January 27, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Christa McAuliffe

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On more overt and more subtle reasons why the teacher-turned-astronaut was a perfect choice for the Teacher in Space Project (and an especially tragic loss).

At least according to her mother Grace George Corrigan’s Foreword to Colin Burgess’s cultural biography Teacher in Space: Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Legacy (2000), the day after John Glenn’s historic September 1962 space flight a 13-year-old Christa McAuliffe told a high school friend, “Do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon? Maybe even taking a bus, and I want to do that!” Nearly a quarter-century later, when she was applying for President Ronald Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project in early 1985, McAuliffe returned to that foundational moment for both herself and the space program, writing on her application, “I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate.” NASA official Alan Ladwig would later note that McAuliffe was chosen from among the ten finalists for the project due to her “infectious enthusiasm,” and it seems clear that that enthusiasm was both specific to the history of the space program and thus a genuine part of McAuliffe’s perspective for many decades by that mid-80s moment.

Obviously that throughline makes for a compelling and ultimately tragic side to the story of McAuliffe’s selection for this unique role on a doomed mission. But I would argue that other details about her work as a history and social studies teacher together comprise an even more powerfully symbolic reflection of what she brought to the Challenger. For one thing, she got her Master’s in Education from Maryland’s Bowie State University, an HBCU; there were geographic reasons for the choice (she and her husband lived in Maryland at the time), but I have to think the experience affected her future work as an educator in a variety of inclusive ways. For another thing, during her subsequent time at Concord High School in New Hampshire (where she was working when selected for the project) she created a new course entitled “The American Woman,” which “explored the history of the United States from the female perspective.” And for a third thing, according to a New York Times profile in her teaching she “emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals.” I can’t imagine a more pitch-perfect combination for this first teacher-astronaut.

There’s one more detail about McAuliffe’s biography that I haven’t seen highlighted in as many stories, and that while small adds another compelling layer to her symbolic identity. McAuliffe’s great-uncle was Philip Khuri Hitti, the Lebanese-American historian and educator who became one of the most influential figures in that community as well as in the development of the discipline of Arabic Studies. I can’t find any clear info about whether the two knew each other or not, but I still love the throughline between that groundbreaking educator and the inspiring teacher his great-niece would become. In one of her interviews about the Teacher in Space Project, McAuliffe exclaimed, “Imagine me teaching from space, all over the world, touching so many people's lives. That's a teacher's dream! I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!" Long before her tragic death (although only amplified by it, if in painfully ironic ways), McAuliffe had already done that, extending the legacy of her historic relative and making her a truly perfect choice for this symbolically American role.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections 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 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 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?

October 23, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Ely Parker

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

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

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

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

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

Last Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 22, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Canvass White

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

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

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

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

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

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

October 21, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: DeWitt Clinton

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

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

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

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

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

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

August 1, 2025: Echoes of Bad Presidents: The 20th Century

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

Five quick hit echoes of 20^th century presidential badness here in our 21^st century moment.

1)      Woodrow Wilson: The other most overtly white supremacist president segregated the federal government; Trump et al are just firing most every non-white federal employee.

2)      Herbert Hoover: Hoover hastened and deepened the Depression, and treated fellow Americans shabbily at every turn in the process; Trump is plunging us into an even more unnecessary collapse, and throwing almost all of us under the bus as he does.

3)      Richard Nixon: Nixon treated the presidency as an excuse to pursue corruption and crimes, most especially against all those his paranoia labeled “enemies”; Trump’s corrupt criming dwarfs every past instance, including Tricky Dick’s, and is itself dwarfed by his persecution complex.

4)      Ronald Reagan: For so many reasons, but most especially because by the end of his second term Reagan was in major cognitive decline, and likely unable to execute even the most basic functions of the presidency; yet again Trump has a predecessor beat, as he’s been in decline since well before his second term began, and it’s only getting worse.

5)      The 2000 Election: Not a person, and perhaps not in the 20^th century (perspectives differ on that one). But the Supreme Court’s stunning abdication of the law in favor of partisan politics frustratingly foreshadowed a great deal of what has created, enabled, and extended the Age of Trump, so it’s gotta make this list.

July Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next baddie tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?