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Saturday, July 31, 2021

July 31-August 1, 2021: Hettie Williams' Guest Post on Black Women in America

                                                            Unprotected:

The Brutalization of Black Women in American History, Society and Popular Culture

“Black women are so unprotected…It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.”

—Megan Thee Stallion

Historically, African American women have been made subject to egregious levels of fetishization, appropriation and brutalization in U.S. society and the American popular imagination. From Mammy to Sapphire, the figure of the Black woman has gone unprotected—Black women’s bodies have gone unprotected—while white Americans consume and commodify Black cultural identity in the process. Historian Danielle McGuire, in her groundbreaking text At the Dark End of the Street, has assiduously demonstrated how Black women were sexually assaulted with regular occurrence by white men across the American south from the Reconstruction Era through the rise of the modern Civil Rights Era. More recently, Breonna Taylor was slaughtered while asleep in her bed. She did nothing wrong. Her body shot eight times and, near death, she was reportedly not offered immediate medical attention for her injuries. “Black women are so unprotected” in this society and culture as rap artist Megan Thee Stallion recently observed, following a gunshot wound she received at the hands of a male assailant.

Toni Morrison in her important text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992) argues that (white) American identity was constructed “against the black shadow” or in relation to derogatory ideas about Blackness. White people like to “play in the dark” with Black bodies and Black culture including in literary, social, and popular cultural contexts. They play in the dark as if in a macabre dance with Blackness illustrated through fetishization and appropriation while, at times, killing the Black body in the flesh. This extends to appropriating the language of Black protest as exemplified in Portland’s white "Wall of Moms." These cosplaying revolutionaries are ultimately dangerous in the end because the focus in mass media always reverts to the white body in these moments or the humanity of those who play as opposed to that of the Black woman’s body within the larger landscape of mass culture.

In this theater of the macabre, Black women’s bodies have been the most unprotected on the account of gender and race. This essay is a brief look at representations of Black women in American popular culture from the lynching of Laura Nelson to the most recent observations of Megan Thee Stallion and the brutal murder of Ma'Khia Bryant by a white cop. I focus here on the brutalization, fetishization and appropriation of Black women in American history, society and culture by thinking about how whiteness thrives off of the degradation of Black women’s bodies.

The rise of Jim Crow and lynch law in the early twentieth century witnessed the public degradation of the Black body with the brutal murder of Black women such as Laura Nelson and Mary Turner. Nelson and her twelve-year-old son were lynched on May 25, 1911. The Nelson’s were accused of stealing a cow from a local white farmer. Nelson’s son, though accounts vary, allegedly shot a member of a white mob who stormed the family’s home in pursuit of Laura’s husband (who initially had been accused of theft). Laura Nelson’s dead body appeared in photos of lynching and on postcards in the early twentieth century. Nelson was brutally lynched for fighting back against white racial oppression. Her death commodified and sold on a postcard. Postcards of lynching became a regular part of American popular culture at the turn of century as James Allen has demonstrated in his riveting photo exhibit "Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching." These postcards of lynched bodies were kept as collectibles, distributed through the mail and saved as souvenirs forever etched into the popular imagination. Turner was lynched while eight months pregnant on May 19, 1918 after speaking out against lynching and the murder of her husband. African American visual Meta Warrick Fuller's sculpture “In Memory of Mary Turner: As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence” was created to speak back against white vigilantism a year later in 1919. These cultural artifacts—postcards and sculptures—are dueling in the dark. Fuller’s work is an act of protest and reclamation, while the postcards of lynching are the product of depraved minds who defined their identity upon the bones of the dead.

 

There were a host of Black women visual artists in the New Negro Era who like Fuller fought against the dark and fashioned respectable images of Black humanity including Laura Wheeler Waring and Augusta Savage amid the rise of filmic stereotypes of Black womanhood. Warring’s painted dignified images of blackness including portraits of Marian Anderson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. Savage, a sculptor like Fuller, depicted Black history and culture with works such as “The Harp” and “Gamin.” It is also pertinent to note here, as well, that the Black Blues women of the New Negro Era such as Glady’s Bentley were gender-bending in top hat and tails long before Madonna graced the stage of the MTV Awards.

Historian Crystal N. Feimster in her book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2011) notes that roughly 200 African American women were lynched between 1880 and 1930.

The Civil Rights-Black Power Era brought further indignities to Black women as exemplified in the testimony of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer. That said, Black women continued to make contributions to American society and culture as advocates for social justice and innovators of American music down to the present in the face of oppression. There has also been a regular appropriation of Black women’s music aesthetics from Big Mama Thornton to Grace Jones and beyond. Before there was a Janis Joplin there was a Big Mama Thornton and before there was a Lady Gaga there was a Grace Jones.

More recently, a big butt or excessively chemically induced tanned skin is deemed cute on a black-fishing (chemically altering one’s skin to appear/pretend to be Black on social media) white Instagram influencer or a Kardashian, while individuals such as Megan Thee Stallion or Cardi B are immediately called “ratchet” for twerking on stage. This race-playing by these black-fishing white women is to play in the dark. It is a theatre of the macabre. Meanwhile, Breonna Taylor is dead.

[Hettie Williams is Associate Professor of History at Monmouth University. She's written and edited a number of vital books on race in American history, culture, and contemporary society, and hosts the Intellectual History podcast for the New Books Network. We've been twitter friends for a long time and I'm so excited to share a bit of her work, voice, and ideas in this great Guest Post!]

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?]

July 31-August 1, 2021: July 2021 Recap

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

June 26-27: Kurtis Kendall’s Guest Post on Athlete Activism: Ending the month in a few with a great Guest Post, and started it with one too, FSU superstar alum on activist athletes!

June 28: Talking Of Thee I Sing: GCE Lab School: A series on my book talks thus far kicks off with the coincidental timing of my January 7th talk and what it helped me think about.

June 29: Talking Of Thee I Sing: Toadstool Bookshop: The series continues with the limits and benefits of virtual talks for a bookstore where I gave an in-person talk in 2019.

June 30: Talking Of Thee I Sing: The Boston Athenaeum: An excellent audience question that helped me think through an important analogy, as the series talks on.

July 1: Talking Of Thee I Sing: Mass Historical Society: How a wonderful archive helps me highlight the inspiration for the book’s title.

July 2: Talking Of Thee I Sing: What’s Next: The series concludes with a type of talk I’m particularly excited to schedule in the Fall!

July 3-4: Of Thee I Sing and Patriotism in 2021: A special weekend post on education, history, and patriotism in 2021 America.

July 5: Work in American Literature: Melville and the Lowell Offering: A series for one of my summer classes kicks off with two distinct but complementary ways to give voice to working women.

July 6: Work in American Literature: Phelps’ “Tenth of January”: The series concludes with a short story that combines local color and sentimental fiction to become so much more.

July 7: Work in American Literature: Depression Novels: Two unique novels that together help us remember the Great Depression’s effects on America’s workers.

July 8: Work in American Literature: “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper”: A quick but stunning poetic representation of work and identity.

July 9: Work in American Literature: Imbolo Mbue and Behold the Dreamers: The series concludes with two takeaways from a compelling creative reading and talk.

July 10-11: Pop Culture Workers: One of my favorite recent posts, on five pop culture characters—from City of Hope’s Nick Rinaldi to Hustlers’ Destiny/Dorothy—who represent the spectrum of 21C work.

July 12: Summer Camp Contexts: Camp Virginia: A summer camp series kicks off with the unique historical camp without which there’d be no AmericanStudier.

July 13: Summer Camp Contexts: Hello Muddah: The series continues with the very American afterlives of a classic camp (sorry) song.

July 14: Summer Camp Contexts: Jewish Summer Camps: Ethnicity, community, and preservation and revision of tradition, as the series camps on.

July 15: Summer Camp Contexts: Playing Indian: The camp tradition that embodies a troubling American trend, and what we can do about it.

July 16: Summer Camp Contexts: Friday the 13th: The series concludes with what camp has come to mean in the late 20th century, and what to make of the change.

July 17-18: Crowd-sourced Summer Camps: Another fun crowd-sourced post, including also a link to my most personal Saturday Evening Post column ever.

July 19: Expanding Histories: The Treaty of Adams-Onís: On the 200th anniversary of the US acquisition of Florida, a post on the layers to that treaty kicks off a series on expanding our histories of expansion.

July 20: Expanding Histories: United States v. Burr: The series continues with two dark sides to expansion that an infamous trial helps us better remember.

July 21: Expanding Histories: A True Picture of Emigration: A forgotten book that helps us engage with the settler experiences in settler colonialism, as the series expands on.

July 22: Expanding Histories: Life Among the Piutes: The horrifying and inspiring effects of reading a vital text on Native American experiences of an expanding US.

July 23: Expanding Histories: The Squatter and the Don: The series concludes with a handful of pieces where I consider a hugely important Mexican American author and book.

July 24-25: Expanding Histories: How to Hide an Empire: A special weekend tribute to one of the most original and compelling works of historical scholarship in recent years.

July 26: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Ed Simon: The first in a series of tributes to awesome fellow AmericanStudiers!

July 27: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Christina Proenza-Coles: The second in that series!

July 28: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.: The third in that series!

July 29: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Kathryn Ostrofsky: The fourth in that series!

July 30: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: New Podcasts: The series concludes with five recent AMST podcasts you should all check out!

Next series starts Monday, and another great Guest Post coming this weekend first,

Ben

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

Friday, July 30, 2021

July 30, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: New Podcasts

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

I’m far from a podcast expert, but I’ve learned a lot in the last year, and part of the reason is that there continue to be so many great new AmericanStudies offerings. Here are a handful (in no particular order, although I have been fortunate enough to be a guest on the first four):

1)      Impressions of America: Three British grad students (one of them an American transplant) run this wonderful podcast on politics and pop culture. If you’re a Star Wars fan, listen to the 2.5 hour episode where Vaughn delves deeper into the politics of that series and extended universe than you could have ever thought possible.

2)      Unsung History: Kelly Therese has been the co-host of the Two Broads Talking Politics podcast for a long while, but recently started her own historical podcast, on which I was very honored to be the third weekly guest (talking about Susie King Taylor). I guarantee you’ll learn a great deal from every episode, both from Kelly and her guests!

3)      Axelbank Reports History and Today: Tampa TV reporter Evan Axelbank is one of our most vocal supporters of historical and public scholarly writing, and he started this podcast to highlight new books and authors/voices in those categories. Let’s all make sure we thank him accordingly by listening in!

4)      Drinking with Historians: I can’t imagine too many of my readers don’t already know this unique and fun video podcast (videocast?) from historians Matt Gabriele and Varsha Venkat. So I’ll just say that I think they’ve unlocked a cheat code for having serious fun while getting guests talking casually and sincerely about their work and interests.

5)      Now & Then: It’s probably even less necessary for me to say much about the new podcast from two of our truly preeminent public scholars, Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson. So I’ll just add that I love how from their title on they’re making clear a central tenet of the work we’re all trying to do: those complex, crucial interconnections between past and present.

July Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

Thursday, July 29, 2021

July 29, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Kathryn Ostrofsky

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

Gotta frame this post with one of those “small world” kind of moments: one of the best students with whom I’ve worked in my 16 years at Fitchburg State, Rebecca Carpenter, worked for a time post-graduation as an archivist at the Dedham Historical Society & Museum (not far at all from my home in Needham); unrelatedly, over the last year and a bit I’ve become connected to Kanisorn “Kid” Wongsrichanalai, the Director of Research for the Massaschusetts Historical Society; and then, also unrelatedly (I thought), I connected on Twitter with Kathryn Ostrofsky, a historian and archivist who took over Rebecca’s position at DHSM and is married to Kid! But while all of that is pretty cool, it’s not nearly as interesting as Kathryn’s work, especially her in-progress book and podcast on the history of Sesame Street (for more on both of which, watch this space!). At times it can feel that media and cultural studies and the work of archives and archivists are separate and even potentially opposed on the public and scholarly landscapes—but Kathryn reminds us of how much they’re intertwined, and the role that both will have to play if we’re to move forward with a full understanding of our past and present, our culture and society, and our shared community.

Last highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

July 28, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

The first two scholars I highlighted this week are folks I’ve had the chance to meet in person, but of course there are lots of amazing AmericanStudiers I haven’t yet met—partly because of, y’know, the last 18 months; but also because of a more positive factor, the countless scholars I’ve met online through the #twitterstorians community. One of those is Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., a History Professor at Augusta University whose first book, The Families’ Civil War, will be coming out in June 2022 from the University of Georgia Press. I can’t lie, one reason I’m highlighting Holly in this series is that he’s perhaps the only person I’ve ever encountered who loves the film Glory even more than I do, and that’s not a fact I take at all lightly. But among the many other reasons is that Holly exemplifies how even the most seemingly exhausted topics—like the Civil War—are being given new life and salience through the work of phenomenal AmericanStudiers. Can’t wait to read his book!

Next highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

July 27, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Christina Proenza-Coles

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

First things first: Christina Proenza-Coles’ book American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World (2019) is not only one of the best works of American historical scholarship of the last decade, but develops ideas at the heart of my last two books—an inclusive and a critical patriotic vision of both African American and American identity—as potently as I could ever hope to communicate them. You might think that could make me jealous, but when I had the chance to meet Christina in my hometown of Charlottesville a couple years back (where she was teaching in the UVa American Studies program, among other gigs), she was so generous and supportive and generally awesome that I was honored to share these ideas and interests with her. Can’t wait to see where her scholarship and writing take her, and us, next!

Next highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

Monday, July 26, 2021

July 26, 2021: AmericanStudiers to Highlight: Ed Simon

[This past weekend’s tribute to Daniel Immerwahr’s book reminded me that it’s been a while since I highlighted fellow AmericanStudiers. So this week I’ll share a handful of such voices and texts—I’d love to hear more scholars and works you’d add to the mix!]

I’ve been a fan of Ed Simon’s public scholarship, journalism, and writing since he and Wade Linebaugh created the wonderful ‘Merica Magazine, and I reviewed his excellent first book America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion (2018) for the LA Review of Books. But over the last few months Ed has outdone himself, with two phenomenal new books (bringing his total to a very high number indeed): An Alternative History of Pittsburgh; and The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters (a collection co-edited with Costica Bradatan). Quite simply, there are no folks doing public scholarly American Studies (and religious studies, and other subjects to boot) journalism and writing any better than Ed these days, and we should all be reading and responding to his consistently unique, provocative, important works.

Next highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? AmericanStudies scholars or works you’d share?

Saturday, July 24, 2021

July 24-25, 2021: Expanding Histories: How to Hide an Empire

[July 17th marks the 200th anniversary of the transfer of Florida from Spain to the U.S. The history of that addition is much more complex than that one date suggests, however—an idea which could be applied much more broadly as well. So this week I’ve highlighted a handful of texts that can help us engage more accurately with the fraught, multi-layered histories of U.S. expansion, leading up to this weekend tribute to one of the best scholarly resources for doing so!]

On a wonderful recent book that expands our whole frame for the US.

Part of the whole point of my week’s series has been that our collective memories and narratives of expansion have consistently been far too over-simplified and reductive (a premise that could be extended to all of American history, no doubt; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about its specific applications for particular histories like these). One of those over-simplifications, and one that I’ve been guilty of sharing and communicating even in recent years, is that while the US had flirtations with imperialism and expansion beyond the continent earlier in the 19th century (and of course did take that step in a way with the 1867 purchase of Alaska, which while part of the continent was entirely separated from the rest of the continental United States), it was really at the very end of the century that the US truly became an empire, with its expansions into Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and other late 1890s new territories.

If that narrative sounds accurate to you (and again, you’re not alone, as it largely did to me too until pretty recently), then you should check out one of the most unique and important books of the last few years: Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019). Immerwahr’s truly epic work of public scholarship certainly does engage at length with those late 19th century histories, as well as with a great deal of the 20th century (and into the 21st). But he also and most strikingly traces those imperial histories much further back, with roughly half of his book focused on earlier in the 19th century. A famous and wonderful example of all that he uncovered and shares in that half of the book is his section on Guano Islands, about which I can’t say much more than that without ruining the surprise inherent in learning about them from Immerwahr himself. But honestly every chapter, of the book as a whole but doubly so of that initial section, is truly mind-blowing, and will fundamentally shift much of what you thought you knew about US history (or at least it did for me, and many other readers it seems).

At the risk of over-explaining the pun at the heart of the week’s series (always a danger when it comes to Dad Jokes, of course), that’s exactly what I mean by “expanding histories”: not just that these are histories around the expansion of the United States, but also and especially that we need to expand our narratives and collective memories, to better engage with all the layers to expansion and all the salient contexts and connections. Fortunately as we work to do so we have not just the different kinds of primary sources I’ve written about throughout the series, but also the discoveries, analyses, and ideas of so many wonderful public scholarly voices and works. I know of no better one, and no more important one for expanding our histories of expansion, than Immerwahr’s book.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Expansion texts or contexts you’d highlight?

Friday, July 23, 2021

July 23, 2021: Expanding Histories: The Squatter and the Don

[July 17th marks the 200th anniversary of the transfer of Florida from Spain to the U.S. The history of that addition is much more complex than that one date suggests, however—an idea which could be applied much more broadly as well. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of texts that can help us engage more accurately with the fraught, multi-layered histories of U.S. expansion, leading up to a weekend tribute to one of the best scholarly resources for doing so!]

I’ve made the case in a number of prior posts and pieces for why we should better remember and read the Mexican American novelist and activist Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and her historical novel The Squatter and the Don. One main reason is that she and the novel alike help us better locate Mexican American communities and histories within our understanding of US expansion, so for this post I’ll direct you to a handful of those prior pieces:

1)      This post for the American Writers Museum blog on why we should all read The Squatter and the Don (1885);

2)      This one for HuffPost on why Donald Trump in particular should read it;

3)      This one for CNN framing Ruiz de Burton as part of my book We the People’s arguments on exclusion and inclusion in American history;

4)      This one as part of a trio of Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns on Mexican American stories and texts;

5)      And this one for the blog, pairing Squatter with George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1881).

Scholarly tribute this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Expansion texts or contexts you’d highlight?

Thursday, July 22, 2021

July 22, 2021: Expanding Histories: Life Among the Piutes

[July 17th marks the 200th anniversary of the transfer of Florida from Spain to the U.S. The history of that addition is much more complex than that one date suggests, however—an idea which could be applied much more broadly as well. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of texts that can help us engage more accurately with the fraught, multi-layered histories of U.S. expansion, leading up to a weekend tribute to one of the best scholarly resources for doing so!]

On the horrifying and inspiring effects of reading a vital late 19th century text.

I’ve written about Sarah Winnemucca and her autoethnographic book Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) many times, including in this column for We’re History. As I do sometimes, I’ll stop this first paragraph and ask you to check out that piece, and then come on back here for more.

Welcome back! There are lots of important 19th century texts that help us engage with Native American histories and communities, but I don’t know any one that more potently traces the horrific effects of US expansion on indigenous Americans than does Winnemucca’s book. Much of that is due to her choice to begin the book with two interconnected subjects: the initial contact between US settlers and Winnemucca’s Paiute (the modern spelling) tribe; and the perspective of her grandfather, a tribal chief who welcomed the settlers and worked tirelessly and yet frustratingly unsuccessfully to create a positive relationship between the communities. Beginning her book as she does with the thorough shattering of this impressive man’s optimism and hope by the hostility and brutality of the US arrivals, Winnemucca immediately and powerfully locates her reader’s empathy with both that specific figure and the tribe as a whole; and the rest of the book, which traces with unrelenting detail the horrors of the removal policy, the “Indian Wars,” and the consistent aggressions of European settlers, builds on that initial empathy quite effectively.

All those histories, and even more so their effects, comprised vital elements of US expansion, and Winnemucca’s book thus is a must-read for all Americans. But as I traced in that We’re History column, Winnemucca also exemplifies Native American resistance to those destructive histories—and, importantly, the successes that resistance achieved, at least as much as the tragedies with which it was met. To extend a bit of my topic from yesterday’s post, another reason why it’s not enough just to think about expansion through the lens of settler colonialism is that that frame too easily locates Native Americans entirely as victims, passively colonized by the arriving settlers. Whereas another layer to the story of expansion is the active response and role of indigenous communities, the countless ways they contributed to the evolving histories of these places and of the expanding nation as a whole. That far more inspiring layer is important to remember as well, and there are no figures nor texts that help us do so any better than do Winnemucca and her book.

Last expanded history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Expansion texts or contexts you’d highlight?

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

July 21, 2021: Expanding Histories: A True Picture of Emigration

[July 17th marks the 200th anniversary of the transfer of Florida from Spain to the U.S. The history of that addition is much more complex than that one date suggests, however—an idea which could be applied much more broadly as well. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of texts that can help us engage more accurately with the fraught, multi-layered histories of U.S. expansion, leading up to a weekend tribute to one of the best scholarly resources for doing so!]

On a forgotten book that helps us consider the first part of a complex current concept.

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard the phrase “settler colonialism,” but it can’t have been too many years ago (which is partly a sign of my own ignorance I’m sure, but not solely that); yet over the last few years it has become one of the most dominant ideas in the scholarship of American history, identity, and culture. As someone who has spent his entire scholarly career working (not as my only goal, but as a consistent and central one, from my dissertation/first book right down to my most recent book) to make Native American histories far more present in every aspect of our collective memories and national narratives, I not only support and endorse but love the idea of emphasizing the ways in which European American colonists were also colonizers, part of a multi-century, imperial invasion (as Francis Jennings reminded us nearly 50 years ago) of a number of existing, sovereign nations. That’s not the only way to frame the story of America, but it has to be a far more central frame than it generally has been, and “settler colonialism” helps us get there.

That’s true not just of the initial European arrivals, but also of all the subsequent European and eventually United States expansions across the continent (and beyond, into Alaska and Hawaii and etc. etc. etc.). Yet without minimizing or downplaying in any way the consistent, destructive effects that the expansion of US settler colonialism had on Native American communities and nations, I would add this: at times it feels that our use of the phrase emphasizes only the second word, the analysis of these arriving and expanding communities as colonizing ones. And while certainly the US military and government played far too consistent and destructive of a role in that process, the truth is that many expansions (and initial arrivals, but this week I’m focused on histories of expansion specifically) were driven by the category comprised in the first word: settlers, individuals and families and communities moving into these territories. And lumping all those settlers into one frame, while again entirely understandable in its emphasis on what these histories meant for Native Americans, doesn’t get us too far into understanding the specific and distinct identities and stories, lives and histories, included within this broad experience of expansion.

I know as a literary scholar I’m biased, but I don’t think there’s a better way to push back such generalizations and get inside more specific experiences and identities than by reading texts, and perhaps especially ones that have been previously under-read. One particularly interesting such text is A True Picture of Emigration (1848), written by Rebecca Burlend with the help of her son Edward. Burlend, her husband John, and their five young children emigrated from England to (eventually, after an arduous multi-stage journey) the woods of Illinois in 1831, and she wrote the book for a specific audience: other prospective English emigrants. But while that occasion and purpose offer important lenses through which to read Burlend’s book, the text is in no way simply a promotional guide or the like, and instead fully lives up to its title, featuring a multi-layered, nuanced, strikingly realistic depiction of many different layers to the experience of emigration and expansion. It’s only one such picture, of course, so needs to be complemented by plenty of other reading—but every one adds a bit more to our understanding of the settlers and stories that constituted expansion.

Next expanded history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Expansion texts or contexts you’d highlight?

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

July 20, 2021: Expanding Histories: United States v. Burr

[July 17th marks the 200th anniversary of the transfer of Florida from Spain to the U.S. The history of that addition is much more complex than that one date suggests, however—an idea which could be applied much more broadly as well. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of texts that can help us engage more accurately with the fraught, multi-layered histories of U.S. expansion, leading up to a weekend tribute to one of the best scholarly resources for doing so!]

On two dark sides to expansion that an infamous trial helps us better remember.

In the summer of 1807, former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr was tried for treason and high misdemeanor in a Virginia federal court, one presided over by none other than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. While Burr has become much better known over the last few years due to his central role in the life and (especially) death of Alexander Hamilton, and while he lived a long and influential American life that included prominent roles in the Revolution and Founding, this trial focused on by far the most striking and controversial part of Burr’s story, what came to be known as the Burr Conspiracy: his 1805-06 efforts (begun while he was still VP, natch) to raise an independent military force in the Western United States and either use it to establish a separate nation with himself as the leader or to invade Mexico (possibly to enact the same purpose of carving out a distinct territory that he could rule). The uncertainties revealed by even that brief summary, however, along with other factors like the lack of reliable witnesses (other than one shady co-conspirator, James Wilkinson), led to an acquittal on both charges (despite President Thomas Jefferson’s ardent and possibly unconstitutional attempts to influence the outcome).

The histories around Burr’s conspiracy and trial, like all those in his incredibly complicated and compelling life, deserve their own specific attention and analysis. But this unique moment nonetheless also reflects a couple broader and quite dark realities of expansion, both in that early 19th century period and throughout our history. For one thing, we often frame expansion (at least in how it is presented in our educational texts and conversations) through the official mechanisms by which territory was added, whether treaties like the one that began this week’s posts or financial transactions like the 1803 Louisiana Purchase through which the Jefferson Administration (with Burr as VP) acquired these Western territories from France. Yet while such measures did formally add new lands to the expanding nation, the actual expansion of Americans (individually and collectively) into those territories was far, far more messy and bloody. I’ve long argued that the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, in which US settlers invaded that future state while it was still all Indian Territory, was a striking and illegal historical moment—yet one could just as easily see it as emblematic of the chaotic and brutal way that US expansion always took place on the ground.

Moreover, the seeming dichotomy between (yet clear interconnections of) Founding Father and Vice President Burr and treasonous conspirator Burr is also emblematic of the unsavory (or at the very least far from idealized) roles performed by countless prominent Americans in the expansion process. Davy Crockett is a particularly good example, a folk hero who had his own Walt Disney TV show yet one who made his name in wars against Native Americans and then a pre-Civil War rebellion in defense of slavery (all of which were also in service of eventual US expansions, whether into the Southeast or Texas). But another example is none other than George Washington, whose first military service (which led directly to all his future military and political roles) was in the French and Indian War, a conflict precipitated by (if not at all limited to) the expansion of English settlements into new territories. Hell, many of the Civil War US Colored Troops (one of my favorite American communities) went on to serve with the post-war Buffalo Soldiers, regiments of all-Black cavalry that fought Native Americans throughout the late 19th century “Indian Wars.” When it comes to expansion, to quote my favorite line from my favorite depiction of that USCT community, “ain’t nobody clean.”

Next expanded history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Expansion texts or contexts you’d highlight?

Monday, July 19, 2021

July 19, 2021: Expanding Histories: The Treaty of Adams-Onís

[July 17th marks the 200th anniversary of the transfer of Florida from Spain to the U.S. The history of that addition is much more complex than that one date suggests, however—an idea which could be applied much more broadly as well. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of texts that can help us engage more accurately with the fraught, multi-layered histories of U.S. expansion, leading up to a weekend tribute to one of the best scholarly resources for doing so!]

On two darker sides to the history of American expansion that the historic treaty exemplifies.

The long and windy road to the 1821 Transcontinental Treaty (also known as the Treaty of Adams-Onís) and the finalized acquisition of Spanish Florida by the United States took more than a decade. In 1810, American settlers in West Florida—who had been immigrating to the region since the late 18th century—rebelled, declaring themselves an Independent Republic separate from Spanish rule. Although that republic did not last long, the event encouraged the US government to claim that the region had in fact been part of the Louisiana Purchase, setting in motion extended negotiations with Spain that began in earnest with Spanish Minister to the United States Don Luis de Onís’ arrival in Washington in 1815. Those negotiations continued for years, both exacerbated yet also pushed forward by General Andrew Jackson’s semi-authorized seizure of multiple Spanish forts as part of an 1818 raid against the Seminole tribe during the conflict that came to be known as the First Seminole War. Eventually Onís and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams reached an agreement in February 1819, “whereby” (quoting this State Department website) “Spain ceded East Florida to the United States and renounced all claim to West Florida. Spain received no compensation, but the United States agreed to assume liability for $5 million in damage done by American citizens who rebelled against Spain.”

Those histories are specific and complex on their own terms, but they also illustrate two broader (and quite dark) threads within the pattern of 19th century American expansion. For one thing, the US acquisition of Florida began quite similarly to the Mexican American War which produced the century’s single largest land acquisition (through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo): with an illegal incursion into a sovereign nation’s territory, one undertaken in support of American rebels fighting against that nation’s legal sovereignty over its own land. Jackson’s seizure of Spanish forts was even more blatant and aggressive than the actions undertaken by US forces in both the Nueces Strip and Alta California in late 1845 and early 1846; but in both cases, these were illegal occupations of sovereign foreign territory, and ones used by the US government as a pretext for further conflict and, eventually, the acquisition of a great deal of that territory. While we’ve begun in recent decades to collectively grapple with the ways in which American expansion depended on the theft of Native American land, I don’t know that we’ve even considered yet the illegal invasions of Spanish and Mexican territory without which the US might never have acquired Florida and much of the Southwest and West respectively.

Moreover, Jackson’s invasion also reveals even darker layers to the white supremacist histories that motivated such military actions (and the First Seminole War as a whole). His authorized invasion was motivated not just by a desire to destroy the Seminoles, but also to recapture enslaved people who had escaped from Georgia plantations and joined the Seminole nation; this cross-cultural Florida community was perceived as a threat to Georgia and the US. Indeed, as part of his invasion Jackson famously and controversially executed two British citizens, Alexander George Arbuthnot and Robert C. Armbrister, who were accused of encouraging both those runaway enslaved people and the ongoing Seminole resistance to the United States. Neither that action nor Jackson’s invasion overall were solely responsible for the US acquisition of Florida, of course—but they both played a significant role and reflected the overarching reality that such territorial expansions were always intertwined with white supremacist American histories and narratives. All part of the story of Florida and the expanding early 19th century United States.

Next expanded history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Expansion texts or contexts you’d highlight?

Saturday, July 17, 2021

July 17-18, 2021: Crowd-sourced Summer Camping

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gave me an opportunity for a week of Summer CampStudying! Leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

First, I wanted to share here my most recent Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, on the worst and best takeaways from an enraging experiences my boys had at camp this year.

Some great responses to Wednesday’s post on Jewish camps:

Betsy Cazden tweets “Do you have the book Raising Reds? It includes the camp I went to as a child, Camp Woodland, which was a lot of NY Jewish lefties plus Black kids and staff plus Pete Seeger and Odetta—pretty radical in the 1950s. My parents were staff; Katha Pollitt was in my cabin.”

Elissa Taub tweets, “Love this! My son is at Jewish summer camp in MS (yes, you read that right). The camp is a great connector for Jewish kids from small and large towns thru-out the Deep South. Some campers are the only Jewish kids in their schools. It's such a great outlet for them!”

And Eric, the Animated Chef shares these couple books on Jewish camps, as well as a few great blog posts of his own on those settings and experiences.

Other great CampStudying responses:

Olivia Lucier writes, “I went to Camp Green Eyrie in Harvard, MA for many many many years and loved it. Some of the best summer memories…except one summer. Our platform tent had an ants nest under it and they traveled into my BAG and laid eggs in my bag! It was disgusting and traumatizing because of the thousands and thousands of ants in my suitcase! Other than that happy memories.”

Robin Field shares, “I went to a ‘young writers’ camp for two weeks at Duke when I was 13. It was gratifying to be around a lot of writer nerd teens. Later I went to a journalism camp for a week when I was 16 at Ball State University, since I was about to be editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. I won first prize for my feature story on interracial dating. These academic camps were really helpful in showing I had a tribe.

Alison Dassatti Allegresso writes, “My dad went to an overnight camp as a kid, and on the first night, all the teenage councilors cruelly threw the young campers’ rolled up sleeping bags down a hill, only to take them and throw them back down when the kids retrieved them. It was so miserable, my dad decided on the spot that when he one day had children of his own, he would never send them to summer camp. So, my brother and I never went.

Mimi Murray shares, “I went to Rockbrook Camp for girls for eight summers as a camper and two as a counselor—I'm still in a private FB group of women I'm friends with from camp. RBC just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

And I’ll end with this wonderful poem from Floyd Cheung.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

Friday, July 16, 2021

July 16, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Friday the 13th

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On what camp has come to mean, and what to make of the change.

I’ve traced a number of different contexts for and meanings of summer camp in this week’s series, but the truth is that, for anyone who grew up in the 1980s as I did, there’s one particularly clear camp connection I haven’t yet mentioned: death. Brutal, bloody, inventive and inevitable death. The series of Friday the 13th films, which began with 1980’s Friday the 13th and saw seven sequels released in the 1980s alone, created in Camp Crystal Lake a horrific doppelganger to the extremely unhappy camp experiences captured in “Hello Muddah” (although, to be fair, the childish campers themselves were never Jason Voorhees’ targets). And thanks to that franchise’s unparalleled and consistent box office success, numerous other horror and slasher films mined the same territory over those years (and beyond), turning summer camp into one of the celluloid settings in which attractive teenagers were most likely to be gruesomely murdered.

So what do we make of this shift in, or at least striking addition to, the cultural images and meanings of summer camp? While, again, the youthful campers themselves were not typically endangered in these films, they were most definitely surrounded by and witnesses to the horror—which, if we connect Friday the 13th with the babysitting scenario at the heart of its most obviously influential predecessor, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), is a common thread across these defining early slasher films. It’s hard not to see this consistent emphasis, the presence of young children observing the monsters and their unfolding horrors, as a commentary on—or, at the very least, a reflection of—a society in which images of childhood innocence were giving way to darker visions and fears. Indeed, the Friday the 13th series took that idea one step further still, creating in the unique character of Tommy Jarvis a multi-film narrative of a young child impacted and then significantly changed by his observations of and encounters with Jason Voorhees.

Moreover, it’s equally difficult not to connect those ideas of childhood observation and change to the experience of watching these films. One of my own most unsettling memories is of watching my first Friday the 13th film, Part VI: Jason Lives, at the home of a middle school friend; it might sound too pat to be true, but the moment and line I remember most vividly is when one of the young campers sees Jason outside a cabin window and tells the (doomed) counselors that she has seen “a monster.” On the other hand, I don’t want to overstate this effect—I attended overnight camp a couple of years later, and I can honestly say that I didn’t think about Friday the 13th a single time during my week’s stay, nor did such images lessen the fun I had at the camp. So perhaps it’s most accurate to say that summer camp, like so many aspects of late 20th and early 21st century American society, contains multitudes, competing and even contrasting images and narratives, historical and contemporary, cultural and social, that nonetheless coexist in our collective consciousness.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

Thursday, July 15, 2021

July 15, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Playing Indian

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On the camp tradition that embodies a troubling American trend, and what we can do about it.

I’ve tried from time to time, mostly in the posts collected under the category “Scholarly Reviews,” to cite works of AmericanStudies scholarship that have been particularly significant and inspiring to me. But it’s fair to say that I’ve only scratched the surface, and I’ll keep trying to find ways to highlight other such works as the blog moves forward into its second (!) decade. One such work is Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998), a book which moves from the Boston Tea Party and Tammany Hall to late 20th century hobbyists and New Age believers (among many other subjects) to trace the enduring American fascination with dressing up as and performing exaggerated “Indian” identities in order to construct and engage with individual, communal, and national identity. In one of his later chapters, Deloria considers Cold War-era practices of “playing Indian” through which children’s social experiences and burgeoning American identities were often delineated—and right alongside the Boy Scouts and “cowboys and Indians” play, Deloria locates and analyzes summer camps.

In the example cited in that last hyperlink, Missouri’s Camp Lake of the Woods held an annual “Indian powwow” for its campers—the tradition dates back at least to the 1940s, and apparently continued well into the late 20th century. (I’m assuming it no longer occurs, although I haven’t found evidence one way or another.) By all accounts, including Deloria’s research and analysis, such summer camp uses of “Indian” images and performances were widespread, if not even ubiquitous, as camps rose to their height of national prominence in the 1950s and 60s. Even if we leave aside the long and troubling history that Deloria traces and in which these particular performances are unquestionably located, the individual choice remains, to my mind, equally troubling: this is childhood fun created out of the use of exaggerated ethnic stereotypes, community-building through blatant “othering” of fellow Americans, and a particularly oppressed and vulnerable community at that; to paraphrase what I said in my post on the racist “Red Man” scene in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), I can’t imagine these camps asking their campers to “play” any other ethnic or racial group. The performances were obviously not intended to be hurtful, but it’s difficult, especially in light of Deloria’s contextualizing, to read them in any other way.

So what, you might ask? Well for one thing, we could far better remember these histories—both the specific histories of playing Indian in summer camps, and the broader arc of playing Indian as a foundational element in the construction of American identity and community across the centuries; Deloria’s book would help us better remember on both levels. For another thing, it would be worth considering what it means that so many American children experienced and took part in these performances, how that might impact their perspectives on not only Native Americans, but ethnic and cultural “others” more generally. And for a third thing, it would also be worth examining our contemporary summer camps and other childhood communities—certainly the most overt such racism has been almost entirely eliminated from those space; but what stereotypes and images, performances and “others,” remain? Summer camps are fun and games, but they’re also as constitutive of identities as any influential places and material cultures can be—as Deloria reminds us, play is also dead serious, and demands our attention and anaylsis.

Last camp context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

July 14, 2021: Summer Camp Contexts: Jewish Summer Camps

[This summer my sons return (after a frustrating Covid hiatus last year) to their favorite sleepaway camp. As ever that gives me serious empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]

On ethnicity, community, and the preservation and revision of tradition.

In the nine first-year writing courses I taught as an adjunct at both Boston University and UMass Boston, I focused on one aspect or another of immigration and American identity; as a result, I found that the conversations and work in those courses circled around again and again to some key topics and themes. Many were what you would expect: the old and new worlds; assimilation and acculturation; hyphens and hybridity; multi-generational continuities and changes. But nearly as frequent were our discussions of ethnic communities and neighborhoods in the U.S., the areas early scholars of immigration dubbed ethnic enclaves—we talked a good deal about the limitations and strengths of such enclaves, the ways in which they can on the one hand foster isolation and separation (and even ghetto-ization), sub-standard living conditions and inequal schools, prejudice and ignorance toward immigrant groups, and other issues; but at the same time can preserve specific cultural identities and customs and languages, build community and support across generations, become potent new world homes for immigrant communities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following the era’s sizeable waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, many of those arrivals settled in such ethnic enclaves, most famously in the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan (as described at great length in early 20th century literary works such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky [1917] and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers [1925]). While some of those neighborhoods and communities persist to a lesser degree, they have mostly dissipated over the subsequent century, as Jewish Americans have spread out across the country. Yet like members of most ethnic and cultural, as well as most religious, communities, many Jewish Americans have worked for continuity despite these historical and social changes, particularly by passing along customs and beliefs, traditions and ideals, to their younger generations. Education and activities, schools and community and cultural centers, have provided vehicles for such preservation of culture—but another, complex, and I believe more easily overlooked, such vehicle has been the Jewish summer camp.

For well more than half a century, Jewish schoolchildren (and of course some non-Jewish schoolchildren) have spent portions of their summers at sites such as Wisconsin’s Camp Ramah, Camp Woodmere in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and New Hampshire’s Camp Tevya, among many others. In many ways these camps have facilitated and continue to facilitate a preservation of Jewish culture and community across the generations: with Hebrew and Talmud instruction, historical and social lessons, and other communal activities and connections. Yet at the same time, if we parallel such camps with those attended by American schoolchildren from all cultures and communities (and it seems clear that these camps have also featured all of the stereotypical camp activities: boating and hiking, capture the flag and campfires, and so on), we could argue the opposite: that they have offered another avenue through which Jewish American kids have connected to a broader, non-denominational American society and experience, one shared by all their peers. A tension between ethnicity and acculturation, tradition and revision, the Talmud and campfire sing-alongs—what could be more American than such dualities?

Next camp context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?