[For this year’s
series on genuine American patriots, I wanted to focus on contemporary figures
who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there’s a through-line to these
four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard
Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Please
share your own patriotic nominees, dissenters or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced
weekend post we can all be proud of!]
It will likely
come as a surprise to no readers of this blog that I believe AmericanStudies
public scholars are among those doing the hard work of patriotism. Here are
four places online where you can find some of the best of that work:
1)
US
Intellectual History blog: The recent post at that hyperlink, by my online
friend and Guest Poster Rob
Greene, embodies the best of the USIH blog: nuanced, thoughtful, deeply
researched, challenging and provocative work that pushes our understandings of
American community and identity on every level. There’s no better example of 21st
century public scholarship as critical patriotism than USIH.
2)
Saved
By History: Saved by History is the personal scholarly blog of one of the
USIH community’s most consistent and interesting voices, cultural and
intellectual historian L.D. Burnett.
Like most of the best personal scholarly blogs (ie, the models for my own
continued work in this space), Burnett’s combines scholarship and research,
pedagogy and practice, personal reflections, and links and shout-outs to fellow
scholars, offering us a window into the perspective and career of one exemplary
public scholar.
3)
African
American Intellectual History Society blog: I believe that W.E.B.
Du Bois would be proud of and inspired by (and definitely want to
participate in) the work being done at the AAIHS blog. Need I say any more??
4)
NPR’s
Monkey See: The public radio pop culture blog likely doesn’t fit with most
of our shared definitions of public scholarship—it’s more the combination of
reporting and analysis we’d usually associate these days with journalistic
bloggers. But to my mind, public scholarship is no longer limited in any sense
to the academy (if it ever was), or to certain kinds of scholarly voices or
conversations. AmericanStudies public scholarship, to me, is defined by all
those doing the hard and vital work of engaging with our culture, society,
history, community, and identity, and seeking to bring that work to public
audiences. The more sites and voices we can include as part of that public
scholarly patriotism, the broader and deeper the conversations will be.
Share other
inspiring public scholars for the crowd-sourced post this weekend, please!
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other 21st century patriots you’d nominate?
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