[It’s been two and a half years since my book on the contested history of American patriotism was published, and let’s just say it doesn’t feel less relevant at the moment. So for this year’s July 4th series, I wanted to highlight a handful of places and ways I’ve been thinking about the book and patriotism here in 2023. Leading up to a request for any and all further such opportunities to share the project!]
Podcasts
and columns are both great ways to share a book project, but for me nothing
beats a true conversation with a full audience, a community that serves more as
active fellow conversants than just passive listeners. As I’ve discussed
countless times in this space, I’ve never found a better such
conversational community than adult learning courses and programs, which is why
I’ve
taught for multiple
such programs for more than a decade now. This Spring I had the chance to return
to one of those programs, Brandeis’
BOLLI, after many years away, and decided to focus the five-week course on
different layers to Of Thee I Sing (I
called the class “What We Talk about When We Talk about Patriotism,” natch). It
was a phenomenal series of conversations as always, but for its instructor was
especially inspiring as a way in which we—and I do mean we, myself entirely
included—consistently found new and compelling contemporary applications for
the book and its different categories of patriotism. I’ll highlight in tomorrow’s
post one specific example that a student shared with me after the class was
officially completed, so here will just make clear the overarching takeaway: that,
to my mind, we’ve never had a moment more defined by our debates over
patriotism than the last 2.5 years have been. Sounds like a job for me!
Next
patriotic post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Ideas for places/ways I could share Of Thee I Sing?
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