February 29, 2024: Leap Years: 1948

[In honor of this once-in-four-years phenomenon, I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy a few interesting leap years from American history.]

On a couple significant election contexts beyond “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Don’t get me wrong—“Dewey Defeats Truman” was a unique historical moment, and the shot of a jubilant Truman holding a copy of that November 3^rd Chicago Tribune is one of the more rightfully iconic 20^th century photographs. The moment also reminds us of just how much American newspapers have always been affiliated with partisan politics: the Tribune was a solidily Republican-leaning paper with no love lost for the incumbent Democrat, and its choice to allow veteran political analyst Arthur Sears Henning’s electoral prediction to determine their next day’s front page (the paper went to press prior to the close of polls on the West coast) was no doubt due at least in part to editorial wishful thinking. It’s easy to decry the partisanship of contemporary newspapers and news media (for more on which see this post), but in truth that’s been part of their identity throughout American history.

But even if the Tribune had gotten its prediction right, the 1948 presidential election would still be a hugely significant one. For one thing, there was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and his third-party run as a Dixiecrat (or, officially, States’ Rights Democrat). Few American histories have been more influential than the long, gradual realignment of politics, race, and region, a story that starts as far back as Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and extends right up to our present moment. Yet despite that century and a half long arc, the splintering of the Democratic Party at the 1948 national convention represents a striking and singular moment, a fulcrum on which those political and social realities permanently shifted. There were all sorts of complicating factors, not least Thurmond’s own secrets and hypocrises when it came to race—but at the broadest level, few election-year moments have echoed more dramatically than did the Dixiecrat revolt.

For another thing, both Truman and Dewey used the mass media in an unprecedented way in the campaign’s closing weeks. The two campaigns created short newsreel films that were played in movie theaters across the country, reach an estimated 65 million filmgoers each week. The first televised 1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon is often described as the first national political moment of the media age—or even as a moment that “changed the world”—and certainly its live broadcast to a national audience represented something new in American electoral politics. But since so much of politics in the media age has not been live, has instead comprised constructed and produced media images and narratives, it’s fair to say that Truman’s and Dewey’s competing movies likewise foreshadowed a great deal of what was to come in the subsequent half-century and more of elections.

Last leap year studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this year or other leap years that stand out to you?

February 28, 2024: Leap Years: 1904

[In honor of this once-in-four-years phenomenon, I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy a few interesting leap years from American history.]

On five of the many cultural legacies of the 1904 World’s Fair (also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition) in St. Louis.

1)      Fair Foods: As is often the case with large public events like fairs, the 1904 World’s Fair didn’t necessarily debut many of its striking innovations, but it did feature them and thus bring them to more widespread attention. That was never more true than with its culinary highlights, a partial list of which includes: hamburgers and hot dogs, ice cream cones, cotton candy, Dr. Pepper and 7Up sodas, and Puffed Wheat cereal. Visitors to this epic fair could truly eat their way into American history!

2)      Flight: The Wright Brothers’ first manned flight had taken place less than six months before the fair’s April 30^th opening, and as you’d expect flight became a central focus for the fair’s exhibits. That included the famous “Airship Contest,” which promised a $100,000 prize (nearly $3 million in our current society) to any flying machine which could successfully navigate the “Aeronautic Concourse” while traveling at 15 miles per hour or higher. Although no vehicle won the prize, the fair did feature a ground-breaking act of flight, as Thomas Scott Baldwin and Roy Knabenshue’s dirigible became the first such airship to fly in public.

3)      The Summer Olympics: The modern version of the Olympic Games began in 1896 in Athens, and the second games were held in conjunction with the 1900 Paris Exposition. So it made sense that the first games held outside of Europe would be similarly paired with the 1904 Fair, but in fact Chicago was initially awarded the 1904 games and they were only moved to St. Louis when the fair organizers threatened to hold an alternate contest. Partly for that reason, and partly because St. Louis was more difficult to reach, Olympics founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin did not attend, nor did many international athletes (nearly 600 of the 651 competing athletes came from North America). But holding the games outside Europe at all, and in the US specifically, was a significant step nonetheless, and one tied to the 1904 World’s Fair.

4)      Kate Chopin: Chopin, one of America’s most talented turn of the 20^th century authors and both a native and longtime resident of St. Louis, was only 54 when she attended the fair on August 20^th (she had bought a season ticket and had attended many prior times as well). That day was one of the hottest of the summer, however, and that night Chopin called her son complaining of a severe headache. It is believed that she had a cerebral hemorrhage; the next day she fell unconscious, and she died without waking on August 22^nd. She would be prominently buried in the city’s Calvary Cemetery, one more reflection—as was the World’s Fair itself—of the deep interconnections between St. Louis and this ground-breaking literary voice.

5)      “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis”: I don’t want to end on that tragic note, so here’s one more way the World’s Fair continued to echo into American culture long after it closed its gates on December 1^st. The aforementioned song was written in response to the fair and recorded by many artists over the years (perhaps the first being Billy Murray’s version, recorded while the fair was still ongoing), but became especially prominent through Judy Garland’s performance in the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis. Thanks to that film, and the late 20^th century Broadway musical adaptation of the same title, the 1904 World’s Fair seems destined to stay in our collective memories beyond even these various, striking influences.

Next leap year studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this year or other leap years that stand out to you?

February 27, 2024: Leap Years: 1848

[In honor of this once-in-four-years phenomenon, I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy a few interesting leap years from American history.]

On how three distinct events within a 10-day period helped change America and the world.

On January 24^th, 1848, James Wilson Marshall found gold on the property of Johann/John Sutter’s in-construction sawmill on the American River near the small town of Coloma, California. Marshall had been gradually migrating West from his New Jersey birthplace since 1834, and in 1845 reached the settlement of Sutter’s Fort, a cross-cultural outpost in the Mexican territory of Alta California. Sutter, the town founder and alcalde, employed Marshall to help run his businesses, although that work was interrupted by Marshall’s 1846-1847 service in John C. Frémont’s California Battalion during the Mexican American War (the end of which, on which more in a moment, brought California into the United States). When Marshall returned he began work helping construct a new sawmill for Sutter, and in the process he found gold in the river nearby. Over the next two years the resulting Gold Rush would bring hundreds of thousands of settlers to California, both from elsewhere in the US and from around the world, and forever change the arc of American and world history.

Just a week after Marshall’s earth-shattering find, his former military commander received far less positive news. Frémont, whose Mexican American War activities were controversial to say the least, had been undergoing a military trial for charges of mutiny, disobedience of orders, and other related offenses since his August 1847 arrest at Fort Leavenworth, and on January 31^st, 1848 he was court-martialed on the charges of disobedience toward a superior officer and military misconduct. President James Polk, who had been president and thus commander-in-chief throughout the war and Frémont’s activities, granted him a partial pardon, commuting his dishonorable discharge and reinstating him into the army. But Frémont found that outcome unsatisfactory and resigned his commission, moving back to California and continuing to lead exploratory excursions there (while also profiting from the Gold Rush, natch). In 1850 he became one of the first two Senators from California, running as a Free Soil Democrat—and that splinter party’s evolution into the Republican Party took Frémont with it, and in 1856 he became the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate, a vital step toward 1860, Abraham Lincoln, and the coming of the Civil War.

The Gold Rush and the Civil War were without question two of the most prominent American historical events of the mid-19^th century; but just two days after Frémont’s court-martial, another, equally influential historical event took place: the February 2^nd, 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I’ve written about that treaty and its pernicious (and ironic, given that the treaty itself guaranteed citizenship and rights for Mexican Americans who remained in the new US territories) effects for Mexican Americans many times, including in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column and this blog post (as well as this HuffPost piece on the best literary representation of the treaty and its effects, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don [1885]). But of course the treaty did not just affect those American communities—it also fundamentally reshaped the nation, not only through all the territories (and very quickly, in California’s case, states) it added to the US, but also through all the new communities (including Mexican Americans but also numerous native nations and Chinese Americans among others) it likewise made part of the expanding US. Few, if any, individual American days have had more lasting national significance.

Next leap year studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this year or other leap years that stand out to you?

February 26, 2024: Leap Years: 1816

[In honor of this once-in-four-years phenomenon, I wanted to highlight and AmericanStudy a few interesting leap years from American history.]

On significant global, cross-cultural, and national trends within a single year.

You would think that a catastrophic historic phenomenon wherein the eruption of a volcano caused a drastic shift in global temperatures for an entire year would be at least somewhat well known. But speaking for myself, I only learned about the “Year without a Summer”—in which the record-breaking 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora caused severe climate change and freezing temperatures throughout 1816, leading to the even more evocative nickname “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death”—just over a year ago, while researching this post on the Panic of 1819. But whether we remember it now or not, this global catastrophe had drastic effects throughout the world in 1816, including a number of important ones in the United States (along with the arc that culminated in the aforementioned 1819 panic): from the failure of corn crops throughout New England to the mass migrations to the Midwest that led to statehood for Indiana (in 1816) and Illinois (in 1818) to the eventual founding of the Mormon Church (as Joseph Smith’s family were one of countless residents who left Vermont farms during this year, in their case moving to the community of Palmyra, NY that would be so foundational in his personal and spiritual journey).

It’s hard to imagine that any other 1816 story could be as significant as that global and catastrophic one, but of course the year featured many other American events, including ones that likewise influenced ongoing histories and trends. A number of them reflected the complicated, evolving Early Republic relationship between the US government and Native American nations. For the first few decades after the Constitution, the federal government dealt with native nations in individual and distinct ways, treating them as the unique communities they were, and 1816 saw an exemplary (if as ever fraught) such moment: the August signing of the Treaty of St. Louis between the US government and the nations within the Three Fires Confederacy (the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi). Yet another 1816 treaty foreshadowed the drastic and tragic change in these US-native relationships: on March 22 the federal government signed a treaty with the Cherokee, agreeing to return land that had been illegally seized as part of an 1814 conflict between the US and the Creek nation; but General Andrew Jackson, who had been involved in that 1814 war, refused to honor the treaty, a blatant step toward his eventual, exclusionary presidential policy of Indian Removal.

Jackson would not be elected president until 1828, but 1816 saw its own influential presidential election (as has every American Leap Year since 1788). In that contest, James Monroe, who had been serving as Secretary of State in the administration of his fellow Virginian founder James Madison, received the Democratic-Republican nomination and handily bested the Federalist nominee, New York Senator (and also a Constitution signer) Rufus King. The size of Monroe’s victory was due in part to a splintering and disappearing Federalist Party: King would be the party’s last presidential nominee, and for the next few years the US had only one national political party, leading to the nickname “The Era of Good Feelings.” As I wrote in that hyperlinked post, there were of course tensions and divisions beneath that seeming unity, and many of them would coalesce ahead of Jackson’s 1828 election. Yet for at least a decade, the United States became a one-party system, another striking legacy of this important Leap Year.

Next leap year studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this year or other leap years that stand out to you?

February 24-25, 2024: Biden and Anti-Immigrant Narratives

[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Leading up to this special weekend post on our own moment.]

I don't normally write posts here in immediate response to current events; that's somewhat more for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. And I'm not entirely doing that in this case either. But a couple days ago I had a Twitter thread go viral, and it was on a topic very much related to the week's series: on a very frustrating way in which President Biden is giving into anti-immigrant narratives and xenophobia; and on the longstanding legacy of such moments in American history. I hope you'll check out that thread, and I hope we can all resist these narratives and argue for inclusive alternatives. 

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

February 23, 2024: Prejudicial Non-Favorites: London’s Fighting Words

[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]

On an ugly moment when white supremacy took precedence over athletic supremacy.

I was super excited when I was invited to review Cecelia Tichi’s book Jack London: A Writer’s Fight for a Better America (2015) for the American Historical Review. There were lots of reasons for my excitement, including how important Tichi’s book Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987) was for my development as an AmericanStudier, and how much I appreciated her goal in this new project of recuperating London as a public intellectual (and thus a model for that role in 21^st century America as well). But I was also just super excited to learn more about London, whom I knew largely as the author of hugely popular boys’ adventures stories about wolves and sailors and that one incredibly realistic and depressing story about a man who needs to build a fire in order to keep from freezing to death and the dog who becomes a witness to the unfolding horrors (all of which of course was a central rationale behind Tichi’s attempt to recreate the more socially and politically engaged sides of London as both a writer and a public figure).

I’m not trying to dwell on my one criticism of Tichi’s book here, but it turned out that one of the things I learned about London was a frustratingly bigoted moment that Tichi understandably but problematically minimized in her project. She did note (if still to my mind a bit too briefly) London’s lifelong fascination with Social Darwinism and that philosophy’s consistently hierarchical and racist worldviews; but it was in response to the controversial (at least for white supremacists) rise of early 20^th century African American boxing champion Jack Johnson that London would articulate much more overtly his own racism. In December 1908 Johnson became the first African American world heavyweight champ, defeating the reigning champ Tommy Burns, and that historic moment led London to implore a retired white champion to return to the ring and defend his race. Covering the 1908 fight as a syndicated sportswriter, London concluded his column, “But now one thing remains. Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his [Burbank, CA] Alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson's face. Jeff, it's up to you. The White Man must be rescued.”

Initially reticent, Jeffries did eventually emerge from retirement, facing Johnson in a July 4^th, 1910 championship bout in Reno. Jeffries was by this time so out of shape that “bout” probably isn’t the word, though, as he was quickly knocked down for the first time in his career and threw in the towel at that point. Given that white Americans often find reasons to riot in both sporting events and racism (although not usually at the same time), it’s unfortunately no surprise that Johnson’s victory led to riots around the country that left a handful of African Americans dead and many more injured (riots, I’ll note, that to this day, when they’re remembered at all, are usually and all too typically described with that deeply loaded phrase “race riot”). Perhaps it should be no more surprising that when an African American athlete reached the pinnacle of his sport, theories of physical prowess and the survival of the fittest gave way to white supremacist bigotry and ignorance, even from an otherwise intelligent and (as Tichi convincingly argues) socially progressive figure like Jack London. But it’s still frustrating to see how powerful such white supremacist nonsense can be—although, to send this series on a positive note, it’s also deeply satisfying to see it literally and figuratively knocked on its ass.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?

February 22, 2024: Prejudicial Non-Favorites: Harlan’s Exclusions

[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]

On a historical and a contemporary lesson from an iconic Justice’s prejudices.

In this post on the United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) Supreme Court decision, I highlighted Justice John Marshall Harlan’s ugly and apparently lifelong exclusionary racisms (both in and beyond his work on the Court) toward Chinese Americans. As I’ve done often in this week’s series (I guess when your blog is past 4100 posts over 13.5 years you often have thought already about the things you’re continuing to think about!), I’d ask you to check out that post for the key quotes and details about Harlan’s ideology to which I’m responding here, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts.

Welcome back! Two years ago, historian Peter S. Canellos published a new biography of Harlan, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero (2022). I haven’t read Canellos’ book yet, so I don’t want to assume anything about any aspect of it, but that hyperlinked official Simon & Schuster description calls Harlan “the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US.” In many ways, especially in his frequent Supreme Court dissents that are apparently Canellos’ principal subject, Harlan did indeed play that role. But the historical lesson here is that white supremacy is a multi-tentacled thing, and I mean that not only about the great legal mind who also had such a racist blindspot toward Chinese Americans (including, as I noted in my above post, in his most famous such dissent), but also about the implicit exclusion of Chinese Americans from Simon & Schuster’s phrase “the nation’s prime defender.” Not for that part of our national community, he wasn’t.

About a month ago, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was caught on camera telling a group of protesters advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza that they should “go back to China.” While there were and are some specific and complicated contexts for Pelosi’s comments related to the funding sources for this prominent protest movement, the bottom line is that a national political leader—and one who during her career in the House represented San Francisco at that—using the phrase “Go back to China” in any context is a very, very bad look, one that echoes much of the worst of anti-Chinese American prejudices and exclusions (including Harlan’s). As we’ve seen time and again in recent years, most especially in the responses to Covid, such anti-Chinese American attitudes and narratives are very much still with us, and indeed seem shared across much of the political spectrum in striking ways (compared to how fully Trump and the MAGA movement exemplify certain other longstanding prejudices in our current moment, that is). One more reason why Justice Harlan’s racisms are not only a non-favorite moment, but one from which we can and must learn a great deal.

Last non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?

February 21, 2024: Prejudicial Non-Favorites: Anthony’s Priorities

[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]

On a collective and an individual frustration with an inspiring figure’s worst quote.

In a long-ago column for my gig at Talking Points Memo on white feminism’s frequently and frustratingly racist histories, I highlighted a particularly crappy line from legendary suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony: “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” Check out both that hyperlinked column of mine and that excellent hyperlinked story on race and the suffrage movement if you would, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on this quote and moment.

Welcome back! As I traced in that column, far too often both particular activist organizations and the suffrage movement as a whole echoed Anthony’s perspective and excluded African Americans. And that’s a significant layer to what makes that perspectives so profoundly frustrating and counter-productive—as with so many issues in American history (indeed, as with all of them, like all of our history overall), there was no actual way to separate out African Americans from the community as a whole, as African American women were just as much part of the push for women’s suffrage as any other group. The only possible arguments for treating race and gender as separate came down to blatant racism and white supremacy, and for a movement dedicated to equality and justice to endorse those ideologies so consistently and fully was nothing short of tragic.

It’s also tragic, on a smaller but not insignificant scale, that a figure as impressive as Susan B. Anthony took part in those practices and perspectives. I know that she knew better, especially when it comes to her long-term relationship with Frederick Douglass, to whom she was connected through their shared community of Rochester among many other ways. As I highlighted in this post, right at the end of Douglass’ life (literally on his last day), he and Anthony met to try to bury the hatchet and strategize about the women’s rights movement of which he was such a lifelong ally. But as far as I’ve seen, Anthony never publicly took back her quote about race and suffrage, and she certainly never became a public advocate for African American voting rights (in the way, again, that Douglass was such an impassioned advocate of women’s voting rights). That makes this one telling quote an even more frustrating non-favorite moment for sure.

Next non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?

February 20, 2024: Prejudicial Non-Favorites: Lincoln’s Mass Execution

[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]

I said much of what I’d want to say about this non-favorite moment in Chapter 3 of my book Of Thee I Sing, so will quote that section here:

“Such mythic patriotisms did not only target African Americans, and indeed the Early Republic myths of expansion and Manifest Destiny remained in force during the Civil War, as illustrated by another horrific historical event: the December 26th, 1862 execution of 38 Dakota Sioux Native Americans in Mankota, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in American history. Throughout 1862 white settlers continued to pour into Minnesota (which had become a state in May 1858) and onto native lands, while the U.S. govern­ment violated treaties with multiple tribes and left many such communities starving after failing to deliver food in “payment” for that stolen land. In August, Dakota Sioux Chief Little Crow led a six-week uprising against these invaders, a revolt framed throughout the U.S. not as an echo of the American Revolution nor as an oppressed people’s quest for liberty and justice, but as an illegal war against the expanding nation. When the uprising was put down more than 300 Dakota men were sentenced to death by Governor Henry Hast­ings Sibley; while President Lincoln commuted a number of the sentences, many of those men nonetheless remained imprisoned for life, and 38 others were executed on Lincoln’s orders. The Sioux and Winnebago nations were subsequently removed from the state to distant reservations, once again on Lincoln’s authority. The era’s mythic patriotisms did not just divide North from South, but continued to divide the expanding United States into those communities perceived as part of that idealized nation and those overtly and violently excluded from it.

Lincoln’s prominent role in both that horrific mass execution and the subsequent extension of the Jacksonian Indian Removal policy reminds us that even Civil War era celebratory patriotisms which embraced the United States in opposition to the Confederacy could too easily be wedded to their own mythic patriotisms, with the same potential to discriminate and exclude. That’s an important rejoinder to any attempt to entirely distinguish the pe­riod’s Union and Confederate celebratory patriotisms.”

Obviously this horrific moment connects to deeper and broader (and far more longstanding and ongoing) American issues and histories than just President Lincoln, and Lincoln did commute a number of the death sentences. But to my mind neither of those things absolves Lincoln of his role in America’s largest mass execution, and one entirely linked to white supremacy (as it was to the subsequent removal policy for which Lincoln likewise bears responsibility). Ain’t none of us clean, to quote one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite cultural works about American history and white supremacy, and this non-favorite moment is a frustrating but important reminder that that maxim applies to even our most best president.

Next non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?

February 19, 2024: Prejudicial Non-Favorites: Jefferson and Banneker

[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]

On three frustrating layers to a founding American exchange.

Back in August 2022, I dedicated one of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns to the great Benjamin Banneker, and included there not only his inspiring letter to Thomas Jefferson but Jefferson’s deeply frustrating responses. Check out that column if you would, and then come on back for a couple more layers to this frustrating founding moment.

Welcome back! Besides the fact that Jefferson was given and dropped the ball on such a clear opportunity to transcend the racism “of his times” (which as I argue in that column was never the only option “in his times” in any case), there are a couple other deeply frustrating things about how my hometown icon responded to Banneker in this moment. For one thing, I’d contrast Jefferson here with what I wrote about Ben Franklin’s evolution on the issue of immigration in this long-ago post. We all hold prejudices at times in our lives, and perhaps especially when we’re younger, and one of our most important life goals thus has to be to continue learning and growing in those ways (among many others of course). Yet when Jefferson was presented with a pitch-perfect opportunity to do so, he instead (after a somewhat encouraging initial response) retreated into and even deepened his prejudices toward African Americans. For such an intelligent man, that’s a strikingly ignorant thing to do.

And speaking of intelligence: as I wrote in this other Saturday Evening Post column, one of Jefferson’s truly inspiring achievements was the founding of the nation’s first non-sectarian public university, a space dedicated the freedom of thought as well as religion (both far from a given in the early 19^th century). It’s true (and important) that that educational and civic community also featured, and indeed depended upon, enslaved people in ways that contrasted quite clearly with its ideals. But just as we can’t let the presence of slavery in every part of America’s founding keep us from fighting for the nation’s ideals (as enslaved people themselves did time and time again), neither should the University of Virginia’s frustrating flaws elide the importance of what an “academical village” (as Jefferson dubbed the institution) could mean for individual and collective thought. That Jefferson himself failed to live up to those thoughtful ideals in his exchange with Benjamin Banneker is one more reason this moment is a decided non-favorite for me.

Next non-favorite tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?

February 17-18, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: Five New Classics

[I know it might not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not just because it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need a little help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ve quickly highlighted the AmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leading to this special post on recent ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’s tunes in comments, please!]

1)      “Prizefighter” (2012): I’ve written about my favorite 21^st century rock band The Killers once before in this space, focusing there (as you would expect) on their most AmericanStudying song. The Killers don’t tend to do unironic love songs—they’re more a fan of the ironic variety, a la their biggest hit “Mr. Brightside”—but this one, a bonus track on their best album Battle Born (2012), delivers a high-octane burst of pure adoration that should be on any Valentine’s Day playlist.

2)      “Dead Sea” (2012): For a long time, I knew The Lumineers through their one huge hit, “Ho Hey” (also, like this track, from 2012’s self-titled debut album). That’s more of a breakup song than a love song, if a particularly catchy and uniquely written one to be sure. But as I’ve taken a much deeper dive into the band over the last few years, I’ve learned that they can express the full gamut of human emotions through equally striking songwriting, including one of the purest expressions of love as partnership I know, “Dead Sea.”

3)      “Fire and the Flood” (2015): I don’t have as much personal history with the next two songs; I just think they’re great 21^st century love songs that belong on any V-Day list! My favorite thing about Australian singer-songwriter Vance Joy’s “Fire and the Flood” is the way he gives the floor to the speaker’s significant other for the first part of a call-and-response, climactic bridge: “‘Now listen here,’ she said/‘Boy when you know, you’ll know’/And I know.” What else do I need to say?

4)      “Roller Coaster” (2016): When I teach poetry I talk a lot with students about metaphor, and more exactly about the concept of an extended metaphor, one that drives an entire poem or text through its symbolic meanings. I’m not sure there’s a better one in 21^st century love songs than Bon Jovi’s “Roller Coaster,” as exemplified by the song’s chorus: “Hold on tight, slide a little closer/Up so high, stars on our shoulders/Time flies by, don’t close your eyes/Kiss by kiss love is like a thrill ride/What goes up might take us upside down/Life ain’t a merry-go-round/It’s a roller coaster.” Well said, JBJ and company—and well modeled for all those students of poetry!

5)      “Before You” (2022): I said everything I need to say about Benson Boone, this beautiful love song, and my connection to him through my sons in that post from last year’s Valentine’s week series. Check it out, and much love, all!

Anti-favorites series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other love songs, present or past, you’d AmericanStudy?

February 16, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “Happy”

[I know it might not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not just because it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need a little help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight the AmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leading to a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’s tunes in comments, please!]

You didn’t really think I could get through a whole songtastic series without including Bruce, didya? When Springsteen was young, he was—as he himself has since admitted quite honestly and thoughtfully—not great when it came to romantic relationships, and thus often not at his songwriting best when depicting them (although there are still some greats on the early records). But in the decades since, Springsteen has matured and become a true master of what I would call the “adult love song”—songs about both the gaps between romantic ideals and human realities and (most importantly and to this listener inspiringly) the ways we try to navigate and make the most of our relationships and lives nonetheless. For my money, no song has ever captured those layers better than does “Happy” (1992), especially in its final verse: “We’re born in this world, darling, with few days/And trouble never far behind/Man and woman circle each other in a cage/A cage that’s been handed down the line/Lost and running ‘neath a million dead stars/Tonight let’s shed our skins and slip these bars.” Word, Boss.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 15, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “Storybook Love”

[I know it might not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not just because it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need a little help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight the AmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leading to a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’s tunes in comments, please!]

It’s no coincidence that the first song I highlighted in this week’s series, “At Last,” made its debut as part of a feature film, as the relationship between love songs and movies is a longstanding and multilayered one (far beyond just great soundtracks for romantic comedies, although that’s part of the story to be sure). Mostly those are existing songs that the films adapt to their own purposes, but sometimes an original love song is written for a film—and an even rarer sometimes that song is both beautiful on its own and a pitch-perfect accompaniment to the movie in question. Checking off every one of those boxes for me is “Storybook Love,” a song written by singer-songwriter Willy DeVille and arranged by Dire Straits’ lead singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler for the closing credits of The Princess Bride (the beloved 1987 Rob Reiner film for which Knopfler wrote the whole soundtrack). My favorite thing about “Storybook Love” is that it is a love song about love songs, and more exactly about how those songs (and films as well) present an idealized vision of romantic love and partnerships—but how, as I can very well attest, reality does occasionally and amazingly live up to those ideals.

Last love song tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 14, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “You Can’t Hurry Love”

[I know it might not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not just because it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need a little help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight the AmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leading to a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’s tunes in comments, please!]

Every corner of American popular music has produced a shit-ton of love songs—maybe if you’re lucky (or cursed?) I’ll devote a future weeklong series to boy bands, for example; don’t even front, you know you want it that way—but I’m not sure any community did so more consistently and more successfully than Motown. The artists and groups signed by Barry Gordy’s Motown Records released a laundry list of phenomenal love songs, and any and all of them could work for today’s post (I’ve definitely got more Marvin Gaye Studying to do, to name just one example). But I don’t think any artists better embody Motown than did The Supremes, especially during their decade with the legendary Diana Ross before she left the group in 1970 to pursue her solo career; and among their many hit love songs (and hits period) I would single out for this Valentine’s Day the beautiful and wise “You Can’t Hurry Love” (1966). What I especially love about “You Can’t Hurry Love” is that it reminds us that love songs aren’t simply or at least not necessarily about romantic love, but also about the other forms and expressions of love in our lives—such as the speaker’s mother in this song, and they her advice represents a loving legacy she has left with the speaker as she navigates her own life and quest for companionship. May we remember all those we love and who love us on this V-Day!

Next love song tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 13, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “Wake Up Little Susie”

[I know it might not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not just because it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need a little help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight the AmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leading to a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’s tunes in comments, please!]

The early years of rock ‘n roll featured plenty of conventional love ballads, as every form of pop culture always has and probably always will. But this new genre also included more boundary-pushing love songs that embodied its youthful and controversial elements—or that might have if we could only figure out what they were saying. Right on the border between those two tones we find The Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” (1957), a song about a pair of innocent young lovebirds who accidentally fell asleep at the movies and now will be seen as scandalous sex fiends by family and friends—or maybe it’s about how two appropriately lustful teens gave in to nature’s call and had sex, and now have to concoct a plausible story to fit themselves back into conventional images of love. After all love songs, like love and life, have and help us connect to all those layers—and if we can sing and bop along while we do, well there’s not much better than that!

Next love song tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 12, 2024: AmericanStudying Love Songs: “At Last”

[I know it might not be very 2024 of me to say, but love is in the air, and not just because it’s Valentine’s week. If you’re feeling it too, or maybe if you need a little help getting into the V-Day spirit, this week I’ll quickly highlight the AmericanStudies stories behind a handful of our great past love songs, leading to a special post on current ones that have hit my heart. Add your Valentine’s tunes in comments, please!]

For most of us, Etta James’ “At Last” (1960) is the quintessential wedding song, a timeless expression of what it means to finally find the love we’ve been seeking. I’m not here to challenge that perspective—wouldn’t be very Valentine’s week of me!—but rather to remind us that behind even the most timeless tunes are some specific contexts and histories, details and stories that can only enhance our appreciation of the art. In the case of “At Last,” that certainly includes James’ own striking, fraught, and ultimately moving and inspiring life story, an arc that reminds us that finding what we seek—and then choosing and celebrating it when we do—is a daily and lifelong goal. But it also includes the song’s multiple and very telling 20^th century histories—its origins as a performance by the Glenn Miller orchestra for the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade; its subsequent release on a 1942 “Victory Disc” from the U.S. War Department; and its numerous versions beyond James’, including a 1952 release from Miller’s trumpeter Ray Anthony that was the highest-charting version before James made it her own.

Next love song tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other love songs you’d AmericanStudy?

February 10-11, 2024: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: My Pitch!

[For many years now, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to blog about sports histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity and leading up to my pitch for a new such film. Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]

First, full disclosure—there’s probably no story from American history that I’ve spent more time trying to add to our collective memories than that of the Celestials, the 1870s semi-pro baseball team comprised of students from the Chinese Educational Mission in Hartford. I did so most fully in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, but also for this TeachItCT lesson plan and in my third book, among other places.

As I’ve shared multiple times in this space, my in-progress seventh book likewise focuses on the Celestials, and specifically on their triumphant, tragic, and very telling September 1881 final game on a San Francisco sandlot. I’m still hopeful that that book will find a home (and would welcome any ideas for places it might or people I could talk to about it!), but because I’m so determined to get this story out there in any and all possible ways, I’m certainly also considering other media through which the story of the Celestials and their last game might be told. That definitely includes a limited-run podcast, for example, which is something I’m just in the early stages of thinking through but am excited to consider further for sure.

But as this week’s series has reminded us, there’s no better venue through which to tell the most exciting and inspiring sports stories than film. And I can’t lie, I’ve long had the basic idea in mind for a screenplay on the Celestials—with that last game as the throughline, and then with flashbacks to the experiences of the players, their fellow students in the stands, the city of San Francisco and its anti-Chinese movement and massacre, Chinese Educational Mission founder Yung Wing, and more. I’m thinking John Sayles to direct, but in whoever’s hands, I believe the story of the Celestials’ last game could be one of the great American sports films, historical dramas, and much more. Let’s make it happen, fellow AmericanStudiers!

Valentine’s series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. So what do you think of my pitch?!

February 9, 2024: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Remember the Titans

[For many years now, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to blog about sports histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity, leading up to my pitch for a new such film. Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]

On the over-the-top scene that really shouldn’t work, but somehow does.

About midway through Remember the Titans (2000), Denzel Washington’s Coach Herman Boone takes the players on his newly integrated Virginia high school football team (who have gone to Pennsylvania for training camp) on a midnight jog. The team ends up, to their and the audience’s surprise, on the grounds of Gettsyburg National Military Park, where Boone gives a speech on the Civil War battle and both its continuing resonances in and potential lessons for the team’s and its community’s struggles with racial discord and division. The speech and scene ends with Boone’s fervent hope that perhaps, if the players and team can learn the lessons that the battle’s dead soldiers have to offer, they can “learn to play this game like men.”

For anybody who has any sense of the horrific awfulness that was Gettysburg, or just the horrific awfulness that was the Civil War in general (and I’m not necessarily disagreeing with Ta-Nehisi Coates when he argues that the war wasn’t tragic, but it sure was bloody and awful in any case, and never more so that on days like Gettysburg’s), this evocation of the battle’s dead for a football team’s lessons feels a bit ridiculous. For that matter, if we think about the most famous speech delivered at the battlefield, in tribute to those honored dead and in an effort to hallow that ground (a phrase that Boone overtly echoes in his own closing thoughts), the filmmakers’ choice to put Boone’s speech in the same spot (and I don’t know whether the Gettysburg speech took place in the real-life histories on which the film is based, but it seems from this article as if it didn’t and it’s a choice in the film in any case) feels even more slight and silly in comparison to that transcendent historical moment.

So the scene really shouldn’t work, not for this AmericanStudier at least—but I have to admit that it did when I saw the movie, and did again when I watched the scene to write this post. Partly that’s due to the performances—Denzel is always Denzel, and the main kids are uniformly great as well (including a young Wood Harris, later Avon Barksdale on The Wire). Partly it’s because great sports films are particularly good at taking what is by definition cliché (all those conventions I mentioned in yesterday’s post) and making it feel new and powerful in spite of that familiarity. And partly, ironically given those Gettysburg contrasts, it’s because of the history—because this football team and its story does connect to America’s tortured and far too often tragic legacy of racial division and discrimination, and because the story and thus the film represents one of those moments when we transcended that legacy and reached a more perfect union. When sports, and sports films, are at their best, they have that potential, which is one main reason why we keep going back to them.

My sports movie pitch this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?