August 31-September 1, 2024: August 2024 Recap

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

July 29: Martin Sheen Studying: Youthful Origin Points: A series for the legend’s 84^th birthday kicks off with three foundational moments that helped make the man.

July 30: Martin Sheen Studying: Catholic Activism: The series continues with a great example of art imitating life.

July 31: Martin Sheen Studying: Estévez Legacies: Two important ways that Sheen’s birth and legal name have carried on, as the series rolls on.

August 1: Martin Sheen Studying: The West Wing: The iconic actor was almost President Bartlett, and two ways to AmericanStudy the one who was.

August 2: Martin Sheen Studying: The series concludes with two ways the sitcom pushed our cultural boundaries, and one way it happily did not.

August 3-4: A Proudly Tearful Tribute: Before we dropped my older son at college, a tribute to a few of the countless ways the boys have inspired me.

August 5-18: Birthday Bests: I won’t link them all individually here, but this was the start of my annual series highlighting some favorite posts from each of the blog’s now 14 (!) years.

August 19: NashvilleStudying: Three Origin Points: A series on my son’s new hometown kicks off with three communities that together built the city.

August 20: NashvilleStudying: Cholera: The series continues with how a devastating epidemic connected Nashville to the nation and the world.

August 21: NashvilleStudying: The Fisk Jubilee Singers: They were from Memphis, but I couldn’t resist dedicating one post in the series to this amazing cultural group.

August 22: NashvilleStudying: Altman’s Film: AmericanStudies contexts for three of the many character in Robert Altman’s sweeping masterpiece, as the series sings on.

August 23: NashvilleStudying: Kane Brown: And speaking of singing, a tribute to our favorite new country artist who’s a lot more.

August 26: American Catholics: Maryland: In honor of Elizabeth Ann Seton’s 250^th birthday, a series on American Catholics kicks off with ideals and realities of the Catholic colony.

August 27: American Catholics: Anti-Catholic Prejudice: The series continues with the frustratingly long reach of conspiracy theories.

August 28: American Catholics: Elizabeth Ann Seton: For her 250^th, three telling stages in the life of the first American Saint.

August 29: American Catholics: The Catholic Worker: Three telling details about Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s groundbreaking newspaper, as the series rolls on.

August 30: American Catholics: Carlo Acutis: The series concludes with what’s familiar, what’s new, and what’s complicated about the young man likely to be the first 21^st century Saint.

Fall Semester previews start Monday,

Ben

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

August 30, 2024: American Catholics: Carlo Acutis

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

[NB. I’m stretching the limits of AmericanStudying with today’s blog subject, as he was born in England and lived most of his tragically brief life in Italy. But his maternal great-grandmother was from New York City, and plus my wife thoughtfully suggested this excellent conclusion to the week’s series so I’m going with it!]

On what’s familiar about the young man likely to be the newest Saint, what’s new, and what’s especially complicated.

1)      Saintly Simplifications: I’m quite sure that the childhood stories told about any individual who ended up canonized as a Catholic Saint would read like a fairy tale, but it’s particularly striking to read such saintly simplifications for a kid who lived from 1991 to 2006. My personal favorite such sentence from Acutis’ Wikipedia page is definitely, “Also an animal lover, he became very angry when he encountered young people who trod on lizards.” But a close second, from that same section “Acts of Kindness,” is, “While at the beach, he used an inflatable boat, snorkel, and fins to retrieve rubbish in the ocean.” As the father of two young men who care deeply about both the environment and our animal friends, I don’t doubt that Acutis also had such views and put them into practice at times; but he was also a boy, not a saint, and descriptions or details that lean too hard into the latter make him feel like a constructed persona rather than the real human being he undoubtedly was.

2)      Digital Details: A significant part of Acutis’ real humanity was that he grew up in the internet age, and to my mind the most interesting details of his life and identity reflect those digital contexts. He was apparently both drawn to and skilled at the use of coding and web design programs like Dreamweaver and Java, and despite passing away at the age of 15 he created two full websites: first a page for his parish, Milan’s Santa Maria Segreta; and then, far more fully and tellingly for his future canonization, a site Acutis began in 2004 and launched in October 2006 (just days before his death) that catalogued all of the world’s Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions among other Catholic connections. It stands to reason that the “first Millenial Saint” (as Acutis is frequently known) would have such digital details in his biography, but this was clearly a kid who was particularly and meaningfully interested in the possibilities of linking the internet to Catholicism.

3)      Church Controversies: Acutis’ story is an interesting and impressive one, but it is of course far from the most prominent 21^st century story about young people and the Catholic Church. I’m hesitant to say too much more than that here, both because this has got to be one of the most fraught subjects I’ve ever included in a post (a competitive list to be sure) and because I know we’re all already quite familiar with that subject. But I can’t conclude a series on American Catholicism without acknowledging this story—which was very much initially uncovered by American reporters, and has featured countless American priests and churches—and I have to admit being at least a little suspicious of the timing of the Vatican’s plans to canonize a teenage boy. Of course canonization will continue to be a thing for the Catholic Church, and of course that process will likely include both modern figures and younger people. But at the very least, we can’t let this inspiring individual draw our attention away from what is unquestionably the more overarching and significant story.

August Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

August 29, 2024: American Catholics: The Catholic Worker

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

Three telling details about Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s groundbreaking newspaper.

1)      The Origins: Day and Maurin published the first issue of The Catholic Worker on May Day 1933, launching not just this new periodical but really the whole of their Catholic Worker Movement in the process. Apparently Maurin preferred the name The Catholic Radical, but Day, rooted in both her prior experiences with Communism and her overall sense of solidarity with all who labor in any way, successfully advocated for calling it The Catholic Worker. Clearly that chosen title and the newspaper’s contents (largely written by Day, both in that initial issue and for most of them thereafter) did resonate with readers, perhaps especially in that Depression-era moment, and after an initial print run of 2500 copies (which Day sold in New York’s Union Square, calling out “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” while she did so) the circulation numbers exploded to 20,000 in September 1933 and 150,000 by 1936.

2)      The Tides of History: The Great Depression was only the first of many significant historical events with which The Catholic Worker engaged forthrightly and controversially. The next such controversy did significantly affect the paper’s circulation numbers—Day was committed to an unpopular pacifist stance during World War II, and as a result circulation decreased by 75% during the war, from a high of nearly 200,000 to 50,000. But this trend in no way affected Day and the paper’s dedication to taking principled stances on unfolding histories, as illustrated just five years after the war: in the July 1, 1950 issue the paper published a letter from the African American nurse, educator, and Catholic activist Helen Caldwell Day Riley that represented an early and powerful argument for wedding the Catholic Worker Movement to the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

3)      The Price!: I’m not sure I’ll ever write a more striking sentence in a blog post than this one: the price for each issue of The Catholic Worker has remained steady at 1 cent (that’s one pretty penny) from that first May 1933 issue up to the present moment. If you want an annual subscription (which gets you the paper’s seven issues a year by mail), however, you do have to be willing to shell out 25 cents (that’s one shiny quarter). I genuinely can’t imagine a more impressive way to put philosophy and ideology into practice than that, and I’m apparently not alone; according to this 2023 The Nation article, the paper still has more than 25,000 subscribers. Amen to that!

Last CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

August 28, 2024: American Catholics: Elizabeth Ann Seton

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

On three telling stages in the life of the first American Saint.

1)      Conversion: Elizabeth Ann Bayley (1774-1821) was born in New York City to a prominent Episcopalian family who raised her in that church; when she married William Magee Seton at the age of 19, she continued to practice that faith, passing it on to their five children who were born between 1795 and 1802. But when William’s recurring tuberculosis brought the family to Italy and he passed away while in quarantine in the winter of 1803, Elizabeth was taken in by William’s Italian business partners Filippo and Antonio Filicchi and introduced to Catholicism. When she and her children eventually returned to America, Elizabeth gradually completed her conversion, being first received into the Catholic Church at New York’s St. Peter’s Church (one of the few in the city at the time, as anti-Catholic laws had been in effect until just a few years before) in March 1805 and then receiving confirmation from the nation’s only Catholic Bishop, Baltimore’s John Carroll, in 1806.

2)      Good Works: When she was just a child Elizabeth helped her stepmother, Charlotte Amelia Barclay, who was active in social ministry efforts in the city; as a married woman she continued those efforts, including as a founding member of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797). So when Elizabeth found herself in that precise situation, it was no surprise that she only deepened her charitable efforts, including as the founder of a congregation of nuns known as the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s (leading to her nickname of “Mother Seton”). But she also extended her charitable efforts to educational endeavors, with her most lasting legacy likely being the 1809 founding of the Emmitsburg, Maryland Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School. Since Elizabeth’s own religious story was very much one of education, experienced when she was a young widow in need of communal support in a variety of ways, this combination of good works was quite appropriate.

3)      Sanctification: Elizabeth died (like her husband, of tuberculosis) at the tragically young age of 46 in January 1821, but the Sister’s of St. Joseph’s continued to found schools and other communal and charitable organizations over the remainder of the 19^th century. Those legacies certainly made Elizabeth worthy of canonization as a Saint, but that process proceeded quite slowly, no doubt due in part to the lack of any American-born Saints. It formally began with her receiving the title Servant of God in 1940, and after a child’s miraculous healing was attributed to prayers to Seton in 1952, she was beatified in March 1963. But sanctification requires at least two miracles, and it was a second such miraculous healing, of a man given hours to life with meningitis in 1963, that cemented her case and led to her September 1975 canonization by Pope Paul VI. It’s hard for me to say how much of that posthumous story really had to do with Elizabeth, but I do value these words of the Pope’s: “All of us say this with special joy and with the intention of honoring the land and the nation from which she sprang forth…Elizabeth Ann Seton was wholly American!”

Next CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

August 27, 2024: American Catholics: Anti-Catholic Prejudice

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

On the frustratingly long reach of conspiracy theories.

My first-ever conference paper, way back in 2001, focused on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s unique and compelling historical novel Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827); I’ve also written about the book multiple times in this space (including for one of my earliest posts back in November 2010), and would still argue a quarter-century after that conference and a decade and a half after that post that Sedgwick’s book is one of the greatest 19^th century American novels. But of course it’s not perfect, and one of its most glaring failings lies in both the intentions and the identity of its central villain, Sir Philip Gardiner (SPOILERS for this 200-year-old novel in what follows). Sir Philip presents himself as a new and important Puritan arrival to Massachusetts (the novel is set in the “early times” of the late 1630s, just after the Pequot War), but is gradually revealed to be a secret agent of the Vatican, working to infiltrate this Puritan colony and take it over on behalf of his evil Catholic masters. He and his youthful page (and secret lover) are also revealed to be cross-dressers, connecting this overarching anti-Catholic plotline to stereotypical images of Catholics as both morally and sexually transgressive among other sins.

It's also noteworthy that Sir Philip is both a secret Catholic and a new immigrant, as it has been through discriminatory narratives about both of those communities (in direct conjunction with one another) that anti-Catholic prejudices have manifested themselves most consistently in American history. That combination was at the heart of much of the anti-Irish xenophobia of the 1840s and the Know Nothing Party; played a significant role in the late 19^th century’s virulent and violent anti-Italian xenophobia; and was likewise central to the rise and anti-immigrant emphasis of the 1910s and 1920s Second Ku Klux Klan (and that period’s much broader immigration restrictions as well). At the core of each of those distinct but parallel anti-Catholic movements have been what I can only describe as conspiracy theories, visions of American Catholics as entirely under the sway of a manipulative and malignant Vatican (or Pope, or Cardinals, or priests, or whatever) and thus as owing allegiance to a foreign power in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution (rather than, y’know, as protected in their religious practices and beliefs by that same Constitution, like every other person in the country).

Those conspiracy theories about American Catholic allegiance were never simply a fringe belief, even when they did not dominate national politics as they did in those particular and certainly extreme moments. But they reached a new level of prominence and potency with the 1960 presidential election and the very much mainstream fears that if elected president, the practicing Catholic John F. Kennedy would owe his first allegiance to the Vatican rather than the country he’d be leading. It’s certainly ironic that in our own moment, some of the most extreme political figures use their Catholic faith as a rationale for taking those profoundly reactionary positions (I’m looking at you, Catholics on the Supreme Court, and not just about abortion or birth control either). But while we can and should criticize that use of religion as a shield for hateful and hurtful views, we also have to make sure to resist any implication that Catholicism is in any way in conflict with American laws or ideals—an entirely inaccurate perspective that has been much too central for far too long in American history.

Next CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

August 26, 2024: American Catholics: Maryland

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

On ideals, realities, and why both are important parts of the story.

One of the first things that schoolkids learn about the origins of the English Colonies in America—or at least one of the first things that my aging brain remembers learning, and I think this was the case for my sons in elementary school as well—is that Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics in that “New World.” As those hyperlinked articles illustrate, that fact is indeed accurate: the Calverts, father George (the 1^st Baron Baltimore) and his son Cecilius (the 2^nd Baron Baltimore), requested a royal charter from King Charles I to found a new colony between New England to the North and Virginia to the South that would be more welcome to Catholic immigrants than were those two; and they named it Maryland after Charles’ Catholic wife, France’s Henrietta Marie. While the percentage of Catholics in the new colony was never more than 10% of the total English population, it was still significantly higher than in those more exclusionary colonies; and in 1649, Maryland’s assembly passed the “Act Concerning Religion” (also known as the Toleration Act) in an effort to ensure that those Catholics and all those in the colony would have the promised religious freedom.

But the reasons why the Toleration Act was necessary at all begin to reveal some darker realities behind those inclusive ideals. After a group of (Protestant) Puritans founded the new Maryland community of Providence (modern-day Annapolis) in 1642, one of their leaders, William Claiborne, decided to take over the colonial capital of St. Mary’s, using religious prejudices to stir up the population against the Catholics. For two years Claiborne and the Puritans dominated the colony, an era that came to be known as “The Plundering Time” due to their mistreatment of and thefts from Catholics. Although the younger Calvert brother Leonard recaptured St. Mary’s in 1646 and convinced the assembly to pass the 1649 Toleration Act, just a year after that law Puritans took over the legislature and instituted a new colonial government that prohibited Catholicism entirely, leading for example to the burning of numerous original Catholic churches. The two factions continued this back and forth battling in subsequent decades, but regardless of who was in power in a particular moment, clearly this was not a colony where Catholics could necessarily feel any safer nor more secure than they would have in the more overtly Protestant colonies.

A community that professes inclusive ideals yet too often features exclusionary attitudes and actions—feels about right for American origin points, no? But just as I don’t think we can only remember the U.S. founding through the lens of hypocrisy or the like, I’d likewise argue that every layer of Maryland’s founding and early histories comprises an important part of the story. Maryland was the third distinct English colony chartered on the continent (Connecticut and Rhode Island had by this time also been founded but were created by existing New England communities), and it was the first of those not only to de-emphasize Protestantism, but also to carve out an overt and official space for religious diversity (Roger Williams had done the same in his founding of Rhode Island). Even if individuals and communities failed to live up to that promise, and even if those exclusionary forces at times dominated and even led the state (as they have far too often in American history as well of course), the existence of this colony and those ideals makes a huge difference in how we think about both the history of American Catholics and the story of religion and community in America as a whole.

Next CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

August 23, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Kane Brown

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On three exemplary songs from one of the city’s (and country’s) up and coming stars.

1)      “Thank God”: I’ll admit that this pretty but extremely sappy ballad, a duet with Brown’s singer-songwriter wife Katelyn (Jae) Brown, is probably the least interesting Kane Brown song I’ve heard. I’m starting this post with it partly because it feels like something that two of the married musician characters in Robert Altman’s film might have recorded together, and thus a nice transition from yesterday’s 1970s cultural text to today’s 21^st century Nashville artist. But it’s also the case that what stands out the most to me about Brown is his multigenerational and to my mind very American family identity and heritage—he’s the product of a multiracial marriage and has Cherokee ancestry as well—and so I love that there’s a musical representation of his own continuation of that multigenerational story through his marriage to Katelyn and their blossoming family (they have two daughters and a son on the way).

2)      “Grand”: “Grand” was the lead single off Brown’s third studio album, Different Man (2022), but it was the first song of his that my sons and I heard, and to us it seemed to define Brown quite specifically as a hip hop artist (and I think you’ll agree if you give it a listen at that hyperlink). Yet that album was released by his (country music) label, RCA Records Nashville; and charted highest on the Top Country Albums Billboard list, as all of his albums to date have. As much as I love Brown’s personal heritage and identity, I think I might love even more the concurrent (and I would argue deeply interconnected) ways in which he has begun to build a music career that so fully and effortlessly crosses genres, making Brown an artist who is equally adept at crafting hip hop anthems like “Grand” alongside country bangers like “One Mississippi” (from the same album).

3)      “Fiddle in the Band”: That multi-genre musical identity seems to have been central to Brown’s career since its 2014 origins, but I’m not sure he’s ever expressed it as clearly nor as powerfully as on his most recent single, 2024’s “Fiddle in the Band.” I don’t know if I’ve loved a moment in a song as much in many years as I do that song’s second verse: “I’m like a burnt CD from ’03 in a Mustang/You never knew what was comin’/So I can’t help but be R&B with a touch of twang/Air guitars and dashboard drummin’.” As Brown puts it in the chorus, “Took a trip to Music City/Brought a little bit of everything with me.” He certainly did, and I’d say that exemplifies not just this impressive young artist, but where Music City is here in 2024 as well.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?

August 22, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Altman’s Film

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

AmericanStudies contexts for three of the many compelling characters in Robert Altman’s sweeping masterpiece Nashville (1975):

1)      Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin): As usual with an Altman film, most every character in connected to multiple others as well as distinct layers of the film’s plot and themes, and that’s certainly the case for Linnea: she’s a Gospel singer who is recording tracks with yesterday’s subjects the Fisk Jubilee Singers when the film opens; but she’s also the wife of Ned Beatty’s Delbert Reese, a sleazy, philandering lawyer who is constantly trying to land both other women and political contacts (such as with the never-seen presidential candidate Hal Walker, a fundraising concert for whom provides one of the film’s main throughlines). Since Walker is a Republican candidate, we can assume that Delbert sees himself as a wannabe Republican political operative; and since Linnea is the devoted mother of two deaf children as well as an artistic partner to the Jubilee Singers, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest her politics are different from her husband’s. All part of the social mix in Altman’s depiction of this Southern city.

2)      Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson): One of the figures to whom Delbert makes those frequent political connections is his legal client and another Nashville musical talent, country singer and Grand Ole Opry star Haven Hamilton. The film’s opening cuts back and forth between Linnea’s session with the Jubilee Singers and Haven in a neighboring recording studio, where he’s quite symbolically cutting “200 Years,” a patriotic track for the upcoming Bicentennial (and one of many songs written specifically for Altman’s film, which ultimately features more than an hour of musical performances, nearly all of original songs). A number of prominent country musicians expressed outrage at Altman’s film, and it’s likely due to the character of Haven, the most explicitly country & western of the film’s many musicians and one who does indeed use his music to express a stereotypical (if not at all inaccurate) form of mythic patriotism. But I’d argue that juxtaposing Haven with Linnea in that opening sequence gives us an immediate sense that Haven’s is just one layer within a truly multilayered musical scene (pun intended).

3)      Opal (Geraldine Chaplin): Trying to surreptitiously listen to both of those opening recording sessions is Opal, an English visitor to Nashville who claims to be a journalist for the BBC. Opal does indeed preserve her impressions of the city on a tape recorder throughout the film (as in that hyperlinked scene at what she humorously calls “an American junkyard”), but there are other clues that she is not an actual journalist but rather an obsessed fan. Either way, Opal is definitely portrayed as both a tourist (and thus an outsider to the community) and a stand-in for the audience (and thus our way to gain insider access to all these locals). That she’s an Englishwoman in those roles, in a film that makes such a big deal of the upcoming Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, can be read as another ironic joke in a film full of them. But it’s also a reminder that when it comes to a place as deeply rooted as late 20^th (or early 21^st) century Nashville, all of the rest of are to some significant degree foreigners.

Last Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?

August 21, 2024: NashvilleStudying: The Fisk Jubilee Singers

 [This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On two of the many vital legacies of a cultural and historical artistic project.

While the kinds of post-slavery and –war debates and questions I discussed in this post were central threads to the Reconstruction era, the period was also intensely focused on the future, and more exactly on how to help African Americans become a full part of this new American community within that future (or, for far too many Reconstruction actors, how to stop them from doing so). Chief among the progressive responses to that question was an emphasis on education, one that took place in every community and at every level but that included the founding of a number of new African American colleges and universities. One of the earliest such post-war institutions was Fisk University, founded in Memphis as the Fisk Free Colored School just six months after the war’s end by members of the American Missionary Association. By 1871, thanks to the vicissitudes of Reconstruction among other factors, Fisk was struggling to stay afloat financially, and its treasurer and music director, George White, decided to found a choral group that could tour to raise funds and awareness for the university’s community and efforts.

That group embarked on its first national (and eventually international) tour on October 6^th, 1871, the beginning of a more than 18-month period of performances. Early in the tour—faced with one of their many encounters with racism and hostility, this time in Columbus, Ohio—White and the performers decided to name themselves the Jubilee Singers, a tribute to the spiritual and cultural vision of a “year of jubilee” after emancipation. By the end of the tour, the Jubilee Singers had more than lived up to that name, achieving a series of stunning triumphs that included performances at the Boston World’s Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival, at the White House for President Ulysses Grant, and (when the tour was extended to an overseas leg in 1873) for England’s Queen Victoria. In an era when nearly all of the representations of African Americans onstage were performed by whites in blackface—whether in overtly racist minstrel shows or in slightly more nuanced productions such as Tom Shows—it’s difficult to overstate the importance of this group of talented African American performers taking and commanding the stage, offering an alternative to those constructed representations and giving voice to their own identities, stories and histories, and communities in the process. That’s one legacy of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and it continues to this day.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers also connected, overtly, immediately, and importantly, to the aforementioned questions of historical memory, however. They did so first and foremost through their choice of repertoire, which in its initial iteration focused almost entirely on African American slave spirituals (what W.E.B. Du Bois would later call, in his beautiful, multi-part engagement with the genre in The Souls of Black Folk, “sorrow songs”). I believe it’s not at all inaccurate to say that by arranging and performing their versions of these songs, the Jubilee Singers helped keep them alive, indeed helped turn them into a foundational and ongoing genre of American music that could endure into future generations and would influence every subsequent such genre. In so doing, I would argue that they provided one middle ground answer to the post-Reconstruction debate between Alexander Crummell and Frederick Douglass I highlighted here—a way to carry forward communal memories and voices of slavery without dwelling in the most horrific and traumatic elements, to build on that historical legacy but at the same time to take potent and inspiring ownership of it for new purposes and goals. That’s a model of the best of Reconstruction, and precisely the kind of story and history we need to remember if we’re to move beyond the most limited and mythologized collective memories of the period.

Next Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?

August 20, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Cholera

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On how a devastating epidemic connected Nashville to the nation and world, and what it meant for this particular community.

As is the case it seems with most everyone who writes about the Nashville (and Tennessee overall) cholera epidemics of the mid-19^th century, everything I know about these public health crises I learned from one contemporary and impressively thorough book: physician William K. Bowling’s Cholera as it Appeared in Nashville in 1849, 1850, 1854, and 1866 (1866). While Bowling does indeed as his title suggests document and analyze four distinct outbreaks of the hugely fatal disease, his focus is on the 1849 and 1850 epidemics, and for good reason: the 1849 epidemic took the lives of 311 Nashvillians (out of a total population of only 10,000 or so), and the 1850 epidemic nearly 500 (with 64 people dying in just the first four days of July 1850, for example). Moreover, the 1849 outbreak produced one of the single most noteworthy epidemic fatalities in American history: outgoing President James K. Polk, who left office with the inauguration of his successor Zachary Taylor in early March 1849, toured the South with his wife Sarah for a few weeks, returned to his home in Nashville (or rather neighboring Columbia) in early April, and quite promptly fell ill with the cholera that would kill him just two months later, on June 15, 1849.

That 1849 epidemic in Nashville was part of what historians of medicine call the third global cholera pandemic, an extended outbreak that seems to have begun around 1846 (when more than 15,000 people died in the city of Mecca alone, for example) and is generally seen as having continued until at least 1860 (although some sources define the third pandemic more narrowly through its worst years, from 1852-1859). One of the most devastated cities was Liverpool, a key embarkation point for immigrants to the U.S., and it was likely through that connection that the disease spread so fully to much of America in these years (although that narrative might also be due in part to anti-Irish prejudice): thousands died in outbreaks in St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and New York among other major cities; and the pandemic likewise apparently traveled with emigrants on the Westward Trails during this Gold Rush period, with estimates of around 10,000 people having died on those trails between 1849 and 1855. In a particularly painful way, that is, Nashville’s experiences of cholera in 1849 and 1850 represented the city’s true emergence, just a few decades after its charter as I highlighted in yesterday’s post, as a more full part of the national and global communities.

At the same time, any community’s experience of an epidemic is specific, and it’s important to think about that layer to cholera in mid-19^th century Nashville as well. The death of President Polk was one singular but symbolic example of that kind of local effect, of course. But a more telling one is what the epidemic meant for two distinct African American communities in this antebellum Southern city: the more than 3000 enslaved African Americans (a huge percentage of the city’s overall population of around 10,000); and the roughly 700 free Blacks who lived in particular neighborhoods in (especially) North Nashville. When the 1850 epidemic hit railroad workers constructing a tunnel for the Nashville and Chattanooga line in July and August 1850, for example, it was enslaved Black workers who bore the worst of that outbreak, reflecting their particularly precarious position in times of public health crisis (as at all times). Whereas we simply know far less about the epidemic’s effects on the free Black community, a demographic on which Bowling’s book remains largely silent, reflecting the difficulty of fully remembering this small but vital part of antebellum Nashville. Just a few of the many ways this global pandemic can illustrate specific Nashville histories as well.

Next Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?

August 19, 2024: NashvilleStudying: Three Origin Points

[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]

On three communities that together helped create Tennessee’s capital city.

1)      Mississippian mound builders: One of the most striking areas about which we’ve collectively learned a great deal in recent decades—it seems to me, at least; I know specific scholars and disciplines have long known more—is the details of the indigenous communities that existed in America before those we generally define as “Native American.” Many of those older communities were mound-building cultures, like those who built and inhabited the ancient city of Cahokia near modern-day St. Louis; that community and others in that region have come to be known as the Mississippian cultures. One of them, the Middle Cumberland Mississippian culture, occupied the site in the Nashville Basin that archaeologists have named Mount Bottom, probably from around 1000 AD to somewhere in the 1400-1450 range. I won’t pretend to know too much more than that about that earliest Nashville-area community, but we can’t talk about this city without recognizing such origin points.

2)      French fur traders: When Europeans first reached that Mississippi Valley (broadly defined—Memphis is the Tennessee city located on the Mississippi River, but the region is generally seen as extending to places like Nashville as well), it was mostly in the guise of French fur traders setting up trading posts. A number did so in the vicinity of modern-day Nashville across the late 17^th and much of the 18^th century, from Martin Chartier in 1689 to Jean du Charleville in 1710 to Timothy DeMonbreun in 1769. Each of those individuals is specific and unique, as are the particular trading posts and homes they built; but taken together they reflect the seemingly haphazard but unmistakably cumulative ways in which a community can grow. By the time of the American Revolution, such a community had indeed sprouted in this area, but without any single name—the region was alternately known as French Lick, Sulphur Spring Bottom, and Sulphur Dell among other designations.

3)      Scotch-Irish settlers: It was the Scotch-Irish families who began settling the area in the Revolution’s early years who coined the name that would stick, one based directly on a Revolutionary hero. Between 1778 and 1780 a number of expeditions from Western North Carolina (particularly that state’s Watauga settlement) arrived in the area, led by individuals like John Buchanan Sr., John Donelson, and James Robertson. It was Robertson’s party that apparently came up with the idea of naming the expanding settlement after General Francis Nash, an early leader of Revolutionary forces in Western North Carolina who had been killed in action in 1777; at first the community was known as Nashborough, which gradually changed into Nashville. When other significant changes took place over the next couple decades—with Tennessee becoming a state in 1796 and Nashville receiving a city charter in 1806—it was with this new name for a community at least 800 years old by that time.

Next Nashville context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?

August 18, 2024: Birthday Bests: 2023-2024

[On August 15^th, this AmericanStudier celebrated his 47^th birthday. So as I do each year, I’ve featured a series sharing some of my favorite posts from each year on the blog, leading up to this new post with 47 favorites from the last year. And as ever, you couldn’t give me a better present than to say hi and tell me a bit about what brings you to the blog, what you’ve found or enjoyed here, your own AmericanStudies thoughts, or anything else!]

Here they are, 47 favorite posts from my 14^th year of AmericanStudying:

1)      August 28: Contextualizing the March on Washington: 1941 Origins: I love finding and sharing forgotten sides to familiar histories, and this whole anniversary series qualified.

2)      September 8: Fall Semester Previews: Departmental Program Review: Being part of Program Reviews is one of the hardest but most rewarding elements of my job, and I highlighted this year’s in one of my Fall preview posts.

3)      September 15: AmericanStudying The Rising: “My City of Ruins” and “Superman (It’s Not Easy)”: I love revisiting one of my favorite Springsteen albums, building to this particularly complex post.

4)      September 23-24: AmericanStudying the Panic of 1873: 2023 Connections: History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

5)      October 4: LGBT Histories: 1950s Discriminations: Finding light in our darkest histories is an incredibly difficult but important goal, and I hope I modeled it here.

6)      October 11: Vice President Studying: Henry Wilson’s Book: We’ve thought a lot about VPs recently; I’m a big Walz fan, but I don’t think any will ever equal what Henry Wilson did in the same year he was nominated.

7)      October 19: Basketball Stories: The Harlem Globetrotters: I don’t generally link to my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns here, but I’m always glad when it makes sense to share that other online writing!

8)      October 23: New Scholarly Books: A Seat at the Table: Every book in this series is well worth your time, but I was especially glad to share this one co-edited by my frequent Guest Poster Hettie Williams.

9)      November 3: Contested Elections: 2000: There are lots of origin points for our own moment, but none looms larger than the 2000 election.

10)   November 11-12: Kyle Lockwood’s Guest Post: Exploration and the Human Spirit: I’ll always include Guest Posts in these recaps, but doubly so when they’re from FSU students!

11)   November 14: AmericanStudying the Blues: Robert Johnson: Quite simply one of my favorite posts of the year.

12)   November 18-19: Sandra Hamilton’s Guest Post on the Blues in American Culture: My cup runneth over with Guest Posts from FSU students this month!

13)   November 20: Thankful for Scholarly Communities: Fitchburg State: Speaking of the community at which I’ll be starting my 20^th year in September.

14)   November 25-26: My Biggest Thanks-giving: But no community is more meaningful than the intimate one my sons and I have built for the last 18.5 years.

15)   December 1: Gun Control Histories: Jim Jefferies: Getting to write about favorite texts is a perk of this gig, and Jim Jefferies’ stand-up special is a great example.

16)   December 9-10: Crowd-sourced Board Game Studying: I don’t get to share as many Crowd-sourced Posts as I used to, but I always love the chance!

17)   December 14: Boston Tea Party Studying: The Peggy Stewart: Did you know there was a second Tea Party in October 1774? Me neither!

18)   December 16-17: A Tribute to BostonStudiers: Really enjoyed paying tribute to a handful of the many folks from whom I’ve learned about my home city.

19)   December 23-24: Hamza Suleiman’s Guest Post on Mohja Kahf: My friend Robin Field has shared a great deal of student work for Guest Posts, with this as the latest example.

20)   December 29: Christmas Stories: A Christmas Carol: Another favorite text, and thus another extremely fun blog post.

21)   January 2: 2024 Anniversaries: The First Continental Congress in 1774: I learn so much from my New Year’s anniversary series, including this one on forgotten 1774 delegates.

22)   January 12: AmericanStudying Columbia Pictures: Matt Helm and Casino Royale: Columbia Studios missing out on James Bond led to some very interesting creative choices.

23)   January 13-14: Vaughn Joy’s Hollywood Histories: Loved the chance to pay tribute to one of our very best up-and-coming Film and AmericanStudiers.

24)   January 20-21: Ava DePasquale’s Guest Post on Grey Dog: And to share a third FSU student Guest Post!

25)   January 26: AmericanStudying Groundbreaking Women: Shirley Chisholm: I had no idea Kamala would be our nominee when I included this post on Chisholm’s campaigns, but I love the connection.

26)   January 29: Quirky American Traditions: Pumpkin Chunkin: Sometimes it’s just fun to research and write these posts.

27)   February 10-11: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: My Pitch!: My current project has evolved into a podcast (for more on which watch this space), but we can all agree it would also work great as a sports film, no?

28)   February 17-18: AmericanStudying Love Songs: Five New Classics: Love was in the air for me all year, and on the blog this week in particular.

29)   February 24-25: Biden and Anti-Immigrant Narratives: Everybody can stand to learn more about our history, including politicians I support.

30)   March 7: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde: Some childhood moments really define our interests and lives. This was one of mine.

31)   March 13: NeMLA Reflections: My Panel on Nostalgia & the 50s: I’ve had so many great experiences at NeMLA conferences, but this was at the top of the list.

32)   March 20: American Magic: Orson Welles: One of the most surprising posts I’ve ever had the chance to share.

33)   March 25: What is Game Show Studying?: 30s and 40s Origins: Another one for which I learned so much, and from which I hope you will too.

34)   April 6-7: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship: Another great post from my most frequent Guest Poster.

35)   April 11: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Two 1967 Classics: Has there ever been a better pair of films from one actor in the same year?

36)   April 20-21: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024: Nothing is more central to this year’s presidential campaign than debates over patriotism, a subject on which I know a little bit.

37)   April 26: Climate Culture: Climate Songs: Really loved the chance to highlight Midnight Oil’s last album among other great climate music.

38)   May 11-12: Beach Blogging: Guest Posts from Elsa Devienne and Jamie Hirami: Don’t think I had ever featured two Guest Posts in the same post before!

39)   May 17: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Special Guests!: My three favorite people visited my classes this Spring!

40)   May 21: Criminal Duos: Leopold & Loeb: Historic anniversaries have driven much of this blog for its last decade, and this was a particularly interesting one to investigate.

41)   June 4: The Indian Citizenship Act: Joseph K. Dixon and Rodman Wanamaker: On the Act’s 100^th anniversary, remembering the pair of complex white dudes who were instrumental in its journey.

42)   June 15-16: Ocean State Histories: Further Reading: I don’t do bibliographic posts as often as I should, and this one was a very fun one.

43)   June 22-23: Kyle Railton’s Guest Post on the Simpson Trial: I’ve had the chance to share Guest Posts from both of my sons now, and man do I love that.

44)   June 24: WesternStudying: Hopalong Cassidy: Come for the first licensed image on a children’s lunch box, stay for a vital cultural history.

45)   July 6-7: Critical Patriotism in 2024: A vital complement to the earliest post on mythic patriotism in 2024.

46)   July 19: ElvisStudying: First and Last: I haven’t always done Elvis Presley justice in this space, so this whole series felt like a nice addition to the conversation.

47)   July 31: Martin Sheen Studying: Estévez Legacies: And I’ll end with one of the most fun series I got to write all year!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!