, that Clift had been gay, the admission was both surprising and seemingly accurate. Yet the details of his life and relationships seem to suggest at least bisexuality, another reminder of how difficult it is to tell the life story of closeted public figures.

4)      Robert Reed (1932-1992): As part of a 2000 ABC News piece entitled “The Real Mike Brady,” Reed’s Brady Bunch costar and on-screen wife Florence Henderson remarked, “Here he was, the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband. Off camera, he was an unhappy person—I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration. I never asked him. I never challenged him. I had a lot of compassion for him because I knew how he was suffering with keeping this secret.” I’ve blogged before about sitcom dads, and it’s particularly interesting to think (as Henderson certainly does in that quote) about the experiences of an actor playing that kind of iconically heteronormative role while living as a closeted gay man.

5)      Freddie Mercury (1946-1991): As compared with earlier icons like Grant and Clift, Freddie Mercury’s bisexuality seems to have become pretty well-established in the years after his tragic death from AIDS. But not if you watch the recent acclaimed film biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), which portrays Mercury as almost entirely gay (with one influential early relationship with a woman). Indeed, the film’s Mercury says to that woman, Mary Austin, that he “might be bisexual,” to which she replies, “Freddie, you’re gay.” Clearly cultural representations of these figures are just as complicated and fraught as were the stories and lives themselves!

Thanksgiving series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 21, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): AIDS

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

On one past and one present reason why Hudson’s diagnosis was so fraught, and an inspiring effect of it nonetheless.

In 1955, thirty years before Rock Hudson’s death, the gossip magazine Confidential threatened to expose the then-rising star’s identity as a closeted gay man. Hudson’s lifelong and domineering agent, Henry Willson, quashed the story by disclosing private information about two other clients, Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter. From what I can tell, that was how it went from then on, as illustrated by Hudson’s subsequent three-year marriage to Willson’s secretary Phyllis Gates (which ended when she filed for divorce in April 1958 on grounds of “mental cruelty,” although it seems she too could be cruel). Bob Hofler’s 2005 biography of Willson is entitled The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson (subtitle: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson), and if we think about that name as representing the fictional identity that Roy Scherer Jr. inhabited for his whole professional career, the phrase makes a lot of sense. All of which meant that when Hudson became so visibly ill in 1984 and the rumors of his diagnosis with AIDS began to spread, the moment’s complexity was significantly deepened by these decades of media misinformation and manipulation.

At the same time, an AIDS diagnosis in 1984 (Hudson was diagnosed on June 5^th) needed no decades-old contexts to be hugely complex and fraught. The first cluster of HIV-infected patients had been identified just three years earlier, the association between HIV and AIDS had only been fully established in 1983, and to say that the moment was ripe with extreme and paranoid rumors and fears would be to understate the case. And if that was true for an entirely private citizen like Ryan White, whose initial diagnosis was also in 1984, then of course it was even more true for a very public figure like Rock Hudson—who had attended a White House state dinner with his longtime friend President Reagan just three weeks before his diagnosis, for example. The fact that Reagan did not publicly address AIDS in any form until September 1985, even though it has since been revealed that he called Hudson in his Paris hospital room in July 1985, illustrates just how much those rumors and fears drove the public conversation about the disease in the era. As does the silly but very real controversy over Hudson’s late-1984 televised kiss with Dynasty co-star Linda Evans about which I wrote in Tuesday’s post.

While Hudson’s diagnosis thus did not change those narratives and fears, it nonetheless significantly and inspiringly affected both conversations around AIDS and support and funding for research into the disease. After Hudson’s death in October 1985, People magazine reported that more than $1.8 million had been raised in private contributions since his July confirmation of the diagnosis (more than double the total for all of 1984); shortly thereafter Congress earmarked nearly $200 million to develop a cure. Joan Rivers noted, “Two years ago, when I hosted a benefit for AIDS, I couldn't get one major star to turn out. Rock's admission is a horrendous way to bring AIDS to the attention of the American public, but by doing so, Rock, in his life, has helped millions in the process. What Rock has done takes true courage.” And Hudson himself agreed, telegramming the September 1985 Commitment to Life AIDS benefit that “I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.” It most definitely did, a moving final act in this complex career and life.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 20, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): WWII Service

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

While researching this week’s series, I learned that Rock Hudson—probably still known as Roy Harold Scherer Jr. at that point—served in the U.S. Navy during the last couple years of World War II, spending time in the Philippines as an aircraft mechanic. I wish I had known that when I wrote this Pride Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the fraught but inspiring history of LGBTQ+ Americans in the armed forces, but I was able to add it as a comment on that post, and wanted to dedicate today’s blog post to sharing that column once more. Check it out if you would, thanks!

Last Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 19, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): Two TV Roles

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

On how one television role reiterated Hudson’s image, and one could help us revise it.

By the early 1970s, Rock Hudson’s draw as a movie star was seemingly on the wane, with a series of mid- to late-1960s box office disappointments—among them Strange Bedfellows (1965), A Very Special Favor (1965), Ice Station Zebra (1968), and Darling Lili (1970)—a main contributing factor. To be clear, I’m not weighing in on the quality of any or all of those films, especially because the only one of them I’ve seen, Ice Station Zebra, is to my mind a pretty compelling spy thriller, based on a novel by my childhood fav Alistair MacLean; but all of them failed to recoup their budget, and we all know how Hollywood responds to that trend. So, like so many fading movie stars did in the second half of the 20^th century (before the medium of television evolved to its current place, where it’s perceived as at least as high on the pecking order as film, and many of our most prominent actors work in TV first by choice rather than career arc), Hudson took his talents to the small screen of TV.

He did so first with the very popular show highlighted in that last hyperlinked article: McMillan & Wife (1971-1977), a detective show in which Hudson starred as police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan alongside Susan Saint James as his wife Sally with whom he solves crimes. For this AmericanStudier, by far the most meaningful thing about McMillan & Wife was that it was one of three rotating shows in the original version of The NBC Mystery Movie, alongside Dennis Weaver’s fish-out-of-water cop show McCloud and, most importantly to your writer, Peter Falk’s Columbo. (How is that the only time I’ve blogged about Columbo?? I’ll have to rectify that with a weeklong series at some point.) But if we’re thinking about the show in the context of Hudson’s career, I’d say it represented a pretty familiar and thus safe way to build on his film roles for this transition to TV, with its irascible, lovable married couple protagonists for example very similar to the roles played by Hudson and Day in the trio of romantic comedies about which I wrote in yesterday’s post. Nothing wrong with that—every performer has a wheelhouse—but it’s not particularly interesting from a cultural studies standpoint.

Far more distinct and interesting was Hudson’s tragically final television role, a recurring guest starring role as wealthy horse breeder (and Heather Locklear’s Sammy Jo Carrington’s biological Dad!) Daniel Reece in the 1984-85 fifth season of the primetime soap opera Dynasty. Hudson’s deteriorating health due to his long-hidden but eventually publicized diagnosis and struggles with AIDS (about which I’ll write in Friday’s post) led to him being written out of the show abruptly and prematurely, but before he was he shared a (to Hudson) fraught kiss with costar Linda Evans. Knowing all we now know about AIDS, I’m not at all interested in the “controversy” around that kiss, which was of course entirely safe. But I think that Hudson’s overarching connection to Dynasty can help us imagine a different potential career arc, one in which—perhaps throughout his career, but at least in its final stage—his identity as a sexually adventurous gay man was publicly known and he could lean into performances that tapped into his full self. As I wrote in Monday’s post, that doesn’t mean he would have to play only gay characters, just that we could see a Hudson on-screen who was as comfortable as possible in his own skin off it. Tragically, that wasn’t the case with Dynasty, but the seeds are there.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 18, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): The Doris Day Films

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

One interesting AmericanStudies layer to each of the three romantic comedies Hudson made with his friend Doris Day.

1)      Pillow Talk (1959): The premise of Hudson and Day’s first film together, which became one of the biggest box office hits of the decade, is itself an interesting window into a fascinating American history: Hudson’s Brad Allen and Day’s Jan Morrow don’t know each other but share a party line, a telephone line shared by multiple customers who have to wait for the line to be free to make calls. But the more enduring AmericanStudies context for Pillow Talk is that its director, Michael Gordon, had spent years on the blacklist due to his membership in the Depression-era Group Theatre, and this was his first Hollywood film after getting the chance to return to the industry (thanks to an invite from influential producer Ross Hunter). Gordon likely sympathized with Hudson’s character’s desire to be someone else, a central facet of the romantic comedy’s hijinks.

2)      Lover Come Back (1961): The success of Pillow Talk almost ensured that there would be a follow-up film, and Hudson and Day (who both served as producers on Lover) made doubly sure of it. Not surprisingly, the plot of Lover Come Back is strikingly similar to that of Pillow Talk, right down to Hudson’s Jerry Webster pretending to be someone else in his initial interactions with Day’s Carol Templeton. But what I do find very interesting is the profession of both those main characters—they are two high-powered advertising executives at a pair of rival Madison Avenue agencies. I’m far from the first commentator to note that Lover is set in the exact historical moment on which Mad Men would focus decades later, making for a compelling comparison between Hudson’s womanizing ad exec and Don Draper and colleagues. Even more intriguing is that in the 1961 film Day’s character could be a high-powered exec, while the same role took Mad Men’s Peggy Olson many seasons to achieve.

3)      Send Me No Flowers (1964): The third Hudson-Day film was also the last, perhaps because it was the least well-received and successful (there was talk of a 1980s sequel to Pillow Talk, but unfortunately it didn’t happen before Hudson’s illness and passing). Based on Norman Basarch and Carroll Moore’s 1960 play of the same name, Send Me No Flowers has a pretty odd premise for a romantic comedy: Hudson’s George Kimball is married to Day’s Judy, is a hypochondriac who wrongly believes he has a terminal illness, and tries to set her up with various other men (with hijinks ensuing, natch). But what’s more interesting to this AmericanStudier is that the film was directed by Norman Jewison, the great social issues filmmaker who just three years later would make the groundbreaking In the Heat of the Night (1967). Directors worked a lot in this era—Jewison made 9 films in the 1960s, for example—so it’s not necessarily surprising that their output would be quite varied. But I do wonder if revisiting Send Me No Flowers with an eye for Jewison’s trademark social commentary might yield something new.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 17, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): Come September

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

[NOTE. I originally shared this post as part of a September 2015 series on September-tastic cultural works. But I think it sets up this week’s topics well, so I wanted to start with it!]

On how biography adds compelling layers and questions to a forgettable romantic comedy.

I honestly tried to watch the 1961 romantic comedy Come September in preparation for writing this post, but after a certain early point I gave up. Even the Wikipedia summary of the film’s plot, and more exactly of who is wooing or leaving whom at any given moment, is almost impossible to follow; and on watching the opening the film feels more like an advertisement for Italy’s spectacular Ligurian coast than a coherent story. And the part that I did most fully understand, and that explains the film’s title, is more creepy than romantic: September is the month when American businessman Robert (Rock Hudson) annually escapes to his Ligurian villa with his Italian mistress Lisa (Gina Lollobrigida); but this year his visit is moved up to July instead, and when he informs Lisa of the change she cancels her imminent wedding to join Robert per usual. The course of true love and all, but not exactly the sweetest way to meet these two star-crossed lovers.

So not exactly a must-watch classic—but if we delve into the biographies of the film’s stars, it takes on additional and more interesting layers of meaning. For one thing, the film’s two young lovers are played by popular crooner Bobby Darin and up-and-coming ingénue Sandra Dee, and the story of their connection behind the scenes is by far the film’s most romantic: Darin and Dee met for the first time on set, fell in love, and were married that same year. Portrayed in the recent biopic Beyond the Sea (2004), with Kevin Spacey starring as Darin and Kate Bosworth as Dee, the marriage lasted seven tumultuous years and produced their son Dodd Mitchell Darin before the couple divorced in 1967. And no matter what the future held for these two, there’s something fascinating about watching two young performers pretending to fall in love while (we know) they were actually falling in love as well, and the romance between these two popular artists makes for a much more compelling story than anything presented on screen in Come September.

And then there’s Rock Hudson. It would be homophobic, narrow-minded, and just plain dumb for me to suggest that a gay actor couldn’t play a straight character, and of course Hudson’s entire career (much of it as the lead in romantic comedies) would belie that notion. Yet at the same time (and of course I’m far from the first to argue this), there’s something inarguably compelling about the reality that one of the most popular, traditional (that is, starring in the kinds of traditional love stories that were permissible and widespread in the buttoned-up entertainment culture of the 1950s) romantic leads in Hollywood history was throughout his life and career performing that sexuality, acting the part of a heterosexual sex symbol. Sir Ian McKellen argued earlier this year that when he finally came out as a gay man (at the age of 49), it made him a better actor; “my acting was disguise,” he put it, “Now, my acting is about revelation and truth.” Seen through that lens, and given that he never came out publicly during his lifetime (although his 1985 diagnosis with AIDS led to awareness of his sexuality shortly before and then after his death), Hudson’s acting was always a multi-layered, complex facet of his life, and one that lends another compelling layer to a film like Come September.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 15-16, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: Three 21C Stories

[For Veterans Day, I’ve AmericanStudied five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to this weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

Three texts and voices that can help us commemorate 21^st century veterans’ communities:

1)      Miyoko Hikiji’s memoir All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq (2013), on which see that hyperlinked post;

2)      Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment (2014), on the stunning and heartbreaking title story of which see that article;

3)      and Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn’s The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History (2019); Ross is an Iraq War veteran as well as one of my favorite former students, and this project embodies veteran critical patriotism amazingly well;

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 14, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: The Best Years of Our Lives and WWII

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On the film and performance that capture the spectrum and significance of veterans’ experiences.

There are no shortage of memorable World War II stories in our national narratives—of course there are the overarching narratives like The Greatest Generation and Rosie the Riveter; there are the explicitly and centrally celebratory texts, such as in films like Midway or Saving Private Ryan; the more complex mixtures of celebration and realism, films like From Here to Eternity or Flags of Our Fathers; and the very explicitly critical and satirical accounts, as in the novels Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. One could even argue, with some accuracy, that if there is any single event or era that doesn’t need additional reinforcing in our national consciousness, it is World War II. And similarly, one could argue that if there’s any group of American films that can’t be considered generally under-exposed or –remembered, even if some have waned in popularity or awareness over time, it’d be those that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Well, I guess I like a challenge, because I’m here to argue that a World War II-centered film that in 1947 won not only Best Picture but also Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Editing, and Music has become a much too forgotten and underappreciated American text. [NOTE: I initially wrote this post more than a decade ago, and I hope and believe that this is no longer as much the case.] That film was The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 novel Glory for Me about three returning World War II veterans and their experiences attempting to re-adapt to civilian life on the home front. It’s a far from perfect film, and features some schmaltzy sections that, perhaps, feel especially dated at more than sixty years’ remove and have likely contributed to its waning appeal. But it also includes some complex and powerful moments, and a significant number of them can be attributed directly to Wyler’s most famous and important casting choice: his decision to cast former paratrooper Harold Russell, an amateur actor who had lost both of his hands in a training accident, in the role of Homer Parrish, a similarly disabled vet with hooks replacing his hands. Homer’s relationship with the extremely supportive Wilma (played by Cathy O’Donnell) offers its share of the schmaltz, but in other ways his character and performance are much more dark and complicated, affecting the emotions through their realism and sensitivity rather than just overt heartstring-tugging.

That’s especially true of the scene that stood out to me most when I watched the film (as a college student in the late 1990s) and that has stuck with me ever since. Homer, once a star high school quarterback who was used to being watched and admired by younger boys in that earlier role, is attempting to work on a project in his garage but struggling greatly with his prostheses; he knows that a group of neighborhood boys are spying on him in fascination and horror but tries to ignore their presence. He can’t do so, however, and in a burst of anger releases much of what he has been dealing with since his injuries and return, breaking the garage windows with his hooks and daring the kids to fully engage with who and what he has become. The moment, big and emotional as it is, feels as unaffected as it gets, and manages to do what few of those more well-known World War II stories can: celebrating and critiquing in equal measure, recognizing the sacrifice and heroism of a Homer while mourning what war does and takes and destroys. Ultimately the scene, like the film, provides no definite answers, no straightforward adulation of its veterans nor darkly comic takedown of war myths, but instead simply asks us to think about what life (in and out of war) has meant and continues to mean for someone like Harold Russell, and all his veteran peers.

Indeed, Best Years is ultimately about precisely that—the experiences and identities of the soldiers themselves, at their best, at their worst, and everywhere in between. On Veteran’s Day, and on every other day as well, I think it’d be ideal to focus not on wars at all, horrific and cold and impersonal and, yes, hellish as they always are, but on remembering those Americans whose lives were and continue to be so impacted by these experiences—not least, I have to add, because I think we’d be a lot less cavalier about starting wars if we did so. Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

PPS. For another take on Best Years, make sure to check out my wife Vaughn Joy's excellent Review Roulette newsletter!

November 13, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: “Returning Soldiers” and WWI

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On how an under-remembered community of veterans helps us make national sense of a complex foreign war.

As part of a June 2017 centennial series on the U.S. and World War I, I shared this post on African American WWI soldiers, including an extended discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s May 1919 The Crisis column “Returning Soldiers.” I’d ask you to check out both that post and that column (the hyperlink in the original post no longer works, but the second one in this paragraph should) if you would, and then come on back for further thoughts on that column and community.

Welcome back! Since I wrote that column, I’ve learned much more about the Red Summer of 1919, a year-long, nationwide orgy of white supremacist violence and racial terrorism that very consistently targeted African American WWI veterans, often in uniform and/or taking part in commemorative marches and events. As that second hyperlinked article from the National World War I Museum and Memorial describes it succinctly and accurately, while the violence was always—let me say again, always—initiated by white supremacist mobs, “the Red Summer saw Black populations fight back aggressively against racial violence and intimidation in ways that were not typical before.” Proving prophetic indeed Du Bois’s stirring lines, “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”

Those are the most specific and to my mind the most important takeaways from this veteran community and Du Bois’s column alike. But I think these histories also frame a broader point, one that has helped me analyze what this complex foreign war—one in which the U.S. got involved very late compared to most of the rest of the world—meant in and for the U.S. When we take into consideration that 1919 violence targeting veterans, and add in ongoing catastrophic crises in that same year including the influenza pandemic and the Palmer Raids (both of which emerged directly out of World War I), it’s fair to say that for the United States the “wartime” period very fully extended past the November 1918 Armistice and into 1919 (if not beyond). Of course that’s always the case for veterans, as I hope every post in this series makes clear. But in this case, I would argue that the entire nation remained in many ways “at war” well past the conclusion of the foreign war, and no community better reflects that reality than African American veterans.

Last veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 12, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: A Fool’s Errand and the Civil War

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On how the protagonist’s status as a veteran adds to a novel’s ironies, and why that’s not the whole story.

Earlier this year, I dedicated a post in my April Fool’s series to the great Albion Tourgée’s historical and autobiographical Reconstruction novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879). I focused there on the novel’s ironies, so would ask you to check out that prior post and then come on back from some thoughts on how that element can be connected to veterans’ stories.

Welcome back! Like Tourgée, the novel’s protagonist Comfort Servosse—the narrator mostly just calls him The Fool—is a Civil War veteran, with the opening few chapters depicting his service with the Union army. Although the novel then jumps ahead four years to focus on Servosse’s move to North Carolina and time in that state during Reconstruction, that Civil War service thus becomes a foundation for everything that follows, on at least two ironic levels. More obviously, Servosse chooses to move his young family and blossoming legal career alike into the heart of enemy territory, a choice that immediately foreshadows why this might indeed be the titular “fool’s errand.” And more subtly but even more ironically, that time in the Reconstruction South will constitute, at least in the novel’s presentation of it, a far more difficult and painful battle than did his Civil War military efforts. Given how badly Reconstruction ultimately went for African Americans and their allies, that’s a very telling and bracing irony to be sure.

But it’s not the whole story, not of this novel and certainly not of Reconstruction. More exactly, the fact that white supremacists, both in the former Confederate states and (especially) on the national stage, successfully managed to sabotage and torpedo Reconstruction and move the country even closer to a white supremacist exclusionary state than it had been in the antebellum period, shouldn’t in any way minimize the impressive and inspiring work of African Americans and allies (like Albion Tourgée) in fighting for a more equal and just South and America. While the tortured irony of A Fool’s Errand can be difficult to parse, or at least to reduce to any single clear point, I would argue that the title itself is meant ironically as well—that this Reconstruction-era work was genuinely a knight’s errand, the most worthy thing this character and author alike could be part of at that moment, indeed a fully worthy extension and amplification of their Civil War service; and that it was not them but rather all of us who were fools, as much for failing to support those efforts as in all the other ways in that painful period.

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 11, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: William Apess and the War of 1812

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On two ways to AmericanStudy the significance of a Native American veteran’s experiences.

I’ve written about William Apess, one of my very favorite American writers and voices, many times in this space and beyond. Most of those posts have focused on individual texts of his, but in this post I wrote more broadly about the arc of his life (as well as how he traced it in his autobiographical writing). I’d ask you to check out that post if you could, and then come on back for thoughts on Apess’s military service during the War of 1812.

As I note in that post, just about every detail of Apess’s life seems hyperbolic; but perhaps the most extreme is captured in this clause: “enlisting in a New York militia at the age of 16 and fighting in the War of 1812.” The U.S. did not yet have a standing army at this time, so it relied on state militias to do the bulk of the fighting (alongside assembled armies like the amazingly diverse one Andrew Jackson commanded at the Battle of New Orleans), and I have to imagine that they weren’t great at checking the ages of their soldiers. But at the same time, I don’t think we can separate Apess’s extreme experience of military service from the fraught and complicated multi-century story of Native Americans service in U.S. wars and conflicts. From Crispus Attucks to Ira Hayes, the U.S. Army Indian Scouts to the Najavo code talkers, and so many other individuals and communities, Native Americans have played a role in every American conflict, one far exceeding their percentage of the overall population. And as we see most potently in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), that service has always affected them profoundly and too often painfully, something I have to imagine was part of Apess’s story as well, especially given just how young he was when that service began.

Alongside such negative effects, of course, veterans can also take away meaningful positives from their wartime service, and one positive aftermath in which I’m especially interested is the critical patriotic perspective that many veterans express and then act upon. William Apess undoubtedly drew his own critical patriotism from a variety of sources, including his faith and his profound understanding of Scripture, his connection to and love for his fellow Native Americans, and more. But I don’t think we can discount the role that this teenage military service played in shaping both Apess’s awareness of the worst of America and his desire to continue fighting to push the nation closer to its best—and when he expressed all those perspectives in his best work, “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836), he did so in the heart of Revolutionary-celebrating 1830s Boston, an act of aggressive activism that seems likewise to continue with that youthful fighting spirit.

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 10, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: The Shoemaker and the Tea Party

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On two important lessons about veterans that we can draw from Alfred F. Young’s book about George Robert Twelves Hewes.

I wrote at length about Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000) in this 2012 Beach Reads post. I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts about Hewes as a Revolutionary War veteran.

Welcome back! In that post I focused mostly on Hewes’s role in and then 1820s memories of pre-Revolutionary events like the Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre, which are also the main focal points of Young’s book. But Hewes did go on to fight in the American Revolution as well, both as a militiaman and as a privateer, and I think that’s as important part of his story that can also help us engage with a couple broader layers of veterans’ experiences. For one thing, I would say that we can sometimes focus on veterans’ wartime experiences as if they exist in a vacuum, or at least as something distinct from the rest of their story; but while of course war is its own thing, it’s also always part of a soldier’s ongoing and larger life story, and more specifically it always follows on whatever had come before for that individual. While most soldiers likely don’t take part in events that directly lead up to the war as Hewes did, they certainly do all live in the society that is experiencing those pre-war events and trends, and I have no doubt that for nearly all of them that means they come to the war with existing perspectives and ideas that have to be considered as part of their wartime experiences.

By definition, veterans also return from their wartime experiences (something that is of course far from guaranteed for soldiers serving in a war). Most of our narratives of returning veterans focus, understandably, on the ways that they carry the war with them for the rest of their lives, a subject I’ve written about many times in this space. But what Hewes and The Shoemaker remind us is that veterans also play a role in shaping our stories, narratives, and collective memories of the wars that they take part in. That they don’t generally do so as overtly as Hewes did through his contributions to 1820s commemorations, or for that matter as overtly as many of the folks and texts I’ll write about in this week’s series, doesn’t change the fact that every time a veteran talks about wartime experiences, tell stories of the war, participates in a meeting or gathering or conversation related to those subjects, and so on, they are helping shape our collective memories of that conflict. That can mean many different things in practice, but no matter what it’s a key role that veterans play, and one that the Shoemaker helps us remember and think about.   

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?