January 31, 2024: Quirky American Traditions: Ostrich Racing

[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]

On three ways to contextualize a very strange “sports” tradition.

1)      Exotic Animals: As the father to two sons who are quite obsessed with alpacas and make an annual pilgrimage to a wonderful alpaca farm (which is in fact going to be part of my wedding in a few months!), I’m certainly not here to critique the longstanding American and probably universal human tradition of falling in love with random exotic animals. But it is pretty darn random, as illustrated by the evolution of Chandler, Arizona—a small town that became home in the early 20^th century to a number of ostrich farms (for reasons that I can’t seem to suss out from any of the write-ups, so if anyone out there knows why or how this got started please add your thoughts in comments!) and that now more than a century later hosts an annual Ostrich Festival featuring not just racing (on which as an overall practice more in a moment) but it seems all things ostriches.

2)      A Silly Rivalry: There’s raising exotic animals and then there’s racing them, and when it comes to ostriches the development of the latter practice in particular seems to have been even more random still. In 1959, the editor of the Virginia City, Nevada Territorial Enterprise newspaper printed a fake story about camel racing in the community; the San Francisco Chronicle believed the story was real and reprinted it. The next year, to get back at the Nevada paper for having been duped, the Chronicle borrowed camels from the San Francisco Zoo and brought them to Virginia City for an actual race. This event has evolved into an annual tradition, one that features not only camels but also zebras, emus, and, natch, ostriches and that will run for the 64^th time this coming September. Virginia City isn’t America’s only site for annual ostrich races—Minnesota’s Canterbury Park features them at its annual EXTREME DAY, for example—but I’m willing to bet that the practice evolved just as randomly in each case, and yet has become an iconic tradition in each as well. America!

3)      Sports Betting: Unfortunately (to my mind, anyway) another longstanding American tradition, and one that is only becoming more ubiquitous in our current moment, is taking advantage of every possible opportunity to gamble. I didn’t know for a fact when I planned this post that folks out there bet on ostrich races, but I was willing to, well, bet that that was the case; and lo and behold, one of the first results when I Googled “ostrich racing” was this short video of a race from Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course in Grantville, PA. I have overall problems with gambling, in terms of what it too often means for the individuals and families (and communities) affected by it; but I have even more problems with gambling on animal racing, as it seems very likely to me that it can lead to the animals being mistreated or at least treated as a source of income rather than living creatures. So this is one quirky tradition I’d love to see end, or at least evolve.

Next quirky tradition tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?

January 30, 2024: Quirky American Traditions: National Hollerin’ Contest

[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]

On the difficulty of remembering the past and preserving traditions, and how the intertubes can help.

As much time as I spend thinking, talking, and writing about history—and that is a very significant percentage of my time, natch—I have to admit that it remains difficult to truly imagine what it was like to live in distant past periods. For example, I grew up in the pre-internet and even pre-cell phone era (yes, children, there was such a thing), so I do have memories of what communication was like prior to all the instantaneous methods we now possess—but nonetheless, telephones were ubiquitous in my childhood, as they had been in America since at least the early 20^th century, and so communicating with distant contacts was relatively straightforward and easy. But of course that wasn’t always the case, and so in the more genuinely distant past communities communicated in quite different ways—as illustrated by “hollering,” the method by which residents of rural communities in places like North Carolina communicated both everyday greeting and urgent news with each other across long distances.

For much of the second half of the 20^th century, one such extremely rural North Carolina community, Spivey’s Corner (population 49 according to that article), sought to preserve that tradition of hollering through the National Hollerin’ Contest. Beginning with the first such contest in June 1969, for the next half-century or so this annual event brought thousands of visitors and a good bit of media attention to Spivey’s Corner, to witness masters of this traditional form of communication demonstrating their craft and to support this community in a variety of ways. By the 2010s the event was having difficulty sustaining interest, however, and the Spivey’s Corner Volunteer Fire Department announced that the June 2016 contest would be the last one. In November of that year a pair of former contest winners (Iris Turner and Robby Goodman) sought to revitalize things by organizing a World Wide Hollerin’ Festival in nearby Hope Mills. Yet that festival took place only once, and from what I can tell the annual hollerin’ contest is no more.

And yet here we are, me writing about the contest and hollering, you (hopefully) reading and learning about them. A main point of the contest was that technology (like telephones) had made traditions like hollering obsolete and risked doing away with them, and I sympathize with that perspective and agree that things have to be done purposefully and consistently if we are to keep the past alive in an ever-changing present. But I also believe—perhaps obviously enough, as I share these thoughts, like I do so much of my work these days, in an online writing setting, but it still needs saying clearly—that technology has the ability to contribute to that work of preservation and memory, and indeed can do so for much broader audiences than even the most well-attended in-person event. To cite just one example, check out the many YouTube videos of both the contest and hollering in general, a veritable database of the practice, the tradition, and this now-concluded yet still fortunately available quirky festival of celebration.

Next quirky tradition tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?

January 29, 2024: Quirky American Traditions: Pumpkin Chunkin

[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]

On the very American balance between the local and the national.

First, it’s important to note that I’m not nearly enough of an American Exceptionalist not to recognize that people all over the world throw/toss/hurl strange things in quirky communal traditions, and, as this Paris Review essay traces, have long done so. That essay does a good job thinking through why this might be such a common human activity, although because it focuses on the admittedly numerous examples that directly involve throwing animals and/or people (and/or throwing things at animals and/or people), it’s a bit more interested in the meanness factor than I would say is the case for today’s American quirky tradition: pumpkin chunkin (or chuckin, but who can resist a rhyme?!). Unless you want to argue that pumpkins have feelings (in which case Halloween is quite the horrific tradition as well), nobody is hurt when we gather together in the sacred ritual of seeing who can hurl a pumpkin the furthest solely by mechanical means.

I don’t have a lot to say about the specifics of that tradition, although the Crossbows & Catapults fan in me is excited to note that many pumpkin chunkers use catapults or similar devices such as trebuchets. But in any case, my goal in this week’s series is to use these particular traditions to raise and think through some broader AmericanStudies topics, and when it comes to pumpkin chunkin I think an interesting such topic is the balance between the local and the national. As you might expect, most pumpkin chunkin contests are connected to specific places and their local traditions, such as the ongoing annual contests in places as disparate as Lake County, California and Bald Eagle State Park, Pennsylvania (among literally countless others). But at the same time, almost every year since 1986 the US has hosted the World Championship Punkin Chunkin (WCPC) contest the weekend after Halloween—for many years it took place in Delaware, and after a hiatus in the late 2010s this Fall the event triumphantly returned and was held in Oklahoma.

While I very much do not believe the Civil War had anything to do with “states’ rights,” there’s no question that the debate between state sovereignty and the US Federal Government has been a defining and ongoing one in American history. I get that that debate has real stakes, and that the 10^th Amendment is frustratingly ambiguous enough to make for seriously conflicting opinions on what is and is not state and federal power. But at the same time, one of the things I like most about the United States is that it is this huge place (one of the biggest nations in the world, both in size and population), with so many distinct settings and spaces, communities and cultures contained within it; and yet at the same time they are all linked to one another, part of a federalist system in which in various important ways and moments they come together. That is, there’s not just room here for pumpkin chunkin at a small state fair and punkin chunkin at a world championship—the presence of both events is the essence of American community and identity.

Next quirky tradition tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?

January 27-28, 2024: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: 21st Century Icons

[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to this special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]

On five 21^st century American women (and one global icon) who exemplify continued, impressive groundbreaking achievements.

1)      Jessica Meir and Christina Koch: I’m not gonna say too much for these entries, preferring to let the stories and the amazing women highlighted in them do the talking. So please make sure to click on these hyperlinks and learn more about, for example, the first all-woman spacewalk and their plans to be the first women on the moon!

2)      Linda Lee Singh: Both NASA and the US military have for far too long been boys’ clubs (and generally white boys at that), so what I especially love about these first two entries is the direct challenge and alternative they offer to that artificially homogeneous vision of American communities and society. What the current attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs miss is that there is no more vital work still to be done than to make sure every part of our society mirrors those fundamental realities of who and what America is.

3)      Kathryn Bigelow: Representation matters in that process too, and that doesn’t just mean who we see in our cultural works—it also (and relatedly) means who is creating them, and how we recognize and celebrate those creators and artists. Bigelow becoming the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar was painfully belated, but we’ve got to start somewhere, and that was a truly groundbreaking cultural moment to be sure.

4)      Kamala Harris: As I wrote in that Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, Harris’ heritage and identity are complicated, which of course makes her all the more symbolically and importantly American. What isn’t complicated at all, though, is that she’s the first woman Vice President of the US, and that’s a fact that reflects everything I’ve said in the prior entries in this list—breaking into and challenging a boys’ club (and an overwhelmingly white one at that), representation and diversity that better reflects our culture and community, all of it.

5)      Malala Yousafzai: Malala is both deeply linked to her native Pakistan and an inspiringly global icon, and I don’t want to elide either of those layers of identity by highlighting her in an AmericanStudies post. But at the same time, one of the best things about the 21^st century is the way we can truly connect to and be inspired by the whole world, and a case in point is that our Fitchburg State Community Read book a few years back was I Am Malala. Groundbreaking Women without Borders!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?

January 26, 2024: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: Shirley Chisholm

[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]

On two telling political efforts beyond Chisholm’s groundbreaking presidential campaign.

Here in this election year, it’s only appropriate to end a series on groundbreaking women with the first America woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (and the second woman to seek a major party nomination, after Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith in 1964), and the first African American presidential candidate to boot: New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm’s 1972 campaign was groundbreaking for both of those reasons, and was also quite successful, with the candidate achieving significant results (sometimes classified as wins, although each case is complicated) in the New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi primaries, and eventually garnering 152 delegates (some symbolically released by the nominee George McGovern, but all real nonetheless) at the Democratic National Convention in Miami. Everything I said in Monday’s post about the symbolic significance of Victoria Woodhull’s 1872 campaign holds true for Chisholm’s campaign a century later, and I’d say Chisholm’s represented a significantly more serious contention for the nomination as well.

If that were Chisholm’s only contribution to national politics it would be more than enough to deserve collective memory—but it’s not, and her participation in a couple specific efforts helps us better remember the full scope of her half-century career in politics. Chisholm’s first political work took place in 1953, the same year that the 29-year-old Chisholm began directing a couple New York City child care centers (putting her MA in Elementary Education from Columbia’s Teachers College to work in the process). In that year she joined prominent local Democratic politician and power broker Wesley “Mac” Holder’s successful campaign to elect Lewis Flagg Jr. as the first African American judge in Brooklyn. That campaign became the basis for a more overarching organization, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League (BPSL), which fought for civil rights, economic equality, and fairness in housing throughout the 1950s. While both those efforts were partly local in emphasis, they were also part of the burgeoning national civil rights movement—and that combination of local and national, targeted and broader political goals, is at the heart of all Congressional work, particularly in the House in which Chisholm would serve for seven groundbreaking terms between 1969 and 1983.

One of Chisholm’s many important efforts during those 14 years in Congress took place just a year before her presidential run. In 1971, she once again utilized her education and experience in early childhood education and care, teaming with fellow New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug to co-sponsor a historic bill that would allocate $10 billion toward child care services. Senator Walter Mondale came on board for the Senate version of the bill, which passed both houses in December 1971 as the Comprehensive Child Development Act. Unfortunately President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing not only that it was too costly but also that it would implement a “communal approach to child-rearing” and thus that it was “the most radical piece of legislation” to have crossed his presidential desk. The fight for federal support for child care has continued into this year, one of many arenas in which we still have a great deal to learn from the lessons and model of Shirley Chisholm.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?

January 25, 2024: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: Pauli Murray and Black Women in the Law

[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]

Back in March 2022, I used the occasion of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court to write a piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the amazing Pauli Murray and the long history of groundbreaking Black women and the legal profession in America. I couldn’t create this week’s series and not included them all, so in lieu of a full post today would ask you to check out that column, please!

Last groundbreaking woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?

January 24, 2024: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: Nelly Bly

[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]

On a rightly famous work of groundbreaking investigative journalism, and another that should also be.

As I traced in this post, the great journalist and author Fanny Fern arrived at the women’s prison on New York’s Blackwell’s Island (literally and as a subject for her journalism) long after she was well-established as a successful columnist—as I argued in that post, that timing only adds to the series’ impressiveness, but it does also mean that Fern was by no means an investigative journalist in her career overall (and never would have defined herself as such). Whereas when Nellie Bly (the pseudonym for Elizabeth Jane Cochran; 1864-1922) published her own sensational (in every sense) 1887 series about the Island, she had already been producing substantive investigative journalism for many years, since she was just a hugely precocious young writer submitting columns to the Pittsburgh Dispatch on controversial topics like the need for divorce reform. Bly published her groundbreaking first column for the Dispatch, “The Girl Puzzle” (1885), when she was just 20 years old, launching a career in provocative and investigative journalism that would change the industry and America alike.

When the Dispatch tried to limit Bly’s columns to more conventionally “women’s” subjects like theater and the arts, she left the newspaper and the city, moving to New York and talking her way into a job with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. She did so by making the case for the truly groundbreaking investigative assignment that would become her justifiably famous series on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (which had been renamed Roosevelt Island). Fern visited Blackwell’s and wrote thoughtfully about what she saw there, but Bly found a way to truly live the experience: going undercover, first in a boarding house where she convinced the authorities she was insane, then for a ten-day imprisonment at the asylum (before the World reached out to identify her and request her release). She published her reporting first in the World in October 1887 and shortly thereafter as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), and in both forms her investigations and journalism alike truly altered the way America thought about mental illness, public health, and women’s rights—as well as about the possibilities for women journalists and all journalists.

If Bly’s asylum work was her only investigative journalism, it would be more than enough to establish her as a titan in that field—but it wasn’t, and indeed despite her youth it wasn’t her first extended such assignment. Shortly after she began writing for the Dispatch her published a series of investigative reports on women factory workers in the city; they were significant enough that factory owners complained to the paper and Bly was reassigned. She then embarked on an extended investigation that, to my mind, was at least as impressive as the asylum one: the 21 year-old Bly traveled to Mexico and spent six months embedded with locals, producing in-depth reporting on their communities as well as the dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz. The latter reports angered the government sufficiently that Bly was forced to leave, but not before she had accumulated enough investigative journalism to publish in the subsequent book Six Months in Mexico (1888). I’m not in any way trying to downplay the asylum work by suggesting that this Mexican project was just as impressive—quite the opposite, I would argue that both represented the best of investigative journalism, of a courageous writer pushing into settings and stories that many of her colleagues and audiences alike never would, and changing our collective conversations in the process.

Next groundbreaking woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?

January 23, 2024: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: Elizabeth Blackwell

[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]

On three institutions that together help tell the story of this groundbreaking physician.

1)      Geneva Medical College: Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910)’s first jobs were as a teacher, in conjunction with her educator sister Anna and to help support her financially struggling family. But she had been drawn to medicine from a young age, and in her mid-20s decided to pursue that profession despite the significant obstacles for a woman doing so in 1840s America. The one medical school that responded to her inquiries was Geneva Medical College, a department of New York’s Geneva College; apparently the unanimous October 1847 vote of the 150 current (male) students to accept Blackwell’s application was a joke, but if so the joke was on them, as Blackwell succeeded admirably at her medical studies (despite consistent sexist prejudice and treatment) and graduated on January 23^rd, 1849 as that first American woman to receive an MD. Whatever the origins of Blackwell’s Geneva story, the endpoint was a hugely impressive and influential moment.

2)      The New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children: Blackwell began practicing medicine in New York City not long after that graduation, while also going on speaking tours and publishing her first textbook, The Laws of Life with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls (1852). But it was when she partnered with two other groundbreaking women, her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell (who became the second American woman to receive an MD when she graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 1854) and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska (a Polish immigrant who likewise graduate from CWRU, in 1856), that Blackwell really took the next step in her career: together the trio expanded Blackwell’s medical practice and dispensary into the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. In an era when (as another groundbreaking 1850s woman, Fanny Fern, could attest from both personal and professional experience) poor women were treated quite terribly, this impressive institution modeled a very different approach and perspective.

3)      The London School of Medicine for Women: Blackwell wasn’t done co-founding impressive institutions, either. In the late 1860s she decided to immigrate to England (where she had traveled many times in her evolving professional career) and help develop women’s medical education there, and once there she partnered with the English physician and former New York Infirmary student Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake. Together the two of them (along with other allies including Emily Blackwell) co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women, which opened in 1874 as the country’s first medical school that would train female physicians. While Blackwell would separate from the school a few years later due to disagreements with Jex-Blake, this institution she helped establish would endure for the next century and a half, merging in the 21^st century with the University College Hospital Medical School to become the Royal Free and University College Medical School. In London, New York, and everywhere, Elizabeth Blackwell’s groundbreaking legacy lives on.

Next groundbreaking woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?

January 22, 2024: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: Judith Sargent Murray

[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]

On the relatively nondescript home that served as both prison and liberation for the amazing Judith Sargent Murray.

I’ve often thought that to be far ahead of one’s time, especially when it comes to one’s own rights and freedoms, likely feels both confining and liberating—a combination of recognizing things which one is frustratingly denied and yet seeing a broader and more open world beyond them. Certainly we can feel both sides to that coin in “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790), the poem and essay written by Gloucester’s own Judith Sargent Murray. Like her close contemporary (English) feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Murray was extremely intelligent, and she ironically but crucially opens “Equality” with an argument for why people are not equal—for why, indeed, certain minds are far more destined for greatness than others. Seeing herself in that light (as she seems to have, and deservedly so) would, again, have likely made Murray feel both good and bad—like part of a Talented Tenth of sorts, but one arbitrarily held back due solely to the biological accident of gender.

The (at the time; over the next century the waterfront was significantly shifted) waterfront Gloucester home built in 1782 for Sargent and her first husband, Captain John Stevens, served first as a direct remainder of such arbitrary and frustrating limitations. Stevens was at the time enjoying a brief period of prosperity as a local merchant, but his fortunes would shortly and permanently decline (thanks in part to the Revolution and in part to his own shortcomings as a businessman); by 1785 Stevens was so deeply in debt that the house was turned into a debtor’s prison, one in which both Stevens and Judith (who was of course literally married to his debt and legally powerless to control her own finances in any way) were held as collateral for those debts. A year later Stevens fled the city and tried to start fresh in the West Indies, but he ended up similarly indebted and imprisoned there, and died in prison. It was during these same years that Judith began to write her articles and essays (under the pseudonym “Constantia”), and such efforts reflect quite literally the only way that she could escape the prison into which her husband’s failures had cast her.

Yet the same period, and the same house, also contained a man who would, on multiple levels, help Judith achieve a far freer and happier existence. John and Judith were among America’s earliest supporters of Unitarian Universalism, the controversial new religion that represented a direct challenge to New England’s ruling Puritanism; they expressed that support by, among other things, providing a home for John Murray, the founder of the religion’s American church and its most prominent preacher. Murray and Judith developed a close friendship and relationship, and by the time of her husband’s death it was clearly something more; a few years later they were married and began a new life together, in the same Gloucester home. Judith’s final years were marked by a series of tragedies, culminating in the 1820 deaths of Judith, her daughter, and her grandson; but for the thirty years prior to those tragedies she had lived in a home and marriage—and philosophy—that were far closer to the social, political, and human ideals she espoused in her writings. Gloucester’s Sargent House contains and --interprets all those sides to her life—and also includes some paintings and pictures donated by her most famous descendent, John Singer Sargent!

Next groundbreaking woman tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?

January 20-21, 2024: Ava DePasquale’s Guest Post on Grey Dog

[I’m really excited to share my third Guest Post in recent months by a Fitchburg State English Studies alum! Ava DePasquale graduated in December, after contributing immeasurably to our newspaper The Point as well as many other aspects of English Studies and FSU. She’s got a great career ahead as a professional writer, as illustrated by her excellent book reviews blog. I’m very honored to share one of her reviews here!]

Grey Dog: A Gothic Horror Steeped in Grey Imagery and Irrepressible Female Rage

A book review of Grey Dog by Elliot Gish, expected publication: April 2024.

At the tail end of the Victorian era Ada Byrd accepts a teaching post in the claustrophobic farm town of Lowry Bridge. Following the death of her beloved sister and a shameful incident with her previous host family, Ada is welcomed by the Griers. She is offered a second chance in an isolated town where no one is aware of her tarnished reputation. The one room schoolhouse in which Ada is to teach happens to be on what the Griers refer to as “the wrong side of the bridge” and Ada soon finds herself confronted by disturbing visions whenever she ventures across. As Ada begins to lose her grip on reality, her new friends and neighbors begin to turn on her. As a voice beckons from the wrong side of the bridge, how long will Ada be able to resist its call?

A true slow burn, this gothic horror has much to offer. A succinct look at grief and what it does to the mind, coupled with the horrors of being a woman in Ada’s time, this historical horror transcends the early twentieth century to reach into our own and will truly disturb any reader willing to hold on through the slow build and slightly tedious setup.

This debut novel by Elliot Gish is a stunning gothic horror steeped in grey imagery, which melds into an explosive display of female rage and a return to nature.

This story is told via unreliable narrator through Ada’s own journal entries, and while this style sets the story up for a lack of believability in a technical way, I was quickly immersed in the story and could not have cared less about the formidable amount of dialogue in Ada’s diary. I was impressed by Gish’s use of language and embodiment of early twentieth century vocabulary and style. I can’t say how accurate it is for 1901, in which this story takes place, but it sounded authentic to me.

In the first 1/3 or so of my reading I was struggling to believe that Grey Dog truly was a horror, and worried that it had been mislabeled. I was quickly proved wrong, as the horror slowly ramped up starting with small disturbances and continued to develop into a full fledged maelstrom of some of the most disturbing gothic horror I’ve read in a while.

Elliot Gish has a gift for writing unsettling scenes, and certain ones had me feeling like I needed to throw down the book and run for the shower. This book was disturbing in very literal ways, as there are plenty of animal corpses and detached body parts, there are detailed descriptions of what happens when you don’t bathe for weeks at a time, and there are descriptions of what birth and violence does to the female body.

This book is disturbing in a psychological and societal mode as well, as Ada faces the horror of concealing her true self for society's sake, there is the very real and disturbing commentary on a woman’s role and worth according to the early twentieth century norms and then there is the horror that I think we all harbor a bit of, which is our confined existence within a manmade society vs. our instinctual inclination to merely exist in nature. All things that when viewed carefully through the right lens are darkly disturbing and enough to drive anyone completely mad.

Ada’s spiral into madness and untethered feminine rage is spectacular. While on the one hand, our first inclination is a desire for her to find her way back to society and the acceptance of her friends and neighbors, it quickly becomes clear that there is no place for Ada within the confines of the societal norms of her day, there is no way back and this is a wholly uncomfortable realization for the reader. Throughout the course of the novel, she transforms from a meek and guarded spinster, to a wild and irrepressible woman who longs to be consumed by nature.

“I am not a place where nature can be tamed and weeded and kept in order. I am tree roots – and dark hollows – and ancient moss – and the cry of owls. I am not a thing that you can shape, not anymore. I am no garden, but the woods, and if you ever come near me again, every bit of wildness in me will rise up to bite you. I will tear your throat out with my teeth.”

Grey Dog by Elliot Gish

The supernatural aspect of this novel made me think of Slewfoot (my favorite book). Grey Dog is much less gory and considerably less violent than Slewfoot, and while it does not possess quite the same level of bewitching magic alongside its darkness, it is still absolutely exhilarating to watch Ada, much like Abatha, harness that same feminine rage to become just the kind of woman that society fears most.

Grey Dog considers much about what it means to be a woman. In the novel we meet several types: school girls preparing for marriage, wives, spinsters and a widow. Ada’s existence in Lowry Bridge, a small and old fashioned farm town, is challenging because as a spinster, and a secretly queer one at that, she does not fit the societal norm of wife and mother, which the girls of Lowry Bridge are groomed for from a young age.

Yet she quickly befriends the pastor's wife, Agatha, who seemingly is the picture perfect Lowry Bridge “woman.” Ada first meets Agatha as she tends her garden, symbolizing the taming and shaping of nature, an idea also embodied by Agatha as a character. Across the bridge, Ada befriends the outcast widow Norah, a woman rumored to be a witch. For the majority of the novel, Ada is stuck in a limbo between the two women, somewhere in between being the right and the wrong type of woman.

“A good woman. How odd that the phrase has such a particular meaning. One might say “a good man” and mean anything – there are as many ways as being a good man, it seems, as there are of being a man at all. But there is only one way of being a good woman.”

Grey Dog by Elliot Gish

As spectacular as Ada’s transformation is, it is also a darkly disturbing and often uncomfortable scene to bear witness to. As the best horror does, Grey Dog leaves you wondering whether you have witnessed a supernatural experience or a total psychological breakdown.

Grey Dog is one of those novels that is going to stick with me for a long time. In part because it is truly unsettling and disturbing (I have a whole new fear of wolf spiders) but also because it is a visceral dissection of grief pertaining to loss, not only in the traditional sense, but one that is exclusive to womanhood. There is an inherent feeling of loss that comes from what society denies women. In Ada's case this grief completely breaks, and then remakes her. We are left in the end with a swift close of the curtains, there is no closure to be had, there is no clear view of the grey dog, all we know is that there is no going back for Ada Byrd.

“The God of outside waits for you. The grey dog. The God of outside. They are one and the same.”

Grey Dog by Elliot Gish

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?]

January 20, 2024: MLK Day and the Humanities

[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ve highlighted one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to this special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]

On three ways I’d connect the iconic Martin Luther King Jr. to the value of the Humanities.

1)      The Real King: I’ve shared that hyperlinked MLK Day post for most of this blog’s 14 (!) Januarys now, and so I wanted to make sure to include it in this year’s MLK post as well (and would ask you to check it out if you haven’t before and then come on back). But I would also say that the need to understand a subject like King in all (or at least a lot of) its breadth and depth, to get at nuance as well as essential elements, to hold complexity in our minds while still making the case for crucial takeaways, quite simply all the perspectives and ideas I argue for in that post, are at the heart of why we teach and learn the Humanities.

2)      The Written Word: For my 2021 MLK Day series, I wrote about a series of important King texts beyond the March on Washington speech (on which that Real King post focuses in part). Some of them were speeches, some essays, some books, and I didn’t come close to highlighting all or even most of his work with any of those genres. I know as an English Professor I might focus on the written word more than other historically minded types, but I don’t believe any historical figure better exemplifies the importance of the written word to American activism, social and cultural progress, and our collective story than does King. And where else you gonna get better equipped to connect with the written word than in Humanities courses?!

3)      The Task Ahead: In mid-December, the contrarian professor Tyler Austin Harper (who teaches Literature and Environmental Studies at Bates College) went viral for a combination of an Atlantic Monthly article and an accompanying Twitter thread critiquing the academic Humanities (at least at elite Ivy League institutions) for emphases on things like DEI, public engagement, and activism instead of learning, sharing, and creating knowledge. I agree with Harper that the latter goals remain paramount, and I hope in fact that my first two items in this post reflect layers to those goals. But I entirely disagree that these emphases are in any way either/or, and would indeed stress that one of our most significant goals is to help our students be publicly engaged activists, not for any particular issue (and certainly not with the same perspective as us), but in their own lives as citizens. No one in American history modeled that work better than did King, and so sharing him with our students, in all the ways I’m talking about in this post and many more besides, is one great example of helping them get to that point as well.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 19, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: Grad Historical Fiction

[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]

The first Graduate course I taught at Fitchburg State, in the summer after my first year there (Summer 2006), was my newly created American Historical Fiction: Theory and Practice course, and 19 students took it. It’s been quite a few years now since any of our Graduate English Studies courses have reached 10 students, the official number of a course to be considered sufficiently enrolled; I’m teaching my American Historical Fiction course again this Spring, and there’s literally no way it will get to 10 (5 is the likely maximum, and as of this writing it’s not there yet). When I took over as our Graduate Program Chair two and a half years ago, I wrote in this space about the serious enrollment crisis facing our program (and just about every MA program), and suffice to say those challenges have not in any way abated. We continue to pursue a variety of strategies for growing the program; for example, if you know anyone interested in the possibility of an MA in Literature or a Creative Writing Certificate, I would ask you to send them my way, and/or to encourage them to check out our upcoming webinar featuring past and present Graduate English Studies students that will be held on January 31^st from 5-6pm and also recorded for folks to watch any time (for more, you or they can email me!). A significant percentage of our Graduate students (past and present) are secondary educators, and I don’t think I need to say anything else about what that community illustrates about the value of the Humanities. But the broader truth is, a society in which folks can’t afford to think deeply about the kinds of questions that literary and cultural works ask us to engage is a society that will fall prey far more easily to the kinds of authoritarian impulses we’ve seen over the last decade. No higher stakes than that!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 18, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online

[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]

I could easily reiterate much of what I said in Tuesday’s post about my Am Lit II course in this post, as my Short Story syllabus includes some of the greatest American stories (from some of our most important authors) and all of them have a great deal to tell us about us and our world—perhaps most especially contemporary gems like Danielle Evans’ “Boys Go to Jupiter” and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Control Negro,” but certainly also enduring classics like James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues“ and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif.” But in this post I want to talk instead about the mode of instruction for this course, which is the latest example of something I’ve done at least once every semester since 2017: teaching an all-online course (this one is also accelerated, something I do roughly half the time with these online courses). My many posts here about teaching online, including the two hyperlinked in that last sentence, make clear the challenges that this mode presents when it comes to literature courses (and probably any courses, but those are the ones that I’ve had experience with), challenges in response to which I continue to work on strategies. But at the same time, what I’ve seen time and time again in these online courses, at least at Fitchburg State, is that many of the folks taking them quite simply would not be able to take in-person Day classes—they work full-time, they have families, they are in the military, they have circumstances of all kinds that make these courses not just the best but really the only option. One of the reasons I love teaching at a public university is the chance to help every American who wants a college education to get one—and what could be more vital to the Humanities and to America than finding ways to help even more folks do so?

Last preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 17, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy

[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]

For last year’s Spring Previews series, I wrote about my excitement to teach a new (to my syllabus) 21^st century fantasy novel in this course, Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (2011); for the first time ever I’m teaching Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy in back-to-back years, and am just as excited to teach Okorafor’s book now that I’ve seen how well students respond to it. It’s also a great example of the power of representation, of what it means to read a fantasy novel (a genre that for too long was dominated, at least stereotypically, by Anglo characters and authors alike) whose main characters are Nigerian and author is Nigerian American. That’s a crucial value of the Humanities, full stop. But I would add that Okorafor’s novel likewise illustrates another and just as important stake of both fantasy storytelling and a class like this—the power of the imagination. Her main character Sunny learns throughout the book just how much there is to the world beyond what she knew, and how much becoming part of all of it is necessary for her and the world’s future alike. I’d say the same for all of us, and reading and engaging speculative storytelling is one exciting and effective way to do just that.

Next preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 16, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature II

[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]

I’ve had the chance to teach a wide variety of courses in my 19 years at FSU (and have written about most of them at one time or another in this space, especially in semester previews and reflections series), but by far the most frequent have been the two American Literature surveys: Am Lit I: Origins to Civil War, recently renamed Slavery and Freedom) and Am Lit II (Civil War to Present, recently renamed Making and Remaking America). I love each and every chance to teach these courses, and while some of that unquestionably has to do with the fact that nearly all of my favorite authors and texts make an appearance in them, even more has to do with a deeper and more communal fact: that there’s no way to be an informed and engaged American citizen, something that every one of us (and certainly every young person) needs to be if we’re going to make it, without an awareness of and engagement with our history and culture, our literature and community, our national story in all its complexities. To repeat what I said in yesterday’s post, I don’t imagine I need to convince anyone reading this blog of that fact, and indeed would say making the case for those stakes of this work has been one of the most central goals of the blog. But it’s also one of the most significant desired outcomes of my teaching—not to get students to see any of those topics how I do, but to get them to see them at all, and then to see what they see and say about them themselves. La lucha continua in Am Lit II this semester!

Next preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 15, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: First-Year Writing II

[As this new semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment for teaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previews series I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the value of the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Day and the Humanities!]

First-Year Writing II, of which I’ll teach two sections this Spring as I do in most Spring semesters, is not quite part of “the Humanities” in the way that the other English Studies courses I’ll highlight in this week’s series are. This is a required course for all first-year students, part of their gateway into college in whatever their major/department might be, and as a result I (like all my colleagues) teach in it a variety of skills, including multiple writing genres but also reading, research and information literacy, critical thinking, and more. But there’s a reason why FYW is so consistently part of, or at the very least attached to and allied with, English Studies and related departments: because writing and those writing-adjacent skills I mentioned are at the core of English and the Humanities, of the ways those disciplines and all those who are part of them think and talk and engage with our world. My FYW II syllabus focuses quite overtly on “our world,” through a series of Units and Papers that connect to different layers to our 21^st century society, from ads to multimedia texts to digital/online identities and communities. But it does so, like every section of this course and every one within all Humanities departments, through reading and writing. Not sure I need to convince anyone here of the essential value of those things, but I’ll gladly go to the mat for them if need be!

Next preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 13-14, 2024: Vaughn Joy’s Hollywood Histories

[January 10^th marks the 100^th anniversary of the renaming, rebranding, and relaunch of Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconic American film studios. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Columbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to this special weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21^st century FilmStudiers!]

I couldn’t write a weeklong series on a Hollywood film studio without paying tribute to the most thoughtful current FilmStudier and historian of all things Hollywood: the business and industry, the political and social ramifications, and those fraught and fantastic films themselves. You can learn a lot more about Vaughn Joy’s work on her website and her prolific Twitter account; here I’ll just highlight a handful of exemplary examples:

1)      Vaughn written a couple of excellent articles (both available at that hyperlink) on the Paramount Decrees, monopolization, and Hollywood for the University of Chicago Business School’s Promarket magazine;

2)      She’s compiled a number of vital Twitter threads on different aspects of the past, present, and future of Hollywood, with many compiled in this thread of threads…

3)      …and a new addition to the list from December on the proposed and deeply problematic merger between Warner Brothers and Paramount;

4)      Her article on Miracle on 34^th Street for a special Christmas Studies issue of Comparative American Studies makes clear how she connects her multilayered analyses of films to those historical, social, and political contexts;

5)      And for lots more examples of those multilayered analyses, make sure to subscribe to her weekly Review Roulette newsletter!

I look forward to learning a lot more about Hollywood’s histories and future from Vaughn in 2024! Speaking of, a Spring semester previews series start Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hollywood histories or historians you’d highlight?