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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? 

Saturday, January 18, 2025

January 18-19, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: My Scholarly Work and You

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ve focused on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Leading up this post with a request for help with my next scholarly project!]

I’ve got some steady public scholarly work that I very much plan to continue in 2025, from this blog to my biweekly Saturday Evening Post Considering History column to my #ScholarSunday Threads newsletter. But my first experience creating a public scholarly narrative history podcast was extremely enjoyable, and so I’m definitely looking to create another!

We can call that a second season of The Celestials’ Last Game if we’d like, and I might because of branding and whatnot (he said very knowledgeably), but I firmly believe I’ve done what I can with that particular history so this second season would have to focus on a new subject in any case. I’ve got one idea, which is the really fascinating story of the early 20th century barnstorming baseball team the House of David (to keep the baseball thread going, natch). But I don’t yet know enough about that story to know if there’s a 9-Inning podcast there, so…

…this space for rent! Or rather, as in this blog’s long and proud history of crowd-sourced posts, this space for y’all’s suggestions. Any ideas for other histories or stories—whether related to baseball, sports stories, or some other under-remembered part of American history—will be very welcome! Share ‘em below, or shoot me an email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu), and thanks in advance!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

Friday, January 17, 2025

January 17, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story Online

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I said most of what I’d want to say about generative AI, in the classroom and everywhere else, in this year in review post on the subject a few weeks back. But since my online-only courses have been the place where I’ve encountered the use of ChatGPT most consistently, I’ll add this: I’m not looking, as I never have looked and never will look, to be a cop in the classroom. What I am looking to do, now more than ever, is to have all the conversations, including the toughest ones. So despite not meeting this class face-to-face, I’m still going to try to have a conversation with them at the start of the semester on why using AI for classwork isn’t just a potentially dangerous thing to do for their own futures, but also will lead to both mediocre work and, y’know, the further destruction of our planet. The skill of resisting these understandably tempting technological tools is no easy task in January 2025, but I skill I look forward to helping the students who are up for the challenge to practice.

Scholarly update this weekend,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?


Thursday, January 16, 2025

January 16, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature II

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I’ve written a lot in this space, especially in semester previews and reflections series, on my back and forth, both over the last few years and in different specific courses, on whether to continue using longer readings like novels or to focus entirely on shorter texts. My default has certainly shifted toward shorter works, not only for reasons of attention span/focus but also because such works are much more frequently available online for free (I try hard these days not to require students to purchase readings). But I try to approach each course and case on its own terms, and to think about when and how it does make sense to use some longer works as well. This Spring I’ll be doing so in both yesterday’s subject (Major American Authors) and in my American Lit II survey, we’re start for example with two weeks each on Huck Finn and The Marrow of Tradition. Both of those late 19th century works are challenging to read in 2025, and I don’t expect most of the students will get through all of them (and they’re able to do the work successfully even if they can’t, to be clear). But I believe that they are well worth making the effort for, and that the effort itself, the goal of staying focused on and engaged with a longer text, is a skill worth continuing to practice despite all its 2025 challenges.

Last preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

January 15, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: Major American Authors of the 20C

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

This is one of the Literature courses I’ve taught the most times and over the longest period, as I believe I had a section in my first Spring at Fitchburg State (20 years ago!). A lot has changed in what and how I teach it across those decades, but one thing that hasn’t is the second weekly post I have the students write for each of our authors and texts: after a more analytical/standard first week’s post, the second one asks them to imitate the author’s style in order to think a bit about some key aspects of how each of our authors writes (this second post is entirely ungraded so they don’t have to worry about whether they’re doing it “right”). That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when some of our authors have particularly unique and challenging styles (I’m looking at you, Theodore Dreiser and Sylvia Plath). But I think it’s an incredibly rewarding one, not only for what it can help us see and analyze, but also and especially because it requires empathy, imagining ourselves into a different perspective and person. Not sure there could be a more important skill to hone in 2025.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

January 14, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: First-Year Writing II

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I’m not gonna lie, probably the hardest part of my Spring semester is going to be the week we watch Fruitvale Station in my First-Year Writing II classes (as part of a unit where they write a comparative analysis of a couple films/TV shows/multimedia texts). I wish I felt we were in a better place as a country than we were 15+ years ago when that film’s events took place, or a decade+ ago when the film itself was released. I wish it didn’t seem so clear to me that so many of my fellow Americans would watch that film and argue that Oscar Grant got what was coming to him, or worse. But a central aspect of what we do in the classroom is to try to engage with our toughest conversations, to develop individual voices and ideas, but also and perhaps especially as communities. So this hardest part of my semester might well be the most important part of the semester as well.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

Monday, January 13, 2025

January 13, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: Graduate Research Methods

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I write and think a lot about dualities, and more exactly about analyzing them rather than seeking to reduce them as is our natural human tendency. But I’ll admit that there’s a particularly complicated one that I struggle with maintaining in my own work: the duality of nuance and clarity, of trying to approach our subjects as the multilayered things they are, while at the same time trying to stay what we have to say about them clearly and compellingly. I think finding a way to do both of those at once is at the heart of what I do—as a thinker, as a writer, as a teacher, as a public citizen—and so I’m very excited to make it the heart of my Graduate Research Methods syllabus as well. For example, we’ll start by reading both The Turn of the Screw and the manifold contexts and lenses that inform how we read it—and our goal will be to keep a sense of just how nuanced this text is, while still figuring out how to express our own takes on it with clarity. I’m excited to work with our phenomenal grad students to practice those vital skills!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?


Saturday, January 11, 2025

January 11-12, 2025: The Great Society in 2025

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a number of Great Society laws, leading up to this post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

Honestly I think I said a good bit throughout this series about what we can, should, and must learn from both individual Great Society laws and programs and the overarching, progressive emphases of this administration and moment. So I’m simply gonna add one follow-up thought here, courtesy of Honest Abe himself:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.”

Am I saying we are currently engaged in a civil war? Not exactly, although I think our moment qualifies at least as one of profound civil conflict (that’s only likely to deepen in the coming years). And in any case, I believe Lincoln’s more central point was about the nation’s ideals being put to the test. I would argue, and I hope have argued throughout this series in fact, that the Great Society both exemplified and amplified many of those ideals. And I know that 2025 and beyond will test the Great Society and our ideals alike in all kinds of ways. I’m out of the predicting business, but I know I’m proud to be in that fight with y’all.

Spring semester previews start tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Friday, January 10, 2025

January 10, 2025: Great Society Laws: Immigration and America

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On one definitively inclusive thing the 1965 immigration law did, one more complicated effect, and the bottom line.

I hope this entire series has made clear just how broad and deep was the Great Society’s commitment to progressively and positively affecting American society. But I have to admit that it’s still a bit surprising to me, in the best possible way, to remember that making federal immigration policies more progressive and inclusive ended up on that list. As I’ve argued since at least my third book, the period beginning in the 1920s was the first time in American history when our foundational diversity was genuinely threatened by the federal government, thanks largely to that decade’s quota laws and the restrictive immigration policy they produced. So it was far from a given that even a progressive administration would be able to challenge, much less reverse, those four-plus decades of policy and history—and yet Johnson’s Great Society program did so, through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), which did away with those nationality- and ethnicity-based quotas and made immigration to the U.S. from much of the world far more possible once again.

The 1965 law did so by instituting a number of other systems of preference through which to categorize and admit immigrants. That’s an entirely understandable and even necessary step, and moreover many of those new preferences made perfect sense, including an emphasis on family connections which directly challenged the ways in which immigration restrictions had for nearly a century sought to break up American families and through them communities. But at the same time, I would point to another and far more problematic preference that went back to the restrictive policies but was deepened by the 1965 law—the overt preference for wealthy arrivals which has long been enshrined in the “Million Dollar Visa” policy. I’m not naïve enough not to understand the rationale behind such a preference, and that particular policy does include an ostensible requirement that these wealthy arrivals create jobs for other Americans (although I would be pleasantly shocked if they were indeed required to do so). But at the same time, my personal preference is still and will always be the same one enshrined on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal—for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The division between wealthier and less wealthy immigrants was on full display in the most recent presidential election, as illustrated by Elon Musk (himself a self-confessed undocumented immigrant in his early days in the US) becoming one of our most vocal cheerleaders for the Trump campaign in general and its xenophobic narratives in particular. But as telling and significant as such divisions and debates are, I think they ultimately can be a bit of a distraction from the more defining question: whether we see immigration as a key aspect of the Great Society, of the best vision and version of the United States; or whether we see it as a threat to those things. The 1960s Great Society answered that question potently through its inclusion of the 1965 immigration law among its programs and policies; the next four years will test whether and how those of us who agree can continue to fight for immigration’s and all immigrants’ place in our great society.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Thursday, January 9, 2025

January 9, 2025: Great Society Laws: Medicare and Medicaid

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

How the Great Society reflected two distinct ways of thinking about health care, and why the second in particular is still urgently needed.

One of the life lessons we all learn—or rather we hope to live long enough to learn—is that aging ain’t for the faint of heart. I don’t know how long exactly a relatively healthy human body is designed (not in an Intelligent Design sense, to be clear, just in the biology and chemistry/nature and evolution sense) to live, but it seems clear to me that in the modern world our life expectancies well outpace that plan, leading to all the potential (and likely, if not indeed inevitable) health and medical issues that come with aging. Before the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, aging Americans were pretty much entirely on their own when it came to such challenges; but that new program alone wasn’t quite sufficient to really deal with those health and medical realities, and so the Great Society added a vital new element, the health insurance program for seniors known as Medicare. As the son to a pair of older parents, I’ve seen first-hand how vital both Social Security and Medicare are to helping folks and families navigate these inevitable challenges of aging, and I truly can’t imagine how anyone survived the arc of life in America without them (and it seems clear that many, many more folks did not, or at least did so with far more challenges still).

Although Medicare is an entirely communal and indeed a socialist program (yeah, I invoked the American Bogeyman, but it’s the truth, folks), I would argue that it nonetheless reflects an individual approach to health care, or rather a resource designed to help individuals and families navigate their own health and medical challenges. Given the Great Society’s emphases on both a “War on Poverty” and social safety nets, it’s not surprising that in the same years—and indeed in the same law, the Medicare and Medicaid Act (also known as the Social Security Amendments) of 1965—the administration also created a more overtly community-focused health insurance program, Medicaid. Designed as a way to guarantee a baseline level of health insurance and thus health care for the most disadvantaged Americans, Medicaid quickly evolved to include a number of related and even more overtly community-focused programs, including for example the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that offers access to not just health insurance but also community health programs for all American children and families.

Medicare and Medicaid are in many ways, as their names suggest, parallel and complementary programs. But I do believe that the latter is more community focused than the former, and likewise and even more importantly represents a recognition that health insurance and health care are communal needs, that access to them profoundly affects not only individuals but also and in many ways especially communities for the better (and the absence of them does so for the worse). One of the most frustrating aspects of the last couple decades in American politics (an incredibly long and competitive list to be sure) has been the collective unwillingness of so many Americans to a) recognize that programs like Medicare and Medicaid are already collective and governmental and, again, socialist; and b) extend that awareness to a recognition that collective health insurance and policies, such as the idea of “Medicare for All,” would represent a vital step forward in guaranteeing access to health insurance and care for all Americans. That’s one Great Society lesson we desperately still need to learn.

Last Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

January 8, 2025: Great Society Laws: Economic Safety Nets

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On three distinct and equally important ways that the Great Society created safety nets.

1)      Housing: In that section of Monday’s post on the Civil Rights Act of 1968, I noted that part of that law (Title VIII) came to be known as the Fair Housing Act. That important set of policies and protections was made much more possible by a distinct federal law from a few years earlier: the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965. Besides adding a number of programs and protections to federal housing policy, this 1965 law also created a new Cabinet department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Given the federal government’s central role in such longstanding discriminatory practices as redlining, it was particularly important that the Great Society make equal opportunity to and accessibility of housing a significant focus, both to redress such specific histories and to do what it could to guarantee this vital resource for all Americans.

2)      Jobs: If housing is a great example of a safety net resource, though, it’s also just a baseline on which more must be added to help move individuals out of poverty and toward prosperity. Exemplifying the Great Society’s efforts towards those broader goals was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which as President Johnson argued was intended “to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.” And for those critics who might worry about the dangers of federal government overreach, it’s worth adding that this law pursued those shared goals primarily by creating Community Action Agencies, local organizations that would help individuals, families, and communities in their areas in specific and targeted ways.

3)      Food Stamps: Whether or not an individual is able to find and keep a job or jobs, however, it’s important to add that far too often more of a safety net is needed to keep folks and families on the right side of the poverty line. Even before the Great Society, President Kennedy and Congress had recognized that fact and launched the Food Stamp Program (often known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) in 1962 to help Americans purchase food and related resources; but the Johnson administration expanded and cemented that program with the Food Stamp Act of 1964. Over the sixty years since, “food stamps” have become almost as frequent a target of misinformation and prejudice as “welfare,” and with just as little cause; as the Great Society’s contemporary activists the Black Panthers knew well, if folks are hungry there’s very little that education, or jobs, or any other resource can truly offer them.

Next Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

January 7, 2025: Great Society Laws: Education and the Arts

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On two specific significant laws, and one broader effect of the Great Society.

As the son of a lifelong early childhood educator I am perhaps biased, but to my mind one of the most under-appreciated (and certainly one of the most transformative) of the Great Society laws would be the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Part of Johnson’s overarching concept of a “War on Poverty,” this hugely influential law represented a major reform of and deepened federal commitment to public education in the United States overall, and disadvantaged students and families in particular. The Act’s dual emphases on guaranteeing equal access and shrinking achievement gaps comprised a radical new perspective on how the federal government should approach education policy, one supported by significant and ongoing commitments of money and other resources, and over the sixty years since those emphases have been complemented and extended by additions involving bilingual education and stronger protections against discrimination (toward students and teachers alike), among others.

Later in 1965 (it was a very busy year for Great Society laws and programs!), a separate Congressional law created the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which became instantly and remains to this day the most prominent federal arts organization. The NEA’s original mission statement linked both the organization and the arts themselves directly to education, in and out of classrooms: the NEA is “dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.” But at the same time, the NEA’s significant annual grant funding in particular is importantly available to any and all artists and creators, individuals and communities, with no necessary connection to particular educational institutions nor to educational goals (which of course are far from the only place or role for the arts in society). These are complementary but far from directly overlapping 1965 laws, that is.

But I do want to push further with my connection between these two laws in one additional and important way. I agree with the framing that the Education Act was tied to the War on Poverty, as access to education is crucial to connecting all children, families, and communities to the opportunities that can help alleviate poverty and lead to better futures. But to quote one of our most famous teacher characters, “medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” I really love that the Great Society supported the arts in education as well as the arts overall, and expressed clearly through such emphases and priorities that both arts education and the arts are part of all lives and communities, rather than in any way more elective or elite. We would do well to extend that emphasis today.

Next Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?