April 29-30, 2023: April 2023 Recap

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

April 3: NeMLA Reflections: My Panel on Niagara Falls: A series reflecting on great papers from this year’s Northeast MLA conference kicks off with the panel I chaired on Niagara Falls in US pop culture.

April 4: NeMLA Reflections: Toshiaki Komura on the Poetry of Internment: The series continues with a great paper on three generations of Japanese internment poetry.

April 5: NeMLA Reflections: Jennie Snow on Eric Nguyen and Homelands: My new FSU colleague Jennie Snow’s great paper on Nguyen’s novel and “homeland security,” as the series reflects on.

April 6: NeMLA Reflections: Robin Field on Postpartum Depression: My friend and Guest Poster Robin Field’s great paper on Helen Dunmore and the literature of pregnancy.

April 7: NeMLA Reflections: Elise Takehana on Making Meaning of Maps: The series concludes with my colleague Elise Takehana’s great paper on experimental writing.

April 8-9: The Limits and Potential of Scholarly Organizations: A special weekend post on NeMLA, the AHA, & what scholarly organizations can’t and can do.

April 10: Remembering Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Bureau: A series inspired by the 150^th anniversary of the Colfax Massacre kicks off with why the Bureau failed, and two inspiring legacies nonetheless.

April 11: Remembering Reconstruction: African American Legislators: The series continues with three of the more than 1500 African Americans who held office during Reconstruction.

April 12: Remembering Reconstruction: Andrew Johnson: Three telling stages in the life and career of one of our worst presidents, as the series remembers on.

April 13: Remembering Reconstruction: Massacres: As we seek to better remember the Colfax Massacre, that and a couple others of Reconstruction’s far too frequent moments of mass violence.

April 14: Remembering Reconstruction: Du Bois’ Vital Revisionism: The series concludes with a book that revised Reconstruction historiography, redefined an entire profession, and then went even further.

April 15-16: Remembering Reconstruction: Kidada Williams’ I Saw Death Coming: And speaking of great books, a special weekend post on a vital new book about the period.               

April 17: Soap Opera Studying: 1930s Origins: For Aaron Spelling’s centennial, a SoapOperaStudying series kicks off with five women who helped launch 1930s radio soaps.

April 18: Soap Opera Studying: The First TV Soaps: The series continues with AmericanStudies takeaways from the first three televised soap operas.

April 19: Soap Opera Studying: Telenovelas: Two ways a classic short story helps us understand a soap opera sub-genre, as the series bubbles on.

April 20: Soap Opera Studying: Parodies: What a few pitch-perfect TV and film soap opera parodies can add to the week’s conversation.

April 21: Soap Opera Studying: Aaron Spelling: The series concludes with a tribute to how the birthday boy helped primetime soaps walk a very fine line.

April 22-23: Crowd-sourced Soap Opera Studying: One of my latest crowd-sourced posts, featuring the responses and thoughts of fellow SoapOperaStudiers—add yours in comments!

April 24: Recent Scholarly Books: Amy Paeth on Poets Laureate: Inspired by the Williams weekend post, a series on other great recent scholarly books kicks off with a NeMLA Book Award winner.

April 25: Recent Scholarly Books: David Waldstreicher on Phillis Wheatley: The series continues with a great new bio on an iconic poet about which there’s plenty more to learn.

April 26: Recent Scholarly Books: Natasha Warikoo on Education: The two (2!) 2022 publications from my SSN Boston Chapter co-leader, as the series reads on.

April 27: Recent Scholarly Books: Three More from Me: My highlights conclude with three of the many great books I’ve been sent to review.

April 28: Crowd-sourced Recent Scholarship: And the series concludes with another crowd-sourced post, featuring more scholarly book highlights from me and others!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

April 28, 2023: Crowd-sourced Recent Scholarship

[Writing about Kidada Williams’ new book a couple weeks back reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve focused a series on new scholarship. So this week I’ve highlighted a handful of great recent books, leading up to this crowd-sourced post of additional recommendations—add more in comments, please!]

A couple more books I’d add to my own recommendations:

Went to a book talk this week for Chad Williams’ vital new book!

And all Americans should read Elwood Watson’s collection of essays on race in contemporary America.

 

And on Twitter, Mae highlights Milan Zafirovski’s new book, and adds this recent paper as context for its frustrating salience in our current moment.

 

Monthly recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scholarly books or work you’d highlight?

PPS. For a lot more—I mean a lot more—great recent books, check out that section of all my #ScholarSunday threads!

April 27, 2023: Recent Scholarly Books: Three More From Me

[Writing about Kidada Williams’ new book a couple weeks back reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve focused a series on new scholarship. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of great recent books—add your nominations for a crowd-sourced Friday post (ahead of the monthly recap on the weekend), please!]

One of the perks of becoming a slightly well-known public scholar is that I get books sent my way to review. I don’t always have an opportunity to do so, but I always appreciate it, and will try to highlight them one way or another when I can. To that end, here (briefly) are three I’ve received over the last year or so that are well worth getting your hands on (the third is a novel, but you know we cover all genres here on AmericanStudier!):

1)      Mark Arsenault’s The Imposter’s War: The Press, Propaganda, and the Newsman Who Battled for the Minds of America (2022)

2)      Bill Shaffer’s The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Gilded Age Grifter, a Founding Father’s Disgraced Descendant, and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism (2022)

3)      Ciahnan Darrell, Blood at the Root (2021)

Crowd-sourced post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other scholarly books or work you’d highlight?

PPS. For a lot more—I mean a lot more—great recent books, check out that section of all my #ScholarSunday threads!

April 26, 2023: Recent Scholarly Books: Natasha Warikoo on Education

[Writing about Kidada Williams’ new book a couple weeks back reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve focused a series on new scholarship. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of great recent books—add your nominations for a crowd-sourced Friday post (ahead of the monthly recap on the weekend), please!]

A couple years back (man, nothing like blog posts to remind you how fast time flies) I wrote a post highlighting my fellow SSN Boston Chapter co-leaders, including Natasha Warikoo. I highlighted there one of Natasha’s 2022 books, Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools; she also published a second book (!) in 2022, Is Affirmative Action Fair?: The Myth of Equity in College Admissions. Both of those built on her 2016 book The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities. To be clear, here in 2023 the most pressing issues facing higher ed and education overall are the sustained assaults on those institutions and systems from overt adversaries and their bullshit narratives, and defending American education from them has to be job one for all of us. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, much more complicated questions facing higher ed, including those around admissions and diversity and equity that Natasha has spent her career writing about with as much thoughtful nuance as any scholar. All those books of hers are well worth checking out as we seek to advance that conversation!

Last scholarly highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scholarly books or work you’d highlight?

PPS. For a lot more—I mean a lot more—great recent books, check out that section of all my #ScholarSunday threads!

April 25, 2023: Recent Scholarly Books: David Waldstreicher on Phillis Wheatley

[Writing about Kidada Williams’ new book a couple weeks back reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve focused a series on new scholarship. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of great recent books—add your nominations for a crowd-sourced Friday post (ahead of the monthly recap on the weekend), please!]

For my Wish for the AmericanStudies Elves this past holiday season, I highlighted one of the phrases that has most consistently defined my goals for both this blog and my work overall: expanding our collective memories. That often means focusing (here, in my Saturday Evening Post columns, in the specific examples I include in book chapters, and so on) on subjects that have been less well-remembered. But that is of course not the only kind of subject that needs our AmericanStudying, and another interesting category would be those topics that we do seem to remember well but that need a lot more depth and nuance than we too often give them. It’s in that category that I would place David Waldstreicher’s excellent new biography of Phillis Wheatley, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey through American Slavery and Independence (2023). Whatever we think we know about Wheatley—and I’m entirely include myself in that “we”—Waldstreicher reveals how much more we have to learn, and all the American lessons we can draw from those layers. That’s a pretty great pair of AmericanStudying goals as well!

Next scholarly highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scholarly books or work you’d highlight?

PPS. For a lot more—I mean a lot more—great recent books, check out that section of all my #ScholarSunday threads!

April 24, 2023: Recent Scholarly Books: Amy Paeth on Poets Laureate

[Writing about Kidada Williams’ new book a couple weeks back reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve focused a series on new scholarship. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of great recent books—add your nominations for a crowd-sourced Friday post (ahead of the monthly recap on the weekend), please!]

One of the best parts of my many years on the NeMLA Board—a competitive category to be sure—was my chance to be part of the process for selecting and awarding the prestigious NeMLA Book Award. Through that process I’ve not only read a ton of phenomenal manuscripts, but I’ve also gotten to know some amazing young scholars, including Katie Daily and Regina Galasso. Exemplifying both those layers is Amy Paeth, whose manuscript on American Poets Laureate was one of the very best I ever got to read. So I’m super excited that that manuscript is now The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State, out earlier this year from Columbia University Press and getting tons of acclaim as you can see at that hyperlink. I’m equally super excited to read it in book form, but I know from that exemplary manuscript that this is indeed one of the best scholarly books of the year.

Next scholarly highlight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scholarly books or work you’d highlight?

PPS. For a lot more—I mean a lot more—great recent books, check out that section of all my #ScholarSunday threads!

April 22-23, 2023: Crowd-sourced Soap Opera Studying

[April 22^nd marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to this crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post featuring the responses and thoughts of fellow SoapStudiers. Add yours in comments!]

Vaughn Joy seconds what I tweeted in introducing the series, writing, “I 100% agree that Aaron Spelling is one of the most influential Americans of the 20^th century.”

Rob Gosselin takes a quote from Tuesday’s post, about “testing the mind of the viewer,” in a different direction: “Wait until AI starts producing television shows. It will not only test us, but it will find increasingly effective ways to influence us. Right now we are just cattle for mass media. We are about to become sheep.”

Other SoapOperaStudying takes:

Georgina tweets, “I’ve loved soap operas since the time my mom plopped me in the ‘playpen’ so she could watch General Hospital. They covered all the hot button issues from rape and domestic violence to AIDS with lots of amnesia and evil twins in between.” And she shares this article as well, as a “good opportunity to talk rape pre-#metoo & soap operas during #SexualAssaultAwarenessMonth.”

& StanYeahMan shares the work of fellow SoapOperaStudier Will McKinley.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?

April 21, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: Aaron Spelling

[April 22^nd will mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]

On a fine line that primetime soaps have to walk, and how the genre’s king perfected it.

As I hope this week’s series has illustrated, there are various elements which help define the cultural genre known as the daytime soap opera. But high on the list is a particularly unique and complex characteristic, a trait that is shared by just one other genre that I can think of, the syndicated daily comic strip: works in both these genres have to be created in such a way that each individual episode/strip tells some sort of story, has its own beginning and endpoint; and yet their creators recognize that audiences will often dip in and out, return to the work after some time away and expect the familiar things they’ve come to (hopefully) love, and so not a lot can ultimately change across those multiple episodes/strips. With the one exception of actors leaving soap operas and thus their characters needing more of a definitive end (unless they’re just going to be recast, as frequently happens and as proves this point with particular clarity), daytime soaps feature seemingly huge events that quite often don’t end up changing a thing about the characters, relationships, overall dynamics, and so on.

There’s good reason for that: daytime soaps are designed to air every day and to stay on the air for as long as possible, with the four longest-running all having long since surpassed fifty seasons! That’s obviously quite different from primetime TV dramas, most of which not only have a much shorter lifespan, but the creators of which also don’t necessarily know whether they’ll be renewed, and so need to tell distinct and definite stories in their individual seasons. So what happens when these two distinct and even contrasting TV genres come together, as they do in the form of the primetime soap? The result is often a pretty delicate balancing act, shows that feature season-long storylines a la the best dramas, yet that are designed with some of the same layers of repetition and stasis that we find in daytime soaps. When that balance goes awry, it can be quite frustrating for audiences, as illustrated by one of the most famously controversial TV plotlines/gimmicks of all time: the long-running primetime soap Dallas (1978-91) ending its third season on the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger and spending the entire offseason hyping up that question, only to reveal the culprit relatively early in the fourth season and with no significant consequence (J.R. lived, no charges were pressed, basically everything went on as if there had been no shooting).

That fourth-season Dallas episode drew one of the largest TV audiences to that point (and remains in the conversation overall), so maybe the gimmick was a success. But I would argue that it’s the creator and executive producer of many of the other most famous primetime soaps, today’s birthday boy Aaron Spelling, who really figured out how to walk that particular genre’s fine line. Across countless mega-popular shows, from The Love Boat (1977-86) and Dynasty (1981-89) to Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000) and teenage Ben’s personal favorite Melrose Place (1992-1999; what can I say, like America itself I am large and contain multitudes), among many many others, Spelling brought the repetitive and thus pleasantly familiar rhythms of soap operas to the explosive plotlines and seasons of nighttime dramas. A show like Melrose Place aired 226 total episodes in its seven seasons, which is not that far off from the number of episodes a daytime soap might air in a single year. A great deal happened and changed across those 226 episodes—and yet viewers could nonetheless tune in to pretty much any single one of those episodes and see Heather Locklear’s Amanda acting in precisely the high-powered, back-stabbing, irresistible ways she always did. Few American artists have achieved greater success in their chosen genre and medium than did the king of such tightrope-walking primetime soaps, Aaron Spelling.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So once more: what do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?

April 20, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: Parodies

[April 22^nd will mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]

On what a few pitch-perfect parodies can add to the conversation.

1)      Soap (1977-81): One way to be sure that a genre has really entered the cultural zeitgeist is when parodies start to emerge, and for soap operas that seems to have particularly happened with TV parodies in the late 1970s, including both the short-lived Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77) and the far more successful Soap. Soap undoubtedly satirized the most extreme elements of the genre, including such plot elements as alien abduction, amnesia, demonic possession, mafia murders, and plenty more. But what made the show genuinely controversial (at least with the Catholic Church and various parent groups), and what has likewise helped it end up on various Best-of TV lists over the years, were its groundbreaking portrayals of identity and social issues like homosexuality. Soap operas have long balanced familiar formulas with envelope-pushing choices, and this satirical soap was very much a case in point.

2)      Soapdish (1991) and Delirious (1991): One of the first films to send up the genre was Tootsie (1982), about which I wrote in that hyperlinked post. But in that film soap operas were part of the setting and context for the main story, while in this pair of 1991 films soaps were the primary subject. They did so through two very distinct kinds of stories: Soapdish is a realistic depiction of life, career, relationships for a group of actors working on a hit soap opera (led by Sally Field but supported by an all-star cast); while Delirious is a fantasy film in which a soap opera writer (played by John Candy) awakens from a car accident to find himself inside the world of his show. But both films are aiming for laughs, and so both, like Tootsie, play up and exaggerate the most outrageous kinds of soap opera stories. There’s nothing wrong with that goal (it’s a primary one for parodies, after all), but it can miss out on the kinds of cultural and social innovations that Soap knew could be part of the genre as well.

3)      Tender Touches (2017-20): It seems to me that the 1980s and 90s were in many ways the heyday of the soap opera genre, including not only daytime soaps but also the popular primetime ones about which I’ll write in tomorrow’s Spelling Birthday Special post. Over the first decades of the 21^st century I believe the genre has lost a great deal of its prominence (just too many ways to entertain ourselves, maybe, even in the middle of a weekday afternoon), but that shift has also opened up new territory for parodies and satires to take the genre itself in different directions. One of the most innovative is the Adult Swim animated series Tender Touches, a boundary-pushing satire that featured (among other striking choices) both a regular and a musical version of every episode across its first two seasons. Another feature of the 21^st century is that the line between satires and the things being satirized have become increasingly blurry, and so perhaps it’s simplest to say that Tender Touches is one of the only new soap operas to emerge over the last decade.

Last soap-post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?

April 19, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: Telenovelas

[April 22^nd will mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]

On two ways a classic short story helps us understand a soap opera sub-genre.

The Mexican American author and educator Sandra Cisneros is most frequently and consistently associated with her wonderful debut book, the short story cycle The House on Mango Street (1984); that certainly includes this blog, where I’ve written about House a number of times. But while House is indeed one of the greatest debut books in American literary history (published when it’s author was only 30, no less), Cisneros has gone on to write plenty of other compelling and important works over the nearly three decades since. Among the best is the short story “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991), which tells the story of Cleófilas DeLeón Hernández, a Mexican American woman who finds herself in an arranged marriage in Texas with an angry and abusive husband. Exacerbating that already fraught and painful situation is how distant it is from Cleófilas’ dreams of her ideal marriage and future, dreams that Cisneros consistently connects to the character’s childhood in Mexico watching the national (and more broadly Latin American) genre of soap opera known as telenovelas.

Telenovelas are a cultural genre linked more to other nations than to the U.S. (although certainly part of American TV and communities alike for many decades now, one of so many layers to the broader idea of creolization for which I’ve argued in this space many times), and I’m not going to pretend to be able to AmericanStudy them in depth here. But I would argue that Cisneros’ story helps us engage with a couple layers not only to that particular genre, but to soap operas overall as well. The more obvious level to their role in “Woman Hollering Creek,” and an important topic to analyze to be sure, is the way that the genre creates fantasy versions of men, romance, and marriage for young women like Cleófilas. As Cisneros puts it in the story’s opening pages, in the first reference to telenovelas and the kinds of perspectives they have helped create in our protagonist: “passion in its purest crystalline essence. The kind the … telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life, and does whatever one can must do, at whatever the cost.” The problem isn’t simply that Cleófilas’ husband Juan Pedro is far from a fantasy man; it’s also and especially that no person, and no love, is worth “whatever the cost,” not if the cost is abuse and violence like that Cleófilas faces.

Those limits and downsides to fantastic representations of romance and relationships are of course a relatively ubiquitous feature of soap operas (and many other cultural genres as well, to be sure). But I would say that Cisneros’ story also features a more subtle but equally significant second layer to what telenovelas can represent for a character like Cleófilas: a feminist, or at least female-centered, alternative to the patriarchal violence she endures on both sides of the border. As the story unfolds through both flashbacks and ongoing events in the present, we see that Cleófilas has been under attack by many more men than just Juan Pedro, from her Mexican father’s patriarchal expectations to the harassment she endures from men (Latino and non-Latino) in Texas. Her one source of escape and enjoyment is her occasional opportunity to watch telenovelas, “the few episodes glimpsed at the neighbor lady Soledad’s house.” “Soledad” translates to solitude or loneliness, but of course those shared moments of telenovela-watching are quite the opposite, one of the experiences of solidarity in Cleófilas’ present life. And those moments foreshadow the female solidarity that ultimately offers her a way out in the story’s hopeful conclusion, one that, perhaps, embodies not the fantasies of telenovelas but their shared, communal realities for an audience for whom they are far more than just cultural escapism.  

Next soap-post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?

April 18, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: The First TV Soaps

[April 22^nd will mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from the first three televised soap operas.

1)      Faraway Hill: The first televised soap was broadcast live once a week on the groundbreaking DuMont Television Network, aiming on Wednesdays between 9 and 9:30pm from October to December, 1946. An adaptation of an unfinished novel from creator and longtime TV writer and director David P. Lewis, Faraway Hill told the story of wealthy young widow Karen St. John (Flora Campbell) who moves away from New York to stay with relatives in the titular Kansas town and falls in love with her niece’s fiancé. While that plotline sounds like plenty of other soap opera stories, its show was quite strikingly experimental—as it aired live and featured no commercials, the show made no money for the network; Lewis’ goal, instead, was to “test the mind of the viewer.” An interesting way to frame the entirety of the new medium of television in that mid-1940s evolutionary moment.

2)      Highway to the Stars: The experiment seemed to be a success, as less than a year later DuMont’s flagship TV station, New York City’s WABD, aired another live, weekly nighttime soap opera, this time featuring commercials. That show was Highway to the Stars, which ran from August to October 1947 and starred Patricia Jones as a talented young singer trying to make it in the big city. As with Faraway Hill, Highway’s live broadcasts means that unfortunately no extant copies of episodes remain, so we can’t for example compare the two to see how the genre was evolving in these early years. But I do think it’s interesting to note how early this new TV genre tapped into one of the most iconic American stories, that perennial, Sister Carrie-like tale of a young woman traveling from her rural hometown to navigate the allure and challenges of the city. If Faraway dealt with the family melodrama that has so often defined soaps, Highway made clear that this new genre would likewise connect to more universal stories.

3)      These Are My Children: There’s no doubt that both Faraway and Highway have a strong claim to the title of “first TV soap opera”; but since they aired once a week and at night, it’s understandable that the daily daytime soap These Are My Children is often granted that title. The show aired live and for only 15 minutes, from 5-5:15 every weekday on Chicago’s WNBQ from January to March, 1949, so it certainly wasn’t yet the prerecorded, hour-long daily formula that came to define the daily soap opera genre. But These was created by Irna Phillips, as I wrote yesterday already well-established by this time as a pioneering figure in the soap opera genre, and was indeed closely based on prior radio soaps of hers like Painted Dreams. So it’s fair to say that These was the first full attempt to translate the genre from radio to television, and despite its short run (and runtime) thus represents an important watershed moment.

Next soap-post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?

April 17, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: 1930s Origins

[April 22^nd will mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]

On five pioneering women who together helped create the genre on 1930s radio.

1)      Irna Phillips: The program generally accepted as the first daytime serial, WGN’s Painted Dreams, which debuted in October 1930, was the brainchild of Jewish American actress and screenwriter Irna Phillips. Phillips also frequently voiced the show’s main character, Irish American widow Mother Moynihan, but writing and showrunning in this nascent genre were really her passions—she would go on to create five more radio soaps over the next decade, including the first to transition to television (The Guiding Light). Phillips likewise transitioned to TV, writing for many TV soaps, including some of the most popular and enduring (As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives, for example), and consulting for one of the first primetime soaps, 1964’s Peyton Place. But it was her radio origins that truly embodied where this genre likewise got its start.

2)      Bess Flynn: No radio or TV program is the product of only one artist of course, and another key player (in every sense) in Painted Dreams was contributing writer Bess Flynn, who also sometimes voiced Mother Moynihan. Like Phillips, Flynn would go on to create a number of other radio soap operas as well, including one of the longest-running and most successful daytime serials, Bachelor’s Children (1935-1946). That show became closely associated with its two male stars, Hugh Studebaker and Olan Soule; but while their performances as the pair of titular bachelors (who, in a plotline that wouldn’t really fly in 2023, fell in love with two young women for whom they served as guardians after their father’s death) were what audiences heard, it was the words and work of Flynn that undoubtedly lay behind this show’s striking success.

3)      Clara, Lu, ‘n Em: There’s never just one “first” in a genre, and at the same time that Painted Dreams was on the air, so too was another very early and successful WGN soap opera. Clara, Lu, ‘n Em first premiered at night in June 1930, and when it was picked up by NBC’s radio network in January 1931 it became the first nationally broadcast soap era (a year later it moved to a daytime slot and so likewise became the first networked daytime soap). This show was the brainchild of a trio of talented young artists: Louise Starkey, Isobel Carothers, and Helen King created the concept while students at Northwestern University, wrote all the scripts, and performed as the title characters. While these various shows and artists gradually went their separate ways, they were all writing and performing at WGN in 1930-31, and I like to think that these five groundbreaking women got the chance to chat occasionally about the compelling new genre they were together creating.

Next soap-post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?

April 15-16, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: Kidada Williams’ I Saw Death Coming

[This week marks the 150^th anniversary of the horrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories we need to better remember, leading up to a special weekend post on a vital new scholarly book.]

On three reasons why Kidada Williams’ I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction (2023) is a must-read.

1)      The Author: I’ve written about Dr. Kidada Williams a couple prior times on the blog: reflecting on our Southern Historical Association panel together here; and highlighting her work on the psychological and emotional effects of racial violence and terrorism (the topic on which she presented on that SHA panel) in this post on Beloved. Her work on that particular, crucial historical (and of course all too contemporary) topic is quite simply the best I’ve ever encountered on those fraught and definingly American themes, and would be more than enough to make me beyond excited for any new project of hers. But that’s just one portion of her work, which also includes the excellent Seizing Freedom podcast; a podcast that begins quite specifically with Reconstruction and which made me particularly stoked for Williams’ new book on that period.

2)      The Premise: As its subtitle suggests, that new book certainly extends and deepens Williams’ analyses of racial terrorism and its effects, bringing that lens to bear on Reconstruction in important new ways. But I think her central premise is more straightforward yet even more groundbreaking than that: a history of Reconstruction that focuses not on political figures and debates, nor activists for civil rights, nor white supremacist forces, but instead on the everyday African American experience. Williams has found and analyzes a ton of vital first-person voices and accounts, but also reads more familiar documents and materials anew through this emphasis on the collective African American experience of the era, opening Reconstruction and its histories and stories up in ways that even Du Bois didn’t manage (understandably, given the limitations of research and travel in his era; but I’m just saying, this book takes things a significant step further).

3)      This Book Talk: Still not convinced? Well there’s no one better to convince you of this book’s importance than Williams herself, and that early February book talk is a great way to hear more of the book as well as her purposes and perspective. Check it out, then get your hands on I Saw Death Coming pronto!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books on Reconstruction (new or not) you’d highlight?

April 14, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: DuBois’ Vital Revisionism

[This week marks the 150^th anniversary of the horrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories we need to better remember, leading up to a special weekend post on a vital new scholarly book.]

On the book that revised Reconstruction historiography, redefined an entire profession, and then went even further.

The development of American historiography is a complex and multi-part story, and would certainly have to include mid-19^th century pioneers such as Francis Parkman, the 1884 founding of the American Historical Association, and the turn-of-the-century popularization of scholarly history by figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles and Mary Beard, among many other moments and figures. So it’d be crazy of me to suggest that one historiographical book stands out as both the single most significant turning point in the profession and the best reflection upon its prior inadequacies, right? Well, then you’re going to have to call me crazy, because I would describe W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) as both of those things. Du Bois had published books in virtually every genre by the time of Black Reconstruction’s release, but interestingly none since his Harvard PhD dissertation (The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870) could quite be categorized as American historical scholarship. But when he returned fully to that genre, he not only produced one of his very best works, but a book that changed everything about both Reconstruction historiography and the discipline as a whole.

Even if we knew nothing of the half-century of American historical writing that preceded Du Bois’s book, its strengths and achievements would be clear and impressive. In an era when extended archival research was almost impossible for most scholars, especially those not supported by wealthy institutions (which Du Bois had not been for decades by the time he published Black Reconstruction, having worked primarily at Atlanta University), Du Bois produced a work of history that relied entirely on archival and primary documents, materials he used to develop original, thorough, and hugely sophisticated and convincing analyses of Reconstruction’s efforts, effects, successes, and shortcomings in every relevant state and community. Moreover, since that prior half-century of historical writing, at least on Reconstruction and related themes, had been almost entirely driven by established narratives and myths (ones that, frustratingly, have apparently endured into our own moment), Du Bois could not do what virtually every other historian since has done—build on the work done by his or her peers, add his or her voice to existing conversations. He had to invent that work and those conversations anew, and did so with nuance, care, and unequivocal brilliance.

That’d be more than enough to make Black Reconstruction a must-read, but in its final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” Du Bois added two striking additional layers to the book. First and foremost, he called out that half-century of historiographical mythmaking, creating a devastatingly thorough and convincing critique of the historians and works that had combined to produce such a false and destructive narrative of Reconstruction (one echoed and extended by pop cultural works such as Thomas Dixon’s novels, The Birth of a Nation, Claude Bowers’ bestselling The Tragic Era, and, a year after Du Bois’s book, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind). Yet at the same time, decades before Hayden White, Du Bois used the particular case of Reconstruction historiography to analyze the subjective and political contexts that inform even the best history writing, recognizing the limitations of the concept of “scientific” scholarship well before the profession as a whole was able or willing to do so. On every level, a book ahead of its time—and still vital to ours.

Special post on a new, equally great book this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 13, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: Massacres

[This week marks the 150^th anniversary of the horrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories we need to better remember, leading up to a special weekend post on a vital new scholarly book.]

I’ve written a good deal, in this space and elsewhere, about the 1898 Wilmington massacre and the 1921 Tulsa massacre (both too often described as “race riots”), among other such acts of racial violence. But just as under-remembered, and perhaps even more historically telling, are the massacres that marred and helped undermine Reconstruction. Here are three:

1)      New Orleans (1866): In late July, 1866, a group of African Americans (many of them Civil War veterans) marching to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention were stopped and attacked by Mayor John Monroe (a longtime Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist), New Orleans police forces, and an angry white mob. As happened in Wilmington, Tulsa, and so many other massacres, this individual starting point morphed into a city-wide rampage against African Americans citizens and communities, one that ended with hundreds of African Americans (both convention delegates and others) dead and wounded. This massacre took place early enough in Reconstruction that a federal response was both possible and swift—Monroe and many other officials were moved from office, and Reconstruction efforts in the city intensified. Yet at the same time, the New Orleans massacre (along with another 1866 massacre, in Memphis) reveals just how fully white supremacists were prepared to use official and political as well as mob and vigilante violence to oppose both Reconstruction and African American rights.

2)      Colfax (1873): By the early 1870s, such white supremacist racial violence had been codified into organized groups—most famously the Ku Klux Klan, but also parallel groups such as Louisiana’s White League (which, as that platform reflects, was not only a paramilitary terrorist group but also a political appendage of the state’s Democratic Party). Not coincidentally, the League’s first organized action was the Colfax Massacre, in which members attacked an African American militia; although at first shots were exchanged by both sides, the militiamen were outnumbered and quickly surrendered, only to continue being massacred by the League members. All told more than 100 African Americans were killed, and only three White League members convicted of murder—and those convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The Charles Lane book reviewed at that last hyperlink argues in its subtitle that both Colfax and the Court decision represented “the betrayal of Reconstruction,” and it’s hard not to agree that by this time, every level of America’s social and political power structure seemed allied with the white supremacists.

3)      Hamburg (1876): The ultimate betrayal and abandonment of Reconstruction are usually associated with the 1876 Presidential election, but racial violence played a significant part in that culminating year as well. In many ways, the massacre in Hamburg (South Carolina) echoes the others I’ve written about here: a seemingly small incident of racial tension (two white farmers had a difficult time driving their wagon through a July 4^th march by African American militiamen) exploded into an orgy of racial violence, as a July 8^th attempt to disband the militia was followed by the arrival of a white mob who first attacked the militia’s armory and then expanded their massacre to much of the city’s African American population. Yet not only were there no federal or legal responses to the massacre, but instead it became part of the Democratic Party’s triumph in the state’s elections, as white supremacist candidate Wade Hampton uses a mythologized narrative of the massacre as a “race riot” to help gain the governor’s seat and put an end to Reconstruction in South Carolina—one more reflection of the central role that these acts of racial violence played in opposing and undermining Reconstruction throughout the period.

Last Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 12, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: Andrew Johnson

[This week marks the 150^th anniversary of the horrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories we need to better remember, leading up to a special weekend post on a vital new scholarly book.]

On three telling stages in the life and career of one of our worst presidents.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches young adult novels first became bestsellers with 1868’s Ragged Dick, Fame and Fortune, and Struggling Upward, but I don’t think so. In many ways, these works can be seen as Reconstruction texts—their protagonists tend to begin their stories at the lowest possible point, after all, and struggle to work their way toward a more stable, successful, and even ideal future. Seen in that light, Andrew Johnson was a perfect president for the start of the Reconstruction era, as his life to that point seemed to mirror an Alger story. Born into abject poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father died when Andrew was only three years old, he began his professional life as a tailor’s apprentice before running away to Tennessee, entering politics at the most local level, and working his way up to Governor and then Senator. And it was his bold and impressive choice at one crucial turning point, his decision to side with the Union when Tennessee seceded (he was the only Senator not to give up his seat when his state seceded), that cemented his national status and led to his appointment as Military Governor of Tennessee and then his nomination as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election.

As I wrote in that hyperlinked piece on 1864 and expanded in this Saturday Evening Post column, however, “impressive” is one of the least likely words that historians would apply to Johnson’s term as president, which began when Lincoln was assassinated only a month into his second term. It’s not just that Johnson was an overt white supremacist—he had never tried to hide that perspective, which of course he shared with many of his fellow Southerners and Americans. Nor is it that he advocated for a different form of Reconstruction (Presidential, as it came to be known) than Congressional Republicans—policy disagrements are part of governance and the separation of powers, and Johnson did seek to uphold the Constitution as he understood it. Instead, what truly defines the awfulness of Johnson’s presidency was how far out of his way he went to oppose even the most basic rights for freed slaves and African Americans, a stance exemplified by his veto of the 1866 bill that would have renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson’s concludes that veto by arguing that in taking this action he is “presenting [the] just claims” of the eleven states that are “not, at this time, represented by either branch of Congress”—yet of course, the veto served only the claims of the white supremacists within those states. The question of whether Johnson deserved to be impeached for actions such as his veto (and other similar stances taken in opposition to Reconstruction) is a thorny one (and was not the actual stated reason for the impeachment trial), but I have no qualms in saying he deserves our condemnation for it, and all that it illustrates about his presidency.

Johnson survived the impeachment trial (by one Senate vote), and continued his destructive policies for the remainder of his presidential term (although he did also support the proclamation that nationalized the 8-hour workday, evidence that even the worst presidencies are not without their complexities). Yet his life and career did not end with Ulysses Grant’s 1868 election to the presidency, and two 1870s moments reflect how both sides of Johnson’s American story continued into his later life. In 1873, Johnson both nearly died of cholera and lost $73,000 in the national Panic, but recovered from both of these traumas to successfully run for the Senate once more in 1875, becoming the only past president to serve in the Senate and adding one more rags-to-riches moment to his legacy. Yet in his brief stint as a Senator (the seat was only open for one special session), Johnson’s only significant contribution was a speech attacking President Grant for using federal troops as part of Reconstruction in Louisiana; “How far off is military despotism?,” Johnson warned, one final mythologized and destructive critique of Reconstruction from the man who did as much to undermine it as any American.

Next Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?

April 11, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: African American Legislators

[This week marks the 150^th anniversary of the horrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstruction sesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five Reconstruction histories we need to better remember, leading up to a special weekend post on a vital new scholarly book.]

I’m quite sure that every one of the more than 1500 African Americans who held elected office during Reconstruction has an amazing story we should better remember. (And that each of them would fully counteract the awful stereotyping created by “historical” texts like Birth of a Nation.) Here are three distinct but equally important and inspiring such individuals and stories:

1)      Benjamin Turner: Born into slavery in 1825 North Carolina, sold down river to Alabama with his mother when he was only five, and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Turner became a self-made businessman and farmer in Selma while the war was still raging. By 1865, he had enough local clout to found one of the areas first freedmen’s schools; two years later he attended the state Republican Convention, launching his political career with an appointment as the county’s tax collector. In 1870 he ran successfully for the U.S. House of Representatives; although he only served one term, it was a productive two years, including authoring private pension bills for Civil War veterans and opposing a cotton tax that he saw as disproportionately affecting African Americans. After his 1872 defeat he mostly returned to farming, although he did attend the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago—one more reflection of his political and communal prominence.

2)      Hiram Revels: Born in 1827 to free African Americans in Fayetteville, North Carolina, educated for the ministry in Northern seminaries, an itinerant minister for the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church throughout the 1850s and the chaplain for one of the first African American regiments in the Civil War, Revels’ story differs from Turner’s in just about every way. Yet he too opened one of the earliest freedmen’s schools (this one in St. Louis, where he had been a pastor before the war) and he too became one of the first African Americans in Congress when he was appointed to the Senate by the Mississippi state legislature in January 1870. Like Turner, Revels served only one term (or in his case, only part of one), as he declined a number of appointments after his Senate term ended in March 1871; yet in that brief time, Revels managed both to fight for the education and rights of freed people and to advocate for universal amnesty for former Confederate soldiers. And in his post-Senate life he continued along both paths, serving as president of Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University) and writing a famous 1875 letter to President Grant denouncing “carpetbaggers”—a duality that illustrates the breadth of perspectives found among these Reconstruction legislators.

3)      P.B.S. Pinchback: Subject of some of the most interesting sections in Allyson Hobbs’ wonderful A Chosen Exile, Pinchback was the mixed-race son of a freed slave and her former master (some of his siblings were born while she was still a slave, but Pinchback was born in 1837, a year after she was freed). Like Revels, he moved north to attend school and stayed there until the outbreak of the war; during the war he moved to New Orleans and worked to raise companies of African American soldiers for the Union army, becoming a captain in one such company. After the war he became active in the Georgia Republican Party, was elected to the State Senate in 1868, and succeeded Oscar Dunn (the first elected African American Lieutenant Governor of any state) as the state’s Lieutenant Governor upon Dunn’s death in 1871. A year later, Governor Henry Clay Warmouth was tried for impeachment; state law required Warmouth to step down while on trial, and for the final six weeks of his term Pinchback served as Georgia’s governor, becoming the first African American governor in the process. The moment reveals the chaotic histories unfolding in every Southern state during Reconstruction—but Pinchback’s readiness and ability to step into the governor’s role are one more reminder of how many impressive and inspiring African American leaders made their mark throughout the period.

Next Reconstruction remembrance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?