November 8-9, 2025: 15 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: My Dad

[15 years ago this week, I started this here public scholarly blog. There have been lots of twists and turns since, and the best ones have been aided & abetted by wonderful folks. So for my 15^th (!) anniversary series, I wanted to pay tribute to a handful of those moments and people, leading up to this special weekend tribute to my first and best reader!]

Just over nine months ago, we lost my Dad. I’ve had the chance to pay tribute to him in a number of different ways this year, as of course I’ve done on this blog many times (but never sufficient to express all that he meant to me). Speaking of this blog, I don’t know that I can put it any more clearly than this: very soon after I started it he figured out how to become a follower, meaning that he would get each day’s post by email; in our daily email exchanges he would respond to my posts a very significant percentage of the time; and to this day, quite literally to the moment that I’m drafting this post, I still think of him as my first and favorite reader for anything and everything I write here. I still can’t quite believe that I’ll never get to read his thoughts on a blog post again (I don’t imagine that will ever entirely sink in, and I’m okay with that), but I promise you that for as long as I write here, and as long as I write and work and teach and parent and love and live, he will be a defining presence. I miss you and love you, Dad.

Veterans Day series starts Monday,                                                 

Ben

PS. Please feel free to say hi and share any blog responses or ideas in comments!

November 7, 2025: 15 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Vaughn Joy’s Partnership

[15 years ago this week, I started this here public scholarly blog. There have been lots of twists and turns since, and the best ones have been aided & abetted by wonderful folks. So for my 15^th (!) anniversary series, I wanted to pay tribute to a handful of those moments and people, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my first and best reader!]

Although this post will also still appear on my blogspot page (as my posts will continue to until the end of January), the main home for AmericanStudier for the last couple months, and moving forward, is the new public scholarly website Black & White & Read All Over. That site was the brainchild and has been created and designed by my wife Vaughn Joy, and it’s really phenomenal—as a space to host each of our public scholarly writing, as a home for my #ScholarSunday threads, but also and especially as an expression of communal solidarity and support. You can find that in the Announcements, the resources like the Pitchables page, the Guest Posts, and more. So please check out all the layers of our (and especially Vaughn’s) amazing site, subscribe if you’re interested, and help this blog and our work take these exciting next steps!

Special tribute this weekend,

Ben

PS. Please feel free to say hi and share any blog responses or ideas in comments!

November 6, 2025: 15 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Jen Bortel’s Journalistic Editing

[15 years ago this week, I started this here public scholarly blog. There have been lots of twists and turns since, and the best ones have been aided & abetted by wonderful folks. So for my 15^th (!) anniversary series, I wanted to pay tribute to a handful of those moments and people, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my first and best reader!]

I’ve written many times in this space about my Saturday Evening Post editor Jen Bortel, and what working with her on my Considering History column for the last 7.75 years (8^th anniversary in early January!) has meant to me. No matter how far along we get in our careers, it seems to be the case that most of our opportunities come by necessity from our own initiative; so for Jen to reach out to me to recruit me to write for the Post remains one of my absolute career highlights. And that’s not even the best thing Jen has done for my career—for that, I would point to her consistently thoughtful editing work with my column drafts, not only to improve my style and voice in the ways I discussed in yesterday’s post (although that for sure), but also and especially to keep me thinking about the Post’s audience and how I can best reach them. Public scholarship requires us to really engage the public, any and all audiences we can find, and there could be no better editor for that process than what Jen has been for me.

Last anniversary tribute tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Please feel free to say hi and share any blog responses or ideas in comments!

November 5, 2025: 15 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Avi Green’s Aid

[15 years ago this week, I started this here public scholarly blog. There have been lots of twists and turns since, and the best ones have been aided & abetted by wonderful folks. So for my 15^th (!) anniversary series, I wanted to pay tribute to a handful of those moments and people, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my first and best reader!]

I wrote at great length in this May 2017 post—part of a weeklong series on my work for and with the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN)—on the vital role that SSN, and especially its then-Media Director (later Executive Director) Avi Green, played in the single most crucial turning point in my online public scholarly writing career. I hope you’ll check out that post, but I do want to quickly follow up on one specific phrase: “after ruthlessly and crucially forcing me to cut it down and make it more engaging.” I’d like to think that the evolution of my style and voice, from their very academic starting point (I hope that dissertation/first book of mine did feature readable academic prose, but still, very academic indeed) to where they are now, took place gradually and consistently and with plenty of my own input as well as that of many other folks. But having to revise a specific piece very quickly, based on very direct and blunt (in the best ways) feedback from Avi, was a trial by fire—and the results, as I detail in that post, were so striking as to leave no doubt that the work was worth it. I’ve never looked back.

Next anniversary tribute tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Please feel free to say hi and share any blog responses or ideas in comments!

November 4, 2025: 15 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Heather Cox Richardson’s Help

[15 years ago this week, I started this here public scholarly blog. There have been lots of twists and turns since, and the best ones have been aided & abetted by wonderful folks. So for my 15^th (!) anniversary series, I wanted to pay tribute to a handful of those moments and people, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my first and best reader!]

I said much of what I’d want to say about the role Heather Cox Richardson and her The Historical Society website played in the evolution of my own blogging and public scholarship in this November 2023 anniversary post. But I didn’t say clearly enough there a crucial reason why Heather and her site’s reaching out and sharing my work and voice were so meaningful—because her book The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001) was a model for me of accessible yet thoroughly analytical academic writing, skills she had only enhanced with a then-recent project like Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010). For such an impressive and well-established academic scholar to be both thinking about public scholarly and online work and supporting and championing mine was without question a push I needed to take my career to the next stage.

Next anniversary tribute tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Please feel free to say hi and share any blog responses or ideas in comments!

November 3, 2025: 15 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Rob Velella’s Role Modeling

[15 years ago this week, I started this here public scholarly blog. There have been lots of twists and turns since, and the best ones have been aided & abetted by wonderful folks. So for my 15^th (!) anniversary series, I wanted to pay tribute to a handful of those moments and people, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my first and best reader!]

Eight years ago, as part of my 7^th anniversary series, I paid tribute to Rob Velella, and started that post by highlighting what his American Literary Blog meant to me as I was starting my own public scholarly blog. I honestly don’t remember how Rob and I got connected, but I believe it was when he responded positively on Twitter when I first started sharing my blog posts (January 2011, that would have been). I know he was entirely supportive of this new AmericanStudies blog that seemed similar to his, which had been around for about a year by that point; he easily could have seen mine as a competitor, but that ain’t Rob’s style. If Rob’s blog provided an excellent role model for the kind of short-form daily public scholarly writing I was hoping to do, his actions, conversations, and whole online public scholarly identity offered crucial role models of their own. I’m sure I would have muddled through those layers of this new stage of my career and life in any case, but I’m equally sure that they wouldn’t have been as successful, and I know they wouldn’t have been as enjoyable. I’m forever grateful to Rob for helping get them off to a start that was both, and remains so these 15 years later.

Next anniversary tribute tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Please feel free to say hi and share any blog responses or ideas in comments!

November 1, 2025: First Guest Post at the New Website!

Just a quick note that, as I transition this blog over to the new Black & White & Read All Over site (after February 1st it will be only over there, so bookmark that site now!), this weekend features my first Guest Post over there, Regina Mills on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Latinx representation in video games! Please check that out, & make sure to subscribe to the new site to get all the blog posts over there going forward!

Thanks,

Ben