[On April 19th, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run. So for the 125th anniversary of this iconic road race, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Marathon histories and contexts, leading up to a special Guest Post from my favorite RunningStudier!]
[Re-sharing this
December 2013 post on the Boston Marathon Bombing, because I would still say very
much the same things.]
On a couple ways
to AmericanStudy an event that’s still understandably raw and delicate.
A former
Fitchburg State University student was good friends with one of the four people killed in April’s bombing of the Boston Marathon finish line (both were Chinese
exchange students). One of my FSU colleagues was near the finish line with her young son and was profoundly impacted by the
experience. And as a resident of
Waltham, I was required to stay in my home throughout the lockdown later that week, as police searched neighboring Watertown for the surviving second bomber
and brother. All of which is to say, I
know full well how much the bombing and its aftermaths affected our local
communities (as well as the nation and world), and I’m well aware that even
eight months later it might feel too soon to analyze and AmericanStudy the
event.
But on the other
hand, I’d say that’s part—if a delicate and challenging part—of the job of a
public AmericanStudies scholar, to try to provide contexts and frames for even
our most raw and painful moments. One such context that has interested me ever
since that fateful day in April has been the question of how we remember such
events, and more exactly of why we remember some tragedies far more than
others. For example, two days after the Marathon bombing, a fertilizer plant in
West, Texas exploded, killing 15 people and seriously injuring more than 160
others (totals higher than the bombing’s effects). Yet
while the explosion received some attention in its immediate moment, it has
gone virtually unremembered on the national level since, and certainly has not
occupied the continual place in our conversations that the bombing has. Of
course, the bombing was a premeditated and violent act, not an accident—but the
Texas explosion has its own complex and controversial histories and contexts. So why do we
remember murder or terrorism so much more strongly than other tragedies? A
complicated, but important, AmericanStudies question for sure.
Even more
complicated and delicate, but just as important, are questions about the
narratives we have constructed and continue to construct of the young bombers.
I’m not looking to wade into Rolling Stone territory here—that’s been
done, and done, and done. But here’s a moment that stood out to me, as I
followed the media coverage during my locked-down day: George Stephanopoulos
was interviewing a high school class of the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, and he asked her the following pair of questions: “Did he speak with
an accent? Or was he Americanized?” I’ve written before about the equation of “American” with
“English-speaking,” but this moment took
that equation one step further, defining an accident (a foreign one,
presumably—not a Southern or Boston accent, to be sure!) as similarly outside
of the definition of “Americanized.” There would be many, many ways to push
back on such a narrative—which might be relatively rare in our national
community, but also might not be—but perhaps the simplest would be this: it’s
quite likely that most, if not all, of the Founding Fathers spoke with a
British accent. So however we define “American,” accents seem utterly
inseparable from it.
Last Marathon
split tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Boston Marathon histories or stories you’d highlight?
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