July 5-6, 2025: Keeping the Critical Patriotic Conversations Going!

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to this special post hoping for further conversations!]

I hope that the excerpts from Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism that I’ve shared all week have not only highlighted that book’s profound relevance to our current moment, but have also made you excited to check out and talk about the whole project! If that’s the case, I wanted to make one offer and one request of y’all:

The offer is one I’ve made many times before but always mean, now more than ever: I have an electronic copy of the book’s proofs, and would always be happy to send it along to anyone who’s interested. Feel free to leave a comment here or to email me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) and I’ll get the book to ya!

And the request, whether you ask for a copy or not, is if you can think of communities and audiences with whom I could talk about the book—from students/classes to libraries/museums to book clubs/organizations to podcasts to anything and everything class—I’d really love to hear about them, and/or for you to reach out to them and keep me updated (again, email works great). I believe this book and all that it includes couldn’t be more present in our current moment, and I’d love the chance to talk about it at any and every point!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do, and thanks in advance!

July 4, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Thoreau

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On two interconnected texts through which the naturalist and activist embodied critical patriotism.

The book excerpt: “[Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s Concord neighbor, friend, and protégé, the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), expressed in one of his most prominent actions and works a distinct and more critical form of active patriotism. In late July 1846, when he was about a year into what would be a two-year sojourn in his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau happened to meet Concord’s tax collector, Sam Staples. Staples asked Thoreau to pay unpaid poll taxes, and he refused, citing his opposition to both the Mexican American War and the concurrent extension of slavery into new American territories, themselves two direct reflections of the violent and divisive effects of myths of Manifest Destiny and national expansion. Thoreau would spend a night in the Concord jail before a family member paid the tax against his wishes, and he turned that experience into the source for two interconnected texts: his January and February 1848 lecture series “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government,” delivered at the Concord Lyceum; and his 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” published by his fellow Transcendentalist and reformer Elizabeth Peabody in a May 1849 collection entitled Aesthetic Papers and posthumously re-published under its more well-known name “Civil Disobedience.”

In that essay, Thoreau advances a clear argument about the active patriotic duty of each American if the nation is to move closer toward its ideals. “To speak practically, and as a citizen, …I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it” (Thoreau’s emphasis). He connects that argument to an alternative, still celebratory but more active account of the “Revolution of ’75” and its legacies in his own moment, noting that “I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” And he ends with a critical patriotic vision of an American government and community that lives up to the founding celebrations of liberty and equality, writing, “I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men.” Thoreau’s active patriotism, expressed in this essay and embodied throughout his tragically short life, weds the Transcendental emphases on the individual and the unfolding present to an argument that it is the expansion of justice and equality to all Americans, rather than the expansion of the nation’s territory, which should be America’s manifest destiny.”

Earlier this year, for a Patriots’ Day installment of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, I connected those Thoreau moments and texts to another even more overtly critical patriotic one, and the reason why I’m sharing this particular post on July 4^th: Thoreau’s speech “Slavery in Massachusetts,” delivered at a July 4^th, 1854 anti-slavery rally in Framingham, Massachusetts (and inspired by the Anthony Burns saga from earlier that year) and then turned into a published essay later that year. Thoreau’s culminating, impassioned contrast of the Burns case with Patriots’ Day celebrations at Lexington and Concord—“As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others”—makes for a perfect complement to another critical patriotic speech I’ve written about often in this space, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4^th of July?” (1852). Two authors and activists, and a number of interconnected texts of theirs, that can serve as exemplary models of critical patriotism, on this holiday and every day.  

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?

July 3, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Carlos Bulosan

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On one of our most poetic and powerful patriotic passages.

The book excerpt: “While the Joads [in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath] experience some of the worst of the period’s oppressions and destructions, the Filipino immigrant, migrant laborer, and author Carlos Bulosan (1913–1956) experienced those and much more besides. Bulosan immigrated to the United States in 1930 at the age of 16, and for the next decade worked as a migrant laborer throughout the Western U.S., witnessing not only the economic and social hierarchies and divisions that Steinbeck depicts, but the era’s exclusionary prejudice and violence targeting Filipino Americans, including constant police brutality, outbreaks of racial terrorism such as the 1930 Watsonville, (California) massacre, and legal discriminations such as the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act and 1935 Filipino Repatriation Act. As I trace in my book We the People, those anti-Filipino exclusions were a defining element of early 20th century America, and reflect the ways in which the Depression’s myths affected immigrant and minority communities with especial force.

Bulosan documents all those exclusions and horrors in depth and with graphic detail in his first book, the autobiographical novel America is in the Heart (1946). But from its title on, that stunning work offers a critical patriotic perspective, one that refuses to turn away from all that Bulosan has experienced and witnessed yet likewise refuses to abandon his fundamental belief in America’s community and ideals. In the book’s final lines, he expresses that vision of the nation with particular clarity and power: “It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines—something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever” (Bulosan’s emphasis). That final “our” is to my mind intentionally ambiguous, encompassing not only Bulosan’s family and cultural community, but all those Americans whose struggles and hopes constitute the idealized nation that he, like [John] Dos Passos and Steinbeck, imagines and contributes to.”

I’m not going to pretend I can follow up with anything that will be as eloquent as what Bulosan already wrote there, but I do want to add one thing to my own analysis of that beautiful closing passage. I really love that Bulosan links not only his “brothers in America” (by which he means his actual brothers, but of course also the broader Filipino American community) but also his “family in the Philippines” (by which ditto on both levels) to this process of knowing, becoming part, and contributing to America’s community, tradition, and final fulfillment. Far too often, even those of us who fully support the equal place of immigrant communities in the United States act as if it is only those folks in the U.S. who are part of that national identity. But the truth, as anyone with any experience of immigration in any way knows well, is that these families and communities and cultures maintain global connections, and thus make them part of our American story and identity as well. Making that case, as Bulosan does quickly but potently, is a profoundly critical patriotic perspective.

Last patriotic model tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?

July 2, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Standing Bear

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On two 2025 takeaways from one of our most important and inspiring court rulings.

The book excerpt: “[Helen Hunt] Jackson experienced her own version of that shift in understanding toward justice for Native Americans, as she was brought into the cause after hearing a speech by the Ponca chief turned civil rights activist Standing Bear (Mantcunanjin; c. 1829–1908). Standing Bear’s Ponca tribe had been removed from their Nebraska homeland to “Indian Territory” (modern-day Oklahoma) in 1877, after decades of conflicts with white settlers and the U.S. army; when Standing Bear attempted to return to that homeland in order to bury his son, who had passed away from starvation in that hostile new setting, he was arrested by General George Crook for having left the reservation. With the help of Susette LaFlesche, an Omaha Native American interpreter, and her husband Thomas Tibbles, a journalist and reformer, Standing Bear sued for a writ of habeas corpus. The Standing Bear v. Crook trial (1879) represented the first time a Native American was allowed to advocate for his rights in a court of law, and Standing Bear took advantage of the opportunity, delivering a critical patriotic final speech in which he both defined himself as part of a national community and appealed directly to the judge’s commitment to American ideals: “[My] hand is not the color of yours, but if I prick it, the blood will flow, and I shall feel pain. The blood is of the same color as yours. God made me, and I am a man…I see the light of the world and of liberty just ahead…But in the center of the path there stands a man…If that man gives me the permission, I may pass on to life and liberty. If he refuses, I must go back and sink beneath the flood…You are that man.” Judge Elmer Dundy ruled in Standing Bear’s favor, establishing as precedent that Native Americans were entitled to full legal personhood and thus civil rights under the law; in his decision the judge also symbolically and crucially linked Native Americans to founding American ideals, writing that they “have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was a crucial victory, and one that, like Standing Bear’s voice and advocacy, would for years to come shift American conversations as well as influence activists like Jackson.”

In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Tom Paine wrote that “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” In this first year of the second Trump administration, we’ve seen a president and his supporters (and, perhaps worst of all, his Congressional enablers) push, far further than in any prior moment in post-Revolutionary American history, toward a genuinely and horrifyingly monarchical chief executive—which has meant and will continue to mean that one of the central means of resistance to those forces has to be precisely what Paine identified, the law. And that, in turn, means that we must depend on judges to make decisions that both follow and enforce the law and at the same time embody our ideals—not an easy combination, as of course too often our laws have fallen far short of our ideals; but still a crucial goal, and one that Judge Dundy’s 1879 ruling exemplifies as well as any judicial figure and decision ever have.

But important and inspiring as Judge Dundy was in that moment, he was nonetheless the second most important and inspiring voice at that trial (a point with which I know he would fully agree). Standing Bear’s statement, including but not limited to the above quoted section, is not just one of the most eloquent ever expressed in a courtroom; it’s also a reminder that one of the reasons our founding and Constitutional right to a trial by jury is so crucial is that it gives every American the chance to express their own voice and perspective, to advocate for themselves and their equality under the law. Which is why one of the most monarchical and horrifying policies of the 2^nd Trump administration has been the kidnapping and human trafficking of Americans without allowing them this right and opportunity—and for anyone who would respond that the right and opportunity is afforded only to citizens, I would note that Standing Bear was not a U.S. citizen, and thank Law he still got the chance to share his voice and make his case.

Next patriotic model tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?

July 1, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: David Walker

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On a fiery work and voice that exemplify the “critical” in critical patriotism.

The book excerpt: “In the same year that [William] Apess published his autobiography, another young Bostonian firebrand launched his own critical patriotic broadside against American myths and exclusions. David Walker (1796–1830) was born in Wilmington, North Carolina to an enslaved father (who died before his birth) and a free mother, making him legally free but deeply tied to and affected by the system of slavery. As an adult he moved to Charleston, South Carolina and then Philadelphia, joining the groundbreaking African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in both cities, before settling in the mid-1820s in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, a haven for free African Americans. He became over the next few years a leading voice, in that Bostonian community and throughout the North, for abolitionism, civil rights, and the development of a thriving commercial and social scene for the African American community, such as in his role as a contributor to the nation’s first black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. And in September 1829 he published a book, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America.

As that long title indicates, Walker directly modeled his Appeal upon the U.S. Constitution, beginning with a Preamble and moving through four Articles. In many ways the book embodies the critical side of critical patriotism, laying out the case for Walker’s opening assertion, offered to his “Dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens,” that “we (colored people of the United States) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.” The Articles trace four root causes of that state, four interconnected forms of oppression and exclusion that Walker demands that all Americans face head on; he does so in a style that combines passion, exemplified by his frequent capitalizations, italics, and exclamation points, with nuanced logic and argumentation. But the very creation of his text, as well as its direct parallels to the Constitution, embodies a critical patriotic challenge to the nation’s celebratory and mythic ideals. And in his conclusion Walker takes that work one step further, quoting at length the opening of the Declaration of Independence and then exclaiming, “See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?”

As those brief quotations from Walker’s book illustrate, his is one of the most extreme (if, as I hope would go without saying, entirely justified and righteous) voices I include in the book and in my category of critical patriotism. While the critical patriotism of a contemporary and fellow firebrand like William Apess leaned a bit more into unity and love, that is (not surprisingly given Apess’s work as a traveling Christian minister), David Walker’s variety most definitely emphasized the “critical.” Such voices and perspectives can be harder for audiences to hear, especially our frustratingly fragile white American audiences (then and now), leading all too easily to dismissals of “angry Black men” and the like. But an important goal of my book’s tracing of the history of critical patriotism is to push us past such knee-jerk reactions and toward a collective conversation about what these voices can help us to see and engage in our shared histories—and if we can’t hear hard truths about our nation, past and present, then we can’t say we truly love it either.

Next patriotic model tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?

June 30, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Hannah Griffitts

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On a Revolutionary poem that models multiple patriotic perspectives.

First, the book excerpt: “[Annis Boudinot] Stockton’s Mid-Atlantic Writing Circle colleague Hannah Griffitts (1727– 1817), a Philadelphia Quaker who contributed dozens of poems to her cousin Milcah Martha Moore’s voluminous commonplace book, linked feminism to incipient revolutionary patriotism even more clearly in her 1768 poem “The Female Patriots.” Griffitts opens with a complaint about the lack of patriotic activism from her community’s men, who, “supinely asleep, & deprived of their Sight/Are stripped of their Freedom, and robbed of their Right.” She then argues for the need for her titular female patriots to take up that cause: “If the Sons (so degenerate) the Blessing despise,/Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise.” She admits that in traditional political terms “we’ve no Voice,” but makes the case for the boycotting of English goods as a key way these female patriots can nonetheless take action: “As American Patriots, our Taste we deny”; and so “rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our Tea.” And she ends by highlighting the broader revolutionary effects of not only such boycotts, but also her own poem and writing: “a motive more worthy our patriot Pen,/Thus acting—we point out their Duty to Men.” By expressing and enacting their female patriotism, then, Griffitts and her peers likewise offer a feminist critical patriotic perspective on the frustrating, counter-productive absence of women from these public debates.”

That last point is without doubt my favorite thing about Griffitts’s unique and engaging poem. I’ve written a good bit, in this space and elsewhere, about Abigail Adams’s request to her husband John that he and his fellow Framers “Remember the Ladies,” lest those ladies “foment a Rebellion” of their own. I like Adams’s letter a lot, and especially love that idea of a potential further revolution from American women (something I focus on a good bit in the section of my book from which the above excerpt is drawn). But in truth, Adams kept her perspective more or less private, and so it’s really published, public writers from the period like Griffitts, Annis Stockton, and others (including one of my favorite Americans, Judith Sargent Murray) who modeled female patriotism in both their words and deeds. One of the most important effects of broadening our definition of American patriotism—perhaps my book’s most central goal—is that it can allow us to better remember impressive and inspiring figures, texts, communities, and events beyond the familiar refrains, and I don’t think that’s more true of any American moment than these Revolutionary women writers.

Griffitts’s poem also models a second form of American patriotism from my book’s four categories: active patriotism. I define active patriotism as service and sacrifice in order to push the nation closer to its ideals, and I don’t know of any single line that sums up that concept better than Griffitts’s “rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our tea.” I know the line, like the poem overall, is a bit tongue-in-cheek (and delightfully so); but at the same time, there’s no doubt that giving up comforts is one of the more challenging sacrifices we can make, especially during difficult times when we need those comforts more than ever. I’ve been inspired by many such collective sacrifices during this fraught first half of 2025, illustrated nicely by the Target boycott (in which my wife and I took part) among many others. This form of active patriotism can be easily overlooked but is one of the most genuinely collective things we can do as a community, and one potently modeled by Hannah Griffitts’s “The Female Patriots.”

Next patriotic model tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?

June 28-29, 2025: June 2025 Recap

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

June 2: GraduationStudying: George Moses Horton’s Poem: A series inspired by my younger son Kyle’s high school graduation kicks off with the layers behind a deceptively simple poem.

June 3: GraduationStudying: Crummell and Douglass’s Debate: The series continues with an impromptu graduation day debate that exemplifies one of our most complex and crucial questions.

June 4: GraduationStudying: Du Bois’s Speech: Two lessons from one of my favorite speeches by my favorite American, as the series commences on.

June 5: GraduationStudying: The Graduate: One aspect of the iconic 1967 film that hasn’t aged well, and two that still feel very relevant.

June 6: GraduationStudying: That Suncreen Speech: The series concludes with three stand-out quotes from Mary Schmich’s famous 1997 advice for graduates.

June 7-8: What’s Next for Kyle: And a follow-up update on what’s next for my favorite recent graduate!

June 9: Revolutionary War Figures: Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys: In honor of the Continental Army’s 250^th birthday, a Revolutionary War series kicks off with the less than noble side to a folk hero.

June 10: Revolutionary War Figures: Molly Pitcher: The series continues with why the iconic hero who might not have existed still matters.

June 11: Revolutionary War Figures: The “Black Regiment”: Three telling details about the Continental Army’s longstanding African American regiment, as the series fights on.

June 12: Revolutionary War Figures: Benedict Arnold: The benefits and limitations to remembering our most infamous traitor the way that we do.

June 13: Revolutionary War Figures: YA Novels: The series concludes with three groundbreaking historical novels that reflect the evolution of YA literature as well as our Revolutionary memories.

June 14-15: Revolutionary War Figures: The Continental Army: For the Continental Army’s 250^th, a special post featuring three details about its formation and evolution.

June 16: American Nazis: Madison Square Garden: For the 80^th anniversary of Operation Paperclip, a series on Nazis in America kicks off with an infamous 1939 event.

June 17: American Nazis: Ford, Lindbergh, and Coughlin: The series continues with three famous figures who reflect the breadth and depth of American Nazism.

June 18: American Nazis: The Plot Against America: Three telling and compelling layers to Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, as the series marches on.

June 19: American Nazis: Wernher von Braun: Three striking lines from Tom Lehrer’s satirical song about the Nazi turned American scientist.

June 20: American Nazis: Neo-Nazis and Charlottesville: The series concludes with how we can respond to a resurgent Neo-Nazi movement.

June 21-22: American Nazis: Project Paperclip and Hunters: A special weekend post on one of our best cultural representations of Operation Paperclip and Nazis in America.

June 23: Sound in Film: Vitaphone’s Anniversary: A series on the 100^th anniversary of a groundbreaking cinematic technology kicks off with contexts for that pioneering moment.

June 24: Sound in Film: Al Jolson: The series continues with how the first spoken dialogue in an American film reflects some of our worst and best.

June 25: Sound in Film: Mid-Century Evolutions: How two films and one genre reflect the changing landscape of film sounds, as the series talks on.

June 26: Sound in Film: Dialogue Dubbing: Revealing one of film’s hidden histories through three characters whose dialogue was dubbed by a different performer.

June 27: Sound in Film: Meaningful Music: The series concludes with a link to a wonderful piece from FilmStudier Vaughn Joy on how one iconic film uses music.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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