June 9, 2025: Revolutionary War Figures: Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys

[On June 14^th, 1775, the Continental Army was formed at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. So for the 250^th of that momentous military moment, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of iconic Revolutionary War figures, leading up to a special weekend post on that historic anniversary!]

On the less than noble side to one of the Revolution’s folk heroes.

This is a tough post for me to write: Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys might not have the national reputation of the Concord Minutemen, but in their native Vermont and throughout New England they’re definitely folk heroes; and I know that my Mom grew up (just outside of Boston) as a big fan. And there’s no question that their May 1775 surprise capture of Fort Ticonderoga represented one of the Revolution’s most significant victories, not only tactically but also symbolically; this was only a month after Lexington and Concord, with the very status of the Revolution still up in the air, and the victory at Fort Ticonderoga thus helped make clear that America’s war effort was to be a serious and ongoing one.

I’m not here to challenge those histories (as far as I know Ticonderoga was all that and more)—but the Green Mountain Boys didn’t come into existence in 1775, and the details of their founding and virtually all of their other actions are far less admirable. Not to put too fine a point on it: the Boys were a local goon squad, organized by Allen and compatriots in 1770 to intimidate New York landowners into leaving the area (then part of New Hampshire) and ceding the so-called “Wentworth” land grants to locals. As far as I can tell the Boys didn’t generally take violent action, preferring threats and intimidation, but at least one genuinely violent event resulted from these conflicts: the 1775 “Westminster massacre,” in which apparently only one or two landowners died but many more were affected. Moreover, the Boys didn’t graduate from these local acts to Revolutionary ones so much as temporarily pause for the latter—as early as 1778 Allen and company were back in Vermont and focused once again on the land grant battles (as well as the distinct possibility, one Allen negotiated for with the British for some time, of Vermont becoming a separate British province!).

So what would it mean if we remembered these different sides to Allen? Those who critique “revisionist history” would argue that I’m seeking to undermine his heroism, to tear down an American icon, and so on. Part of my response would be that both elements must be included in any accurate history of the man, his military importance to the Revolution as well as his more shady local endeavors. But another and more significant part would be that Allen offers a far more historically meaningful portrait of the Revolutionary era, a moment in which hugely defining and world-altering events existed side by side with the most petty and minor (and at times, indeed, ugly and divisive) conflicts. If anything, an awareness of that history makes the defining events that much more impressive still—in 1775, the 18^th century equivalent of the Sons of Anarchy biker gang played an instrumental role in a victory without which there might not be a United States.

Next Revolutionary figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rev War figures you’d highlight?

June 7-8, 2025: What’s Next for Kyle

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wiped away proud Dad tears, this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to this special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

After the multi-year, multi-part, multi-emotion process that is the college search, with just a few days remaining until the May 1^st deadline, Kyle committed to the University of Michigan! I’d say that I don’t know what makes me prouder, that he’ll be attending one of the nation’s top public universities or that he navigated the process and decision so thoughtfully, but the truth is I didn’t need any of that to be as proud as punch of my amazing, inspiring younger son. You know I’ll keep you all posted on all that’s next for both him and his brother!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?

June 6, 2025: GraduationStudying: That Sunscreen Speech

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

On three particularly stand-out moments from Mary Schmich’s famous 1997 column (long falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, and eventually turned into a hit song by none other than Baz Luhrmann):

1)      “Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.” I’m not sure I know a more apt phrase than “Comparison is the thief of joy.” This is an incredibly hard piece of advice to take, and we’re all gonna fall short of it plenty no matter what. But I do believe in doing our best to judge ourselves against our own journey, rather than what we see of others’ (which is never how they would see their own in any case, of course).

2)      “Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good.” Man alive do I feel this one in June 2025, just a couple days after what would have been my folks’ 55^th wedding anniversary. I most definitely got to know my Dad, and will always be eternally grateful for all that I learned from him. But the second sentence of the quote is still profoundly true nonetheless—there is no way to prepare for losing a parent, you got to go there to know there (one of my Dad’s favorite quotes), and all we can do is our best to make the most of every second we have with those we love.

3)      “Wear sunscreen” (which is the speech’s first and last piece of advice). As someone who grew up in the generation located smack dab in between the prior total lack of skin health awareness and the subsequent extremely knowledgeable sense of the sun’s dangers, I certainly agree with this advice in specific terms. But what I also like about it is that, amidst a speech that largely emphasizes living in the present and not worrying overly much about the future (perspectives I mostly agree with—“No day but today,” indeed), this deceptively simple phrase reminds us that life is long, and we want to make sure that our long lives are as healthy in every sense as they can be. Graduates can feel invincible, at least in their own skin (ie, probably not as much in the larger world in 2025), but the truth is we’ve got to take care of that skin to truly make it last.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?

June 5, 2025: GraduationStudying: The Graduate

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

On one aspect of the iconic 1967 film that hasn’t aged well, and two that still feel very relevant.

In a 1997 column revisiting The Graduate for its 30^th anniversary, Roger Ebert apologizes for his initial 1967 review; more exactly, he apologizes to the character Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) for having initially sided with “that insufferable creep,” Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock, over her, whom he now sees as “the most sympathetic and intelligent character in” the film. I first saw the film around that same 1997 moment and very much agreed with Ebert’s later take, and moreover saw Benjamin’s relationship with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) as similarly creepy rather than romantic (he essentially stalks her for much of the second half of the film, and I don’t blame her for looking rather nonplussed as they pull away together on that climactic bus). Elaine is also ridiculously quick to forgive Benjamin for his extended affair with her mother, which he is still in the midst of when he first goes out with Elaine. Basically, both romantic relationships and the portrayals of the main female characters in this film are a mess, and at the very least come out looking far different in the 21^st century than they apparently did in 1967.

On the other hand, one aspect of Mrs. Robinson’s character has aged very well: the Simon & Garfunkel song named after her that was written (or rather adapted) for the film (Paul Simon had a slightly different, not-yet-recorded song-in-progress called “Mrs. Roosevelt” that director Mike Nichols convinced him to revise). “Mrs. Robinson” is a fascinating glimpse into American culture in the late 1960s, one that certainly begins as an ode to a suburban married woman amidst a midlife affair but that evolves into a far broader and deeper examination of a society in the midst of deepening and destructive malaise. The final verse about Joe DiMaggio and the disappearance of shared heroes gets the most attention, but I would highlight a series of lines in the penultimate one: “Going to the candidates’ debate/Laugh about it, shout about it/When you’ve got to choose/Every way you look at it, you lose.” While of course those lines could still be from the perspective of the title character, I would argue they ring even truer for a new graduate, someone emerging into a future where it feels that there are no great choices (something about which, I’ll be honest, I worry a great deal when it comes to both of my sons and their generation).

And speaking of graduates and their choices, I would argue that the film’s single most iconic line has also aged all-too-well into our present moment. At a graduation party at his childhood home, Benjamin is cornered by family friend Mr. McGuire, who says to him, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word…Plastics.” When Benjamin asks for a bit more, McGuire simply adds, “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” It’s safe to say that Benjamin does not, in fact, think about it, but it seems to me that we as an audience are meant to—not because there’s any there there, but instead quite specifically because there’s not. In a moment when young people, and especially young men around the age of high school and college graduates alike, are apparently devoting a great deal of their time, energy, and resources to the mystical and to my mind entirely fabricated world of crypto and bitcoin and the like, seeking to find a great future in these largely unexplained and (again, to my mind) unsubstantiated concepts, we would do well to collectively revisit this 1967 scene and consider just why it feels so silly.

Last graduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?

June 4, 2025: GraduationStudying: Du Bois’s Speech

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

On two of the many vital 2025 lessons from a 1930 speech to high school graduates.

I wrote a good bit about W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1930 address “Reflections upon the Housatonic River,” delivered to the graduates of Searles High School (in his hometown of Great Barrington, MA), in this prior post. In lieu of a full first paragraph here, I’d ask you to check out both the speech and my post if you would, and then come back for a couple further thoughts.

Welcome back! One of my favorite things about Du Bois (a very long and competitive list, as readers of this blog know well) was how much he loved rivers, and his love of the Housatonic River of his childhood in particular contributed to the publication in his NAACP magazine The Crisis of the first poem by none other than Langston Hughes, as I discussed in this post. He opens his speech with a recognition that that love, and thus the speech’s titular subject, might seem silly, that “on hearing the subject of my speech, some of you may have thought of it as a joke.” But it is anything but, and not just because of his personal affiliation with and fondness for this particular river. Instead, the central subject of Du Bois’s speech is an overarching argument for taking better care of our rivers and all our natural spaces, an impassioned plea that, as he concludes his speech, we “should rescue the Housatonic and clean it as we have never in all the years before thought of cleaning it, and seek to restore its ancient beauty; making it the center of a town, of a valley, and perhaps—who knows?—of a new measure of civilized life.” Never has that call been more necessary than here in the summer of 2025.

Such environmental conservation is a key part of Du Bois’s speech, but I would argue that he makes the case for it through an even more overarching concept: that of what we collectively owe to the communities that we are part of. Earlier this year, the film historian and American Studies scholar Vaughn Joy focused her excellent review of High Noon on the defining American debate between the individual and the community. Like both Vaughn and me, Du Bois was a lifelong advocate for the communal emphasis, for the idea that we are all profoundly connected to one another and the concurrent concept that society only functions at all (much less approaches its more perfect unions) when we seek to strengthen such communal connections. And he also ends this moving speech, just before that quote about rescuing and restoring the river, with an appeal to his audience based precisely on that sentiment, through the lens of the high school from which they all had graduated: “And so I have ventured to call to the attention of the graduates of the Searles High School this bit of philosophy of living in this valley.” If America is to survive, and certainly if has a chance to thrive in the years ahead, we must all hang together, not just out of necessity but out of such communal connection.

Next graduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?

June 3, 2025: GraduationStudying: Crummell and Douglass’s Debate

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

[Note: This post was part of a 2013 series, and I’m sharing it largely unchanged, except for a few updated links. The rest of the week’s series is newly drafted, but I couldn’t resist adding this graduation-focused moment into the mix!]

On the impromptu debate, between two of the most impressive Americans, that exemplifies one of our most complex and crucial questions.

One of my most common topics in this space, including in this late August series, has been the challenges and yet the importance of remembering our darkest American histories. As I wrote in that week’s third post, no national histories are darker nor more important for us to better remember than those of slavery; that’s why, whatever its flaws or limitations, I’m on board with Quentin Tarantino’s project in his latest film, Django Unchained. Yet in arguing for that importance, I can and should recognize the fact that it’s significantly easier for me to say than it is for African Americans, for those who own darkest histories and heritages are directly tied to these national horrors. For that community, it’s fair to ask whether remembering the histories of slavery is as important as trying to move beyond them and into a more positive future; and indeed, in the decades after emancipation and the Civil War many prominent African American voices argued precisely for, if not forgetting slavery, at least not focusing on keeping its memories alive.

Perhaps the leader of that movement was Alexander Crummell, the priest, philosopher, professor, and political activist whose impressive 19^th century life and career spanned abolitionism, black nationalism and the development of the Liberian state, and many other causes. In the years after the Civil War, Crummell came to feel that only by moving beyond the memories of slavery could African Americans achieve success and equality; he developed that theme with particularly clarity in “The Need for New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era,” his 1885 commencement address at Storer College, the newly founded freedmen’s college in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In the audience was none other than Frederick Douglass, a trustee of the college and one of the few men who could equal Crummell’s longstanding prominence in the African American community, and Douglass apparently objected vocally to Crummell’s arguments. Unfortunately no specific transcript of Douglass’s comments exists, but throughout this era Douglass certainly argued the opposite of Crummell’s critique of “fanatical anxieties upon the subject of slavery”; for Douglass, instead, that dark history “could be traced [in American identity] like that of a wounded man through a crowd by the blood,” and so must be followed and engaged with.

If we approach this debate from a scholarly perspective, as I did when I used the exchange to open a chapter of my first book, it seems clear enough that Douglass was right, that it’s vital to remember even—perhaps especially—our darkest histories. But for those African American college graduates in the audience, just as for all African Americans in the era—and, in less immediate but still present ways, for all their descendents—the question was and remains far from simply academic. Obviously there is value, practical as well as philosophical, in remembering the worst parts of our pasts, for individuals, for communities, and for the nation. But as Crummell noted, to dwell upon such memories can make it significantly more difficult to live in the present and move into an even stronger future. So the key, perhaps, is to remember without getting lost, to engage without giving in to the most limiting or damaging effects. Easier said than done, of course—but both Crummell and Douglass, and many other inspiring and influential voices, give us models for such work.

Next graduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?

June 2, 2025: GraduationStudying: George Moses Horton’s Poem

[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]

On two ways in which biographical contexts greatly enhance a seemingly simple graduation poem.

When read in a vacuum, George Moses Horton’s “The Graduate Leaving College” (1845) is a tender and sweet depiction of the final moments in a college student’s career before he departs that educational institution which has of course also become his community and home. A couple of word choices really drive home the bittersweet tone: calling this cohort of students “the pensive seniors”; and describing their final rest before the departure “one more transient night.” Although the poem’s last word is “joy,” suggesting that the graduate’s return to his childhood home is not without its pleasures as well, the overarching tone is one of happy but nostalgic remembrance and leave-taking, as captured by the first stanza line “My eyes let fall a friendly tear.” Again, a tender and sweet depiction of this experience eventually shared by most every college student, and indeed by every graduate of every kind of educational institution (and, yes, by their proud papas as well).

But when we add in the details of Horton’s quite amazing biography (which I first learned about when I taught him in my 19^th Century African American Literature course a few years back, and which I can’t do full justice to here so please do check out that first hyperlinked piece from the University of North Carolina’s Special Collections folks), this poem becomes significantly more interesting still. To quote a particularly relevant passage, which follows sentences about Horton being enslaved near Chapel Hill and developing relationships with the campus and town alike: “He earned money for himself through selling romantic poetry commissioned by UNC students. These poems were acrostics: the first letters of the lines spell out the subject’s name. Horton composed poetry in his head and recited the poems while others transcribed them.” “Graduate” is not an acrostic nor does it focus in any overt way on a specific individual, and so likely wasn’t one of these directly commissioned poems—but it of course reflects Horton’s relationship to UNC, his understanding of both the experiences of college students and of this pivotal communal moment.

Yet it also reflects more than that. Horton remained enslaved until the end of the Civil War, but for the four decades before that moment consistently used his poetry to argue for his freedom; such as his first poem, “On Liberty and Slavery” (1828), which he published in the Lancaster (MA) Gazette with the help of UNC faculty member Caroline Lee Hentz. “Graduate” makes no mention of slavery, nor is there any direct evidence in the text that its author is an enslaved person. But when we know that he was, and know moreover that his poetry was a principal means through which he expressed the layers of his identity that slavery could not circumscribe, then I believe we have to see one of his most striking formal choices—his use of the first-person pronouns “I” and “my” in the opening stanza—in a new light. Here at the opening of this poem, one seemingly connected to the UNC students whom Horton got to know well during his time around Chapel Hill, Horton imagines himself as a college student, and one graduating to all that’s next, and even better, in what lies beyond that experience. At once a bittersweet detail, and a reflection of the ideals of education and graduation alike.

Next graduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?