My New Book!

My New Book!
My New Book!

Saturday, February 8, 2025

February 8-9, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Aidan and Kyle Railton

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

I could write about my sons in every post and ad nauseum (probably literally for y’all, but #sorrynotsorry), but here I’ll restrain myself and just a highlight a few of the many reasons why I’m so proud of their athletic accomplishments:

1)      Aidan’s Guest Post on Strava and social media in running;

2)      Kyle’s current role as an Indoor Track captain;

3)      Aidan’s blossoming connection to the Vanderbilt University Running Club, for which he’s already a leader as a freshman;

4)      And Kyle’s commitment to mentoring and teaching younger runners, the subject of one of his phenomenal college application essays.

Valentine’s series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

Friday, February 7, 2025

February 7, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: FSU Student-Athletes

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

As I near the conclusion of my 20th (!) year at Fitchburg State University, I wanted to share quick examples of a handful of the many amazing student-athletes I’ve taught across those two decades. These folks stand out for their record-breaking accomplishments, but they also represent the vast majority of such student-athletes at FSU, a school that can’t offer athletic scholarships, that still demands an exceptionally challenging balance of its student-athletes, and that would be infinitely impoverished without folks such as these:

1)      Amy Fahey

2)      Aidan Hanratty

3)      Diana Okongo

4)      Cameron Monette

5)      Oliver Cookson

6)      Jenna Morse

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

Thursday, February 6, 2025

February 6, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Jaylen Brown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two inspiring layers to the most recent NBA Finals MVP.

I wrote briefly about the inspiring stories behind Boston Celtics superstar Jaylen Brown in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the Celtics. In lieu of a full first paragraph here I’d ask you to check out that column if you would, and then come on back for more on what makes Brown such an inspiring sports story.

Welcome back! Brown’s social and political advocacy and activism are without doubt the most inspiring layers to his career and life, far beyond the basketball court, and were nicely traced in this excellent William Rhoden essay for Andscape. It’s not just that he’s so committed to those efforts, but also the language and ideas on which they depend—look at the homepage for his 7uice Foundation, for example, which leads with “A History of Systemic Racism”! I’ve written before in this space about the 2015-2017 Boston Globe Spotlight investigation which revealed that the median net worth for Black families in Boston was $8, a statistic that is as complicated as statistics always are but that nonetheless captures quite definitively the legacies of systemic racism in the city for which Brown plays professional basketball. Brown’s foundation represents a direct and vital response to such histories and realities, and that alone makes him one of our most inspiring contemporary athletes.

But as his excellent Hot Ones interview reminded us, there’s even more to Brown than his combination of athletic and activist achievements. A Berkeley grad who was offered a NASA internship, became the youngest person ever to deliver an invited lecture at Harvard when he did so at the age of 21, and in his role as an MIT Media Lab Fellow co-founded the Bridge Program which mentors Boston high schoolers of color who are interested in STEM, Brown was described by certain scouts as “too smart” for the NBA before he was drafted in 2016. Obviously that perspective is caught up in all kinds of limited and prejudicial mindsets that tell us more about those holding them than they ever could about Brown. But there’s no doubt that he’s a unique professional athlete in any sport, and from any time period, one who exemplifies the best kind of Renaissance person that also can and should inspire all of us to be our most multilayered and best selves.

Last inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

February 5, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Chubbtown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two contrasting and equally important ways to contextualize an inspiring family story.

I don’t imagine I have to convince readers of this blog that sports are more than just a distraction or entertainment, that they connect to all the layers of our society and community and history. One of the most striking instances of such connections for me is the fact that I first learned about the unique and amazing American community of Chubbtown, Georgia, through a pregame story on the running back Nick Chubb, then playing as a stand-out at the University of Georgia. Chubb has since moved into the NFL, as has his relative, the equally talented defensive lineman Bradley Chubb. Both Nick and Bradley are related to the historic Chubb family, one of the oldest-recorded multi-generational African American families in our history (with records dating back to the pre-Revolutionary days) and the founders of Chubbtown, a community of free Black folks established in the mountains of Northwest Georgia in 1864, during the depths of the Civil War (and as an escape from that conflict).

Chubbtown is far from the only community founded by African Americans during and immediately after the Civil War, as anyone who has read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) knows; Hurston sets much of her novel in such a community, one based closely on her own influential childhood experiences in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-Black city in America. And remembering such communities overall allows us—or perhaps forces us is the better phrase—to engage with the 1923 Rosewood massacre, when another all-Black community in Florida was largely destroyed by white supremacist domestic terrorists. The late John Singleton’s 1997 film portrays both that community and that massacre with nuance and power, and I would say we can’t commemorate the Chubbs and Chubbtown without a complementary examination of that story and these frustratingly frequent and foundational American histories of racial terrorism.

At the same time, we talked a great deal throughout my 20th Century African American Literature course this past Fall semester about not allowing such histories to dominate our collective memories of the truly multilayered and often profoundly inspiring stories of Black history. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first recorded stories of the Chubb family, making their saga a particularly striking and symbolic such inspiring story in early 2025 (and one that can, for example, complement, challenge, and transcend collective memories focused only on the 250th anniversary of white-centered stories and figures from the American Revolution). That story extends far beyond Chubbtown, but it became deeply interconnected with this community, one that produced two iconic 21st century athletes who can, like so much of the best of sports in our histories, offer a window into better remembering every layer of that setting and story.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

February 4, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Babe Didrikson Zaharias

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two ways to connect and parallel the pioneering athlete to legendary men, and one key way not to.

1)      Multi-Sport Achievements and Fame: I’ve always thought of Jim Thorpe as the 20th century’s most talented athlete, what with his stunning and groundbreaking successes in Olympic track and field, football, and baseball, among other sports. But in researching this post, I realized that Didrikson Zaharias has a serious case for the same title: I had long known about her unparalleled successes as a professional golfer, but she also won two track and field gold medals (and one silver medal) at the 1932 Summer Olympics and was an All-American in basketball, again among many other athletic accomplishments. Although sports lend themselves particularly well to lists and rankings and debates about who was the best, the truth is that both Thorpe and Didrikson Zaharias should be remembered as truly exceptional and influential athletes, figures whose early to mid 20th century, runaway crossover successes in both amateur and professional sports helped pave the way for the sports world to become the national and global phenomenon that it remains to this day.

2)      Larger-than-life Persona: Born Mildred Ella Didrikson, Didrikson Zaharias would later claim that she gained the nickname “Babe” when she hit five home runs in a youth baseball game. That might or might not be true (her Norwegian immigrant mother supposedly called her “Bebe” throughout her life), but even the uncertainty helps illustrate Didrikson Zaharias’ embrace of a larger-than-life persona that echoes that of her potential namesake Babe Ruth. For example, she long claimed to have been born in 1914 (rather than her actual 1911 birth year), perhaps to exaggerate her youthful accomplishments yet further. And she complemented the athletic successes I detailed above with a lifelong series of forays into the worlds of celebrity and popular culture: singing and playing harmonica on several pop songs for Mercury Records; performing on the vaudeville circuit; trying her hand as a pocket billiards player, as in a famous multi-day match against billiards champion Ruth McGinnis; and marrying professional wrestler George Zaharias, the “Crying Greek from Cripple Creek.” Like Babe Ruth, Didrikson Zaharias’ athletic accomplishments would have been more than enough to cement her fame and legacy; but like Ruth, she clearly wanted all that culture and life had to offer.

3)      Shattering Stereotypes: Jim Thorpe and Babe Ruth are two of the greatest American athletes of all time, and linking any other athlete to them is (I hope and would argue) a sign of respect. Yet at the same time, I did so at least somewhat ironically, to help engage with the particular, unquestionably gendered limits which Didrikson Zaharias continually encountered and yet challenged and destroyed. (Certainly a Native American athlete like Thorpe faced his own barriers and challenges, of course.) The most overt such limits, many of which called into question Didrikson Zaharias’ gender itself, are nicely encapsulated by this quote, from sportswriter Joe Williams in the New York World-Telegram: “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.” In the last few years of her life, Didrikson Zaharias developed a close, quite possibly romantic relationship with fellow golfer Betty Dodd, a relationship neither would describe as romantic due to the limits of their early 1950s society. Yet at the same time, in those final years Didrikson Zaharias shattered all limits one final time: diagnosed with colon cancer in 1953, she continued to golf professionally until her 1956 death, winning multiple tournaments including the last two she entered. A towering and inspiring sports legend to the last.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

Monday, February 3, 2025

February 3, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: The Celestials

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

For my money, the most inspiring American sports story and figures are those at the heart of my podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. If you haven’t had the chance to check out that podcast yet I’d really appreciate it, so I’m going to end this post here and ask you to take a listen if you have a chance (and if you’re pressed for time, I’d say the Seventh Inning in particular is among the best work I’ve ever done)!

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

Saturday, February 1, 2025

February 1-2, 2025: January 2025 Recap

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

December 30: 2025 Anniversaries: King Philip’s War: My annual historic anniversaries series kicks off with the 350th anniversary of a tragic early American conflict.

December 31: 2025 Anniversaries: Lexington and Concord: The series continues with two important ways to add to our Revolutionary memories for the 250th.

January 1: 2025 Anniversaries: The Erie Canal: For the 200th anniversary of its opening, three figures who helped construct the Erie Canal.

January 2: 2025 Anniversaries: Two 1875 Laws: The Page Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the worst and best of America, as the series remembers on.

January 3: 2025 Anniversaries: 1925 Literature: A link to a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column where I argued for complementing The Great Gatsby with other 1925 lit.

January 4-5: 2025 Anniversaries: Five 1975 Films: The series concludes with quick thoughts on what five class 1975 films can tell us in 2025.

January 6: Great Society Laws: Civil and Voting Rights: For the Great Society’s 60th anniversary, a series on its groundbreaking laws kicks off with three pivotal civil rights acts.

January 7: Great Society Laws: Education and the Arts: The series continues with two specific laws and one broader effect of the Great Society.

January 8: Great Society Laws: Economic Safety Nets: Three distinct and equally important ways that the Great Society created safety nets, as the series acts on.

January 9: Great Society Laws: Medicare and Medicaid: How the Great Society reflected two distinct ways of thinking about health care, and why the second is still urgently needed.

January 10: Great Society Laws: Immigration and America: The series concludes with one definitively inclusive thing the 1965 Immigration Act did, one more complicated effect, and the bottom line.

January 11-12: The Great Society in 2025: A special weekend follow-up on where we are in January 2025, and why we need to fight for the Great Society now more than ever.

January 13: Spring Semester Previews: Graduate Research Methods: For my Spring semester previews series, I wanted to focus on skills we’ll be working on in my classes this semester, starting with the combination of clarity and nuance in my Grad course.

January 14: Spring Semester Previews: First-Year Writing II: The series continues with a film I’m for the first time hesitant to share with my First-Year Writing students, and why that makes it even more important to do so.

January 15: Spring Semester Previews: Major American Authors of the 20C: How creative assignments can complement and strengthen analytical writing, as the series teaches on.  

January 16: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature II: Why I’m still committed to including longer works in my literature classes despite the challenges.

January 17: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online: The series concludes with the unmistakable frustrations of generative AI, and how I’m trying to push back.

January 18-19: Spring Semester Previews: My Scholarly Work and You: A special weekend post on my ideas for a next public scholarly podcast, and how you all can help!

January 20: Misread Quotes: MLK’s Dream: To build on my annual MLK Day post on the misunderstood King, a series on misread and -remembered quotes, starting with King’s most famous one.

January 21: Misread Quotes: Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural: The series continues with why one of our most justifiably famous inaugural addresses needs to be remembered more accurately.

January 22: Misread Quotes: The Constitution: Three sections of the Constitution that conservatives consistently get wrong, as the series reads on.

January 23: Misread Quotes: The Bible: And three sections of Scripture about which I would say the same.

January 24: Misread Quotes: Churchill on Politics and Age: The series concludes with a Churchill quote that never happened, and why it’s even wronger than that.

January 27: Musical Activism: “We Are the World”: For the recording’s 40th anniversary, a musical activisms series kicks off with three figured who embody the multiple layers of “World.”

January 28: Musical Activism: Live Aid and Farm Aid: The series continues with an overblown controversy at one benefit concert that helped produce another enduring one.

January 29: Musical Activism: Post-9/11 Songs: How connections to political and historical events can change what songs mean and do, as the series plays on.

January 30: Musical Activism: Artists United Against Apartheid: Two American contexts for an inspiring 1985 musical activism.

January 31: Musical Activism: Endorsements: The series concludes with three examples and types of political endorsements from musicians.

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

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

Friday, January 31, 2025

January 31, 2025: Musical Activism: Endorsements

[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]

On three examples and types of political endorsements from musicians.

1)      Elvis and the Polio Vaccine: I said in that hyperlinked post much of what I’d want to say about the role played by Elvis Presley (among other celebrities) in helping make the new and frustratingly (if not necessarily, here in early 2025, surprisingly) controversial polio vaccine palatable to the American public in the 1950s. A moment that helpfully reminds us, when we’re quick to complain about the outsized influence of celebs in our moment or on the public, that it’s been thus for at least half a century now.

2)      Elvis and Nixon: As that Time article indicates, the most-requested photo from the National Archives is the one that captures the December 1970 Oval Office meeting between the President and the King. It wasn’t an endorsement exactly—Nixon was in between campaigns at the time, and Presley wasn’t there to support any particular policy or the like—but it nonetheless reflects that the intersection between musical celebrities and political figures is likewise nothing new.

3)      Sinatra and Multiple Campaigns: My man Bruce Springsteen might have eclipsed the record over the last few presidential campaigns, but for a good while no musicians had endorsed more such campaigns than did Frank Sinatra. And likely no other has crossed party lines in the way Ol’ Blue Eyes did—campaigning with FDR in 1944 and JFK in 1960 but later endorsing Ronald Reagan during his 1980 campaign. Much as those shifts might have angered particular supporters, I think they do reflect, as I believe Springsteen’s certainly do as well, artists genuinely sharing their perspectives (which, to be clear, was also the case with Kamala’s endorsers in this last campaign, who despite false stories to the contrary were not paid for their support).  

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?

Thursday, January 30, 2025

January 30, 2025: Musical Activism: Artists United Against Apartheid

[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]

On two American contexts for another 1985 musical activism.

First things first: South Africa is not the United States, and it’s important to note that the 1985 musical supergroup Artists United Against Apartheid, and their protest song “Sun City,” were explicitly and entirely focused on that African nation and its policies of racial segregation. There are of course additional, complex layers to that focus, including the Sun City resort and casino, located in the semi-autonomous-but-ultimately-still-part-of-South-African-and-thoroughly-tied-to-Apartheid state of Bophuthatswana, that the group and song were overtly protesting and boycotting (a concert venue at which, frustratingly enough, a number of contemporary artists and groups had been and continued to be more than happy to perform). This blog is called AmericanStudies, and so I’m going to focus the rest of this post on a couple American contexts for this musical activism; but there’s plenty more to say about its South African contexts, and if folks want to add to them in the comments below I’d be very appreciative as always.

One particularly striking American context for the supergroup is just how diverse a collection of artists rocker Steve Van Zandt and hip hop producer Arthur Baker assembled for the recording session and the song that they created. In his book on the project critic Dave Marsh called it “the most diverse line up of popular musicians ever assembled for a single session,” and I can’t disagree: you’d be hard-pressed to find another group that included DJ Kool Herc and Ringo Starr, Grandmaster Melle Mel and Hall & Oates, Bob Dylan and Afrika Bambaataa, Bono and Gil Scott-Heron, and literally countless others. And the resulting song reflects that diversity, as it moves back and forth between hip hop and rap verses, rock ones, and a chorus that brings the multiple voices and styles together. A great deal has been made of the groundbreaking 1986 collaboration between Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith, and rightly so—but nearly a year earlier, the “Sun City” sessions and song likewise featured these multiple musical genres, and could be seen as helping pave the way for future such collaborations and cross-overs.

The other American context I want to highlight here is far, far more complex. By his own admission, Steve Van Zandt’s initial interest in opposing Apartheid came when he learned that the policy had been based in part on Native American reservations in the US, and the song’s lyrics reflect that intersection with the repeated lines “Relocation to phony homelands/Separation of families, I can’t understand.” And then there’s this: Sun City had been developed by the South African hotel tycoon Sol Kerzner and his Sun International group; and just over a decade after Van Zandt’s supergroup, Kerzner opened another resort and casino, this time as a joint venture with a Native American tribe: Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. I’m not suggesting for a second that a Native American casino is the same as an Apartheid one; indeed, the two could be seen as polar opposites. But the same South African tycoon was behind both, which at the very least reminds us that, to quote Trip in Glory, “We’re all covered up in it. Ain’t nobody clean.”

Last musical activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

January 29, 2025: Musical Activism: Post-9/11 Songs

[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]

On how art can radically change in meaning alongside history.

The song, and one of the cultural works in any media, that became most overtly associated with September 11th and its aftermaths was released almost exactly a year before the attacks. America Town, the second studio album from Five for Fighting (the stage name of singer-songwriter Vladimir John Ondrasik), was released on September 26th, 2000 and included the song “Superman (It’s Not Easy).” That song, an interesting psychological examination of Superman’s inner perspective and emotions, was the album’s second single and had already become a minor hit by September 2001; but in the aftermath of the attacks it became an anthem for the first responders, an expression of their collective service and sacrifice on and after that horrific day. Five for Fighting’s live piano performance of it at the October 20th Concert for New York City was one of the most moving moments in a period of American and world history full of them, and cemented this song’s enduring status as a definitive artistic expression of the best of post-9/11 America.

Obviously all of Bruce Springsteen’s 2002 album The Rising comprised another, and much more intentional, such artistic expression. But interestingly enough, perhaps the single song from that album which became most overtly connected to 9/11 and its aftermaths—including a similar live performance at another benefit concert, September 12th, 2001’s televised special “America: A Tribute to Heroes”—was likewise written a year before that event. Springsteen first wrote the song “My City of Ruins” in November 2000 for a Christmas benefit concert for Asbury Park, New Jersey, the seaside community that had been such a vital element of Springsteen’s childhood and early musical career alike. By 2000 Asbury Park was in pretty rough shape (hence the need for a benefit concert), and so was the titular city of ruins to which Springsteen’s speaker repeatedly implores that it “come on, rise up!” By performing the song at the Tribute to Heroes benefit Springsteen already began to shift its association to post-September 11th New York City, however, and then his inclusion of it on The Rising—indeed, it is the album’s concluding track—cemented that new and enduring association.

The specific circumstances and ways in which these two songs became so closely associated with September 11th are thus quite different, but the fundamental facts are nonetheless similar: songs written in the fall of 2000 becoming repurposed a year later after the attacks and in the process coming to feel like collective artistic anthems of that moment and its emotions. And that’s what I would especially emphasize about this interesting and telling pair of 9/11 songs: a particular and potent form of what literary critics would call reader-response theory. That critical perspective argues that the meaning of texts is made not by the authors (nor by intrinsic elements within those texts), but by audiences through their engagement with and responses to the texts. In my understanding reader-response generally focuses on individual reader/audience member, but there’s no reason why we can’t think about collective such responses, and indeed when it comes to historical events that affect an entire community or nation, it makes sense that there would likewise be collective experiences of cultural and artistic works. Moreover, Springsteen sought to produce such a collective experience with his post-9/11 album The Rising, and it’s clear that he succeeded very fully indeed.

Next musical activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

January 28, 2025: Musical Activism: Live Aid and Farm Aid

[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]

On how an overblown controversy at one activist concert led to a second that endures to this day.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, “We Are the World” was directly inspired by the British supergroup Band Aid’s late 1984 single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Band Aid was the brainchild of producers Bob Geldof and James “Midge” Ure, and in the summer of 1985 the pair decided to build on that starting point with a “global jukebox” known as Live Aid, comprising a number of concerts held around the world (but headlined by a pair of star-studded shows in London and Philadelphia) on July 13th. Watched by nearly 2 billion people around the world, the concerts raised hundreds of millions for African famine relief (ostensibly, although the destination of those funds remained controversial for many years to come). But at least one famous performer at the Philadelphia show expressed a different perspective: before he launched into a performance of his song “When the Ship Comes In” (alongside Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones), Bob Dylan argued, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks.”

Even in that pre-internet era, Dylan’s quote went viral, and was quickly and consistently misquoted (as hyperlinked above, there’s a full video of the Live Aid moment, so the exact quote is perfectly clear) as “Wouldn’t it be great if we did something for our own farmers right here in America?” The us vs. them framing of that misquoted version is hugely frustrating, not only because it plays into so many problematic broader narratives, but also because it goes directly against the global solidarity exemplified by Live Aid. But if we set that false framing aside, Dylan’s quote can be seen as offering a far more complementary than contrasting perspective, and indeed as having set in motion conversations that led to a complementary activist concert: Farm Aid. Inspired by Dylan’s idea, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young organized that September 1985 benefit concert, held at Champaign, Illinois’s Memorial Stadium, to raise funds for family farmers in the U.S. Along with those three artists, Farm Aid also featured performances from Dylan (natch), Billy Joel, B.B. King, Loretta Lynn, and Tom Petty among many others. Attended by a crowd of 80,000 the concert raised nearly $10 million for its worthy cause.

That cause didn’t evaporate when the final notes sounded, though, and neither did Farm Aid, which has held concerts almost every Fall since 1985. The most recent, 38th Farm Aid concert, held on September 21st, 2024 in Saratoga Springs, New York, still featured performances by Nelson, Mellencamp, and Young, this time joined by Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds from the Dave Matthews Band, Mavis Staples, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, and many others. It’s easy to see benefit concerts and other musical activisms as a kind of parachuted-in moment without the staying power that is required to make a lasting difference; I don’t think that’s entirely fair in any case (raising millions of dollars as well as collective awareness are meaningful effects no matter what), but Farm Aid certainly reminds us that many of these efforts endure long after the initial concert, and can become an ongoing element of vital collective activism.

Next musical activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?

Monday, January 27, 2025

January 27, 2025: Musical Activism: “We Are the World”

[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]

Three individuals who together embody the serious and silly sides of musical activism.

1)      Harry Belafonte: By the mid-1980s, Harry Belafonte had been an iconic presence on both the cultural and political landscape for decades; indeed, as I discovered in researching this column on Vietnam Veterans Against the War, it’s hard to find a social movement and cause from the second half of the 20th century that didn’t feature Belafonte’s activism in a significant way. So it shouldn’t be a surprise (even though I didn’t realize it until researching this post) that the original idea for USA for Africa came from Belafonte—inspired by the British supergroup Band Aid and their single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984), in early 1985 Belafonte reached out to a number of prominent American musical artists to create a fundraising single for African famine relief. With its superstar lineup it’s easy to see “We Are the World” as more musical than activist, but Belafonte’s role certainly reminds us that it was fundamentally the latter.

2)      Michael Jackson: One of the first musicians that Belafonte enlisted to create the single was also the biggest superstar in the world at that moment. Michael Jackson wasn’t Belafonte’s first call, partly due to industry connections—Belafonte’s manager Ken Kragen reached out to a pair of his clients, Lionel Ritchie and Kenny Rogers; and Ritchie then contacted Stevie Wonder, whom he knew well. But when the legendary Quincy Jones was brought in to produce the song, he suggested Jackson, and as you might expect once the King of Pop was involved it more or less became his show. He offered to co-write the song with Ritchie, and the songwriting and initial recordings ended up happening in Jackson’s bedroom at the family home in Encino. Obviously the song’s activist goals remained throughout these stages, but I would say the involvement and then the prominence of Jackson did reflect a definite shift toward the musical side of the equation.

3)      Dan Ackroyd: When it came time to record the song that musical side ended up including a veritable who’s who of mid-1980s musical royalty, from Ray Charles to Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper to Bruce Springsteen, Waylon Jennings to five of Michael Jackson’s siblings. But eagle-eyed observers of the resulting music video noticed a very different kind of mid-80s star in the background, the comedian and actor (and, yes, musical performer) Dan Ackroyd (fresh off the blockbusting success of 1984’s Ghostbusters). As the first hyperlinked story above notes, Ackroyd’s participation in “We Are the World” was entirely random, the result of the actor and his father walking into a management office for utterly different reasons but at precisely the right time. Again Ackroyd did have a musical career which I’m not trying to downplay, but I would nonetheless argue that his presence in the recording session reflects how an earnest activist effort can gradually morph into something a bit more celebrity-driven and, as a result, something somewhat sillier.

Next musical activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?

Friday, January 24, 2025

January 24, 2025: Misread Quotes: Churchill on Politics and Age

[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]

This one is pretty straightforward. Conservatives love to attribute to Winston Churchill the quote, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” But as Professor Paul Addison argued in this piece, that’s not only not a Churchill quote, but it also goes against both his own political journey and the lifelong liberalism of his beloved wife Clementine. I’m a big believer in the importance of both a heart and a brain, but we can’t let our heart dictate the way our brain works, and relying on false quotes to support our pre-existing perspectives seems like doing precisely that.     

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

Thursday, January 23, 2025

January 23, 2025: Misread Quotes: The Bible

[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]

I’m no religious scholar, but I have read every word in the Bible (for a college class), and here are three quotes therein I think conservatives get wrong:

1)      Leviticus: I don’t think I can say it any better than Jed Bartlett did in that hyperlinked scene. But he’s quoting a ton of different Old Testament Books, and I would argue that simply reading all of Leviticus makes it far more difficult to single out the single verse (18:22) about men lying with men as some sort of particularly significant prohibition. After all, Leviticus dedicates something like twenty straight verses to which animals the people of Israel can and can’t eat, and I would be willing to bet that just about everyone who references Leviticus to excuse homophobia regularly eats many of the prohibited meats. A little consistency please, bigots.

2)      “An eye for an eye”: Hammurabi’s Code, to my understanding the origin point for the “eye for an eye” argument for the death penalty and similarly retributive punishments, is already far lengthier and more complicated than that simplified phrase. But for conservative Christians who seek to support the death penalty, it’s the Book of Exodus to which they turn. It’s true that Exodus 21:24-25 does delineate such punishments with that “eye for an eye” phrase, but that’s in response to a very specific situation: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and mischief follow” (meaning I believe death or other grievous injury to the woman). Even if we want to use the Bible to influence our justice system (and I do not want that), this section ain’t an overarching frame for that effort.

3)      Jesus: Mostly I want to ask you all to read that blog post, written by what seems to be an ardent believer, making the case for Jesus as at least anti-capitalist and ultimately (and this is where I would land as well) quite overtly socialist. I know those frames didn’t exist a couple thousand years ago, but the ideas behind them have always been part of human societies, as has for example the debate between a more individualist and a more collectivist way of thinking. If Jesus was anything, he seems to have been thoroughly collectivist, and I believe if conservative Christians were truly to follow his model, they and we would be in a very different place today.

Last misread quote tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

January 22, 2025: Misread Quotes: The Constitution

[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]

On three complex Constitutional quotes that conservatives consistently over-simplify.

1)      The 2nd Amendment: I said a good bit of what I’d want to say about the minefield that is the 2nd Amendment in that hyperlinked Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. I’m not going to pretend that for those of us who are for stringent gun control the amendment is a slam-dunk in our favor, as it’s much more complicated than that—and that’s the thing, it’s really quite complicated, historically as well as legally. 2nd Amendment absolutists refuse to recognize those layers, and that’s a deeply problematic over-simplification.

2)      The 10th Amendment: The balance of federalism and “states’ rights” (a phrase not specifically found in the Constitution) in the founding era was at least as complicated as the question of guns, and the very brief 10th Amendment doesn’t do much to resolve those complexities. But I think there is a crucial part of that brief amendment that has been consistently overlooked by those who argue for “states’ rights”: that the powers not delegated to the federal government “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That is, there’s a third powerful party in this framing in addition to the U.S. and the states; and when it comes to current controversial issues like whether individual states have the power to pass restrictive abortion laws, I’d argue that conservatives are overlooking the people’s power in that equation.

3)      We the People”: I began that hyperlinked book with an extended discussion of why I believe that opening phrase of the Constitution’s Preamble represents a truly striking and significant choice, locating the new nation’s identity not in law or religion or any other overarching frame we might expect, but in the human community itself. That entire book project was an attempt to argue that we haven’t meant just one thing by that phrase, though, and more exactly that the conservative emphasis on a homogeneous white America as our origin point is at best just one perspective and at worst (and what I would really argue) a mythic patriotic perspective with very little basis in history or reality. At the very least, we can’t let that perspective dictate what we mean by “we the people,” no more than any other part of our Constitution.

Next misread quote tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

January 21, 2025: Misread Quotes: Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural

[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]

On what Lincoln did indeed say in his 1865 second inaugural address, and two other things he importantly said as well.

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered on March 4th, 1865, is not quite as brief as the Gettysburg Address but is still quite short (especially for an inaugural address), totaling less than 700 words. That makes every one of those words even more significant for sure, and so I don’t entirely disagree with the emphasis that has long been placed on Lincoln’s brief and pointed final paragraph: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” There are more clauses in that one-sentence paragraph than have generally been the focus, but “malice toward none” and “charity for all” are indeed two striking perspectives at the end of the Civil War, and are thus indeed a model for reconciliation as this passage has long been read.

But at just over 70 words, that brief paragraph comprises about one-tenth of the inaugural, and for most of the rest of it (hyperlinked above so you can read the whole thing for yourself), Lincoln says some quite different things about the war that, not surprisingly, have not figured into conservative collective memory of this speech and moment. For one thing, he is quite clear about the causes of the Civil War: “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.” The paragraph which begins with those sentences is by the longest in the address, indeed comprises nearly two-thirds of the entire speech, and so it’s more than fair to say that the main thrust of Lincoln’s remarks was not on imagining a reunited future, but on being very clear about what had brought the nation to this present point. Anyone who argues that he would have let the nation forget those histories had he lived into Reconstruction needs to grapple with that fundamental fact.

Moreover, Lincoln ends that longest paragraph on an even more somber and striking note, one that would not be out of place in another great American speech, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” Having expressed the “fond and fervent” hope that “this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln adds, “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” In Of Thee I Sing I made the case for Lincoln as a consistent voice of critical patriotism, and I don’t think he ever expressed that perspective more clearly nor more powerfully than in this impassioned sentence. Let’s make sure to remember it as well every time we quote the malice and charity moment.

Next misread quote tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

Monday, January 20, 2025

January 20, 2025: Misread Quotes: MLK’s Dream

[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]

On two ways to reframe the one King quote we collectively (but inaccurately) remember.

For many years now, I’ve shared the same post for MLK Day, highlighting the many layers of King beyond the March on Washington speech (and even the many layers of that speech beyond the famous “content of their character” line). That’s all important context for today’s post, so I’d ask you to check it out and then come on back for more.

Welcome back! All those are reasons to go beyond this one quote and this one speech in commemorating King, but it’s equally true and important to reframe our collective memories of that individual quote in multiple ways. For one thing, the “content of their character” paragraph is the third of five straight “I have a dream” paragraphs (here’s the full transcript of the speech), each articulating a different (if interconnected) dream about race, community, and America. Three of the other four focus in particular on Southern states, highlighting quite fully the layers of prejudice, racism, segregation, and racial terrorism that these communities still feature so prominently and centrally in 1963 (one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a frustrating anniversary with which King begins his speech). King might be arguing in the “content of their character” paragraph that it would be ideal if we could stop seeing and thinking about skin color and race (which is how conservatives love to use that line), but these adjoining paragraphs make clear that the targets of that argument are Southern white supremacists specifically and (I would argue) all white Americans generally. Physician, heal thyself.

Relatedly, but even more overarchingly, King frames all five of those “I have a dream” paragraphs with a sixth, introductory paragraph worth quoting in full: “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” In this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column for MLK Day four years ago, I made the case for King as exemplifying my concept of critical patriotism, and I don’t think he ever did so more succinctly and potently than in this quote. That means we have to recognize that every one of the subsequent dreams is a goal for the future, and also and most importantly something we have to work for together, to push the nation toward that idealized but never yet realized more perfect union. Conservatives want to read King as chastising his progressive peers for a misplaced focus on race, but the truth was precisely the opposite—he was critiquing conservatives for the ways their racism has kept us from progressing. Feels like an important lesson to consider for MLK Day 2024.

Next misread quote tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?