February 8-9, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Aidan and Kyle Railton

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

I could write about my sons in every post and ad nauseum (probably literally for y’all, but #sorrynotsorry), but here I’ll restrain myself and just a highlight a few of the many reasons why I’m so proud of their athletic accomplishments:

1)      Aidan’s Guest Post on Strava and social media in running;

2)      Kyle’s current role as an Indoor Track captain;

3)      Aidan’s blossoming connection to the Vanderbilt University Running Club, for which he’s already a leader as a freshman;

4)      And Kyle’s commitment to mentoring and teaching younger runners, the subject of one of his phenomenal college application essays.

Valentine’s series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 7, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: FSU Student-Athletes

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

As I near the conclusion of my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University, I wanted to share quick examples of a handful of the many amazing student-athletes I’ve taught across those two decades. These folks stand out for their record-breaking accomplishments, but they also represent the vast majority of such student-athletes at FSU, a school that can’t offer athletic scholarships, that still demands an exceptionally challenging balance of its student-athletes, and that would be infinitely impoverished without folks such as these:

1)      Amy Fahey

2)      Aidan Hanratty

3)      Diana Okongo

4)      Cameron Monette

5)      Oliver Cookson

6)      Jenna Morse

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 6, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Jaylen Brown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two inspiring layers to the most recent NBA Finals MVP.

I wrote briefly about the inspiring stories behind Boston Celtics superstar Jaylen Brown in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the Celtics. In lieu of a full first paragraph here I’d ask you to check out that column if you would, and then come on back for more on what makes Brown such an inspiring sports story.

Welcome back! Brown’s social and political advocacy and activism are without doubt the most inspiring layers to his career and life, far beyond the basketball court, and were nicely traced in this excellent William Rhoden essay for Andscape. It’s not just that he’s so committed to those efforts, but also the language and ideas on which they depend—look at the homepage for his 7uice Foundation, for example, which leads with “A History of Systemic Racism”! I’ve written before in this space about the 2015-2017 Boston Globe Spotlight investigation which revealed that the median net worth for Black families in Boston was $8, a statistic that is as complicated as statistics always are but that nonetheless captures quite definitively the legacies of systemic racism in the city for which Brown plays professional basketball. Brown’s foundation represents a direct and vital response to such histories and realities, and that alone makes him one of our most inspiring contemporary athletes.

But as his excellent Hot Ones interview reminded us, there’s even more to Brown than his combination of athletic and activist achievements. A Berkeley grad who was offered a NASA internship, became the youngest person ever to deliver an invited lecture at Harvard when he did so at the age of 21, and in his role as an MIT Media Lab Fellow co-founded the Bridge Program which mentors Boston high schoolers of color who are interested in STEM, Brown was described by certain scouts as “too smart” for the NBA before he was drafted in 2016. Obviously that perspective is caught up in all kinds of limited and prejudicial mindsets that tell us more about those holding them than they ever could about Brown. But there’s no doubt that he’s a unique professional athlete in any sport, and from any time period, one who exemplifies the best kind of Renaissance person that also can and should inspire all of us to be our most multilayered and best selves.

Last inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 5, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Chubbtown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two contrasting and equally important ways to contextualize an inspiring family story.

I don’t imagine I have to convince readers of this blog that sports are more than just a distraction or entertainment, that they connect to all the layers of our society and community and history. One of the most striking instances of such connections for me is the fact that I first learned about the unique and amazing American community of Chubbtown, Georgia, through a pregame story on the running back Nick Chubb, then playing as a stand-out at the University of Georgia. Chubb has since moved into the NFL, as has his relative, the equally talented defensive lineman Bradley Chubb. Both Nick and Bradley are related to the historic Chubb family, one of the oldest-recorded multi-generational African American families in our history (with records dating back to the pre-Revolutionary days) and the founders of Chubbtown, a community of free Black folks established in the mountains of Northwest Georgia in 1864, during the depths of the Civil War (and as an escape from that conflict).

Chubbtown is far from the only community founded by African Americans during and immediately after the Civil War, as anyone who has read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) knows; Hurston sets much of her novel in such a community, one based closely on her own influential childhood experiences in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-Black city in America. And remembering such communities overall allows us—or perhaps forces us is the better phrase—to engage with the 1923 Rosewood massacre, when another all-Black community in Florida was largely destroyed by white supremacist domestic terrorists. The late John Singleton’s 1997 film portrays both that community and that massacre with nuance and power, and I would say we can’t commemorate the Chubbs and Chubbtown without a complementary examination of that story and these frustratingly frequent and foundational American histories of racial terrorism.

At the same time, we talked a great deal throughout my 20^th Century African American Literature course this past Fall semester about not allowing such histories to dominate our collective memories of the truly multilayered and often profoundly inspiring stories of Black history. This year marks the 250^th anniversary of the first recorded stories of the Chubb family, making their saga a particularly striking and symbolic such inspiring story in early 2025 (and one that can, for example, complement, challenge, and transcend collective memories focused only on the 250^th anniversary of white-centered stories and figures from the American Revolution). That story extends far beyond Chubbtown, but it became deeply interconnected with this community, one that produced two iconic 21^st century athletes who can, like so much of the best of sports in our histories, offer a window into better remembering every layer of that setting and story.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 4, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Babe Didrikson Zaharias

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two ways to connect and parallel the pioneering athlete to legendary men, and one key way not to.

1)      Multi-Sport Achievements and Fame: I’ve always thought of Jim Thorpe as the 20^th century’s most talented athlete, what with his stunning and groundbreaking successes in Olympic track and field, football, and baseball, among other sports. But in researching this post, I realized that Didrikson Zaharias has a serious case for the same title: I had long known about her unparalleled successes as a professional golfer, but she also won two track and field gold medals (and one silver medal) at the 1932 Summer Olympics and was an All-American in basketball, again among many other athletic accomplishments. Although sports lend themselves particularly well to lists and rankings and debates about who was the best, the truth is that both Thorpe and Didrikson Zaharias should be remembered as truly exceptional and influential athletes, figures whose early to mid 20^th century, runaway crossover successes in both amateur and professional sports helped pave the way for the sports world to become the national and global phenomenon that it remains to this day.

2)      Larger-than-life Persona: Born Mildred Ella Didrikson, Didrikson Zaharias would later claim that she gained the nickname “Babe” when she hit five home runs in a youth baseball game. That might or might not be true (her Norwegian immigrant mother supposedly called her “Bebe” throughout her life), but even the uncertainty helps illustrate Didrikson Zaharias’ embrace of a larger-than-life persona that echoes that of her potential namesake Babe Ruth. For example, she long claimed to have been born in 1914 (rather than her actual 1911 birth year), perhaps to exaggerate her youthful accomplishments yet further. And she complemented the athletic successes I detailed above with a lifelong series of forays into the worlds of celebrity and popular culture: singing and playing harmonica on several pop songs for Mercury Records; performing on the vaudeville circuit; trying her hand as a pocket billiards player, as in a famous multi-day match against billiards champion Ruth McGinnis; and marrying professional wrestler George Zaharias, the “Crying Greek from Cripple Creek.” Like Babe Ruth, Didrikson Zaharias’ athletic accomplishments would have been more than enough to cement her fame and legacy; but like Ruth, she clearly wanted all that culture and life had to offer.

3)      Shattering Stereotypes: Jim Thorpe and Babe Ruth are two of the greatest American athletes of all time, and linking any other athlete to them is (I hope and would argue) a sign of respect. Yet at the same time, I did so at least somewhat ironically, to help engage with the particular, unquestionably gendered limits which Didrikson Zaharias continually encountered and yet challenged and destroyed. (Certainly a Native American athlete like Thorpe faced his own barriers and challenges, of course.) The most overt such limits, many of which called into question Didrikson Zaharias’ gender itself, are nicely encapsulated by this quote, from sportswriter Joe Williams in the New York World-Telegram: “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.” In the last few years of her life, Didrikson Zaharias developed a close, quite possibly romantic relationship with fellow golfer Betty Dodd, a relationship neither would describe as romantic due to the limits of their early 1950s society. Yet at the same time, in those final years Didrikson Zaharias shattered all limits one final time: diagnosed with colon cancer in 1953, she continued to golf professionally until her 1956 death, winning multiple tournaments including the last two she entered. A towering and inspiring sports legend to the last.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 3, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: The Celestials

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

For my money, the most inspiring American sports story and figures are those at the heart of my podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. If you haven’t had the chance to check out that podcast yet I’d really appreciate it, so I’m going to end this post here and ask you to take a listen if you have a chance (and if you’re pressed for time, I’d say the Seventh Inning in particular is among the best work I’ve ever done)!

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 1-2, 2025: January 2025 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

December 30: 2025 Anniversaries: King Philip’s War: My annual historic anniversaries series kicks off with the 350^th anniversary of a tragic early American conflict.

December 31: 2025 Anniversaries: Lexington and Concord: The series continues with two important ways to add to our Revolutionary memories for the 250^th.

January 1: 2025 Anniversaries: The Erie Canal: For the 200^th anniversary of its opening, three figures who helped construct the Erie Canal.

January 2: 2025 Anniversaries: Two 1875 Laws: The Page Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the worst and best of America, as the series remembers on.

January 3: 2025 Anniversaries: 1925 Literature: A link to a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column where I argued for complementing The Great Gatsby with other 1925 lit.

January 4-5: 2025 Anniversaries: Five 1975 Films: The series concludes with quick thoughts on what five class 1975 films can tell us in 2025.

January 6: Great Society Laws: Civil and Voting Rights: For the Great Society’s 60^th anniversary, a series on its groundbreaking laws kicks off with three pivotal civil rights acts.

January 7: Great Society Laws: Education and the Arts: The series continues with two specific laws and one broader effect of the Great Society.

January 8: Great Society Laws: Economic Safety Nets: Three distinct and equally important ways that the Great Society created safety nets, as the series acts on.

January 9: Great Society Laws: Medicare and Medicaid: How the Great Society reflected two distinct ways of thinking about health care, and why the second is still urgently needed.

January 10: Great Society Laws: Immigration and America: The series concludes with one definitively inclusive thing the 1965 Immigration Act did, one more complicated effect, and the bottom line.

January 11-12: The Great Society in 2025: A special weekend follow-up on where we are in January 2025, and why we need to fight for the Great Society now more than ever.

January 13: Spring Semester Previews: Graduate Research Methods: For my Spring semester previews series, I wanted to focus on skills we’ll be working on in my classes this semester, starting with the combination of clarity and nuance in my Grad course.

January 14: Spring Semester Previews: First-Year Writing II: The series continues with a film I’m for the first time hesitant to share with my First-Year Writing students, and why that makes it even more important to do so.

January 15: Spring Semester Previews: Major American Authors of the 20C: How creative assignments can complement and strengthen analytical writing, as the series teaches on.  

January 16: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature II: Why I’m still committed to including longer works in my literature classes despite the challenges.

January 17: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online: The series concludes with the unmistakable frustrations of generative AI, and how I’m trying to push back.

January 18-19: Spring Semester Previews: My Scholarly Work and You: A special weekend post on my ideas for a next public scholarly podcast, and how you all can help!

January 20: Misread Quotes: MLK’s Dream: To build on my annual MLK Day post on the misunderstood King, a series on misread and -remembered quotes, starting with King’s most famous one.

January 21: Misread Quotes: Lincoln’s 2^nd Inaugural: The series continues with why one of our most justifiably famous inaugural addresses needs to be remembered more accurately.

January 22: Misread Quotes: The Constitution: Three sections of the Constitution that conservatives consistently get wrong, as the series reads on.

January 23: Misread Quotes: The Bible: And three sections of Scripture about which I would say the same.

January 24: Misread Quotes: Churchill on Politics and Age: The series concludes with a Churchill quote that never happened, and why it’s even wronger than that.

January 27: Musical Activism: “We Are the World”: For the recording’s 40^th anniversary, a musical activisms series kicks off with three figured who embody the multiple layers of “World.”

January 28: Musical Activism: Live Aid and Farm Aid: The series continues with an overblown controversy at one benefit concert that helped produce another enduring one.

January 29: Musical Activism: Post-9/11 Songs: How connections to political and historical events can change what songs mean and do, as the series plays on.

January 30: Musical Activism: Artists United Against Apartheid: Two American contexts for an inspiring 1985 musical activism.

January 31: Musical Activism: Endorsements: The series concludes with three examples and types of political endorsements from musicians.

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

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