February 28, 2025: AlaskaStudying: McKinley or Denali?

[100 years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]

On two ways to contextualize formal renamings.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote for my Talking Points Memo column about the controversies over President Obama formally renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. I’d ask you to check out that column if you would, and then come on back for a couple more layers to such debates.

Welcome back! I’m glad that I focused most of that column on Native American histories and perspectives, and would very much still argue that any debate over such renamings which in any way centers white Americans is a non-starter from the jump. There is of course a good deal of irony (as the Sigourney poem I included in that post argues) in using Native American names for places that, in almost every case, have been forcibly taken from those communities, a removal process without which (for example) the National Park system quite literally would not exist. But at the same time, these places remain important (and in many cases sacred) to those indigenous communities, a key reason why they and their allies advocate for returning the names of places like McKinley to their indigenous names instead. It is, to be honest, the least we can do to honor those demands.

When we do, though, it doesn’t mean we should forget the complex and telling histories that led to names like Mount McKinley for a peak thousands of miles away from William McKinley’s Ohio birthplace. I tend to believe (as I argued in this post nearly four years ago) that the phrase “settler colonialism” gets used a bit willy-nilly these days without the necessary contexts and nuances, or at least without a great deal of thought as to what it helps us understand. But whatever we want to call it, there’s something profoundly telling about recent white arrivals to a place like Alaska deciding to rename one of its most striking natural wonders (and indeed the tallest mountain in all of North America) after a white leader with pretty much no connection whatsoever to that place (other than that he was president of the entire United States, of course). Such brazen intellectual ownership over places and communities in a setting with such rich natural and human histories is, I would argue, far more foolish than anything Seward could have ever done.

February Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?

February 27, 2025: AlaskaStudying: Nenana Ice Classic

[100 years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]

On what a unique Alaskan tradition tells us about both Alaska and tradition.

The annual contest in which participants bet on the exact day and time that ice will break up on the Tanana River near the small community of Nenana, Alaska developed in a few distinct stages. It started very informally in 1906, with six locals forming a betting pool and the winner getting treated to a couple drinks at the local bar. It was revived a decade later in 1916 on a larger but still local scale, with railroad workers and other Nenana residents buying tickets at Jimmy Duke’s Roadhouse. And when the word was spread by railroad workers across the region, the 1917 contest was opened to all residents of both the Alaska and Yukon territories. That 1917 contest is the one that the official website highlights as the contest’s genuine origin point, and it has been run every year since, with the original betting pool of $800 reaching nearly half a million dollars in some recent years (and over $200,000 in the 2023 edition). The technology involved in determining the precise moment when the ice breaks up has also evolved significantly over that century, as this local news story details.

One of the most important but complicated things for any AmericanStudier to try to wrap their head around is just how big and multi-part this nation of ours is, with every state featuring some pretty distinct layers and contexts that have helped shape its identity and community and that it contributes to the whole of the U.S. as a result. I believe that’s genuinely true for every state, but as I discovered during my one visit to Alaska in the summer of 2005, I’d say Alaska is one of the most distinct and unique of all 50 states (perhaps only rivalled by the one territory which gained statehood later, Hawai’i). Part of Alaska’s uniqueness is unquestionably due to its natural landscapes, an environment utterly different from anywhere else in the United States and one primarily defined by ice (although I’m sad to think about how much that has changed in recent years). And part is due to the way in which a great deal of the territory and state have been constituted by migratory communities, both individuals and broader cohorts like railroad workers (all, of course, alongside Alaska’s indigenous communities). We can see all those layers to Alaska’s story and identity in the Nenana Ice Classic, both its existence and how it evolved to become the annual tradition it remains.

This whole blog series focused on such distinctive local traditions, but I hope it also offered windows to consider the overarching concept of tradition and how it is created, how it evolves, and how it works in a society (all topics about which I learned a great deal from one of my favorite scholarly books, Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory). In the case of the Nenana Ice Classic in particular, I’d say that we can see how a tradition can be at once quite genuinely connected to key aspects of its local community (as I argued above) and yet thoroughly constructed over time, constructions driven as likely always by a combination of more cynical factors like tourism and capitalism and more sentimental ones like fun and community pride. One thing I try really hard not to be is the kind of scholar who leans so far into the cynicism or even the analysis that I lose sight of those latter factors, and so I’ll end this post with something I’d say for each and every entry in the series: I’d love the chance to be at an event like the Nenana Ice Classic, preferably with my sons and other loved ones, and to enjoy this unique tradition for all that it is.

Last AlaskaStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?

February 26, 2025: AlaskaStudying: Glacier Bay

[100 years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]

On three forces of nature who together helped preserve Glacier Bay (on the 100th anniversary of its designation).

1)      The Huna Tlingit: As with every history in Alaska—and every history in America—the story of Glacier Bay is inextricably interconnected with the worst and best of Native American histories. We can’t celebrate its natural beauty, nor its evolution from endangered site to National Monument to (when Jimmy Carter signed the act into law in 1980) National Park, without recognizing and mourning the removal of the Huna Tlingit people from the area. But we can’t only mourn, either—even before the Huna Tlingit were able to return to and reconnect with Glacier Bay in recent decades, as traced in the first hyperlink above, their legacy was everywhere in this iconic place, and defining in shaping it across centuries if not millenia. Every visitor to Glacier Bay must remember and engage with that worst and best of its, and our, histories.

2)      John Muir: Speaking of the worst and best. As that hyperlinked article notes, Muir relied on Tlingit guides for his exploration of Glacier Bay; yet despite his unquestionable admiration for Native Americans, Muir was also far too often a purveyor of racist attitudes towards these American communities. That’s all part of Muir’s story and legacy, and of what he found and advocated for in Glacier Bay. But at the same time, I don’t know of any more beautiful writing about America’s natural wonders than Muir’s chapter “In Camp at Glacier Bay” in his book Travels in Alaska (1915), among the many other places in that book where he writes movingly about Glacier Bay. As he did with so much of America’s wilderness, Muir’s perspective on Alaska helped his audiences see this place differently, a vital step toward preserving rather than simply exploiting our natural wonders.  

3)      William S. Cooper: Muir was an advocate for all of our natural spaces, but the plant ecologist and activist William S. Cooper made Glacier Bay his specific, lifelong focus. Cooper first visited Glacier Bay a year after Muir’s book was published, fell in love, and made the area a living laboratory for his researches for the rest of his groundbreaking career. But he also and especially became a determined advocate for the preservation of Glacier Bay, writing to anyone and everyone about the importance of not turning this natural wonder over to those who saw only profit in it (and continuing those efforts for decades after the 1920s act). Conservation is a collective effort, but it also requires individuals like Cooper (or others I’ve written about in this space such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas), and I’m deeply grateful for every one of them.

Next AlaskaStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?

February 25, 2025: AlaskaStudying: Mardy Murie

[100 years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]

On three factors that help explain the unique life and legacy of the “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement.”

1)      Alaska: Born Margaret Elizabeth Thomas in Seattle in 1902, Mardy and her family moved to Fairbanks, Alaska when she was 9; although she briefly attended colleges in both Oregon and Massachusetts, she would return to Alaska to finish school at the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines[ (becoming its first female graduate in 1924). While her life, inspiring marriage (on which more momentarily), and conservation efforts would take her to many other places for much of the rest of her life, Alaska always remained a focal point, as illustrated by her successful 1956 campaign to create the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and her late 1970s testimony in support of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act (signed by President Carter in 1980). Alaska is of course hugely singular on the American landscape, but it’s also long served as an exemplification of the broader need to protect public lands, and no one has been more instrumental to those efforts than Mardy Murie.

2)      Her Marriage: She was Mardy Murie because of Olaus Murie, a biologist and fellow conservationist she met in Fairbanks and married (at sunrise in the village of Anvik) the same year she graduated college. I’m not sure any single detail could better capture their genuine partnership than the fact that their honeymoon consisted of a 500-mile dogsled journey around Alaska to research its wildlife and ecosystems. The lifelong, deeply inspiring partnership that developed from there would eventually take the Muries to Moose, Wyoming (near Jackson Hole), where the ranch that served as both their home and their research base has since become a National Historic Landmark (linked to Grand Teton National Park) as well as an operating scientific and conservation school. Mardy’s activisms weren’t defined (and certainly weren’t circumscribed) by her marriage, but they were absolutely complemented and amplified by it, as were his.

3)      The Wilderness Act: While it doesn’t really make sense to boil centuries-long movements down to individual moments or laws, it’s nonetheless fair to say that one of the most significant such turning points for the environmental and conservation movements in America was the 1964 passage of the Wilderness Act, the first law to create a national legal definition of “wilderness.” That act was written by the then-Executive Director of the Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser, and in both its creation and its nearly decade-long fight for passage represented a collaboration between many of the leading voices in that longstanding organization—a community that featured Mardy and Olaus Murie throughout their lives. While Olaus had tragically passed away in 1963, Mardy attended the ceremony at which President Lyndon Johnson signed the Act, as is only appropriate for an activist without whom every 20^th century conservation effort would look different and far less successful.

Next AlaskaStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?

February 24, 2025: AlaskaStudying: Seward’s Folly

[100 years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]

A few examples of why it’s not at all foolish to consider the specifics of how, when, and why America’s territory expanded.

Let me get this out of the way at the start: despite having had the singular dishonor of vaulting Sarah Palin, and her erroneous and destructive visions of American identity and history, onto the national stage, Alaska is a very welcome part of our 21^st century American community. Everything I wrote about Sitka in this post on complex and instructive American places is equally true of the state overall; it opens up landscapes, histories, and communities without which we’d be a less rich and diverse nation. Yet we can’t fully appreciate much of what Alaska brings and means if we don’t better understand the contexts of its addition to our nation: the complex history of Russian imperialism in the region; the pre-Civil War arguments over international expansion that led to the first consideration of buying Alaska, under the Buchanan Administration; and the very divided Reconstruction-era moment and Johnson Administration during which Seward finally gained approval for that purchase in 1867 (and received the funds in 1868), and which produced the very vocal and famous critiques of the acquisition.

At least as complex, and far more explicitly dark and tragic, is the history surrounding the American “acquisition” of Hawai’i a few decades later. My January 25^th Memory Day nominee, Charles Reed Bishop [NOTE: I’ve since changed that nomination for these reasons], illustrates some of the powerful and inspiring sides to American connections to Hawai’i in the mid-19^th century; yet at the same time, Bishop’s struggles to hold onto his late wife’s ancestral lands (on which they had started their school) in the face of pressures from subsequent settlers and big business to acquire that land exemplify the kinds of forces that led directly to America’s annexation of Hawai’i. There are few historical figures whose stories reflect more poorly on the US’s actions than Queen Liliuokalani (although she has plenty of competition, of course), and we can’t possibly understand the place’s history or meaning outside of a much fuller inclusion of her in our national histories and narratives. Such an inclusion wouldn’t make it impossible to appreciate the state’s natural beauties, nor its most famous contribution to 21^st century America—but it would force us to recognize at which price those beauties, and the resources they include, were bought, and what that reveals about late 19^th century American imperialisms.

If Hawai’i’s history is one of the nation’s most dramatic and tragic, the evolving story of Maine would seem to be one of the quietest and most diplomatic. Although the area had been part of the United States (and specifically of Massachusetts) since the Revolution, and had gained its own statehood in 1820, it had throughout those years served as a flashpoint for continuing conflicts between the US and England. Those conflicts turned into the so-called “Aroostook War” (or Pork and Beans War) of 1839, a bloodless struggle over the state’s borders and resources that was resolved through diplomacy three years later with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Besides revealing how tense relations between the US and its former mother country remained throughout the first half of the 19^th century, that Treaty also illustrates some of the many other issues to which that relationship connected—besides settling the Maine/New Brunswick border, the treaty also stipulated the creation of a joint American and British naval force for the sole purpose of patrolling the African coast and “suppressing the Slave Trade,” enforcing laws that had been on the books in both nations for decades but which clearly remained an issue. Engaging with the history of Maine, then, allows us to better understand multiple complex and crucial, Early Republic international influences and relationships.

Next AlaskaStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?

February 21, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Salem

[For this year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!) anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]

I said most of what I’d want to say about why (during the 22 years I’ve lived and worked in Massachusetts since coming up here to finish my PhD dissertation long-distance and staying for my job at Fitchburg State) I’ve come to both hate and love Salem in this post on how the city remembers the Witch Trials. Here I’ll just add this: while I think some of that strange balance is unique or at least specific to Salem, I think a great deal of it also reflects the worst and best of America as a whole, and certainly of our collective memories. So, as I put it in this Shepherd book recommendation list, I love and am frustrated by Salem very much like I love and am frustrated by the US of A.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?

February 20, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Philly

[For this year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!) anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]

On frustrating attitudes, fantastic academics, and a secret third thing.

I used to think it was probably apocryphal, but apparently it’s entirely real: in the 1970s, a billboard on the highway leading into Philly, sponsored by the civic group Action Philadelphia which was seeking to drum up tourism for the city, featured the slogan “Philadelphia Isn’t as Bad as Philadelphians Say It is.” Obviously that was a joke and thus a hyperbolic portrayal of local attitudes and narratives, but like many jokes, this one was definitely also a reflection of reality. I’ve never lived anywhere where the locals had a more consistently and comprehensively negative self-image than did Philadelphia and Philadelphians during the few years I spent there (as a grad student at Temple University), and for a congenital optimist like myself, encountering that attitude toward my home and our shared city on the regular was a pretty painful thing to experience.

On the other hand, one of my very favorite people and certainly one of my favorite fellow academics is a local Philadelphian born and bred. I’ve featured Jeff Renye quite a bit in this space, from multiple awesome Guest Posts to my own impassioned tribute to his awesomeness (since I made that plea, he has indeed gotten a full-time teaching gig, in the UPenn Writing Program). I don’t think I’ve said it specifically or overtly on any of those prior occasions, but Jeff is profoundly interconnected with Philly, and I don’t just mean because I met him in grad school there and he became a guide to much of the city for me (although that’s certainly the case)—I mean because I think the best of Philly and its ethos, of what the city stands for (compared for example to more smug and self-confident places like Boston and New York), is captured by Jeff and his work and identity alike.

Those two paragraphs capture the duality of this place pretty well, I’d say. But I would add this: one of my favorite places in Philly is a relatively unknown historic site that’s drastically overshadowed by the more famous and to my mind less interesting ones located nearby. I really love the Benjamin Franklin Museum and would recommend it to any visitor to historic Philly—but nearly all such visitors, it seems to me, stay in the area of neighboring sites like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, which are certainly historic but much less interesting in their presentation and exhibits than the museum. And that sums it up too, perhaps—Philly has tons of great stuff, but you’ve got to work a bit harder to find it, and you’ve got to make it through the self-deprecating narratives to do so.

Next love/hate place tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?

February 19, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Harvard

[For this year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!) anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]

I’ve dedicated a number of prior posts to impressive individuals who contributed meaningful moments to my undergraduate experience, including:

Peter Gomes, the groundbreaking minister who sat down with us at lunch one day in the freshman dining hall;

Alan Heimert, the most demanding teacher I ever had and (despite all our differences in style and tone) one of my clearest inspirations for my own teaching;

And Mark Rennella, my senior thesis advisor who became a lifelong friend.

I always say that the people were my favorite part of my time at Harvard, and those are a few of the many reasons why. But my least favorite part was the institution’s snottiness about its own legacies and self-importance, and I have to admit that as a public university professor who despairs at how many news stories focus on Harvard and its Ivy League peers as if they are the norm for (or even vaguely representative of) higher education in America, my frustrations with those aspects of Hahvahd has only deepened over the quarter-century since my graduation.  

Next love/hate place tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?

February 18, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: CHS

[For this year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!) anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]

On prisons, pains, and promises in a public school.

In lieu of full paragraphs in today’s post, I’m gonna point you to prior posts where I’ve thought about these layers of my public high school, Charlottesville High. First, there’s this one on how much this first integrated high school in town seems to have been modeled on a prison.

Second, there’s this post, on my own painful high school experiences with hazing.

But third, there’s this one on just a handful of the many inspiring and important teachers I was fortunate enough to learn from in (as well as before and after) that public high school. There are certainly things I hated about high school (join the club, I know), and certainly very challenging things about my school in particular. But there were also powerful positive presences there, ones that have remained with me ever since.

Next love/hate place tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?

February 17, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Cville

[For this year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!) anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]

Five pieces through which I’d chart my evolving, fraught feelings on my hometown.

1)      Talking Points Memo (2015): I’d certainly written about Charlottesville here on the blog before 2015, but it was with the violent arrest of UVa student Martese Johnson in that year (also the origin point for one of my favorite short stories) that I really started to lean into public scholarly engagements with race, community, and Cville, if in a pretty preliminary way at that time.

2)      Huffington Post (2016): The evolving debate over Charlottesville’s Confederate statues was a driving force in my continued thoughts, as reflected in this HuffPost column—also the first time I started to more directly link, in my writing at least, the city’s histories of segregation and racism to those broader questions of collective memory.

3)      Segregated Cville (2017): This Activist History Review article remains one of my favorite pieces of my writing, not just about Cville but on any subject, and I’d ask you to check it out in full if you read any one of the hyperlinked pieces in this post. It brought together those two earlier columns, but also and especially deepened my thinking about all the American histories and issues that Cville so profoundly embodies.

4)      Saturday Evening Post (2019): That’s one of a few Considering History columns I’ve written about my hometown, but I’m focusing on it here because it was the one in which I had the chance to write about the destruction of the Vinegar Hill neighborhood, one of the most painful and telling stories from Cville and any American community.

5)      Here on the Blog (2020): Over the last five years I’ve returned many times in this space to Cville, with updates on both its unfolding stories and my own evolving thoughts. That’s just one example, and of course since 2020 my perspective has likewise continued to shift. As I imagine it always will on my fraught, frustrating, foundational hometown.

Next love/hate place tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?

February 15-16, 2025: One More Love Letter to the Big Easy

[Last month I got to return to my favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention. So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ve offered some love letters to what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to this special tribute post!]

On a few more magical moments my wife and I experienced on our January visit.

1)      A Food Find: It will come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with New Orleans that we ate very well throughout the trip. But while that was true of the expected spots, especially those throughout the Quarter and environs, what really makes NOLA so delicious is the culinary perfection awaiting in even seemingly out-of-the-way spots. Probably the best meal we had on the whole trip was at one such spot, Blue Oak BBQ; not gonna say anything else, other than go if you get the chance!

2)      Musical Moments: We experienced plenty of planned moments of musical magic on our trip, including a jazz cruise on the city’s only working steamboat (the Natchez) and a jazz concert at the legendary Preservation Hall. But my favorite music (or least music-adjacent) moment was the kind of spontaneous one you can only find in NOLA—I was buying a copy of Wendell Pierce’s The Wind in the Reeds in a used bookstore, and the employee told me that his uncle is none other than Deacon John Moore, the wonderful jazz musician who guest-starred as Pierce’s trombone teacher on Treme!

3)      Great Galleries: For whatever reason, on my earlier visits to New Orleans I hadn’t spent much time in art galleries, but this time we were drawn to multiple of them as we walked the French Quarter, encountering works by profoundly talented artists in the process. I don’t remember any specifics, but that’s at least partly my point—these weren’t planned or pre-scheduled visits to places or works we already knew, they were just impromptu walk-ins that gifted us with beautiful art in compelling spaces. I recommend you do the same if you get the chance!

4)      A Moving Museum: By far the most moving experience we had on our trip was another entirely unplanned one: not long after our initial arrival, we followed signs to The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum in the heart of the Quarter. Everything therein was striking and impressive, but I’d highlight two exhibits in particular: the absolutely heartbreaking Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration; and the evocative Prospect.6: Gesture to Home, artist Didier William’s contribution to the city-wide Prospect New Orleans project.

5)      A Missed but Still Meaningful Second Line: The Sunday during our visit featured a Second Line, a unique part of New Orleans culture that I’ve never gotten to see in person (despite loving every one featured on Treme). Unfortunately the timing was too tight with our Preservation Hall concert, and after waiting for a while to catch a glimpse of the Line, we had to leave before it arrived. But every part of the experience still felt meaningful, from walking through Armstrong Park and Treme to get to our viewing spot, to waiting out there with the folks preparing food and playing music and adding their own contributions to the day and city. In its own very real and very moving way, one of my favorite moments ever in my favorite city (and with my favorite person)!

Anti-favorites series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cities you’d love on?

February 14, 2025: Love Letters to the Big Easy: Literary New Orleans

[Last month I got to return to my favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention. So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ll be offering some love letters to what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to a special tribute post this weekend!]

On five of the many books through which we can read New Orleans.

1)      The Grandissimes (1881): I love George Washington Cable’s messy and magnificent multi-generational historical novel so much that I featured it in that hyperlinked post in my very first week of blogging (and made it the sole focus of the last chapter of my dissertation/first book to boot). I also don’t know any novel that more fully captures its setting than does Cable’s for New Orleans, making it doubly a must-read for anyone who loves the Big Easy.

2)      The Awakening (1899): Kate Chopin’s masterpiece, which as illustrated by that hyperlinked post I’ve taught many times and always to great effect, isn’t necessarily about New Orleans—indeed, I’d argue that Chopin’s story could take place most anywhere. But at the same time, Chopin was consistently interested in portraying her Louisiana and Creole communities through local color writing, and there’s a lot we can learn about them in this novel.

3)      A Streetcar Named Desire (1947): That hyperlinked post focuses on The Iceman Cometh, because for whatever reason I haven’t written at length in this space about Tennessee Williams’s iconic New Orleans-set play. I also know it less well than I do other Williams works, or even than I do the film adaptation with Brando’s famous t-shirt. But we can’t talk literary New Orleans without Williams and Streetcar!

4)      The Moviegoer (1961): As I argued in that hyperlinked post, Walker Percy’s unique and quirky debut novel is profoundly interested in where American society and culture were in its early 1960s moment, and thus is more interested in portraying and engaging with the time layer of setting than the place one. But Percy’s protagonist Binx Bolling spends the whole novel roaming his native New Orleans, making this book for many readers then and since an iconic tour guide to that city.

5)      The Yellow House (2020): Mostly I want to take this last entry on the list to recommend Sarah Broom’s multi-generational family memoir as enthusiastically as I can. But it also offers an excellent book-end to the first post in this week’s series, as I don’t know any book that captures all the layers of New Orleans and of the America it reflects better than Broom’s.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cities you’d love on?

February 13, 2025: Love Letters to the Big Easy: Fats Domino

[Last month I got to return to my favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention. So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ll be offering some love letters to what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to a special tribute post this weekend!]

On a few iconic moments in the career of the legendary New Orleans rock ‘n roller.

1)      “The Fat Man”: Domino’s first hit under his debut recording contract with Lew Chudd’s Imperial Records, co-written with his frequent producer and collaborator (and an influential artist in his own right) Dave Bartholomew and recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studios on Rampart Street, wasn’t just the first rock record to sell a million copies (although it did hit that groundbreaking number by 1951). It also embodies rock’s profoundly cross-cultural origins, on so many levels: from Domino’s own French Creole heritage (his first language was Louisiana Creole) to Matassa’s multi-generational Italian American New Orleans legacy, from Chudd’s childhood in Toronto and Harlem as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants to African American artist Bartholomew’s time in the US Army Ground Forces Band (an integrated band despite the army’s segregation in the era) during WWII. It took all those individuals and all those legacies to make “Fat Man” and get American rock music rolling.

2)      “The King”: Over the next couple decades Domino would record many more hit records and albums, with “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955) and “Blueberry Hill” (1956) the two biggest smashes. A February 1957 Ebony magazine feature dubbed him (on the cover no less) the “King of Rock ‘n Roll.” But it was an offhand line from another “King,” more than a decade later, that most potently reflects Domino’s status and influence. On July 31, 1969, Domino attended Elvis Presley’s first concert at the Las Vegas International Hotel; during a post-concert press conference, a reporter referred to Presley as “The King,” and he responded by pointing at Domino and noting, “No, that’s the real king of rock and roll.” At the same event Elvis took an iconic picture with Domino, calling him “one of my influences from way back.” I’ll have a bit more to say about Elvis and his influence in a couple days; but regardless of any other factors, this recognition for Domino from one of the most famous American rockers in history illustrates just how iconic Fats was within (and beyond) the industry.

3)      Katrina: Domino was known to be one of the most humble and grounded rock stars, and he and his wife Rosemary continued to live in their home in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward throughout the late 20^th century and into the first decade of the 21^st. Because of Rosemary’s ailing health they did not evacuate in the days before Hurricane Katrina hit the city, and in the storm’s chaotic aftermath their home was flooded and Domino and Rosemary were feared dead for a couple long days. But it turned out they had been rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter, and in 2006 and 2007 Domino made triumphant returns to the city and the music world: first with his 2006 album Alive and Kickin’, the proceeds from which benefitted Tipitina’s Foundation; and then with his last public performance (and first in many years), a legendary May 19, 2007 concert at Tipitina’s. If there had been any doubt that Domino represented New Orleans just as much and as well as he does rock ‘n roll, these culminating iconic moments laid them forever to rest.

Last love letter tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cities you’d love on?

February 12, 2025: Love Letters to the Big Easy: Treme

[Last month I got to return to my favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention. So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ll be offering some love letters to what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to a special tribute post this weekend!]

On five characters through which the wonderful HBO show charts Katrina’s and New Orleans’s stories.

[NB. The hyperlinked clips are just relatively random ones from YouTube, not summations of everything about these deeply human and multi-layered characters.]

[Also NB. Here be SPOILERS, so if you haven’t watched this great show yet, hie thee hence!]

1)      Creighton Bernette: I wrote about John Goodman’s Creighton and his righteous rants about New Orleans and Katrina in this post, and those rants are what made Creighton famous, both on the show and in the responses to the show. But while those rants were indeed righteous, they were also fueled by Creighton’s inability to move on, his permanent state of mourning for what had happened to his adopted, beloved city. In retrospect, everything in this character (and in many ways in the show’s first season) built inevitably to his suicide at the end of that season’s penultimate episode, as a statement about Katrina’s all too permanent effects for New Orleans and many of its residents.

2)      LaDonna Batiste-Williams: Khandi Alexander’s fiery bar owner LaDonna’s first season arc embodies a different, even more tragic lingering effect of Katrina: all those families who literally lost loved ones in the storm and its aftermaths, and who never knew (or did not learn for months if not years) what had happened to them. But while the story of LaDonna’s brother Daymo wraps up by the end of season one, LaDonna’s character endures, experiencing another decidedly different tragedy of her own while fighting to maintain a foothold in a city that seems intent on pushing her and her family out. New Orleans is still trying even in the series finale, but against LaDonna I don’t like even an entire city’s odds.

3)      Janette Desautel: Kim Dickens’ chef and restauranteur Janette reflects a third, slower burning kind of post-Katrina tragedy—someone who tries her hardest to stay but finds the storm’s lingering effects too much for her, and more exactly for her career and passion. Like her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Steve Zahn’s DJ Davis McAlary, New Orleans post-Katrina seems as if it might be more destructive than constructive for Janette, a passionate but unsustainable relationship. But in truth, even what would seem to be a significant relationship upgrade (to the New York City culinary world) can’t ultimately compete, and the show’s end finds Janette back in New Orleans and back with Davis—and despite ourselves we fully understand and support her in those choices.

4)      Albert Lambreaux: My favorite character is Clarke Peters’ Big Chief Albert, a handyman whose true talent and passion is in the world of Mardi Gras Indians. Albert’s return to New Orleans and his decimated house (and to masking Indian) seem for much of his arc like the acts of sheer stubbornness that his children (especially Rob Brown’s jazz trumpeter Delmond) believe them to be. But the traditions and legacies that Albert embodies and carries on are too potent to be broken and, it turns out, too charismatic to be resisted, even by his frequently resisting son. Like New Orleans post-Katrina, Albert may be fighting a losing battle—but he makes the fight so irresistibly appealing that we’re with him every step of the way.

5)      Antoine Batiste: And then there’s the first character we meet, Wendell Pierce’s jazz trombonist Antoine. While Antoine is certainly affected by Katrina (particularly in the loss of his house), in some ways he is the character who seems least by either the storm or the events of the show’s multi-year arc, who feels the closest in the final episode to where he was in the opening one (down to his continued disagreements with cab drivers). But Antoine’s difficulties finding steady gigs (which might be an effect of Katrina, but might be the challenge of a city jam-packed with jazz musicians) push him into a new profession, that of middle school music teacher, and through that work Antoine becomes connected to the most crucial question of all when it comes to post-Katrina New Orleans: what it will mean for the city’s young people, and especially young people of color. That remains a painfully uncertain question at the show’s conclusion, but with Antoine at the front of the classroom I feel better about the answer to be sure.

Next love letter tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cities you’d love on?

February 11, 2025: Love Letters to the Big Easy: The Battle of New Orleans

[Last month I got to return to my favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention. So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ll be offering some love letters to what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to a special tribute post this weekend!]

On three striking sides to one of America’s most insignificant victories.

The first thing that stands out about the January 1815 Battle of New Orleans is that it was entirely unnecessary. Not in the “War: what is it good for?” sense, but quite literally unnecessary: the War of 1812 had been ended by the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, but the various signatories were still in the process of ratifying the treaty and word had not reached the British troops who were trying to take the city and with it the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory. So the attack continued, the American troops led by Major General Andrew Jackson fought back, and the U.S. won its clearest military victory of the war after that conflict had officially ceased.

If the victory was thus officially meaningless, however, the composition of those American forces was far more significant. I’ve written elsewhere in this space about the uniquely multicultural, -national, and –lingual identify of New Orleans, and the army fighting to protect the city reflected that identity very fully: the relatively small force (it numbered around 8000, noticeably fewer than the British forces) included French Creole troops from New Orleans (some commanded by the former pirate Jean Lafitte), both free African American residents of the city (colloquially known as fmcs, “free men of color”) and slaves who had been freed specifically to aid in the battle, and Choctaw Native Americans, among other communities.

Moreover, one particular such community is even more striking and unremembered in our national narratives. Since the mid-18^th century, a group of Filipino immigrants had settled in a Louisiana town known as Manila Village, comprising what seems likely to be the oldest (and certainly the most enduring) Asian American community. Men from the village joined Lafitte’s forces for the battle, helping to create the truly multicultural fighting unit known as the “Batarians.” It’s difficult for me to overstate how much would change in our understanding of American history and community if we acknowledged at all, much less engaged at length with, this fact: that in one of our earliest military efforts, our forces included French Creole and Filipino Americans, fighting side by side to defend the city and nation that were and remain their home.

Next love letter tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cities you’d love on?

February 10, 2025: Love Letters to the Big Easy: New Orleans and America

[Last month I got to return to my favorite American city for the 2025 MLA Convention. So for this year’s Valentine’s Day series I’ll be offering some love letters to what makes New Orleans so unique, leading up to a special tribute post this weekend!]

On how New Orleans helps us better engage America’s defining creolizations.

I’ve written a good bit about New Orleans in this space: from this early city-centric post inspired by Mardi Gras and my first visit to the city; to this one from the same blog era on one of my favorite American novels and a book that’s as much about New Orleans as it is about its huge, multi-generational cast of characters, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1881). Those posts illustrate a few of the many reasons why I believe New Orleans is so distinctly and powerfully American, as I hope will this week’s subsequent posts in their own complementary ways. And as I’ll highlight a bit more in tomorrow’s post, the responses to and aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina likewise reveal some of the worst as well as the best of American history, society, culture, and art; on that final note, I should highlight another text I could definitely have featured in this week’s series and one of my favorite 21^st century American novels, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011).

To say much more eloquently than I ever could a bit more about why I’d define New Orleans as so deeply American, here’s one of the central characters from Treme that I didn’t get to analyze in this post, Steve Zahn’s DJ Davis McAlary. As a radio DJ, and a highly opinionated person to boot, Davis is often ranting, much of it about the best and worst of his beloved New Orleans (and all of it a combination of communal and self-aggrandizing, convincing and frustrating). But my favorite Davis monologue, in the opening scene of the Season 4 episode “Dippermouth Blues,” is far quieter and more thoughtful. Coming out of playing a hugely cross-cultural song, Davis calls it, “A stellar example of McAlary’s theory of creolization. Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, the Great American Songbook meet African American musical genius. And that’s what America’s all about…‘Basin Street, is the street, where all the dark and light folks meet.’ That’s how culture gets made in this country. That’s how we do. We’re a Creole nation, whether you like it or not. And in three weeks, America inaugurates its first Creole president. Get used to it.”

Those of us who loved that aspect of Obama and even called him “the first American president” as a result didn’t have to “get used to” anything, of course. And as for those whom Davis is addressing more directly in those closing lines, well to say that they seem not to have gotten used to it is to significantly understate the case (which of course David Simon and his co-creators knew all too well, as that final-season episode of Treme may have been set around New Year’s 2008 but was made and aired in late 2013). Indeed, when I was asked by audiences during my book talks for We the People about why we’ve seen such an upsurge in exclusionary rhetoric and violence over the last decade and a half, I’ve frequently argued that backlash to Obama—as a representation of so many perceived national “changes”—has been a central cause. Which is to say, it’s not just that we need to “get over” the reality of our creolized history, culture, and identity—first the we who love those elements need to do a better job making the case for them, both as valuable and as foundationally American. There’s no place and no community through which we can do so more potently than New Orleans.

Next love letter tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cities you’d love on?