December 16, 2025: Refugee Stories: WWII Refugees

[On December 14^th, 1950, the United Nations adopted its Statute on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. So for the 75^th anniversary of that important moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy the UNHCR and other refugee stories, leading up to a weekend post on that fraught and crucial issue in 2025.]

On two federal actions that reflect the worst and best of our reactions to WWII refugees, and why we have to engage with precisely that duality.

In recent years, the story of the German ocean liner St. Louis and its ill-fated May 1939 attempt to help nearly 1000 Jewish refugees escape the deepening Holocaust has become more familiar to American audiences. As is too often the case, it has been a significantly over-simplified version of that history which has achieved that level of collective awareness, one for example that leaves out the ship’s original destination of and extended attempt to unload passengers in Havana, Cuba entirely. But nevertheless, one essential series of interconnected facts about the St. Louis that has been accurately highlighted is this: the U.S. government had the opportunity to welcome the refugees once they had been denied entry to Cuba and the ship sailed to Miami; the Roosevelt administration chose not to allow any of them to enter the U.S., due at least in part to blatant anti-semitism; and after they returned to Europe, more than 250 of the passengers ended up dying in the Holocaust. That’s a painful and shameful story for all concerned, including without question the United States.

As the war continued to unfold, the U.S. government took small but meaningful steps to revise a different such shameful history. There’s no topic from American history about which I’ve written and talked more than the Chinese Exclusion era; while my work has focused on the last couple decades of the 19^th century, those exclusionary laws and policies toward both Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans also continued throughout the first few decades of the 20^th. Indeed, the first federal law of any kind that began to change that exclusionary trend was the Magnuson Act of 1943, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act. Proposed by Washington Representative (soon-to-be Senator) Warren G. Magnuson, this law both permitted some Chinese immigration to the U.S. and allowed some Chinese Americans to naturalized citizens. Both of those provisions were directly related to China’s newfound status as a wartime ally of the United States, in direct opposition to the unfolding war with Japan that had begun after Pearl Harbor and was at its height in December 1943 when Roosevelt signed the Magnuson Act into law.

Wartime alliances and adversaries are a straightforward, and not at all inaccurate, way to link these two World War II-era histories. Not only to differentiate two communities (Jewish Europeans and the Chinese), but also and even more relevantly because in 1939 the U.S. was not at war with any nation, and so the St. Louis decision can’t be separated from the official policy of neutrality in that moment. But even when we include those necessary (if still complicated) contexts in the mix, these two federal actions (or rather inaction and action respectively) nonetheless help us make a very clear and very crucial point, one I’ve tried to make for at least the 13 years since my Chinese Exclusion Act book: immigration laws and policies are incredibly haphazard, targeting communities and nations based on specific prejudices, shifting toward those same communities based on other practicalities or trends, finding new targets in new eras with no apparent lessons learned from the prior experiences, and so on. Anyone who seeks to make the case for immigration restrictions or exclusions based on concepts like “fairness” or “the rules” needs to engage with just how absent those concepts have been from the entire history of these laws and debates, as illustrated concisely by these WWII moments.  

Next story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 15, 2025: Refugee Stories: Global Organizations

[On December 14^th, 1950, the United Nations adopted its Statute on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. So for the 75^th anniversary of that important moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy the UNHCR and other refugee stories, leading up to a weekend post on that fraught and crucial issue in 2025.]

On two prior iterations of a global refugee organization, and how the UNHCR has built on them but gone much further.

Not surprisingly, the first global organization dedicated to assisting refugees was created by the first truly global organization period: the League of Nations, which in 1921 appointed a High Commissioner for Refugees, naming the Norwegian explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen to the role. Nansen had plenty to do in the continuing aftermath of WWI, including his longtime advocacy for Germany becoming part of the League in order to allow for aid to its internally displaced refugees (he finally achieved that goal in 1926). But his organization and role really came to the fore in response to a pair of 1920s European conflicts: the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22, which created hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees in particular; and the Armenian Genocide, which had been ongoing and worsening for nearly a decade and about the effects of which Nansen wrote in his 1923 book Armenia and the Near East and two follow-up volumes. From what I can tell, this first international refugee organization was in many ways a one-man show, but Nansen was clearly a good choice for that role.

Nansen passed away in 1930, and like the League of Nations itself his organization became increasingly powerless across the subsequent decade. The Second World War which concluded that decade created an even more global and dire refugee crisis than the first one had, however, and not long after that war’s resolution a new global refugee organization was thus created: the International Refugee Organization (IRO), founded in April 1946 and gradually folded into the operations of the new United Nations. But the IRO was immediately and significantly hamstrung by two aspects of its Constitution (which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1946): it could only work in areas outside of the Soviet bloc and/or controlled by Western armies of occupation; and it would not concern itself with “persons of German ethnic origin” (which in practice meant both German war refugees and many Jewish refugees of the Holocaust). The IRO’s two Directors-General, William Hallam Tuck and J. Donald Kingsley, did what they could within those parameters, but by 1952 the organization had ceased operations—and that was a year or so after it had for all practical purposes been replaced by the UNHCR.

The UNHCR was initially established with a December 1950 statue, the anniversary of which this week’s blog series is commemorating, but it was with the July 1951 United Nations Geneva Convention, also known as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, that the organization’s sweeping mandate was truly defined. That Convention in turn built on an important prior UN document, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had recognized the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. Together, this pair of UN actions made clear that this new international refugee organization wasn’t going to depend on the efforts of heroic individuals, nor that its purview would be in any way limited by geography or politics or time period. While the UNHCR did focus much of its early efforts on European refugees, by the end of the 1950s it had done significant work with Chinese refugees in Hong Kong and Algerian refugees from the revolution in that North African nation, among other communities. And in 1967 the UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees reaffirmed that this organization could continue to evolve as world history did, could address “new refugee situations that have arisen since the Convention was adopted and the refugees concerned that may therefore not fall within the scope of the Convention.” For 75 years now, this vital global entity has done just that.

Next story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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?