December 13-14, 2025: Kyle at Michigan!

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to this special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

As I highlighted with this August blog series in particular, my younger son (and phenomenal Guest Poster) Kyle started his first year at the University of Michigan this Fall. It was as full and kick-ass a semester as I knew it would be, and there are countless moments and experiences of which I’m very proud and which make me even more excited for all that’s next. But for a series on teaching reflections, I have to highlight two very distinct but complementary and equally impressive papers Kyle wrote for his tough but fascinating and rewarding first-year history seminar on the study of deep time:

Toward the start of the semester, Kyle’s professor asked them to write a personal observation and analysis of some aspects of the (beautiful) Michigan campus, tied to the class themes of continuity and change over deep time. He chose to observe the seasonal pattern of the changing Fall leaves, to connect it to the cycles of campus construction, and to consider the relationships and contrasts between these natural and man-mind experiences of the landscape, setting, and time. And he did so in a style that was equal parts funny and wise, warm and thought-provoking, very much Kyle’s but also something I hadn’t quite read from him before. My favorite paper I read all semester, with absolutely no offense to any of my FSU students!

The course’s second assignment was a somewhat more typical analytical paper: working with multiple class texts to develop a thesis about and multi-layered analysis of a central class question and theme. Kyle chose a complex and important question/theme about whether and how human progress is possible, and worked closely and convincingly with a series of dense and challenging texts (including one featuring the perspective of the legendary Werner Herzog) to develop a thoughtful and nuanced thesis about different theories of progress as, themselves, the best reflection of both the limits and the possibilities of such change. If Kyle continues in his pre-Law path he’s going to have lots of occasions to work with dense texts to consider big human questions, and this paper made me very excited for that continued arc—and every part of Kyle’s next steps at Michigan!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

PPS. I drafted this post before Kyle wrote his final paper for the course, a truly stunning synthesis of many different ideas about deep time, both from class readings and (especially) from his own evolving perspective. I could go on & on about that culminating essay and his incredibly thoughtful and multilayered work in it, but I'll simply conclude this post with his banger of a concluding sentence: "Through a collective understanding of deep time, humanity can challenge notions of temporal insignificance and inevitable environmental destruction, pioneering a newfound epoch defined by interrelational mutualism between man and nature, not one categorized by geological antagonism."

December 12, 2025: Semester Reflections: Our Graduate Programs

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

I’ve covered the five courses I taught this semester in the first four posts in this series (since I had two sections of First-Year Writing), and so for the final post I wanted to focus on my role as the Chair of our Graduate English Studies programs at FSU (we offer both an MA in Literature and a Creative Writing Certificate). But in so doing, I am also shifting the tone of the series: because while we’ve certainly been facing for many years a serious challenge in terms of enrollments in our Graduate English MA, I’m very very proud to note that we have dramatically reversed that situation; a few years back we were in single digits in the number of students in the program, which had been temporarily frozen as a result, while as of this moment at the end of the Fall 2025 semester we have 25 enrolled students!

Mostly I’m just really excited about that trend and wanted to share it. But in case it might be useful for other folks facing similar situations, I also wanted to share two things that have, I believe, contributed to this significant upswing; the first is a practical thing we’ve done consistently and well, and the second a philosophical shift that I’ve made a permanent part of our program.

The practical thing has been to make and share (not only live, but also and I would argue especially as recordings) a ton of webinars, most of them featuring the voices of our Grad students themselves (mostly current ones, but with some alums sprinkled in as well). These webinars have represented our program and our community far better than I ever could by myself, and have I believe modeled for prospective students what the experience and community are like for our Grad students. Every time we’ve recorded a new one I’ve seen at least one or two new applications for the program over the subsequent weeks, sometimes from folks who were in the live audience for the webinar but most often from folks who saw them down the road (generally linked on our website). I can’t recommend this practice strongly enough.

The philosophical shift is a significant one, but it’s also one I very much stand by. For the first couple years of having the CW Certificate, its courses were pretty much entirely separate from the MA ones, and reserved for students in that Certificate program. But in order to recruit more students for the MA, I decided to allow MA students to take CW courses and have them count as Electives toward the degree. Since we only require 9 such Electives total (along with one required course), this shift means that a number of our students might well take significantly fewer Literature courses; but it also and especially means that they will be able to design their own version of the MA, one that might include Creative Writing if it is of interest, and in any case that can be more individualized (which was always a goal, but I believe this shift makes it much clearer still). I’ve put through a proposal to cement this practice as policy, and believe it will help us continue to recruit and grow our numbers, while also doing what we want to do in these wonderful Graduate English programs.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 11, 2025: Semester Reflections: American Lit Online

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

To circle back to the starting point of Monday’s post on First-Year Writing: I haven’t seen that much obvious or clear use of generative AI in those courses (no more than general instances of plagiarism over the years); but I most definitely have seen far more than I would like in my online-only literature courses over the last couple years (I’ve been teaching one online section every semester since about 2013). I think that’s no coincidence, for a couple of distinct reasons: these courses are entirely online, meaning they use technology and the web for every aspect, and so AI programs are just that much closer to the surface of our work; and I don’t get the chance to talk in person with these students, to show them how much I respect their voices and work and how much the use of AI takes them away from those things in all kinds of damaging ways (I try to make that case by email, but I’m well aware that it’s just not the same when it comes to tone).

I have to admit that, beyond trying to communicate those overall emphases early and often in emails to the students, my main strategy for dealing with this challenge has been and remained this semester a responsive one: when I see a first instance of clear AI use (almost always in an early weekly Blackboard post/response, and almost always because generative AI programs invent quotes and evidence when asked to work with texts; seriously, they do that, and not just for texts either), I reach out to the student to make the case as clearly as I can for why that’s a bad idea on every level, and to give them the chance to create a new version of the post featuring their own work and to receive the grade and credit it would have had it been the original one they posted (ie, to get a mulligan).

It's not a bad strategy, and it generally seems to help push students toward sharing their own voice and ideas, literally my only central pedagogical goal. But the question I return to is whether there would be ways to shift my syllabus and assignments in order to mitigate this challenge on the front end as well. I’m not sure there are such ways, as in a literature course we are always going to be reading texts and responding to those texts in one way or another, and in an online lit course those responses will take the form of short-form posts a good bit of the time. But I am considering using somewhat more creative and first-person post prompts in my Spring online lit course, to see if such prompts make clear from the jump that only the students themselves can do this work. I’ll keep y’all posted!

Last reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 10, 2025: Semester Reflections: American Lit II

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

For many years now, I’ve featured in semester preview and reflection series the question of whether I should substitute shorter texts for longer ones in my literature courses. There have been a number of factors pushing me toward that question, as those hyperlinked prior posts reflect; but certainly one has been my desire to minimize (and ideally eliminate entirely) the number of texts that students have to find their own copies of (ie, purchase, although there are always potentially copies at libraries), rather than that are available online in full. Of course there are plenty of longer readings available in that latter way, but they have to be out of copyright, meaning that any text published after 1930 (as of right now) is not likely to be available online in full yet.  

For the first two-thirds of my American Lit II syllabus, that’s not an issue, as all of our readings (including the longer ones) are available online in full. But in the final Unit, in which we read texts from the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, it is one—and the two longer readings in that Unit happen to be two of my favorite American novels, both overall and specifically to teach: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003). So when I was planning this semester’s section of American Lit II, I really debated whether to keep those two texts on the syllabus or to replace them with shorter readings by the same authors that are available online (such as Lahiri’s wonderful short story “The Third and Final Continent” [1999] in place of her novel, for example).

I ended up keeping the two novels on the syllabus, and made sure to have copies of both on reserve at the FSU library (e-reserve as well as hard copy for Silko, which was available in both ways; hard copy for Lahiri, which was not) so students had at least one guaranteed way to take a look at them without finding their own copies. But I also offered a compromise that I’m still not sure about but that did seem to help a bit—highlighting opening sections in each text that, if students were able to look at, would allow us to have meaningful conversations even if most folks were not able to read beyond those sections (which, indeed, most were not). Since I’m not requiring students to purchase any text, I don’t feel badly from that standpoint about not asking them to necessarily read the whole of a text; but since I especially love where those novels go in their latter sections, I most definitely did miss the chance to fully teach these books. This challenge remains a work in progress, and since I’ll have an American Lit II section next Fall it’s one I’ll be returning to to be sure.  

Next reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 9, 2025: Semester Reflections: Honors Lit Seminar

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

As always, my Honors Lit Seminar was an unadulterated joy to teach—a phenomenal group of students who were willing and able to dive into a large and challenging group of texts, including four longer readings and tons of shorter supplemental ones; individual work with our three papers as well as the Panel Presentations (four moments across the semester when a handful of students share their in-depth thoughts on a Unit and its texts as we’re concluding with them) that pushed my own thinking about our texts and topics; and collective class conversations that modeled the best of what a classroom can and should be. Can’t complain at all, and won’t try!

But I would say that this semester’s section of Honors presented one interesting challenge, something I have thought about every time I’ve taught this course but that felt a bit distinct and more fraught this time around. While our class focuses on America in the Gilded Age, just about every one of our texts and topics has complex and compelling legacies and parallels in our present moment. That’s obviously a positive in many ways, including making clear the stakes of doing this work and having these conversations. But in Fall 2025, those parallels were so apparent and so constant that I really struggled with the question of whether and how to make them a much more central part of our conversations than I usually do, or whether that would detract from our historical and analytical focal points.

I didn’t answer that question in the same way each time—that is, in some discussions I engaged the parallels more fully or centrally than in others—but I would say that across the semester I came up with a strategy that seemed to work well: allowing the majority of our discussion time and topics to focus on our texts and their historical and cultural contexts; but making sure to bring up the contemporary parallels in the final few minutes, both to allow me to note them and to see if folks had responses of their own to those connections. Since I give them the option of connecting to contemporary America in their final paper, as long as they bring in a text or two to help analyze our own moment alongside their analyses of the Gilded Age, I thought these brief and still analytical 21^st century-focused discussions helped model that layer while making clear that it’s a secondary one to our main class focal points.  

Next reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 8, 2025: Semester Reflections: First-Year Writing

[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21^st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]

I know you might expect me to say AI for the significant challenge facing my two sections of First-Year Writing I this Fall. But while there were a few instances, as there have always been a few moments of plagiarism in every Writing class I’ve ever taught, they weren’t a consistent issue in these courses. What was, however, was somewhat more surprising: a higher than usual percentage of students with life and schedule issues that made it very challenging for them to get papers in on time. In a class that is all about building skills across assignments, with the help of my feedback as well as our continued class conversations, this widespread challenge (which some percentage of students in every class and semester experience, but which was again much higher than usual this semester) made our work together a good bit more complicated than my general FYW experience (outside of Covid and its immediate aftermaths, at least) has been.

I won’t pretend I have some silver bullet solution to this challenge (no more than any of them I’ll highlight in this week’s series), but I did lean into enhanced versions of a couple of my class policies and practices in ways that helped us move forward:

First, I doubled down on my willingness to make some assignments/papers ungraded, or rather standards-graded (if the students get me a paper and have included work on a couple of key levels, they get full A credit). I’ve long made the first graded paper in each case ungraded in that way, to help introduce them to me as a grader with a bit lower stakes. But this semester I circled back to that grading method with a key later assignment, and found that many more students got that assignment in and genuinely practiced its major skills. Does that throw off the class grades in a way that might be frowned-upon by admins? Probably, but it meant students got papers in and did the work in thoughtful ways that I could give feedback on, and I was good with that.

And second, I really leaned into the role of my most consistent pedagogical practice: weekly emails, short, informal, participatory emails where students share reading responses as well as work in progress on papers. I’ve long found countless benefits of using such emails in almost every class I teach, but this time I decided to make one such email required as part of the work on their concluding paper—if they didn’t get me that email at some point, that is, I couldn’t grade their final paper. I hadn’t ever taken that step, and am not sure I’m willing to do it consistently—I want these to feel productive, not punitive—but in this case it did make sure I heard from every student about their paper at some point, and I think the percentage of submissions went way up for that assignment as a result.

Next reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 5, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bermuda Triangle

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how an urban legend develops, how it gets challenged, and what it tells us about the human power of such legends nonetheless.

The five naval jets known collectively as Flight 19 may have disappeared in 1945, but the legend of the Bermuda Triangle really began to develop with Edward Van Winkle Jones’s 1950 Miami Herald article “Same Big World: Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton age.” Or maybe it was two years later—Jones charted a number of such mysteries in his article, while George X. Sand devoted his entire 1952 Fate magazine article “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door” to the Bermuda Triangle specifically. Or maybe the legend really took off with Allen W. Eckert’s 1962 American Legion Magazine article “The Mystery of the Lost Patrol”; or with Vincent Gaddis’s 1964 Argosy magazine article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle,” which Gaddis expanded into the book Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea (1965). In truth, it was the cumulative effect of these multiple stories and others across a couple decades that firmly established this mysterious region as an full-fledged urban legend, one that was still very much in force when I was growing up a couple decades later.

Yet still in force doesn’t mean unchallenged, and indeed one of the most extended and successful takedowns of the legend had been published two years before I was born. In 1975 Larry Kusche, who as a research librarian and trained pilot was perfectly positioned to challenge the legend, authored the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (he would publish a follow-up, The Disappearance of Flight 19, five years later). What I really like about Kusche’s work is that he took the legend seriously, not only overall but also and especially in terms of the specific stories out of which it had been built—and then thoroughly investigated the details and realities of those stories, as well as those (such as weather events) which had often been left out. For an example of overall challenges, Kusche found that the number of ships and aircraft reported missing in this area was not proportionally greater than anywhere else on the world’s oceans; while for a specific challenge, he learned that a plane purported to have disappeared in 1937 had really just crashed near Daytona Beach in full view of witnesses. It seems difficult to imagine anyone reading Kusche’s work with an open mind and still giving unquestioning credence to this urban legend.

But at the same time, I hope this whole weeklong series has illustrated not just the prevalence and persistence of urban legends, but the power that they hold in our imaginations. And for an excellent explanation of that power, I think we need look no further than both main phrases in the title of that first 1950 newspaper article from Edward Van Winkle Jones. “Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age”: who wants to believe that our technological or scientific advancements can take all mystery out of the world? And “Same Big World”: as various factors and trends have made the world feel smaller and more understandable, it remains crucially important to recognize just how much of that world is still outside of our collective understanding, with the oceans at the top of that list to be sure. That’s a scary proposition, especially for those who find themselves confronted with those mysteries (as the pilots of Flight 19 seem to have been). But as someone who believes deeply in the power of stories and imagination, it’s also a comforting thing—and a great reason why we need, and hopefully will continue to create and propagate, our urban legends.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 4, 2025: Urban Legends: Those Damn Clowns

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two ways to AmericanStudy the bizarre spate of clown sightings in 2016.

First things first: I have to share my two favorite sentences from the Wikipedia page “2016 clown sightings.” For sheer silliness, you can’t beat “In October 2016, McDonald’s decided that Ronald McDonald would keep a lower profile as a result of the incidents.” But for far more significant effects of such a craze, there’s “nine people in Alabama [were] arrested on suspicion of ‘clown-related activity.’” That’s really the duality of most urban legends, I’d say—they tend to be quite silly in both origin and collective conversation; but they can have very real and all-too-often destructive effects on their societies. If you don’t believe me, here’s a bonus third sentence from Wikipedia: “Students at Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University were involved in mobs that searched for clowns on campus after reported sightings.” I submit that any widespread phenomenon which leads to “mobs” can never be dismissed as simply silly.

So the 2016 clown craze was both silly and serious—but what can we make of it? One definite, and very 21^st century, layer was the possibility—and at times the unquestionable reality—of the sightings being part of marketing campaigns. That turned out to be definitively the case for one of the most famous sightings, a series of viral pictures of a clown wandering an abandoned parking lot in Green Bay in August 2016. A Facebook page soon followed, claiming that the clown was named Gags; and then, lo and behold, indie filmmaker Adam Krause revealed that it was all marketing for his short film Gags the Clown, which was expanded into a feature horror film in 2018. Thanks to such stories, as well as to the era’s general and increasing difficulty of distinguishing reality from reality TV (to coin a phrase), just a month later New Line Cinema, distributor of the in-production film adaptation of Stephen King’s It (which would be released the following year), had to release a statement that “New Line is absolutely not involved in the rash of clown sightings.”

Neither was Donald Trump, at least as far as I can prove. But it’s nonetheless impossible to miss the coincidental timing of this spate of sightings in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election (and yes, the clown sightings were a global phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean the American ones didn’t have specific resonances here). Speaking for myself, but also for many other AmericanStudiers with whom I’ve spoken about the moment, when Trump first descended that golden escalator in June 2015, the campaign he launched looked and sounded and felt like a clown show. And even though by the summer of 2016 it was beyond clear that things were far more serious than that, they were also still, y’know, a clown show. Indeed, I’ll go a step further: the most dominant political and social force over the decade since can be summed up as—perhaps can’t be summed up any better than—a killer clown. Ha, ha, fucking ha.

Last urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 3, 2025: Urban Legends: Sewer Gators

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two figures who together helped spread an urban legend, and one broader way to AmericanStudy it.

From what I can tell, it has for some bizarre reason occasionally been the case that New Yorkers have bought baby alligators as pets, decided that they don’t want to keep them, and flush them down the toilet, leading to the genuine (if usually tragically brief, as they can’t really survive down there) presence of these tiny gators in the city’s sewers. But the urban legend that there are full-grown alligators living in New York’s sewer system is largely due to one unique individual, the public worker Teddy May. I can’t sum up May any better than do the three extended passages featured at that hyperlinked sewergator.com page, but I will highlight this quote from Sewer Division Chief John T. Flaherty, featured in the 1999 book Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends: “Yes, Professor, there really was a Teddy May…almost as much of a legend as the New York City Alligator [Alligator cloaca novum Eboracum] itself.”

If May was apparently notorious among his fellow public workers, and perhaps to a degree in the city’s conversations more broadly (at least during his mid-20^th century life), it took an author and book to extend that legend beyond the Big Apple. That text is NYPD officer turned journalist and acclaimed novelist Robert Daley’s first book, The World Beneath the City (1959), an ostensibly documentary work that leans well into the realms of both folklore and humor, with Teddy May as its primary guide for both. Daley writes, “Sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators about 1935, Teddy May being Superintendent at the time. Neither May nor anyone else believed them.” But Flaherty notes that “in the fullness of time, [May] rose to become a Foreman or, perhaps, a District Foreman.” So it is apparently Daley whose belief should have been a bit more hard-earned, and May whose stories are likely as mythic as those full-size sewer gators.

But even if the gators aren’t really there, the legend certainly is, and like all such tales has a lot to tell us about its and our worlds. In this case, I’d say this urban legend is particularly illustrative of the ways we think about the first word in that phrase, our urban spaces. For at least the last 150 years, many American narratives have been dedicated to spreading fears about our cities, and more exactly about the unseen dangers that lurk around every corner in these urban landscapes. In B.V. Hubbard’s Socialism, Feminism, and Suffragism, the Terrible Triplets, Connected by the Same Umbilical Cord, and Fed from the Same Nursing Bottle (1915), one of the worst books in American history despite having one of our best titles, he writes that “In large cities people do not know their nearest neighbors, and it is sometimes dangerous, both from the moral and financial point of view, to make indiscriminate acquaintances without some investigation of the proposed acquaintance.” Hubbard is using the idea as an analogy for the dangers of Suffragism, but it also succinctly reflects this fundamental fear of the urban unknown—and what could be more unknown nor more fearsome than the legendary creatures lurking in a city’s sewers?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 2, 2025: Urban Legends: Cryptids in Culture

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from pop culture works about three legendary creatures.

1)      Harry and the Hendersons (1987): I’m not going to make the case that this E.T.-lite film about a suburban family who accidentally adopt a Bigfoot and have to keep him safe from hunters and scientists is any great shakes. But I do think that the tagline, captured on the original theatrical poster, is really telling: “According to science, Bigfoot doesn’t exist. When you can’t believe your eyes, trust your heart.” There are various reasons why folks have been determined to believe in Bigfoot/Sasquatch for more than a century, and indeed why cryptids of all kinds maintain their hold on our collective imaginations—but I think high on the list is that we want to believe that there are mysteries beyond the reach of science or knowledge. I agree with that perspective, by the way, even if I’m not quite sure that one of those mysteries is Harry the Bigfoot.

2)      “El Mundo Gira” (1997): There’s no shortage of cultural representations of El Chupacabra, the goat-killing cryptid whose story seemingly originated in Puerto Rico but who has also haunted much of the American Southwest, Mexico, and further into Central America for at least half a century. But I think this Season 4 episode of The X-Files is particularly interesting for two reasons: it links the mythic creature to one of the show’s most realistic social commentary plotlines, about Mexican American migrant workers in California; and, as the title (which translates to “The World Turns”) suggests, the entire episode is presented in the style of a telenovela. I’m not sure either of those elements entirely works, but both are a great reminder that urban legends can and must always be contextualized with both real-world issues in their societies and the kinds of cultural forms of storytelling through which all legends are told.

3)      “A Night with the Jersey Devil” (2008): You didn’t think I could resist including a Springsteen song, didya? This single-only, b-side type release isn’t anywhere close to Bruce’s finest work, but it’s got a very unique and interesting sound and vibe, one that nicely complements its gruesome description of the activities of the famous cryptid who supposedly inhabits New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. And most interesting, to me, is Bruce’s choice to make that cryptid the song’s speaker, right from the striking opening lines: “Hear me now!/I was born 13^th child, ‘neath the 13^th moon/Spit out all hungry and born anew.” As this whole blog series will illustrate, plenty of folks believe in urban legends—but it’s one thing to believe in these mysterious and often frightening tales, and another to actually listen to what they might tell us. As Bruce’s song reveals, that’s an even scarier prospect.

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 1, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bell Witch

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three telling stages in the development of a local legend.

1)      Word of mouth: The basic outline of the Bell Witch legend is that between 1817 and 1821, in Robertson County, Tennessee, the family of farmer John Bell Sr. was repeatedly haunted by a female spirit who came to be known as Kate, and who seemed to be particularly obsessed with Bell’s teenage daughter Betsy. Meanwhile, a young military officer named John R. Bell (apparently not related to the farmer, which is cray cray but might also explain why the name “Bell Witch” caught on for this legend) was part of Stephen H. Long’s 1820 expedition to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and recorded in his detailed journal that during a stop in Robertson County he was told the story of a young woman who was haunted by a ghostly voice. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get an urban legend going, some oral history storytelling and a figure and text that can help pass the word of mouth along.   

2)      Media Investigations: One explorer’s journal wouldn’t likely be enough to perpetuate a legend for generations, though—for that, it takes the kinds of repeated rediscoveries and reports that media outlets can provide. One of the main such outlets for the Bell Witch legend was none other than my public scholarly home The Saturday Evening Post, which supposedly reported on the legend sometime around 1850 (the details are, appropriately, sketchy). Those reports were then picked up later in the 1850s by two New England periodicals, the New England Farmer and Green Mountain Freeman, both of which credited the Post. A few decades later, we see another example of this trend, as a pamphlet associated with the 1880 Nashville Centennial Exposition included a new account of the Bell Witch legend, presumably based on one or more of these earlier versions. The legend continues!

3)      An obsessed author: Those various versions would likely have ensured that the Bell Witch legend didn’t die out completely, but they seem sufficiently isolated in both time and place that they would likely not have been enough to lead to tons of 20^th and early 21^st century pop culture representations. For that, it took what it often takes, an obsessive individual willing to do a very, very deep dive. In this case, that individual was the strikingly named Martin Van Buren Ingram, a Kentucky Civil War veteran turned journalist who became interested in the legend around 1890 and in 1894 published a book with a title I am obligated to repeat in full: An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. The Wonder of the 19th Century, and Unexplained Phenomenon of the Christian Era. The Mysterious Talking Goblin that Terrorized the West End of Robertson County, Tennessee, Tormenting John Bell to His Death. The Story of Betsy Bell, Her Lover and the Haunting Sphinx. If I told you that its publisher, Clarksville’s W.P. Titus, reported a delay due to the witch herself haunting the premises—well, what’s more urban legend than that?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

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?