November 30-December 1, 2024: November 2024 Recap

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

November 4: The 1924 Election: Harding’s Shadow: A series on the 100^th anniversary of another wild election starts with lingering scandals from a deceased president.

November 5: The 1924 Election: Three VP Nominees: The series continues with three GOP VP candidates who embody electoral chaos.

November 6: The 1924 Election: KKKonventions: The Klan’s influence on both 1924 Conventions and a contemporary echo, as the series campaigns on.

November 7: The 1924 Election: La Follette’s 3^rd Party: In honor of one of the most successful 3^rd party candidates in American history, three ways to analyze why such candidates exist at all.

November 8: The 1924 Election: Foreshadowing the Future: The series concludes with three ways that the 1924 election foreshadowed future political events.

November 9-10: 2024 Election Reflections: I wanted in much of a mood for extended reflecting after the 2024 election, but I did have one thing I wanted to make sure to say.

November 11: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Foregrounding Favorites: For the blog’s 14^th anniversary I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging all these years, starting with my focus on favorites.

November 12: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Lifelong Learning: The anniversary series continues with posts that have helped me continue to learn.

November 13: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Teaching Thoughts: How much I’ve appreciated the chance to reflect on my teaching in this space, as the series celebrates on.

November 14: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Great Guests: Guest Posts have been my favorite part of writing this blog—and I hope you’ll propose one of your own!

November 15: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Communal Crowd-Sourcing: The series concludes with a second way I’ve been able to share y’all’s thoughts on the blog.

November 16-17: AmericanStudies’ 14^th Anniversary!: Thankful Tributes: A special weekend tribute to five folks who have helped make the blog what it’s become over these 14 years.

November 18: AmericanTemperanceStudying: A 1623 Origin Point: For a famous organization’s 150^th anniversary, a TemperanceStudying series kicks off with a foundational law.

November 19: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The Early Republic: The series continues with three milestone moments in the movement’s early 19C evolutions.

November 20: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Three Reformers: Takeaways from a trio of radical reformers across the 19C, as the series abstains on.

November 21: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The Anti-Saloon League: One important innovation and one troubling interconnection for America’s most influential temperance organization.

November 22: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Prohibition: Three great scholarly books that can help us consider the multilayered contexts for temperance’s greatest success.

November 23-24: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The WCTU: The series concludes with six women who helped shape the Women’s Christian Temperance Union on its 150^th anniversary.

November 25: Podcast Thanks: A Serendipitous Conversation: For this year’s Thanksgiving series I wanted to give thanks for moments and folks who helped make my podcast what it was, starting with a conversational origin point.

November 26: Podcast Thanks: Supportive Peers: The series continues with fellow podcasters who both modeled the work and gave me a chance to talk about mine.

November 27: Podcast Thanks: CEM Connections: A vital website without which I never would have been able to create my podcast, as the series thanks on.

November 28: Podcast Thanks: Audience Love: For Thanksgiving, how three of my favorite people became pitch-perfect audience members for the podcast.

November 29: Podcast Thanks: A Narrative History: And the series and thanks conclude with a narrative history that modeled that challenging and crucial form.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

November 29, 2024: Podcast Thanks: A Narrative History

[The most significant part of my work this fall was the launch of my first public scholarly podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. A lot of factors helped make that work possible, so for my annual Thanksgiving series I wanted to express my gratitude to a handful of them!]

As I hope all of my work over the last few years has made clear, including this blog and my #ScholarSunday threads and much else besides, public scholarly community and conversation are consistently central to everything I do. Often that means sharing other folks’ work, but sometimes it means highlighting scholarly models for what I’m trying to do with my own projects. In the case of this project, as I discussed in Wednesday’s post, the lack of definitive historical information meant that I had to think about whether and how to fill in and fill out those histories with some narrative, with imaginative storytelling to complement the sources. And in so doing I had a great public scholarly model, one that I overtly talked about in one of my episodes: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I was inspired both by the ways Hartman works to create the perspectives and identities of her focal historical subjects and by the moments where she brings her own perspective and voice into the conversation, and I hope I did justice to both of those elements in my podcast. I’d be grateful if you shared your thoughts at any point!

November Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: I’d be thankful if you’d check out the podcast and let me know your thoughts!

November 28, 2024: Podcast Thanks: Audience Love

[The most significant part of my work this fall was the launch of my first public scholarly podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. A lot of factors helped make that work possible, so for my annual Thanksgiving series I wanted to express my gratitude to a handful of them!]

Happy Thanksgiving (and National Day of Mourning too)! For me the holiday is all about family, and so I had to dedicate today’s post to my podcast’s three most dedicated audience members: my parents and my wife. They didn’t just listen, either—their thoughtful responses and contributions truly shaped every part of the podcast, making both the experience and the product infinitely better than they otherwise would have been. If I were to give fellow first-time podcasters any advice based on my own initial experiences with the medium, it’d be that it is really important to have particular audiences in mind when we’re writing and recording, so we’re not just talking to ourselves (this advice would obviously be different for a co-hosted podcast or one featuring guests). For me, these three favorite people were my pitch-perfect ideal listeners and conversation partners.  

Last thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. I’d be thankful if you’d check out the podcast and let me know your thoughts!

November 27, 2024: Podcast Thanks: CEM Connections

[The most significant part of my work this fall was the launch of my first public scholarly podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. A lot of factors helped make that work possible, so for my annual Thanksgiving series I wanted to express my gratitude to a handful of them!]

As I discussed throughout the podcast, and really got into fully in my Postgame Press Conference (an extra, 10^th episode), one of the most challenging aspects of telling this story was the significant lack of information about its key events and histories. That meant I had to do the imaginative work I’ll talk more about in Friday’s post. But it also meant I had to rely quite a bit on a few key sources, and none was more crucial than the semi-defunct but fortunately not entirely lost CEM Connections website (I’m no longer able to access the site on my computer, but it still works on my phone, just FYI), and especially its extensive biographical information on all 120 CEM students. I’ll forever be grateful to the site’s co-creators Bruce Chan and Dana Young for their work (and to Bruce for his thoughtful responses to and pushback on the podcast itself, which I also engaged in that Postgame Press Conference), and can only hope that it encourages more folks to find their way to the website and continue supporting their historical projects as well.

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. I’d be thankful if you’d check out the podcast and let me know your thoughts!

November 26, 2024: Podcast Thanks: Supportive Peers

[The most significant part of my work this fall was the launch of my first public scholarly podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. A lot of factors helped make that work possible, so for my annual Thanksgiving series I wanted to express my gratitude to a handful of them!]

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve had the chance to appear on quite a few podcasts over the last few years, including the ones highlighted in this list among others. That meant I had a ton of great models for how to make the most of the medium, which was one vital way that my peer podcasters helped me immeasurably in creating my own. But I also had the chance to talk about my podcast on a couple of those excellent examples of the genre: Liam Heffernan’s America: A History and Kelly Pollock’s Unsung History (my second time on that great podcast). Starting an entirely new type of project can be a very daunting endeavor, and I’m so grateful to have had such inspiring models and supportive peers at every step of the process.

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. I’d be thankful if you’d check out the podcast and let me know your thoughts!

November 25, 2024: Podcast Thanks: A Serendipitous Conversation

[The most significant part of my work this fall was the launch of my first public scholarly podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. A lot of factors helped make that work possible, so for my annual Thanksgiving series I wanted to express my gratitude to a handful of them!]

As attentive readers of this blog will remember, for many years The Celestials’ Last Game was a book manuscript and proposal. The transformation into a public scholarly podcast didn’t happen in any one moment, but the idea for it actually did: while taking part in retirement celebrations for my PhD advisor, Professor Miles Orvell, I happened to have a conversation with one of his recent undergrad students at Temple University. She was kind enough to ask about what I was working on, and when I described both the project and my struggles to land it with a publisher, she (an avid podcast listener herself) mentioned that it sounded like a great idea for a podcast. Despite having appeared on many podcasts as a guest, I have to admit I had never thought about creating one of my own, so this serendipitous conversation was really important in presenting me with that possibility and lighting the initial spark that would end up with my first podcast.

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. I’d be thankful if you’d check out the podcast and let me know your thoughts!

November 23-24, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The WCTU

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to this weekend post on the influential organization launched by that 1874 convention!]

Six impressive women who together reflect the evolution of a successful and still-active organization.

1)      Matilda Gilruth Carpenter: No national organization springs to life without more local efforts on which it’s building, and that was certainly the case for the WCTU, which in many ways began in central Ohio in late December, 1873. It was there that a reformer and religious leader named Matilda Gilruth Carpenter spearheaded an effort to close saloons, calling her community the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the process. The book she authored a couple decades later about those experiences is one layer to her legacy, but the national organization that met in her native Ohio about a year later is certainly another.  

2)      Annie Turner Wittenmyer: By the time she was elected as the WCTU’s first president at that 1874 convention, Annie Turner Wittenmyer had been a prominent activist for at least a decade, most especially through her Civil War-era efforts with Soldiers’ Aid Societies, Sanitary Commissions, and dietary reforms. But Wittenmyer’s activism made an effort to be as apolitical, or at least non-partisan, as possible, and she frequently fought with other WCTU leaders over whether the organization should address (much less support) women’s suffrage. Which is why in 1879 she lost the presidency to…

3)      Frances Willard: Willard was a groundbreaking educator who also became one of the late 19^th century’s most impassioned and effective feminist activists, and she saw the WCTU as very much part of the overall women’s movement, rather than solely or even centrally a temperance organization. In her 19 years as WCTU President (a term ended only when she passed away in 1898) she pushed the organization to fight for not only suffrage, but also many other social reforms, including equal pay for equal work, uniform divorce laws, and free kindergarten. She also founded the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to make these efforts truly global.

4)      Bessie Laythe Scovell: Think globally, act locally isn’t a new idea, though, and some of the most successful WCTU efforts took place in state chapters. Probably the most prominent and effective of those state chapters was the Minnesota WCTU, which was founded in 1877; Scovell didn’t become its president until 1897, so its efforts were well established by then, but she became a particularly important symbol of this chapter’s groundbreaking work, especially among immigrant communities in the state. In that hyperlinked “President’s Address,” delivered at the Minnesota WCTU’s 24^th Annual Meeting in 1900, Scovell lays out her holistic and progressive vision for the organization and how it could become better connected to immigrant communities through linguistic and cultural solidarity.

5)      Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Eliza Pierce: Such local efforts certainly helped advance the WCTU’s cause, but even more important were the leaders of color who could help make the organization more truly representative of the American population. That included Harper, the African American poet, novelist, educator, and activist who led the WCTU’s “Department of Work Among the Colored People”; and Pierce, the Iroquois Native American activist who started a new New York chapter and extended the WCTU to Six Nations communities throughout the state. As with all the temperance histories I’ve highlighted this week, the WCTU’s was complex and could feature exclusionary attitudes to be sure; but women like Harper and Pierce helped make sure it likewise featured inclusive possibilities.

Thanksgiving series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 22, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Prohibition

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On three great scholarly books that can help us analyze an incredibly multi-faceted historical period and its many legacies.

1)      Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (2015): Yesterday I argued that the Anti-Saloon League’s successful pressure politics were instrumental in finally achieving the movement’s longstanding goal of nationwide Prohibition. That was absolutely a factor, but it’s also far from a coincidence that the 18^th Amendment passed Congress in 1917 (the same year as the Espionage Act) and was ratified in 1919 (the same year that the post-WWI Palmer Raids began). As McGirr argues convincingly, World War I specifically and many wartime contexts more broadly were crucial to turning Prohibition from a movement priority into a nationwide policy—and while that particular policy ended with the amendment’s repeal in 1933, many of those wartime contexts have endured in the 90 years since.

2)      Stephen Moore’s Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland (2014): Another crucial legacy of the Prohibition era was the creation of—and yes, I mean that precisely; not just newfound attention to, but in many ways the creation of—the U.S.-Canadian border as a space for law enforcement concerns and activity. My paternal grandfather and his parents moved across that border and into New Hampshire in the mid-1910s with no hassle or legal attention of any kind; but just a few years later, that would have been impossible, and as Moore argues Prohibition enforcement was the reason why. While the U.S.-Mexico border was not as much of a Prohibition focal point, it’s no coincidence that it was likewise during the 1920s that that border became genuinely patrolled. The end of Prohibition was only the start of U.S. border patrols, of course.

3)      Marni Davis’ Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (2012): I wrote a bit in yesterday’s post about the interconnections between white supremacy, race, and Prohibition, especially in the alliance between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan. The 1920s Klan focused equally on anti-Black and anti-immigrant domestic terrorisms, of course; and as Davis’ book traces powerfully, so too was Prohibition driven by anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic narratives. I’ve argued for many years in many different settings that the 1920s represented a nadir of American racism, xenophobia, and exclusion—and yes, I’m well aware that this is a very competitive contest; but the more I learn, the more convinced I am that this was indeed a stunning low point—and it’s crucially important that we include Prohibition in our understanding of those elements of 1920s America.

WCTU post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 21, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The Anti-Saloon League

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On one important innovation and one troubling interconnection for America’s most influential temperance organization.

Each of the posts in this series has moved between more individual and more collective and organizational temperance activisms, and I don’t think that’s just due to my own choices and focal points: it seems to me that any social movement that endures and achieves significant successes likely needs both groundbreaking leaders and widespread communal support. Similarly, the final push toward Prohibition (on which more in tomorrow’s concluding post) in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries relied on both the individual presence and prominence of yesterday’s subject Carrie Nation and the social and political connections of the Anti-Saloon League. Founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, the League certainly featured its share of impressive individual leaders, from founder Howard Hyde Russell to the hugely influential lawyer Wayne Bidwell Wheeler among others. But it was precisely the League’s organizational presence that made it so effective in shifting national conversations.

The League utilized a number of strategies to achieve those aims, including creating its own American Issue Publishing Company in 1909; that publisher produced and mailed so many pamphlets that its hometown of Westerville, Ohio became the smallest town to feature a first-class post office in the period. But by far the most influential element of the Anti-Saloon League’s activist efforts was a strategy that the organization seems to have created (and which was certainly related to those ubiquitous publications): pressure politics, the concept of using a variety of interconnected means, from mass media and communication to intimidation and threats, to pressure political leaders to support and pass particular legislation and policies. There’s no doubt that it was the successful application of such political pressure by the League and its allies (but most especially by the League) that convinced enough national and state politicians to support Prohibition (after well more than a half-century of unsuccessful temperance movement efforts toward that specific end), leading to the Congressional passage and state-level ratification of the 18^th Amendment in 1919.

I’ll have a lot more to say about that specific League legacy tomorrow. But it’s important to add a troubling layer and contemporary context, particularly to the application of pressure politics: the other organization which used that strategy with particular effectiveness in the 1920s was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Moreover, this wasn’t a coincidence or even just a parallel—as historian Howard Ball has discovered, in a setting like late 1910s and 1920s Birmingham the two organizations were closely connected, to the point that a local journalist wrote, “In Alabama, it is hard to tell where the Anti-Saloon League ends and the Klan begins.” And it wasn’t just Alabama—throughout the 1920s the two organizations became allies not only in enforcing Prohibition (although I’m sure the League would say that was their only goal) but in achieving their political and social goals on multiple levels. The ties between white supremacy and American social movements are far from unique to temperance, of course—but that doesn’t excuse in any way this most influential temperance organization’s symbiotic relationship with white supremacist domestic terrorists.

Last temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 20, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Three Reformers

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On takeaways from a trio of temperance reformers across the 19^th century.

1)      Sylvester Graham (1794-1851): As that hyperlinked article argues, Graham’s temperance activism was just one small part of his truly multi-layered efforts for health and wellness reform. But my older son dressed up as and interpreted Graham for an APUSH project earlier this year, and in his honor (and in tribute to Graham’s most enduring legacy, the undeniably tasty Graham Cracker) I wanted to include the quirky and influential Graham in this post. Moreover, Graham did hold a position for years with one of the organizations I highlighted yesterday, the Philadelphia Temperance Society, so he did see alcohol abstinence as an important part of his overall health reforms. While analyzing the longitudinal history of the temperance movement over these 400 years is one important way to think about this issue, it’s equally worthwhile to connect each specific moment latitudinally to other elements of its era and society, as Graham’s multi-faceted efforts remind us.

2)      Neal Dow: But some reformers did laser-focus on temperance throughout their lives and careers, and while Portland, Maine’s Neal Dow (1804-1897) did other important work as well—including with the Underground Railroad and as a Civil War Brigadier General—temperance was the through-line, leading to his nickname as the “Father of Prohibition.” Active in the movement since his early 20s, it was with a pair of closely linked mid-century elections that he really took his efforts to the next level: he was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union in 1850 and then mayor of Portland in 1851. Dow saw his political role as an extension of his movement activism, to the point where in 1855 he ordered state militia members to open fire on rioters who opposed his “Maine Law,” the first in the nation to prohibit all alcohol. Dow even tried to take those political goals truly nationwide, running for President in 1880 as the nominee of the Prohibition Party. In those and other ways, the political history of prohibition is inseparable from the career of Neal Dow.

3)      Carrie (sometimes Carry) Nation (1846-1911): While Dow did order that moment of militia violence, his own activisms remained more on the organizational and legal levels, as was the case with the 19^th and early 20^th century temperance movement as a whole. But all social movements feature a variety of perspectives and tactics, and not long after Dow’s presidential run the temperance movement came to be dominated by a figure who preferred much more direct and violent action. Believing herself called from God to oppose all things alcohol—“a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,” as she strikingly put it—Nation’s activist weapon of choice was neither words nor laws, but a literal weapon, the hatchet with which she attacked both liquor bottles and the businesses that served them (leading to the nickname “Hatchet Granny”). While Nation was part of the broader community of the Anti-Saloon League about which I’ll write tomorrow, she was also profoundly and powerfully individual, as were each of these influential temperance reformers.

Next temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 19, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: The Early Republic

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On three milestone moments in the movement’s early 19^th century evolutions.

1)      1813: While the issue and debate continued to simmer (to steep? Not sure of the best alcohol-based pun here) for the two centuries following the 1623 Virginia law, it was with the 1813 founding of the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance that a truly organized Temperance Movement began to develop in the Early Republic United States. To reiterate my last point in yesterday’s post, the Society did not initially advocate for total abstinence from alcohol, but rather opposed “the frequent use of ardent spirits and its kindred vices, profaneness and gaming.” But the more than 40 chapters founded in the Society’s first five years certainly reflects how broadly and passionately shared this perspective was in the first decades of the 19^th century.

2)      1826: As its name suggests, the Massachusetts Society was still somewhat local in its efforts; but a few years later, another Boston-based organization, the American Temperance Society (ATS) or American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, explicitly took the movement national. The ATS was also far more overtly committed to abstinence as a principal collective goal, with members signing a pledge to abstain from drinking distilled beverages. Moreover, while that pledge was of course voluntary, the ATS soon shifted its efforts to arguments for mandatory legal prohibition, reflecting a significant and lasting shift in the movement’s goals. The more than 1.25 million members who joined the ATS in its first decade of existence (about 10% of the total US population in the 1830s) makes clear that this was a truly communal such shift.

3)      Philadelphia: This developing national temperance movement also led to countless new local organizations—in Philadelphia alone there were 26 distinct Societies operating in 1841, and an entire building (Temperance Hall) dedicated for the movement’s meetings and rallies. Two of those Societies reflect the breadth of the movement’s inspirations and motivations: the Pennsylvania Catholic Total Abstinence Society was founded in 1840 by an Augustinian priest and focused on issues of religious and morality; while the Philadelphia Temperance Society was led by doctors and focused much more on reform narratives of health and wellness. While the movement was certainly coalescing around abstinence and prohibition in this prominent Early Republic period, it remained a broad and varied representation of the landscape of American reform, activism, and society.

Next temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 18, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: A 1623 Origin Point

[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]

On a couple historical and movement lessons from the 400^th anniversary of a foundational law.

As with many things early 1600s, it’s difficult to find too much specific information about the groundbreaking temperance law enacted in Virginia on March 5^th, 1623. The colony’s first royal governor Francis Wyatt and the recently-established colonial legislature deemed that date Temperance Day in an attempt to prohibit, as the law put it, “public intoxication.” That was just the first public and political step in a century-long debate in the colony over alcohol and its effects, as traced at length in Kendra Bonnett’s 1976 PhD dissertation Attitudes toward Drinking and Drunkenness in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (I’ll admit to having only briefly skimmed the beginning of that thesis for this post, but it’s linked there for anyone who wants to read more!). While those specific Virginia and 17^th century contexts are of course important to understanding this law, I want to use that 1623 moment to introduce a couple key lessons about temperance in America for this entire weeklong blog series.

For one thing, it’s crucial to understand how longstanding, widespread, and indeed foundational American temperance debates have been. Much of the narrative around this issue links it to early 19^th century reform movements, which were certainly influential and about which I’ll have a lot more to say in tomorrow’s post. But it’s pretty striking and telling that one of the very first laws passed in collaboration by two of the first European American political entities—both Virginia’s royal governor and its colonial legislature were only four years old at the time—addressed the issues of alcohol, drunkenness, and temperance. Moreover, while we might expect that the other principal English colony at the time, Puritan Massachusetts, would enact such a law—and while the Puritans most definitely had strong opinions on strong drink, but similarly more in opposition to public drunkenness than alcohol itself—this took place in the far less overtly religious (or at least religiously governed) Virginia colony. Clearly the issue was consuming across the new colonies from their outset.

But it’s just as important to note what this groundbreaking law specifically did and didn’t do. The temperance movement is often closely associated in our collective memories with—if not directly defined by—the goal of prohibition, an understandable connection given that particular, prominent early 20^th century Constitutional amendment and 13-year period (with which I’ll end the week’s series). Indeed, the association is so strong that one definition of “temperance” has come to be “abstinence from strong drink.” But I would argue that that definition emerged because of the association of the movement with prohibition, and that another definition—“the quality of moderation or self-restraint”—is more foundational to the word and movement alike. Virginia’ Temperance Day didn’t ban or even legally restrict alcohol, just “public intoxication”—a demonstrable lack of moderation or restraint in the consumption of such drinks. There’s at least a spectrum in play here, and one that would continue to shape the movement’s goals and laws throughout the subsequent 400 years.

Next temperance histories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 16-17, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Thankful Tributes

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now, leading up to these special weekend tributes!]

Along with the obvious, AKA my favorite people in the world—my sons, my wife, and my folks—here are a handful of people who have helped make this blog a favorite of mine as well.

1)      Irene Martyniuk: One of my very first Guest Posters, my colleague and friend Irene has also become my most consistent reader, and one who frequently takes the time to share thoughtful responses as well (some of which I’ve gotten to feature in Crowd-Sourced Posts). We all want to know we’re being read and read well, and nobody has helped me feel that better than Irene!

2)      Rob Velella: I wrote in that hyperlinked post about what Rob’s blog and work have meant to me. But I’m not sure I said clearly enough how much it helped to have an existing public scholarly blogger, one whose blog was a model for what I was hoping to create, be so supportive and collaborative from the jump. I hope I’ve paid that forward!

3)      Heather Cox Richardson: I likewise wrote in that hyperlinked post about how much it meant to have Heather and her excellent Historical Society website support and share my blog at any early point (and I could say the same about her even more excellent We’re History website, for which I was able to write many times). Now that Heather has become one of the most prominent and successful public scholars in American history, I can add, “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person!”

4)      Robin Field: That Guest Post of Robin’s was impressive and inspiring, as was the 2023 NeMLA paper of hers I highlighted in this post (and as is all of her work). But Robin has also connected me with a number of her students over the last few years, all of whom have contributed phenomenal Guest Posts in their own right (and who collectively have largely kept the Guest Post layer to the blog going). Am I suggesting that you all should connect me to awesome students who also might want to Guest Post on this blog? Yes, yes I am.

5)      You: Whether you connect me to students or not, I’m so damn thankful for y’all. And not just in the colloquial Southern 2^nd-person sense—for each and every one of you all. I try not to dwell on blog stats, as they’re outside my control and can and do fluctuate and in any case are just numbers. But I get somewhere in the range of 30,000 discrete views each month, and I really am profoundly grateful for each and every one of those folks who finds their way to this blog. So thanks, and here’s to the next 14 years!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 15, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Communal Crowd-Sourcing

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

If you click on the tab for Crowd-Sourced Posts in the list of “Labels” to the right on the blog’s homepage, you’ll notice that there haven’t been any in 2024 and were only four each in 2023 and 2022, compared to the average of about ten each year prior to that. There are all kinds of reasons for that shift, including the growth of my #ScholarSunday threads (first on Twitter, now on their own newsletter) which have become a powerful form of crowd-sourcing in their own right (both in terms of sharing others’ voices and because many of the things I feature there have been shared with me). But even if I never feature another crowd-sourced post—and I hope and believe I will, at the very least for next year’s non-favorites series!—I don’t think I can overstate how much those posts have meant to me over the course of my blogging career. Scholarly blogging, like most every other part of scholarly work, can feel individual and isolated at times; some degree of that is likely inevitable, but I’ve still spent my whole career seeking ways and places to challenge that feeling and offer a communal alternative. I love that my blog has featured precisely such an alternative, and hope it always feels like it can.

Tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 14, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Great Guests

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

Two years ago, I dedicated my entire anniversary series to sharing my 25 most recent (at that time) Guest Posts, a tribute as I noted to how much such connections to others, and the opportunity to share their words and ideas, has helped me keep the blog going. In recent years the roster of Guest Posters has included a growing number of Fitchburg State students as well as both of my sons, making this aspect of the blog even more meaningful than ever (although the very first Guest Post was written by Mom, so they’ve always been plenty meaningful!). But even with the many Guest Posters whom I’ve never met in person—and in some ways especially with that cohort, to whom I would never have become connected without the blog—the chance to feature their work here has been a true privilege as well as a pleasure. When I ask y’all to consider Guest Posting, it’s at least as much for me as it is (I hope) an opportunity for you—and in any case, it’s one of the things that most definitely keeps me coming back.

Last post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 13, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Teaching Thoughts

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

In mid-May 2011, almost exactly six months into my blogging career, I decided to end the Spring 2011 semester with a few consecutive posts (starting with that hyperlinked one) reflecting on that semester’s classes, teaching, and other work in my roles at Fitchburg State. I won’t pretend to remember if I planned at that time to make such end-of-semester reflections a consistent part of the blog, nor exactly when I decided to complement them with beginning of semester posts (I featured one individual such post in September 2011, but featured the first full pre-semester series in January 2012, and likewise featured a weeklong end of semester series that May). All I know is, it’s been a long time since I’ve started or ended a semester without blogging about it, and I really love how much the two go hand-in-hand for me: the promise of a new semester and the opportunity to express those hopes in this space; the culminating moments of a semester and the chance to think about takeaways from that work here. Other than my sons, teaching and blogging have been my two true constants over the last 14 years, and I love that they’re so intertwined.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 12, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Lifelong Learning

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

For some time in the blog’s early days (and really its early years), I’d say my posts tended to focus on the kinds of familiar topics I highlighted yesterday—sometimes favorites, sometimes frustrations, but most of the time subjects about which I knew a decent amount before I began planning and writing. It was really when I began planning weekly series around a particular topic that I likewise started creating posts—not all of them, but at least a couple in each series, let’s say—from an initially less well-informed place, and thus needing to research before (and while) writing. As a result, there’s absolutely no doubt that I have learned a great deal from this blog, about an unbelievably wide variety of topics: including, to cite just a few from my early moves into such weekly series, San Diego, satire, and Sendak. I hope I’ve modeled lifelong learning as a collective goal in the process, but in any case that goal has kept the blog fresh for its author, and thus without question kept me going.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 11, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Foregrounding Favorites

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

For folks who know me, it’s likely no surprise that the first month of this blog included posts that featured The Marrow of Tradition, Thunderheart, Boston’s Shaw/54^th Massachusetts Memorial, The Grandissimes and The Squatter and the Don, The Best Years of Our Lives, and the Chinese Educational Mission and its Celestials baseball team. That is, all of those things are favorites of mine in their respective cultural and historical categories, and I can’t imagine creating a daily blog without getting the chance to share such favorites with y’all (I’m honestly just surprised I didn’t get to Springsteen or Sayles for as long as I did, although I’ve more than made up for it since). While I got a lot of those favorites into the mix very quickly, I’ve certainly returned to favs every month and year since, including further attention to those but also to other subjects such as (to name just a few from this past year) Kane Brown, House of Leaves, Deadwood and Justified, and many many more. I’m still doing this 14 years down the road for lots of reasons, as I hope this series will illustrate, but high on the list is that I’m having a lot of fun, and favorites help make it so.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 9-10, 2024: 2024 Election Reflections

So that happened. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking and writing about the worst and best of America, and somehow I’m still surprised and saddened when we lean into our worst. We can try to understand and analyze these results in all sorts of ways, but the bottom line is that more than 70 million of my fellow Americans voted for a candidate who expresses and embodies not just the worst attributes of human behavior and the worst impulses toward fascism, but also (and most relevantly to this blog) the worst of our shared histories and national identity.

The only other thing I want to say here is this: over the last few days, I’ve started to work hard to lean in myself, into the people and things I love, into the best in my life, from the biggest (my younger son as he moves through his senior year, my older son as he continues to rock his freshman year in college, my parents, my wife) to the smallest (a Reese’s ice cream cake for no reason other than all the reasons). And one of the things I love most is the best of the work I get to do—in the classroom, on my podcast, in this blog, everywhere I get to do this AmericanStudying thing. La lucha continua, and as ever I’m very proud to be in it with y’all.

Blog anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 8, 2024: The 1924 Election: Foreshadowing the Future

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

Three ways that the 1924 election foreshadowed future political events.

1)      Progressive programs: I don’t want to repeat too much of where I ended yesterday’s post, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the significance of La Follette’s third-party run and success. Coolidge’s win was due in large part to perceptions that the economy was booming—but five years before the stock market crash, La Follette’s success reflected a sizeable contingent of Americans for whom things weren’t going so well, and a desire for a government that could support and help those folks. Less than a decade later, the federal government would dedicate itself to doing so in ways that would extend into at least the 1960s and in many ways the rest of the century.

2)      Catholic candidates: A major reason for the ridiculous deadlock at the 1924 Democratic National Convention was that one of the two leading contenders for the nomination, New York Governor Al Smith, was Catholic, and thus the target of the same longstanding anti-Catholic prejudices I highlighted in this post a couple months back. If Smith did not ultimately break through those prejudices in 1924, however, he was able to do so just four years later, winning the Democratic nomination at the also-contested 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston. Smith lost to Herbert Hoover in November, and there’s no doubt that his Catholicism played a role; but progress is progress, and I believe Smith’s progress in the 1920s absolutely foreshadowed Kennedy’s election in 1960 (as well as the non-issue that Biden’s Catholicism has been in our current moment).

3)      Right-wing extremism in New York: Both of those were genuine and positive legacies of the 1924 election, and I don’t want to minimize them by ending on a darker note. But the presence and influence of the Ku Klux Klan at the Democratic Convention in New York City was a powerful moment of foreshadowing in its own right, and I’m not talking here about the immigration restrictions and exclusions I highlighted in Wednesday’s post. Instead, I’m thinking about another, even more extreme right-wing gathering in Madison Square Garden fifteen years later, one that truly reflected the presence of such American extremists. I think it’s fair to say we’re still dealing with that presence lo these 100 years later.  

2024 election reflections this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?