December 31, 2021: Year in Review: New Novels

[It’s been another year, that’s for sure. So for my annual Year in Review series, I wanted to highlight a handful of things that have made me happy this year—and, yes, to complicate and analyze them, because I yam what I yam. I’d love to hear your year highlights and takeaways as well!]

On two wonderful new novels from familiar voices, and one from a writer I’m just encountering.

1)      The Night Watchman: Louise Erdrich has been publishing for nearly forty years, and I’ll always have a soft spot for her first novel, the magisterial Love Medicine (1984). But she has never rested on the laurels of that stunning debut, and over those four subsequent decades has continued to evolve as a writer (while building a literary universe to rival Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha). The Night Watchman feels like it’s both in conversation with some of the best of that career and staking new ground at the same time, and makes clear that Erdrich remains one of the truly towering American novelists of this and any era.

2)      Harlem Shuffle: While Erdrich’s four-decade career has been defined (at least to a degree) by continuities, Colson Whitehead’s quarter-century career has been marked by striking shifts, with every novel engaging (and also exploding, or at least radically repurposing) different genres and literary traditions. Whitehead’s latest Harlem Shuffle is no different, using tropes of crime and heist fiction/stories to tell a family story of race and community in 1960s New York. After the truly painful read that was Nickel Boys, Harlem Shuffle is far lighter and more fun while still connecting to many of the same histories and issues, a reflection of Whitehead’s truly unique ability to reinvent himself again and again while remaining true to his craft and mission.

3)      Libertie: As those hyperlinked posts illustrate, I’ve written about Erdrich and Whitehead many times in this space, but this is the first time I’ve highlighted Kaitlyn Greenridge, mainly because I haven’t yet had the chance to read her acclaimed debut novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman (2016). I’ll be rectifying that gap soon, though, because I greatly enjoyed Greenridge’s second book, the historical novel of race, gender, family, and identity in 19th century America Libertie. I’m a sucker for great historical fiction, and Libertie is one of the best historical novels I’ve read in years, capturing so many layers of its period and world while dealing with themes that remain powerfully relevant in our own moment. Can’t wait to read more from this awesome author I added to my list this year!

December Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 2021 stories you’d highlight?

December 30, 2021: Year in Review: James Bond

[It’s been another year, that’s for sure. So for my annual Year in Review series, I wanted to highlight a handful of things that have made me happy this year—and, yes, to complicate and analyze them, because I yam what I yam. I’d love to hear your year highlights and takeaways as well!]

[NOTE: SPOILERS for No Time To Die in this post.]

On a subtle but striking moment in the latest James Bond film.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given that it’s a profoundly British film series that only occasionally intersects with American settings or issues, I’ve only written about James Bond at length once in this space: this decade-old post on the most American, and one of the most problematic (even though I love a lot about it), of the films, Live and Let Die (1973). (I did include another and less problematic favorite Bond film, The Living Daylights, in this post on Afghanistan, which is the one aspect of that film which doesn’t hold up well.) Live and Let Die is no more about race in America than Moonraker was about space exploration during the Cold War or The World is Not Enough was about the need to divest from fossil fuels; Bond isn’t Bourne, nor do us fans expect it to be. But Live and Let Die does utilize racial images and stereotypes quite a bit, in unnecessary and deeply frustrating ways.

The Daniel Craig era as James Bond, which began with 2005’s Casino Royale and came to a close with this year’s No Time to Die, purposefully sought to modernize the films in a variety of ways, with racial representations among them. For that latter issue the Craig films did so most overtly through the casting choices for two of the series’ original and most longstanding characters, MI6 secretary Moneypenny and CIA agent Felix Leiter, with British actress Naomie Harris and American actor Jeffrey Wright playing the two across the Craig films. When Wright’s Leiter first introduces himself to Craig’s Bond in Casino Royale, he even turns this identity question into a clever joke: “I should have introduced myself, seeing as we’re related. Felix Leiter, a brother from Langley.” And in an important scene in the next film, Quantum of Solace (the only other Craig film in which the character appeared until No Time to Die), Wright’s Leiter once again calls Bond “brother.”

No Time to Die returns to and concludes a number of threads from throughout the Craig films, with Leiter’s character and arc among them: he recruits Bond into the film’s originating mission and subsequently is murdered by Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), a U.S. State Department employee secretly in league with the film’s villain. Later in the film, Bond has the chance to exact revenge by killing Ash; when Ash pleads for his life and calls Bond “brother,” Bond replies (before killing Ash), “I had a brother. His name was Felix.” Bond has always been known for his badass one-liners before and after kills, and this could be seen as simply the latest in that long series (and not the best example in No Time to Die, which comes late in the film and I won’t spoil here). But as I remember it at least, this is the first time that Bond has reciprocated Leiter’s term and called the agent his brother, and he does so here even more clearly than in those other, more jokey and casual uses. The moment isn’t about race at all—which at the same time, like the casting of Wright in this pivotal role, makes it a small but important step in racial representation in the Bond films.

Last review post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 2021 stories you’d highlight?

December 29, 2021: Year in Review: Ted Lasso

[It’s been another year, that’s for sure. So for my annual Year in Review series, I wanted to highlight a handful of things that have made me happy this year—and, yes, to complicate and analyze them, because I yam what I yam. I’d love to hear your year highlights and takeaways as well!]

On one obvious and one more subtle way the megahit show challenges our current narratives.

I was late to the party when it came to watching Apple TV’s super-smash show Ted Lasso, and so am likewise late when it comes to writing about the show (at least in this space, but I didn’t even share many of my thoughts about it on Twitter, which really puts me behind the times; even Ted himself has a Twitter presence!). Indeed, with season 2’s dozen episodes dropping weekly this past summer and fall, it felt at times like every pop culture and journalistic outlet and website, and even every individual writer about such texts and topics, was responding to Ted, often with compellingly unique angles and takes on a show that rewards such multi-layered attention to be sure. (Seriously, I could spend hours finding additional worthwhile articles and conversations to hyperlink in this first paragraph; I look forward to the inevitable, competing collections of Ted Lasso essays that will certainly be published in the not-too-distant future.)

So what on earth could I have to say about the show that hasn’t already been said (and said and said and said), you might ask? Or, more exactly, why am I dedicating one of this week’s five posts to such well-trodden ground? My answer to the second question, and perhaps to the first as well, is two-fold. For one thing, Ted was a hugely important part of my year, and for a reason that, well-covered as it might be, remains well worth highlighting: Ted’s deceptively simple optimism. As someone who has thought and written a great deal about critical optimism, I would say that I have found very few contemporary cultural works that really embrace and model that perspective, but Ted Lasso most definitely does. There’s been a lot of talk about how the second season’s various twists and revelations challenge or undercut Ted’s and the show’s optimism, but I would argue that’s because we mostly define optimism as the blandly and superficially cheery variety, rather than the hard-won, critical type that Ted has clearly worked to model and still is at Season 2’s end.

(NOTE: Serious Season 2 SPOILERS in this parargraph.) That’s why Ted meant so much to me this year, and why I knew I wanted to include it in this week’s series. But I do also have a take on one of the most complex and controversial Season 2 plotlines: the shocking evolution of fan-favorite Nate from beloved Season 1 underdog to bullying Season 2 villain. I’ve written a good bit in this space about one of the most central trends and tropes in 21^st century TV (and cultural) storytelling: the anti-hero. Hell, one of the most acclaimed 21^st century shows is entirely focused on how a nice guy becomes such an anti-hero. Yet whatever individual viewers think about the Walter Whites and Dexter Morgans of the world (and I’m not much of a fan), they are clearly the protagonists of their respective shows, and so there’s at least some degree of built-in empathy in how we watch their anti-heroic exploits. Whereas Nate the Great seemed like a straightforwardly heroic character in Season 1, and then gradually in Season 2 that rug was pulled out from under us and he was revealed to be at best an anti-hero (and perhaps again a villain, although eye of the beholder and all). That’s a really interesting way to both use and yet challenge a familiar TV trope, one more reason why Ted Lasso is worth continuing to watch and write about!

Next review post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 2021 stories you’d highlight?

December 28, 2021: Year in Review: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

[It’s been another year, that’s for sure. So for my annual Year in Review series, I wanted to highlight a handful of things that have made me happy this year—and, yes, to complicate and analyze them, because I yam what I yam. I’d love to hear your year highlights and takeaways as well!]

On two strikingly and importantly thoughtful layers to the hit Marvel show.

As part of October’s SitcomStudying series I wrote this post about Wandavision, perhaps the best (in terms of consistent quality from start to finish, anyway) and certainly the most thought-provoking of the three Marvel TV shows to drop in the last year-plus. The boys and I also enjoyed the hell out of Loki as it aired this past summer, and I would gladly ride or die for Alligator Loki. But when it comes to AmericanStudying, there’s no question that the third of those three shows, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, has the most to say about American history and identity. Indeed, for a show created by a company and brand so committed to global relevance (and domination), and of course one now owned by the corporate juggernaut that is Disney to boot, I was really pleasantly surprised by just how deeply Falcon connects to a number of AmericanStudies threads and questions. Here I’ll highlight the pair of such threads that most stood out to this AmericanStudiesViewer.

The more obvious such thread, but still a surprisingly central and nuanced one, were the show’s interconnected themes of race, American history, and heroism. Of course those questions were linked to African American actor Anthony Mackie’s titular Falcon (the superhero alter ego of Sam Wilson), particularly through the lens of the character’s (and actor’s) potential adoption of the Captain America role after the passing of Steve Rogers. But even more complicatedly and crucially connected to those themes was an unexpected character, Isaiah Bradley (played pitch-perfectly by Carl Lumbly), an African American Korean War veteran turned supersoldier who was in line to be the second Captain America until racism not only took away that opportunity but turned him into an imprisoned and abused lab experiment instead. Bradley asked some very tough questions not only of Sam but of the audience as well, forcing us all to take a long look at whether and how our superhero stories (like our narratives of heroism overall) have had and continue to have room for Americans of color—and leading to a very well-earned and moving final scene in the show’s concluding moments.

That was the best stuff from Falcon, and the main reason why I’m writing about it in this week’s series to be sure. But the show featured another contender for the title of Captain America, former Marine turned complex hero John Walker (played with impressive nuance by Wyatt Russell), and that character likewise raised a series of compelling and not-easily-answered questions for the show’s characters and audiences alike. Those questions unquestionably connected to the threads about race, as the white Walker was presented as the U.S. government’s clear preference for the second Cap instead of the Black Sam Wilson (and, through the historical comparison, the black Isaiah Bradley as well). But Walker’s ultimately flawed and failed Captain America also raised questions about one of my favorite current topics, patriotism: what it means to have an individual symbolize a nation, what political as well as cultural work such symbols can and should (and shouldn’t) do, and what happens when the realities fall short of the ideals. Pretty heady stuff for a superhero show, and one more reason why The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is well worth AmericanStudying.

Next review post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 2021 stories you’d highlight?

December 27, 2021: Year in Review: The Braves

[It’s been another year, that’s for sure. So for my annual Year in Review series, I wanted to highlight a handful of things that have made me happy this year—and, yes, to complicate and analyze them, because I yam what I yam. I’d love to hear your year highlights and takeaways as well!]

On nostalgia, rituals and names, and the need to move forward.

The magical 1991 Atlanta Braves season remains one of my favorite memories and experiences to this day. Everyone talks about how they went “worst to first,” but I think it’s important to add that we’re not just talking about 1990—the Braves had been one of the worst teams (if not the worst team) in baseball for at least 5-6 years (ie, most of my childhood fandom) prior to their stunning turnaround. So while they didn’t win the World Series in 1991 (although they came about as close as it’s possible for a team to come without doing so; I don’t recommend Braves fans watch that hyperlinked game, though), each in every one of those October baseball moments felt as surprising and stunning as the next. And each and every one of them was inextricably linked with the Tomahawk Chop, the newly adopted fan celebration that I’m quite sure 14-year-old Ben was performing right alongside all those other fans throughout those magical moments.

Fast-forward to 2021, and this season’s almost-as-surprising and even-more-successful Atlanta Braves playoff run. I loved sharing that run with my sons, who are very similar in age to 1991 Ben (if not nearly as lifelong baseball fans—but they’ve adopted the Braves as their MLB team, so it was a deeply meaningful shared sports experience nonetheless). But not only were we not chopping along with the Braves fans, the continued presence of the Chop (which is not limited to the Braves, but still most fully associated with them for sure, and in any case two wrongs don’t make a right) provided a very definite and frustrating blemish on what should have been an unalloyed positive in this difficult year. As someone who also grew up a Washington Redskins fan, I get the way in which our nostalgia (such a powerful force in sports fandom, and one we can and do pass along to our kids) can make it seem that changing such longstanding rituals or elements is destructive. But not only is it really, really not, it’s the rituals and elements themselves that are damaging in both these cases.

In one of my adult learning classes this past semester, I dedicated a class to racism and anti-racism in sports, and we talked at some length about team names and mascots. In response to a student question about why the name “Cleveland Indians” is racist, given that many Native Americans themselves have returned to the term “American Indian” in recent years, I offered two answers: treating a community and culture as a sports symbol is very strange (we really don’t do it with any other cultures, and certainly no other current ones); and in cases like that one, it’s impossible to separate that potentially neutral name from far more blatantly racist imagery like the rightfully infamous Chief Wahoo. The same is true with the name “Braves”—it’s impossible to separate it from ongoing racist elements like the Chop, as well as historic ones like Chief Noc-A-Homa (seriously). I can’t think of a better way to celebrate this latest Braves World Series win than with doing away with the Chop—but changing the team name (I’m personally partial to the Atlanta Hammers) would be a great step as well.

Next review post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 2021 stories you’d highlight?

December 25-26, 2021: A Special Holiday Wish

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to this special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

On a simple shift that could change a great deal.

Because my upcoming year in review series will focus on more upbeat topics, I wanted to take this holiday post to engage briefly (as I also did at a bit greater length in one of my recent Saturday Evening Post columns) with the current, divisive debates over education in America. I don’t imagine I have to spell out for even the most casual or occasional reader of this blog where I come down on the question of whether we should be teaching histories and issues of race, racism, white supremacy, antiracism, and so on. Indeed, in many ways, I find the voices raised in opposition to such teaching to be a profoundly frustrating combination of breathtakingly ignorant of what actually happens in classrooms (of every type and at every level) and strikingly direct in their embrace of the most mythologized, whitewashed visions of the nation and its histories and communities (guess we should have read the writing on the wall when the 1776 Commission Report was released, on MLK Day no less, and directly attacked “universities” as “hotbeds of anti-Americanism…that generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country”).

I likewise shouldn’t have to state how wrongheaded, and just plain wrong, I find that image of our universities and those who teach and work in them. But I will add this: I find it profoundly frustrating that so much of the time it feels as if inspiration is one of the very last concepts or effects associated with academic or scholarly history (or academic/scholarly work of any kind). While I don’t think many of us are teaching disdain, much less hate (not toward the United States and not toward anything or anyone else either), I do think that at times our collective scholarly emphases (in our teaching, in our writing, in our public scholarly voices and perspectives, and so on) can veer a bit more fully toward the hardest and most painful (and even, yes, the most pessimistic) sides of our histories, our stories, our issues. All of which are certainly crucial to remember, to teach and learn, to engage and understand—but all of which, I believe and have argued across multiple projects now, also have to be balanced by ideas and goals like critical optimism and critical patriotism.

There are lots of vital voices doing that work already, of course, and so my holiday wish, AmericanStudies Elves, is that we learn from those voices and work who are modeling thoughtful, nuanced, critical optimism and patriotism. Voices and works about American history like Christina Proenza-Coles’ American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World (2019). Voices and works about education like Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (2020). Voices and works that offer models for where we go from here like Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020). As we keep doing the hard work, fellow Elves, let’s make sure we’re doing hopeful work too.

Year in review series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 24, 2021: Wishes for the AMST Elves: A New Driver

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to a special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

One of the somewhat less fun parts of parenting—not a very competitive list at all—is recognizing that your kids will gradually and inevitably move out into the world, a world that can threaten and hurt them in so many ways. Much of that danger is emotional or psychological, but some of it is quite literal, a fact I have found myself contemplating with some regularity as I’ve waited to pick the boys up in the high school parking lot. I don’t have any worries about how my thoughtful and sensitive older son will drive when he gets his learner’s permit in a week (and then his full license in six months)—but I can’t say the same for the many teenage drivers with whom he’ll be frequently surrounded. So AmericanStudies Elves, the first and most important of today’s wishes is that he stays safe on all the roads he ever travels down; the second, less important but certainly present, wish is that his Dad finds peace with all that he can’t control in his sons’ world and lives.

Special holiday wish this weekend,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 23, 2021: Wishes for the AMST Elves: A Developing Debater

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to a special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

One of the most fun parts of parenting—a very competitive list!—is watching your children develop and pursue interests and passions. Sometimes they take you by surprise, as was the case with my older son’s volunteering for Boston mayoral candidate (and now mayor-elect) Michelle Wu this past year. But sometimes they are clear and perfect fits, and that’s the case with my younger son and his evolving successes as a new (9^th grade) member of his high school’s debate team. I recommended he try debate because I’ve never known anyone who is more passionate about, nor more talented at, argumentation (and I say this as a relatively argumentative chap myself). And I knew how much he was taking to it when, in the midst of his second day-long tournament, he showed me a handwritten spreadsheet with all sorts of info about claims, counterclaims, responses, and other categories he was already well on his way to mastering. Who knows where it will take him, but in any case, AmericanStudies Elves, today’s wish is that he keeps finding challenge and joy in this new activity, and all that he gets to experience and do in high school.

Last wish tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 22, 2021: Wishes for the AMST Elves: Ilene Railton’s Novel

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to a special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

As part of this year’s Valentine’s week series on short stories I love, I highlighted the short stories and creative writing in progress of my favorite writer, my Mom Ilene Railton. While all those short stories to date are excellent and I hope you all get a chance to read them in published form at some point, Ilene has over the past year moved more fully into work on a novel, a truly exceptional book that combines mystery and memory, memoir and collective history, and more in ways that echo some of my favorite mystery stories, from the novels of Ross MacDonald to the film Memento to the third (and best) season of True Detective. If ever a first novel deserved to be published and find an audience, it’s this book—so AmericanStudies Elves, today’s wish is that Ilene Railton’s stunning debut book becomes part of our cultural landscape in the next year!

Next wish tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 21, 2021: Wishes for the AMST Elves: Digital Yoknapatawpha

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to a special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

In this early August post on my Dad Steve Railton’s AmericanStudies web projects, I highlighted the third and newest such project, Digital Yoknapatawpha. I’m a huge fan of all three websites, and for far more than simply filial reasons—these projects to my mind embody the best of what Digital Humanities work can be, do, offer, and mean. And DY is perhaps the best and most important yet, not only because it’s so fully collaborative and features so many voices and perspectives, and not only because it can help us keep the complex and important works of William Faulkner in our collective memories and conversations, but also because it really models how technological resources and multimedia elements can be wedded to literature and culture, to reading and analysis, in ways that should be at the heart of our continued work as educators. For all those reasons, AmericanStudies Elves, I wish for a very bright future indeed for Digital Yoknapatawpha.

Next wish tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 20, 2021: Wishes for the AMST Elves: Higher Ed Funding

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to a special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

One of the big stories of the last month (at least in the worlds of higher ed and scholarly Twitter) was the creation of a new “university” (scare quotes very, very intended), The University of Austin. In her Tweet announcing and describing this alternative “educational” institution, journalist Bari Weiss argued that “higher ed is broken.” [NOTE: I’m not hyperlinking to any of the promotional materials; you can find ‘em out there if you’d like!] I couldn’t disagree more, but one thing higher ed—and especially public higher ed—definitely is is broke. So before I turn for the rest of the week’s wishes to folks who are literally part of my family, I wanted to make a wish for a community that has over my 17 years here become home and family to be sure: my public university, Fitchburg State. AmericanStudies Elves, may a new year bring the funding and support that public higher education, and public education overall, so desperately needs and so powerfully deserves.

Next wish tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 18-19, 2021: Spring Semester Previews

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. Leading up to this weekend post on a few of the things I’m looking forward to in Spring 2022!]

On three of the many things I’m looking forward to in Spring 2022 (!):

1)      Du Bois Redux: As that hyperlinked post illustrates, my Major Author course on W.E.B. Du Bois, which concluded eight years ago this week, was and remains one of my favorites across my 17 years at FSU. I’ve since taught an excellent Major Author section focused on Mark Twain, but when the course came back around to me for Spring 2022, I knew that it was time to revisit Du Bois. I can’t wait to share the many, many sides, genres, layers, and legacies of my favorite American with a new group of students!

2)      19C Women Writers: A couple months back I blogged about my new role as our English Studies Graduate Program director, and my hope to draw more students from near and far (with your ideas, which I’d still love to hear!) to help keep that wonderful program going. Every chance I get to teach in that program reinforces its awesomeness, and I’m excited to teach this Spring, for a second time, my grad seminar on 19^th century American Women Writers. From Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Fanny Fern to Frances Harper and Ida B. Wells, and with so so so many in between, this class features many of my favorite American writers and texts, and it’ll be great to share them with a group of fellow educators!

3)      Adult Learning and My Next Book: Work on my next book, Two Sandlots: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America, has been stop-and-start at best in this challenging Fall semester. To help that work along, and to share these histories and stories with some of my favorite communities in the process, I decided to focus my Spring adult ed courses for both the ALFA and WISE programs on the book. Excited to see what it helps me to emphasize, and especially to see how these awesome classes and communities respond!

Holiday series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Other Fall reflections or Spring previews you’d share?

December 17, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: Adult Learning Class on the 1920s

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On a particularly eye-opening and important conversation in one of my latest adult ed classes.

All five conversations in my WISE class on the America in the 1920s (and connections to the 2020s, natch) were as multi-vocal, engaging, and impressive as they’ve been in every adult learning course I’ve ever taught (these students haven’t missed a beat with the transition to remote learning, that’s for sure). But the most eye-opening for me was the conversation in the first class, which focused on the 1918-20 Influenza Pandemic. At least three students (and possibly more—this was three months ago, and they were three long months!) shared stories about how their own families and communities had been affected by the pandemic, paralleling and extending (and making far more personal of course) our conversations about historical, cultural, and literary texts. We talked a lot that day about how and why the pandemic was forgotten for so long (at least in such collective conversations), but by far my most important takeaway from the discussion, and especially from these voices and stories, was how much we can and should remember.

Special post this weekend on what’s next,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 16, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: Online American Lit Survey

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On how small follow-ups can make a big difference, especially in online classes.

I’ve been teaching at least one online class a semester for more than seven years now, and over that time I’ve certainly gotten better at this new (to me) form of pedagogy in a variety of ways. For this semester’s online American Literature II course, as I indicated back in the Semester Previews series, I added a new component, short videos (of me talking—not high-tech enough for much else!) that introduced our different time periods/Units. I wasn’t a huge fan of what I was able to do with those videos—they felt largely redundant to the Word documents featuring Unit/time period contexts I was already providing students; if I’m to keep using them I’ll have to find a way to make them stand out more, I’d say—but I hope at least that they gave the students a little better sense of me, my voice and perspective, my ideas, the kinds of things I’d of course share as part of (or at least frames for) our discussions in in-person classes.

I’ve also recently found another way to add myself into these online classes a bit more, and this semester it yielded some unexpected and really compelling moments. I’ve written at length about my gradual shifts in grading processes and emphases, and as part of that I’ve started to give both Paper Feedback (focused more on writing and analytical skills) and Idea Feedback (focused more on, well, y’know). While I would never want to insert my own takes on readings and related topics into the Paper Feedback (that’s about my response to their skills and work), I’ve felt more comfortable doing that in the Idea Feedback if and when it’s felt relevant: if, for example, a student is analyzing Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free,” as a few did in my online American Lit course this past semester, I’ll pass along my first ever Saturday Evening Post column from back in January 2018, a piece which I began with a bit of my own analysis of that story in historical and cultural contexts.

I can’t say that I really expect students to read such pieces when I share them—they’re not required (or even optional) readings for the course, after all, and there are more than enough of those that I’m already asking my students to look at. But when they not only do take a look, but also share some continued thoughts in response, each and every one of those moments immediately becomes a favorite for me, with different sides of my work and career, different conversations I’m part of, coming together in such inspiring ways. Those quick email follow-ups, from them in response to my paper feedback and then usually from me back to them with a few follow-ups to the follow-up, are quick and small moments in the arc of the semester, outside of the official work of the class and easily forgotten once the semester is complete. I hope the students won’t forget, but I can promise you I won’t, as these moments help me feel a bit of that classroom conversation and community that can sometimes be hard to come by in online course.

Last recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 15, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: English Studies Capstone

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On an inspiring chat that exemplified the broader conversations into which our graduating English Studies Majors are moving.

There are lots of reasons why I love teaching our English Studies Capstone course, including the chance to read the students’ culminating portfolios (I know of no better way to get a truly comprehensive sense of a student’s work, voice, interests, skills, perspective, identity, and more). But I think my favorite part of this course is the opportunity to work with students who are right on the cusp of not being students (or at least not undergraduates) any more, who are really taking the final steps to becoming peers of mine in every sense across this semester together. When I teach in our grad program or in our program for vocational educators, those students are almost all fellow educators, and thus peers right from the start; when I teach adult learning courses, those students all bring a great deal more life experience to the class than I. But in Capstone, I get to be part of the moment when undergraduate students fully enter that category, and it’s a really awesome thing.

This hasn’t been something purposeful (indeed it’s not something I had consciously thought about until planning this post), but I think that particular timing has a lot to do with why I’ve always chosen shared readings for Capstone by contemporary authors, folks who are (in almost every sense) not only still alive but still working in our own moment. The last time I taught this course, for example, that meant assigning as our Literature Unit reading the first hardcover text I’ve ever asked students to purchase: Monique Truong’s new novel The Sweetest Fruits (2019). This time I decided to go with a group of shorter readings for the Lit Unit, but with the same kind of emphasis: short stories and poems by contemporary authors Danielle Evans, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jericho Brown, and Claudia Rankine.

The students seemed to love those works and authors as much as I do (Johnson’s “Control Negro,” now the centerpiece of her acclaimed debut collection My Monticello, is quite simply the best 21^st century short story I’ve ever read), but even more special was our work with the contemporary text I assigned for the Education Unit this time around: Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (2020). Gannon’s text is plenty great on its own terms, but he was kind enough to join us remotely for our final discussion, to answer student questions and put his voice and ideas in conversation with ours, and especially with theirs. And that’s the key—that this group of future (but the very near future) educators, writers, creators, public scholars were very much in conversation with such an important and inspiring voice. If that’s not the kind of moment that reminds us of why we do what we do, I’m not sure what ever could be.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 14, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: Honors Lit Seminar

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On an unplanned discussion that turned into one of my favorites in any class.

In my Semester Previews post on my Honors Literature Seminar on America in the Gilded Age, I highlighted the ways in which, over my handful of sections teaching this course since Fall 2015, contemporary 21^st century contexts and connections that had initially been “unspoken” have become more and more overt and even central to our class conversations. Of course our main focus remains on texts (and related histories and themes) from the late 19^th century era known as the Gilded Age, but in recent years (not only in this class by any means, but certainly specifically in this one) I’ve become more and more comfortable making overt the 21^st century parallels, legacies, and continuities that are everywhere across this time period and course.

Generally those contemporary connections are ones I plan ahead of time (unless they’re shared by an individual student in the course of a discussion, anyway), but this semester I decided on the spot to frame a question around them, and I couldn’t be happier that I did so. We were starting our second three-week thematic Unit, on Gilded Age texts and histories around women’s experiences, identities, and rights, and I decided to open the Unit’s first class by asking directly for examples of things in our own moment and society (from the smallest to the biggest issues) that are different for women than for men. I made clear that we should hear first from the many women in the class (or as many of them as wanted to share, that is), but that men’s perspectives and contributions would of course be welcome as well as the discussion went along.

I run discussion-based classes across the board, and have been doing so for all of my 17 years at FSU (that’s between 8-10 classes per year, so you do the math), so I when I say that this one of the best and most multi-vocal discussions I’ve ever been part of, you know that’s a very meaningful superlative. It’s not just that almost every student in the class spoke up, including many who were a bit more quiet for our discussions generally, though that is true and was really impressive (especially for a professor whose stated goal is bringing out every student voice). It’s that they had things to say that were equal parts personal and analytical, highlighting their own individual experiences but linking them to broader frames and issues effectively and thoughtfully throughout. The discussion not only made clear how the Unit’s Gilded Age issues echo into our own moment, but really set the stage for every subsequent class and conversation in that Unit. Here’s to contemporary connections!

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 13, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: First Year Experience Seminar

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On a discussion that balanced skills and content as well as any I’ve ever been part of.

This was my first time teaching FSU’s new First Year Experience seminar, and I wrote back in my Semester Previews series about my goal of featuring a consistent thread of content (around the topic of cultural representations of #BlackLivesMatter) despite the course’s overarching and important emphasis on student skills (as framed by a Reading Apprenticeship approach). Finding that balance between content and skills within my overall student-centered pedagogy has been both a challenge and a priority for all of my classes for many years now. But the particular nature of the challenge here, in a class so fully dedicated to preparing students for all of their experiences in college, was one of many things that was new and different about FYE from any other course I’ve taught.

I can’t say that I really figured out how to achieve that balance consistently in this first version of FYE, and I’m excited to have the chance to teach the course at least one or two more times over the next couple Fall semesters. But this week’s Semester Recaps are focused on moments that did work, and there was one particular class discussion that really exemplified the balance I’ll work to achieve more regularly in my future FYE sections. After many weeks working with written texts in a variety of genres (nonfiction including memoir, journalism, and scholarly analysis; creative literature including fiction and poetry) I wanted them to spend a couple weeks practicing analyzing multimedia texts, and so we watched the same pair of recent cultural works that I’ve used in my First Year Writing II sections for a few years: the film Fruitvale Station and the Black-ish Season 2 episode “Hope.”

I love both of those texts, and it was fun to share them with this new group of students, who seemed to enjoy them a great deal as well. But I have to admit I wasn’t sure how much we’d have to say about Fruitvale when we returned to class discussions (after portions of two class periods spent watching the film) to engage with it. Which made the discussion that ensued one of the most surprising as well as one of the best I’ve ever been around. Students highlighted a wide range of analytical lenses for working with multimedia texts, from camera angles and sound editing to choices in the screenplay and the acting performances, among others. And they used those analytical lenses to raise a number of important elements of the film’s themes, its portrayals of identity and community, race and racism, the real historical figures and events that inspired it, and more. I’ve never had a discussion balance analytical skills and content more successfully, a moment that modeled not just why we teach a class like FYE, but what we’re aiming to do in every classroom.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 11-12, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: Remembering Infamous Days

[December 7^th marks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ve remembered and AmericanStudied some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to this special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.

Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7^th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.”  We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11^th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.

In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian, educator, and public scholar Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11^th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). This 2016 Obama White House statement on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 10, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Film

[December 7^th marks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the uses and abuses of history in Michael Bay’s most serious blockbuster.

First, let’s stop for a moment and acknowledge the basic impressiveness of the fact that the director of Bad Boys (and sequels), Transformers (and sequels), The Rock, Armageddon, and the like made a historical epic summer blockbuster film about the Pearl Harbor bombing and its World War II aftermaths. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) came out in July (three years prior to Bay’s film) and so I suppose would qualify as a summer blockbuster, but it was still Spielberg, and the post-Schindler and Amistad Spielberg at that—nothing surprising about a historical epic from that guy. But from the man who at the time was rumored to be in production with both Transformers 4 and Bad Boys 3? Again, worth noting and, at a baseline level, admiring.

Moreover, it’d be pretty silly to critique Bay’s film for making a friendship and a love triangle central to its plotlines. After all, that’s the nature of the genre I’ve elsewhere dubbed period fiction—works of art that set universal human stories against a backdrop of (often) impressively realized historical moments. While those of us who care deeply about the histories themselves might be frustrated that such works relegate them to the background, it would be just as possible to argue the opposite: that works of period fiction help modern audiences connect to their historical subjects through engaging and accessible human characters, stories, and themes. After all, none other than the godfather of historical fiction, Sir Walter Scott, could be said to have done precisely that in the creation of characters like Waverly and Ivanhoe. Yes, I just compared Michael Bay to Sir Walter Scott, and I stand by it.

On the other hand, I would argue that if a piece of period fiction is set in wartime, it owes its audience at the very least an equally compelling and affecting portrayal of war: Saving Private Ryan, whatever its flaws, certainly offers that, especially in the opening sequence linked above; Gone with the Wind, more flawed still, is nonetheless at its best in depicting the Civil War and particularly the destruction of Atlanta. Thanks to its sizeable budget and state-of-the-art special effects, Pearl Harbor is able to include an extended depiction of that bombing, among many other battle sequences—yet to my mind (and you can judge for yourself at that link) it fails utterly at capturing any of the brutalities or terrors, or any other aspects, of war. The problem isn’t that the director of Transformers is making a wartime historical epic—it’s that the wartime historical epic doesn’t feel noticeably different from any other action film in his oeuvre.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 9, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Varsity Victory Volunteers

[December 7^th marks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On a post-Pearl Harbor group who embody the best of the war, Hawai’i, and America.

I learned a great deal while researching and writing my fifth book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American (2019). I had a general sense of the exclusionary and inclusive histories I wanted to highlight in each chapter, having talked about most of them in a number of settings over the last couple years; but in the course of working on each chapter I discovered new histories related to those central threads, stories that surprised me yet also and especially exemplified my topics and themes. So it went with Chapter 7: Everything Japanese Internment Got Wrong: I knew that I wanted to focus in that chapter on Japanese American World War II soldiers as a central, inclusive challenge to the exclusionary histories and narratives of the internment policy and camps; but it was only when researching those respective World War II communities further that I learned about the amazing, inspiring, foundational story of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV).

There were quite simply too many Japanese Americans in Hawai’i (and they were too integral to the community’s economy and society) for internment camps to be possible. But the island featured its own forms of World War II anti-Japanese discrimination to be sure, and it was out of one such discriminatory moment that the VVV was born. The day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, all of the island’s ROTC students were called up for active duty as the newly constituted Hawaii Territorial Guard (HTG). But when federal officials learned that Japanese American students were among those numbers, they dismissed those students from service, deeming them 4C (“enemy aliens”) and thus ineligible to serve. Frustrated by this treatment, many of the students met with Hung Wai Ching, a Chinese Hawaiian community leader who had become an ally to the group. On his advice they drafted a letter to the territory’s military governor, Delos Emmons, which read in part: “We joined the Guard voluntarily with the hope that this was one way to serve our country in her time of need. Needless to say, we were deeply disappointed when we were told that our services in the Guard were no longer needed. Hawaii is our home; the United States, our country. We know but one loyalty and that is to the Stars and Stripes. We wish to do our part as loyal Americans in every way possible and we hereby offer ourselves for whatever service you may see fit to use us.”

Emmons accepted the VVV’s offer, and in February 1942 they were constituted as a labor battalion (attached to the 34^th Combat Engineers) and assigned to Schofield Barracks. Over the next year they would contribute both their labor and their presence to the community there, becoming such an integral part of its operations and society that when Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy visited in December 1942 (escorted by none other than Hung Wai Ching), he was struck by the VVV in particular. Not at all coincidentally, in January 1943 the War Department reversed its policy and allowed Japanese Americans to serve in the armed forces; the VVV requested permission to disband so they could volunteer, and nearly all of the VVV members ended up in the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit that would become the most decorated in American military history. I knew about the 442^nd before I wrote the chapter and book, but I had never heard of the VVV—and I know of few stories that exemplify the best of American military, social, and cultural history more fully than does this post-Pearl Harbor, volunteer Japanese American student community.

Last post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 8, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Tokyo Trials

[December 7^th marks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the complex question of whether a military attack is also a war crime.

Although they are not as well-known as the concurrent Nuremberg Trials (perhaps because there wasn’t an excellent dramatic film made about them), the Tokyo War Crimes Trials comprised one of the most significant aftermaths of and responses to World War II in their own right. Convened in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), an organization established by General Douglas MacArthur in a January 1946 proclamation, the trials took place in the city between May 1946 and November 1948. Per MacArthur’s charter the IMTFE was tasked with bringing to trial Japanese officials and officers charged with war crimes and other “offenses which include crimes against peace”; under that aegis nine senior political leaders and eighteen military leaders were prosecuted, and all of them (other than two who passed away from natural causes during the course of the trials) were found guilty and sentenced to death or imprisonment.

Many of the Tokyo trials’ focal war crimes fit that broad category straightforwardly enough: the rape of Nanking and similar mass atrocities; the beheading of prisoners of war and similar violations of international law; and so on. But a number of the accused were also charged with Class A war crimes (the category that focuses on “crimes against peace”) stemming from the Pearl Harbor attack: this group included Shigetaro Shimada, the Minister of the Navy who authorized the attack (and was convicted of a Class A war crime for it); and the attack’s mastermind, Chief of Naval General Staff Osarni Nagano (who died in prison during the trial). This paper by University of Virginia law student Jeffrey D. Fox makes the case for why the Pearl Harbor attack should indeed have been defined as a war crime by the IMTFE, and it’s a compelling case, starting with the lack of a war declaration or a self-defense justification for the attack, and including broader legal ideas in the era related to “waging aggressive war.” I’m no expert in wartime or international law, and so I’m willing to accept such arguments and this legal definition of Pearl Harbor as a Class A war crime.

And yet (a favorite third-paragraph opener of mine, as longtime readers know well). I know that the August 9, 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place in the midst of a declared war, but in every other way (as I wrote in this 2015 piece for Talking Points Memo) that bombing seems to me more criminal than the Pearl Harbor attack. It targeted almost exclusively civilians, for one thing (soldiers comprised an estimated 3% of the city’s 1945 population). And it was extremely aggressive and likely unnecessary, for another thing (the Truman administration gave Japan only two days after the August 6^th Hiroshima bombing to figure out what had happened and surrender, and the U.S. military was already rehearsing the Nagasaki bombing on the second day, meaning that there really was no time for Japan to take action before this second bombing). I’m not suggesting that Nagasaki fits the legal definition of a war crime, necessarily; just that such categories and their applications, as is always and inevitably the case with any law, are influenced in no small part by who is framing them and in what contexts. I’m also not excusing Pearl Harbor in any way—simply noting that the contrast between it and Nagasaki is not as clear-cut as the Tokyo trials would suggest.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 7, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Conspiracy Theory

[December 7^th marks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory that doesn’t hold up but is illuminating nonetheless.

I wrote an entire weeklong series on American conspiracy theories a few years back, but managed to avoid writing about one of the most prominent historical conspiracy theories: the theory that high-ranking U.S. government officials, up to and in some of the theories including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and let it happen (or even, in some of the most extreme theories, encouraged it) in order to push the United States into the European theatre of World War II through a so-called “back door.” Such theories go back at least as far as 1944, when John Flynn, a journalist and co-founder of the isolationist America First Committee, published a pamphlet entitled The Truth about Pearl Harbor (that’s the full text of the 1945 British edition, which seems unchanged other than a new “Publisher’s Preface”). A World War II naval officer, Rear Admiral Robert Theobald, wrote his own 1954 book, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Background of the Pearl Harbor Attack, developing the argument more fully. And in recent years, the most prominent of these conspiracy theorists has been World War II veteran and journalist Robert Stinnett, whose 1999 book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor lays out the theory at particularly elaborate length.

I could pretend that I’ve done all the research myself to disprove those sources and theories, but in truth I’ve mainly relied on this excellent Wikipedia page, which takes the different theories one-by-one and takes them apart quite effectively. Highlighting any one tends to reveal just how easily and thoroughly they can be debunked, as illustrated by the argument that the absence of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers from Pearl Harbor indicates advance knowledge of the attack (and a desire to protect the carriers from it). For one thing, one of those carriers, the Enterprise, was on its way back to Pearl Harbor that morning (having delivered fighters to Wake and Midway Islands), and had been scheduled by arrive at 7am (about an hour before the attacks commenced) but was delayed by weather. And for another, even more important thing, at that time carriers were considered far less central to naval strategy and warfare than battleships; if the U.S. had wanted to protect key elements of its fleet, it would certainly have not had all 8 of its Pacific Fleet battleships in the harbor at the time. Certainly after the attack carriers became central to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific, but that represents both a strategic shift and a direct response to the attack’s destruction of the U.S. battleships and navy.

So there really doesn’t seem to be much to the various layers to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories—but they have endured for more than 75 years, and I think there are a couple significant reasons why (besides our general societal and perhaps human fascination with conspiracy theories, about which I wrote many times in that aforementioned series). For one thing, few if any other military moments in American history have been as surprising and embarrassing for the U.S. forces, and thus in need of alternate explanations for the disaster; this was even more true in the 1940s, when the U.S. had not yet suffered what is considered its first defeat in an international military conflict, the Vietnam War (and that conflict has its own share of “The powers that be wouldn’t let us win” theories). And for another thing, Franklin D. Roosevelt has in my experience received about as much extreme and vehement hate as any American president not named Lincoln. Since Roosevelt was president during a war that should have united Americans, rather than one that directly divided us, that vitriolic opposition is a bit harder to understand; but I’ve encountered it time and again, and I believe it helps again why so many Americans can apparently continue to believe that FDR allowed a catastrophic attack on the United States to take place on his watch.

Next history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?