January 30-31, 2021: January 2021 Recap

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

January 4: Hope-full Texts: “A Long December”: A New Year’s series on hope-full cultural works starts with the Counting Crows song we were all quoting as December and 2020 ended.

January 5: Hope-full Texts: The Marrow of Tradition: The series continues the hard-won hope at the end of my favorite American novel.

January 6: Hope-full Texts: The Shawshank Redemption: What we can learn about hope from three famous quotes in the cult classic film, as the series hopes on.

January 7: Hope-full Texts: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”: One of the most beautiful poetic visions of hope, and an equally moving essay about it by one of my favorite AmericanStudiers.

January 8: Hope-full Texts: Radical Hope: The series concludes with perhaps the best of the many things I’ve learned from inspiring fellow teachers and scholars like Kevin Gannon.

January 9-10: Crowd-sourced Hope: My favorite crowd-sourced post ever, with countless responses from fellow AmericanHopers in all the week’s categories and more.  

January 11: Of Thee I Sing: Celebratory Patriotism: In honor of my forthcoming book, a series on my four categories of patriotism starts with the most familiar.

January 12: Of Thee I Sing: Mythic Patriotism: The book series continues with the exclusionary, white supremacist form of patriotism that our celebrations too often morph into.

January 13: Of Thee I Sing: Active Patriotism: The first of my two alternative categories of patriotism, as the series rolls on.

January 14: Of Thee I Sing: Critical Patriotism: The alternative form of patriotism for which my book is ultimately arguing.

January 15-16: Sharing Of Thee I Sing: The series concludes with a special post on five of the many places and ways I’d love to share this book and the contested history of American patriotism.

January 17: Emily Hamilton-Honey’s Hope-full Guest Post: Following up the prior weekend’s Crowd-sourced Post, my twitter friend Emily shared some further thoughts on texts that offer hope!

January 18: MLK Histories: The Real King: My annual MLK Day post on remembering the full Martin Luther King Jr. beyond the most famous speech.

January 19: MLK Histories: “Give Us the Ballot”: A series on under-remembered King texts kicks off with one of his first prominent public speeches.

January 20: MLK Histories: Stride Toward Freedom: The series continues with his memoir and collective history of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

January 21: MLK Histories: Where Do We Go from Here?: King’s final book and the first of two ways to think about his work resonating beyond his death, as the series rolls on.

January 22: MLK Histories: The Poor People’s Campaign: The series concludes with the collective action and the second of two ways to think about King’s work resonating beyond his assassination.

January 23-24: MLK’s 21^st Century Heirs: A special weekend post on five figures who carry King’s legacy into the 21^st century.

January 25: Spring 2021 Previews: First-Year Writing II: A Spring semester series kicks off with balancing schedule flexibility and assignment scaffolding in first-year writing.

January 26: Spring 2021 Previews: American Lit II: The series continues with the drawbacks and benefits of radically reworking a survey course’s chronology.

January 27: Spring 2021 Previews: Major American Writers of the 20^th Century: How to achieve depth without longer works and what I fear might be lost in the process, as the series teaches on.

January 28: Spring 2021 Previews: American Art and Lit 1800-1860: The temptation of the familiar and pushing toward something new—with your help!

January 29: Spring 2021 Previews: Projects Old and New: The series concludes with three scholarly projects on my radar this Spring.

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

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

January 29, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: Projects Old and New

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On three scholarly projects on my radar this Spring:

1)      Of Thee I Sing: The due date for my 6^th book has been pushed back a couple times—it will now be at the publisher in a couple weeks, and available for general purchase in March. But my plan to talk about the project, and the contested history of American patriotism, at any and every opportunity hasn’t changed, and so I hope that such virtual talks—at bookstores, at libraries and archives, at museums and historic sites, with classes and colleagues, with reading or discussion groups, and more—will be a big part of my Spring. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any and all such opportunities, whether here in comments or by email. Thanks!

2)      1893: Just a couple days before I’m drafting this post I signed a contract (once again with Rowman & Littlefield, natch) for my next book, discussed in that hyperlinked post and now with the working title 1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition and the Remaking of America. I’m so excited to spend a good bit of my free time this Spring researching and writing the stories of the many prominent Americans whose lives, texts, and identities intersected with the 1893 World’s Fair. I’ve already learned some great sources and resources about and around the Exposition from colleagues near and far, and would love to hear your ideas, whether here in comments or by email. Thanks!

3)      America the Atlas: Meanwhile, I’m excited to be working as the main scholarly advisor to another interesting project, a coffee-table type book that will tell the story of American history through maps (especially) and images. I’ve already been fortunate enough to recruit a diverse and impressive group of scholarly contributors to help structure and flesh out the book’s ten chapters (which move from the earliest peoplings up through our contemporary moment), but I could always use additional ideas for maps, images, communities, sections, and histories we’d want to include in a project ike this. Share ‘em here or, y’know, by email—thanks!

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?

January 28, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: American Art and Lit 1800-1860

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On resisting the temptation of the familiar and pushing toward something new--with your help!

The last few years my one annual graduate course for our English Studies MA program has alternated between Spring and Summer semesters, and this time I’m back to the Spring, with a hybrid class that will meet in person once at the start of the semester and once at the end (with weekly Google Meet conversations and plenty of asynchronous online responses in between). The class I’ll be teaching, American Art and Literature 1800-1860, was on the books before I started at FSU in 2005, and is one I’ve only taught once before, in the 2007 Summer session (making it the second graduate class I taught at FSU). I’d be lying if I said I remembered much at all about a class I taught 13.5 years ago, but in looking at the syllabus, I like the choices past Ben made, and especially the breadth of genres, media, and perspectives & identities featured therein: main texts from The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass to A Son of the Forest and A New Home; Who’ll Follow?; and secondary ones including paintings, magazines and newspapers, speeches, essays, local color short stories, and more.

I’ve never believed in reinventing just for the sake of reinventing, and to that end, when I’ve found a syllabus that works well, I’ve tended to use it for at least a few sections of the course before considering any significant changes. Given that general attitude, and then factoring in, well, [gestures at everything], it stands to reason that I’d keep this syllabus the same for my Spring 2021 section of the course. And I sure considered doing so—but the truth is, I’ve learned a ton about this era in particular, and about American literature and culture in general, in those intervening 13 years. From individual voices and works like Henry Highland Garnet’s address and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s “Cacoethes Scribendi” to more communal conversations like the Lowell Offering and the Young America movement to historical communities like the Chinese in California and the Mashpee Revolt in Massachusetts, there’s just a great deal that I’d want on a syllabus like this one that wasn’t there in 2007, and I’m excited to figure out where and how to include it this time around.

In that spirit, however, I’m also interested in broadening the “art” part of the course, in thinking about how to make my materials more genuinely multimedia. And for that I’d really love your thoughts and ideas, all—takes on either particular works, artistic or cultural genres, or websites/projects that would work well in this class? I’ll leave some room to slot them into the syllabus, so I’d love to hear your ideas, thanks!

Last Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?