January 29, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Aftermaths

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On a controversial investigation, a tragic follow-up, and a bigger question that remains.

As would likely be the case with any federal disaster as tragic and as public as the Challenger explosion, and as was doubly the case due to President Reagan’s more personal interests in the mission as I traced in the prior two posts in this series, the tragedy was followed by an intensive investigation, or rather two interconnected ones: first the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, chaired by former U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers and featuring such space program and scientific luminaries as Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, Chuck Yeager, and (most controversially) Richard Feynman; and a subsequent House Committee on Science & Technology inquiry. The Rogers Commission (as it came to be known) held a number of televised hearings and then released its extensive report on June 6^th, 1986; the House Committee then reviewed that report along with its own findings and released its complementary report on October 29^th.

Both reports noted a number of mistakes and missteps, not only in the immediate lead-up to the disaster, but also and especially in earlier moments when specific issues (such as the difficulty of a launch in extremely cold temperatures, as was the case on January 28^th) had been raised and frustratingly brushed aside. Feynman went even further, making a more stridently critical case against NASA that he demanded be added to the Rogers report as an Appendix (Appendix F). I have to imagine that such hindsight finger-pointing could be part of virtually any post-mission investigation and report, even with the 99% of such missions that went off smoothly and successfully across the Space Shuttle’s (and space program’s) history. But the pro-NASA case was not helped at all by a second and equally tragic shuttle disaster almost exactly 17 years later: on February 1^st, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up when attempting reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board. After that second tragedy, NASA began to wind down the Space Shuttle program, replacing it with the newly constructed International Space Station (ISS) and phasing out the shuttles entirely by the early 2010s.

No governmental or scientific program necessarily needs to last forever, and no matter what the Space Shuttle program achieved a great deal of significant success in its 30 years of operation. It also seems silly to even suggest additional federal expenditures on science or research here in early 2026, given the exact opposite trends that the second Trump administration has created. But I’m going to do so anyway, at least as a long-term goal. There are all kinds of ways we can and must respond to the global climate crisis and fight for a more sustainable future, most of them very much focused on our own planet as they should be. But a federal program that offers the possibility of helping us find other places around the galaxy where we might live—and, yes, one that is not spearheaded by egotistical and destructive tech billionaires—seems to me well worth reinvesting in and extending as we deal with all those global challenges and their effects. I’ve got one more post in this series on a different note, but to end the thread of the last few posts: while the Challenger was in many ways one of the worst moments of the late 20^th century in America, it also helps us remember a program that featured much of our best, and could do so again.

Last ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 28, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: The Explosion

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On why we were so unprepared for disaster, and what the horrifying moment meant.

As I wrote in Monday’s post, there’s a significant difference between early space program disasters like the Apollo 1 fire or Apollo 13’s manifold issues and what happened on the morning of January 28^th, 1986. Apollo 1 was to be the first manned mission of its type for the U.S. space program, and Apollo 13 was only three years later, very much still in the program’s infancy. By comparison, the Challenger’s 1986 mission, dubbed STS-51-L, was to have been the 25^th Space Shuttle flight since the program’s launch in 1981, and the 10^th for Challenger alone. Both the space program overall and the Space Shuttle missions specifically had become well-oiled and predictable machines—indeed, so confident were the NASA engineers in the Space Shuttle program that, after initially featuring ejection seats and pressure suits for the astronauts on the two-person test flights, they decided not to include any such escape mechanisms on the operational flights.

While of course the presence on the shuttle of Teacher in Space Project selectee Christa McAuliffe, about whose inspiring story and voice I wrote in yesterday’s post, had a lot to do with it, I have to think that this level of earned confidence in the Space Shuttle program was likewise a factor in NASA’s decision to not only broadcast the Challenger’s launch live, but also and especially to show it to millions of children in classrooms around the country (or at least in the more eastern time zones, as the 11:30 am launch time was a bit too early for it to be shown on the West Coast). (Another factor, and one I should have mentioned in yesterday’s post so I wanted to make sure to do so here, was the presence of another groundbreaking and inspiring astronaut, Ronald E. McNair, one of the first three Black astronauts and the second to go to space when he did so for the first time on 1984’s STS-41B shuttle mission.) (Too many parentheses, I know, but another potential factor, especially for conspiracy-minded folks, was President Reagan’s scheduled State of the Union address on the evening of January 28^th, during which he planned to talk about the shuttle launch.)

Reagan ended up using that evening time slot to address the tragedy instead, perhaps hoping to provide some context for those millions of children who had watched the explosion live. But according to a long-term psychiatric study of a number of those kids, one eventually published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in October 1999, those who watched the launch did display at least some symptoms of what came to be known (thanks in part to this groundbreaking study) as distant-traumatic effects, a subcategory of PTSD. And as one of those kids, and one who distinctly remembers not only watching the launch and explosion on the small TV in the office of the large man who taught me to swim in the Charlottesville public schools, but also and especially the unexpected, unusual, and lingering feelings the experience created in me, I would have to agree. Whatever the factors involved in broadcasting this launch live, the choice to do so, coupled with a tragedy that no one could have predicted (although, as I’ll discuss tomorrow, some did worry about), was even more momentous than the explosion itself.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 27, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Christa McAuliffe

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On more overt and more subtle reasons why the teacher-turned-astronaut was a perfect choice for the Teacher in Space Project (and an especially tragic loss).

At least according to her mother Grace George Corrigan’s Foreword to Colin Burgess’s cultural biography Teacher in Space: Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Legacy (2000), the day after John Glenn’s historic September 1962 space flight a 13-year-old Christa McAuliffe told a high school friend, “Do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon? Maybe even taking a bus, and I want to do that!” Nearly a quarter-century later, when she was applying for President Ronald Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project in early 1985, McAuliffe returned to that foundational moment for both herself and the space program, writing on her application, “I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate.” NASA official Alan Ladwig would later note that McAuliffe was chosen from among the ten finalists for the project due to her “infectious enthusiasm,” and it seems clear that that enthusiasm was both specific to the history of the space program and thus a genuine part of McAuliffe’s perspective for many decades by that mid-80s moment.

Obviously that throughline makes for a compelling and ultimately tragic side to the story of McAuliffe’s selection for this unique role on a doomed mission. But I would argue that other details about her work as a history and social studies teacher together comprise an even more powerfully symbolic reflection of what she brought to the Challenger. For one thing, she got her Master’s in Education from Maryland’s Bowie State University, an HBCU; there were geographic reasons for the choice (she and her husband lived in Maryland at the time), but I have to think the experience affected her future work as an educator in a variety of inclusive ways. For another thing, during her subsequent time at Concord High School in New Hampshire (where she was working when selected for the project) she created a new course entitled “The American Woman,” which “explored the history of the United States from the female perspective.” And for a third thing, according to a New York Times profile in her teaching she “emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals.” I can’t imagine a more pitch-perfect combination for this first teacher-astronaut.

There’s one more detail about McAuliffe’s biography that I haven’t seen highlighted in as many stories, and that while small adds another compelling layer to her symbolic identity. McAuliffe’s great-uncle was Philip Khuri Hitti, the Lebanese-American historian and educator who became one of the most influential figures in that community as well as in the development of the discipline of Arabic Studies. I can’t find any clear info about whether the two knew each other or not, but I still love the throughline between that groundbreaking educator and the inspiring teacher his great-niece would become. In one of her interviews about the Teacher in Space Project, McAuliffe exclaimed, “Imagine me teaching from space, all over the world, touching so many people's lives. That's a teacher's dream! I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!" Long before her tragic death (although only amplified by it, if in painfully ironic ways), McAuliffe had already done that, extending the legacy of her historic relative and making her a truly perfect choice for this symbolically American role.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 26, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Predecessors

[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]

On three earlier space program disasters that in distinct ways echoed into the Challenger’s.

1)      Apollo 1 (1967): 59 years ago tomorrow, on January 27^th, 1967, a fire swept through the command module of the first manned Apollo mission while the ship was on the launchpad for a preflight test, killing all three astronauts on board (Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee). Obviously a launchpad disaster that takes the life of an entire mission’s crew is eerily similar to what would happen with the Challenger a couple decades later, but there’s at least one significant difference: this was to be the first manned Apollo mission, and so it stands to reason that mistakes and failures were possible, and indeed likely inevitable when it came to things like the first launch (although of course this was a hugely destructive and tragic failure); while the Space Shuttle program had begun in 1981 and seen the first successful orbital flight in 1982, making the Challenger’s launch part of what would seem to have been by that time a well-established and safe routine before tragedy struck.

2)      Apollo 13 (1970): I don’t imagine I need to say too much about the story of this subsequent, successfully launched but hugely troubled Apollo mission, given the prominence of the 1995 film which depicts the mission’s events. As that film captures, the Apollo 13 astronauts were able to work with the NASA folks on the ground to get their ship and themselves back to Earth safely, one of the most impressive scientific feats in American history and a clear contrast to the Challenger tragedy. But the latter mission’s tragically different endpoint shouldn’t obscure something we can learn from the Apollo 13 mission: the remarkable level of skill, ingenuity, teamwork, and courage displayed by NASA astronauts and ground crew alike. That was just as true of every member of the Challenger mission (including the unique one about whom I’ll write tomorrow), even if they sadly did not have a chance to demonstrate it.

3)      Soyuz 11 (1971): As I highlighted in this post on Kennedy’s “moon shot” speech, the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union played a huge role in the development of the U.S. space program, which means that (at least in my experience) we tend not to think much at all about Soviet space missions, and certainly not about them as parallel to U.S. ones. But if we take a step back, of course they were parallel; and moreover, as these are the two nations that (to this day) have had the most success putting humans in space, there’s a lot we can and should learn from comparing and contrasting their experiences doing so. Especially their most tragic experiences—and if Challenger is ours, I’d say the death of all three Soyuz 11 astronauts aboard the new Soviet space station Salyut 1 has to be theirs. And while all the lessons we might take from the latter are above the paygrade of this last moment in a brief blog post, I’ll just add this: mourning and memorializing those three Soviet astronauts should be just as much of a no-brainer, for Americans and all people, as doing so for the Challenger’s.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 24-25, 2026: Occasional Poems: Mine!

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

I could go on and on, and perhaps a free-verse epic would be required to really do justice to where we are in late January 2026. But that would be neither a challenge for me nor something y’all would likely want to read, so I decided on a sonnet (Shakespearean, natch):

 

I try to avoid language that’s rash;

AmericanStudies demands our nuance.

But honesty is ripe for a renaissance,

And I gotta say things have gotten pretty fash.

 

Don’t believe me—believe your honest eyes:

Our troops in Caracas, Minneapolis, even freaking Nuuk?

It’d be enough to make our Founding Framers puke,

And all because he didn’t get a Nobel Prize.

 

Of course that’s just the tip of the melting ice:

This nation I love is overrun with ignorance and hate;

Folks are looking for artificial intelligences to date;

And like eggs, sanity comes at an increasingly steep price.

 

I know this sonnet’s supposed to end with a turn,

But hard-won hope’s something we’re gonna have to earn.

 

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share, including your own?

January 23, 2026: Occasional Poems: 21st Century Inaugural Poems

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On quick takeaways from the three 21^st century inaugural poems to date.

1)      Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song for the Day” (2009): I’ve thought and talked and written a lot about critical optimism and hard-won hope over the last decade, and would say that Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s first inauguration captures those perspectives and concepts very eloquently. I especially like how the line that first introduces the poem’s title, “Praise strong for struggle, praise song for the day,” expands in the poem’s final full verse and then culminating single line: “In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,/any thing can be made, any sentence begun./On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,//praise song for walking forward in that light.” Each one of the poems I’m highlighting today looks different from the dimmed light of January 2026, but goddamn do we still need to walk forward.

2)      Richard Blanco, “One Today” (2013): I don’t think I had ever read Blanco’s poem, written for Obama’s second inauguration, until researching this post, and I was immediately struck by just how Whitmanesque it is, especially in those long lists (catalogs, as Whitman scholars call them) of settings and social roles alike. The poem’s final lines envision hard-won hope in ways that feel indebted to (or at least in conversation with) Alexander’s, and that Amanda Gorman would herself echo and extend eight years later in the poem I’ll get to in a moment. But the lines of Blanco’s that I love best are the ones that are in conversation with Martín Espada’s poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?” (1993): “ring-up groceries as my mother did/for twenty years, so I could write this poem”; and “hands/as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane/so my brother and I could have books and shoes.”

3)      Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021): It’s very difficult for me to read or watch Gorman’s incredible poem, written for Joe Biden’s inauguration, these five years later, especially when we get to/ lines like “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it./Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy./And this effort very nearly succeeded./But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” Jury’s still out on that one, I’m afraid. But I still find these lines not only just as inspiring as ever, but a crystal clear vision of how I would define both America and the work we must do: “If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made./That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare./It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit./It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, but I’ll try to say my own piece this weekend!

That special poem of mine this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 22, 2026: Occasional Poems: Angelou and Williams for Clinton

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On what differentiates Clinton’s two inaugural poets, and a crucial connection in their content.

I’m not going to pretend that Maya Angelou wasn’t already a very, very big deal long before she delivered her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in January 1993. Indeed, it’s fair to say she had been one of America’s preeminent writers for at least a quarter-century by then, since the 1969 publication of her first memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But nonetheless, it was both symbolically and nationally significant that the second inaugural poet in our history—and, as I wrote yesterday, the first in more than 30 years; I have to imagine that by 1993 it seemed like Robert Frost’s reading in 1961 was just going to be a one-off—was an African American woman. And honestly, it’s the combination of both of those sentences and contexts—that Angelou was one of the most important 20^th century Black writers, and that this was still a surprising invitation on multiple levels—which makes Clinton’s choice of Angelou to my mind the single most significant moment of occasional poetry in American history.

I hope it’s thus abundantly clear that I mean no disrespect to Clinton’s second inaugural poet Miller Williams, who read his poem “Of History and Hope” at Clinton’s January 1997 inauguration, when I say that the moment was in every sense less significant. Williams was a longtime English Professor at the University of Arkansas (he joined the department in 1970 and was emeritus until his passing in early 2015), and also co-founded and directed for twenty years the University of Arkansas Press. He published a ton of his own poetry, translated other poets including Pablo Neruda, and also happens to have been the father of Lucinda Williams. So this was an impressive figure on many fronts, and one deeply connected to the state of Arkansas that was so foundational in Bill Clinton’s life and story, making Miller a very logical choice for Clinton’s second inaugural poet—but, again, a much less significant one than Maya Angelou (which likely has a lot to do with why I didn’t know about his inaugural poem until researching this series).

But any student of mine, and probably anybody who knows me well at all, knows how much I value close reading, textual analysis, not letting such contexts dictate too fully how we approach the evidence in front of us. And when we look at these two inaugural poems, different as they likewise are in many ways, they have a crucial connection in a core element of their content: their visions of American history and its role in our present. I used a relevant quote from Angelou’s poem as the epigraph for my fourth book (the title of which begins with the same phrase as Williams’s title, “History and Hope”): “History, despite its wrenching pain/Cannot be unlived, but if faced/With courage, need not be lived again.” And very much in conversation with those lines are the concluding ones in Williams’s poem: “All this in the hands of children, eyes already set/on a land we can never visit—it isn’t there yet—/but looking through their eyes, we can see/what our long gift to them may come to be./If we can truly remember, they will not forget.” I’d say we still desperately need to hear and read both of these poetic works and voices in our 21^st century moment.                                    

Last occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 21, 2026: Occasional Poems: Frost for Kennedy

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On the first poem read at an inauguration, the poem that could have been but wasn’t, and what we both lost and gained as a result.

Because a number of the recent presidential inaugurations have featured poetic readings (the last five in which Democrats were inaugurated—it’s funny that only Democratic Presidents seem interested in featuring these cultural figures and works…), it might seem like the practice has been long-established or consistently present at these historic events. But really the opposite is true: the first such inaugural poet in American history, and the only one before Clinton restarted the practice in 1993 (inviting Maya Angelou, on whose inaugural poem more tomorrow), was Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration 65 years ago today. Kennedy was a big fan of Frost’s, noting that “I’ve never taken the view the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart” (both perspectives that Frost himself had recently reciprocated and reinforced by actively supporting Kennedy’s campaign), and asked the poet to read his 1923 poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration.

Never one to do things the easy way, though, the 86-year-old Frost apparently didn’t want to just read that existing poem. He drafted a new prefatory poem for the occasion, “Dedication” (later expanded and known as “For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration”), which he planned to read ahead of “Gift.” Unfortunately the glare from the morning sun (especially as reflected by the new-fallen show from a serious nor’easter which had hit the city over the previous two days) made it impossible for Frost to read this new work from his papers; after struggling for a bit he noted, “this was to have been a preface to a poem which I do not have to read” and then, like the badass he was, recited “The Gift Outright” from memory. He subsequently gave Kennedy first a manuscript copy of the original “Dedication” and then another of the expanded poem “For John. F Kennedy His Inauguration,” which Frost had published in his 1962 collection In the Clearing.

I love the idea of Frost sharing a new poem as part of this inaugural inaugural poetry reading (repetition poetically intended, obvi), and “Dedication” begins with a really fun invocation of the occasion that I’m sorry he didn’t get to share there: “Summoning artists to participate/In the august occasions of the state/Seems something artists ought to celebrate./Today is for my cause a day of days./And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise/Who was the first to think of such a thing.” But on the other hand, later in the poem Frost writes, “We see how seriously the races swarm/In their attempts at sovereignty and form./They are our wards we think to some extent/For the time being and with their consent,/To teach them how Democracy is meant.” There are a number of problems with those lines, but I would particularly note that as a preface to “Gift,” which more or less directly features a Manifest Destiny-like vision of American history and land, it’s especially problematic to refer to other “races” as “our wards.” I have to say I’m glad those phrases weren’t part of the first poetic work to be read at an inauguration.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 20, 2026: Occasional Poems: Whitman on Lincoln

[65 years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On takeaways from the three poems Walt Whitman wrote on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination.

1)      “Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day (May 4, 1865)”: Whitman’s book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps (1865) was already in the printing process when Lincoln was assassinated, but the poet managed to get one more poem added to the book in order to reflect that tragic postscript to the war. Supposedly Whitman wasn’t too happy with “Hush’d,” which stands to reason if he completed it more quickly than normal to get it into the book (its first manuscript is in fact dated the day after the assassination). But I think his choice of speaker and perspective is quite brilliant—he writes in the collective voice of Union soldiers, which allows Whitman both to express the communal loss of Lincoln and (in a classic Walt move) make his writing of the poem a response to the soldiers’ request that he “Sing poet in our name/Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.”

2)      “O Captain! My Captain!”: Written roughly six months after the assassination and included in his book Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865), “O Captain!’ is definitely Whitman’s most famous response to Lincoln’s death, and perhaps (thanks to a certain fictional English teacher and then a certain climatic tribute to same) his most famous poem period. That’s ironic, as it’s a lot more straightforward and as a result a bit less interesting than most of Whitman’s poems, which is perhaps why he later exclaimed, “Damn My Captain…I’m almost sorry I ever wrote the poem.” But he did add that it “had certain emotional immediate reasons for being,” and I believe that it’s in its two-part stanza structure that the poem fully and impressively embodies those reasons—moving from victory to loss, from wartime triumph to postwar despair, and doing so not just through the two four-line sections in each stanza but also through the page layout of those respective sections.

3)      “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: Also included in Sequel to Drum-Taps, and indeed giving the book its subtitle, was this much longer and more epic poem inspired by Lincoln’s assassination. And, I would argue, a far more Whitmanesque poem than these other two, in two particular ways that I want to highlight here. First, and more overt, is the poem’s use of pastoral metaphors (including the titular lilacs but also a star and a thrush), rather than direct references to Lincoln and the war and so on, to achieve its powerful emotional resonances. But even more interesting to me is its balance of two very different styles, both of which are at the heart of another epic Whitman poem, “Song of Myself,” as well: first-person romantic elegies; and his famous “catalogs,” lists of people and places and social realities. This is Whitman’s truest occasional poem for Lincoln’s death, and it’s a beautiful one.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 19, 2026: Occasional Poems: Wheatley to Washington

[65 years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On how an occasional ode reflects the equal boldness of its author and subject.

Nearly thirteen years ago, I focused a Black History Month post (part of a series on inspiring historical conversations) on the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley’s rumored in-person conversation with Continental Army General George Washington in March 1776. As I wrote in an IMPORTANT PPS that I added as a comment below the post, the awesome Revolutionary War and Boston history scholar J.L. Bell followed up with a note that there’s no real evidence that that meeting actually took place, and it now seems to me unlikely that it did. But what’s much more definitive (as Bell also notes in his comment) is Washington’s invitation to Wheatley to visit him at his Cambridge headquarters, as well as the reasons behind that striking invite: the young poet had recently penned her 1775 ode “To His Excellency George Washington”; and had then (as I note in that prior post) sent the poem to Washington himself, along with a letter introducing herself and defending her choice tosuch a work (despite her status as an enslaved person).

If we turn to that 1775 poem itself, we can find a similarly striking presence of Wheatley herself in her ode to Washington and the Revolutionary American cause. She uses three first-person singular pronouns, and while one represents a moment of self-deprecation (“Shall I to Washington their praise recite?/Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.”), the other two position the author as both overtly part of the poem’s occasion (“Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,/Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.”) and directly petitioning the heavens on behalf of Washington and the cause (“Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates/How pour her armies through a thousand gates”). And those earlier references mean that the start of the poem’s climactic stanza, “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,/Thy ev’ry action let the Goddess guide,” while making Washington the official subject of the sentence, nonetheless positions Wheatley herself as an equally powerful participant in the moment, a voice that parallels both Washington and the Goddess there.

The poem is an ode to Washington, of course, and after those two lines the final couplet reinforces that emphasis, in typography as well as content: “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,/With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.” But Wheatley’s bold choices likewise add another layer to her content, an underlying argument about the revolutionary place and ideas that this military layer symbolizes. We see that most clearly in the opening of the fourth stanza: “One century scarce perform’d its destined round,/When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;/And so may you, whoever dares disgrace/The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!/Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,/For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.” I’ve written elsewhere about Wheatley’s complex and crucial poetic arguments for the Revolutionary cause, and included them as both celebratory and active patriotism in the first chapter of Of Thee I Sing. We can see all those layers to both the poet and her works here in this very early American occasional poem.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 17-18, 2026: Crowd-sourced 60s & 70s TVStudying

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ve AmericanStudied those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring the responses and recommendations of fellow TVStudiers!]

Gotta start the first crowd-sourced post on the new website with thoughts from my second-most longstanding and thoughtful reader, my FSU colleague Irene Martyniuk. She writes, “MeTV is perhaps the greatest thing ever if only for science fiction Saturday Night. From 1:00 am until 5:00 am, in order—Lost In Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, and then The Invaders. They are all Irwin Allen shows and so tacky and brilliant and hokey and wonderful. I love them all. They walked so that every version of Battlestar Galactica could fly. And I haven’t even gotten to The Love Boat and Fantasy Island yet. Good times.”

Responding on Bluesky to Monday’s post, John Edwin Mason argues that West’s show is “still the best Batman by far.”

While Marty Olliff adds, “You might have seen me mention this before, but I once served Adam West in a buffet line. Here's one I've never reported: my wife and kids (before I was in the picture) lived in the foothills of Mt. Hood, Oregon, near Lindsay Wagner's local home. They saw her occasionally.”

Responding to Tuesday’s post, Darlene Cypser notes that “Bonanza actually addressed a number of controversial issues.”

Finally, Joshua R. Greenberg requests another B-centered show from the era, BJ and the Bear (Guest Post time, says I!).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 16, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: The Brady Bunch

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

On how the iconic sitcom avoided controversy, how it got closer to the line, and a secret third thing.

The Brady Bunch only aired for five seasons, from September 1969 through March 1974, which boggles my mind when I think about how often I watched its reruns as a kid (and, yes, how large its shadow looms in the TV world as well as our broader cultural consciousness). But I can’t imagine a more fraught social and political moment in which those five seasons could have been located, from the deepening Vietnam War and its protests to almost the entire unfolding of the Watergate scandal (Nixon resigned just five months after the show’s run ended). And while of course a sitcom wouldn’t necessarily dive deep into those kinds of issues, it’s pretty striking how fully The Brady Bunch avoided even the barest whisper of them. For example, oldest child Greg (Barry Williams) was certainly of the age where he would have been thinking about the war and the draft, but such questions were never mentioned; nor, for another example, did any of the show’s strong female characters (no, not even Alice) ever refer in any direct way to the second-wave feminist movement. Its rough contemporary All in the Family (1971-1979) The Brady Bunch was definitely not.

There are different ways to push the envelope, though, and while the Bradys didn’t generally do so through overt plotlines or dialogue, that doesn’t mean that the show wasn’t without its controversial elements. One of them was controversial enough that it never got overtly mentioned: while Mike Brady (Robert Reed) was a widower, Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) was intended to be divorced, and the subject was still taboo enough that her first husband was simply never mentioned at all. But another controversial element was present on screen in many of the episodes: the fact that Mike and Carol shared a bed, and were frequently depicted talking about the show’s events while getting ready to go to sleep in that single bed. This wasn’t the first TV couple to do so, but it was without question the most prominent such early instance, and I’d say that specific detail reminds us that the show’s overall premise, its presentation and exploration of the challenges and joys of a blended family, was itself at least a bit controversial (or at least unusual) and worth celebrating.

And then there’s what was unfolding behind the scenes for the show’s actors. In that hyperlinked post I highlighted what we’ve learned in the 50 years since the show ended about Robert Reed’s closeted sexuality, his eventual tragic death from AIDS, and most relevantly to this post, what those layers to his identity meant about his experience making this particular show. I quoted in that post and will quote again here Florence Henderson’s thoughtful perspective: “Here he was, the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband…He was an unhappy person…I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration.” There shouldn’t be anything controversial about an actor’s sexuality, but the fact that there would have been had Reed been honest about his identity reflects the limits of even the most progressive portrayals of family on 1960s and 70s TV.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 15, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: Bewitched

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

On how Salem both inspired and was inspired by the 60s sitcom, and why that’s profoundly problematic.

According to Walter Metz’s 2007 history of Bewitched, the show’s creator Sol Saks was inspired by two films featuring witchy romance in a contemporary setting. The more famous, Bell, Book, and Candle (1958, but an adaptation of John Van Druten’s 1950 Broadway play of the same name), features Kim Novak as a modern witch who uses a love spell on Jimmy Stewart. But to my mind the more telling is I Married a Witch (1942, an adaptation of James Thorne Smith’s posthumously published 1941 novel The Passionate Witch), in which Veronica Lake’s modern witch seeks revenge on Fredric March’s descendent of Salem Witch Trials accusers but ends up falling in love with him instead. When we take these two cinematic predecessors together, we can see the origins of a show largely focused on sitcom problems (marriage and parenting, home and work conflicts, neighbors, and so on) but with an interesting layer of a multigenerational magical family (main character Samantha Stephens’s mother and later her and her husband Dick’s daughter, both fellow witches, in particular).

If Salem played a small role in the show’s origins, Bewitched would eventually play a very significant role in Salem’s evolving late 20^th-century histories. As that hyperlinked Smithsonian magazine article (itself based on Witch Trials historian Stacey Schiff’s New York Times piece) notes, it was when the show filmed special episodes in Salem in 1970—including one episode where Samantha travels back in time and becomes one of the accused in the Witch Trials—that the city first began to lean into the possibilities of using these controversial and painful histories as a vehicle for tourism. That possibility gradually became not just a reality but the city’s defining one in the 21^st century, to the point where most of its public signage, marketing, and even institutions like the police call it “The Witch City” and—most strikingly when it comes to the influence of Bewitched on this process—since 2005 one of its central public parks features a life-size statue of actress Elizabeth Montgomery in character as Samantha.

I’ve already written a good bit in this space about why that “Witch City” emphasis is at best seriously complicated and at worst deeply frustrating, and I don’t want to rehash all those arguments here. Instead, I’ll just note that it’s particularly fraught to connect this particular sitcom, with its central emphasis on the wacky hijinks that befall a witch and a non-witch who are also a married couple, to the histories of Salem and the Witch Trials. After all, one of the most famous pairs of Witch Trial victims were Martha and Giles Corey, a woman who was executed after her husband testified against her at her witchcraft trial—and after which he subsequently was accused and executed (in the admittedly badass moment with which I began that hyperlinked post) as well. I don’t have any problem with Bewitched’s premise on its own terms, and as those prior pieces indicate I have long since made my peace with the contradictions of Salem. But this seems to me to be a case where life and art should stay quite fully distinct from one another.

Last TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 14, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: The Bionic Woman

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

On silly spinoffs that succeed, silly spinoffs that don’t, and what we can make of the difference.

The Bionic Woman, which aired its first episode on this date 50 years ago, was a spinoff from an existing hit show, The Six Million Dollar Man. In April 1975, season 2 of that show had featured a two-part episode, “The Bionic Woman,” in which superpowered protagonist Steve Austin (Lee Majors) reunites with his high school sweetheart Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), almost loses in her a tragic skydriving accident, and convinces his scientist handlers to save her by turning her into a bionic woman with the same procedures that they had used on him. He does so by promising that she will work for the same fictional top-secret office he does (the Office of Scientific Intelligence), and after some hemming and hawing on both their parts she obviously decides to do so. The new episode and character were thus as over-the-top and silly as the original, and that’s precisely the point—Six Million had been an instant hit, and the producers decided, as is so often the case, to repeat the formula in a new show.  

In the fall of 1977, season 3 of The Bionic Woman opened with a very similar two-part episode, “The Bionic Dog.” In it Sommers meets Max (short for Maximillion, named for how much his procedure cost), a German Shephard who she learns had been the first bionic test subject before the later procedures on Austin and Sommers; Max is experiencing some negative side effects and is slated to be put down when they meet, but Sommers rescues him and enjoys some quality time with this appropriately powerful pet. The producers’ intent was that after this two-part introduction, Max would likewise go on to headline his own spinoff show, presumably called The Bionic Dog, in which he would live with Sommers’s forest ranger friend Roger Grette (also introduced in this two-part episode) and, I dunno, fight forest fires alongside Smokey or some such. But the network rejected this second spinoff and Max stayed with Sommers instead, periodically appearing on the show to perform his own spectacular and silly superpowered feats.

I’m not in the heads of those network executives (and let’s face it, if I were I would have greenlit a show about a superpowered little friend like Max), but I would say there are a couple ways to analyze the difference between these two cases. One is what I alluded to above: while of course there can be spinoffs that diverge from the original, it seems likely to me that when a spinoff is going to launch while the original show is still airing (and indeed, still very early in its run), the goal would often be that it replicates the formula closely enough to guarantee (the network believes, anyway) success. A superdog in the woods is different enough from these superhumans working for the OSI that it just wasn’t as sure of a bet, I’m saying. But I would also highlight a broader TV history context—while the first couple decades of TV were rife with animal-centered shows, from Lassie to Mr. Ed. to The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, that trend had largely died off by the late 1970s; and perhaps the timing was thus just wrong for a show entitled The Bionic Dog. Ruff.

Next TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 13, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: Bonanza

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

Three diverse characters and plotlines through which the long-running and legendary Western can help expand our collective memories of the West.

1)      Hop Sing: While Bonanza’s main characters, members of the Cartwright family including father Ben and his three sons (and eventually other relatives in later seasons), were all white, the show did feature a non-white recurring character who would become perhaps its most beloved: Victor Sen Yung’s family cook and housekeeper Hop Sing. Much of the time as that second hyperlink illustrates Hop Sing was a minor character used for comic relief, but his presence alone reminds audiences of both the 19^th century Chinese American community and the multiracial diversity of the American West. And his character became so popular that in later seasons the writers created episodes focused on Hop Sing and his own identity and community, including one (“The Fear Merchants”) which deals directly with the anti-Chinese sentiments that led to the Exclusion Act (a couple decades after the show’s 1860s setting).

2)      “Day of Reckoning”: Hop Sing was the show’s only non-white recurring character, but Bonanza did also dedicate full episodes to other non-white characters and related questions of race and ethnicity in its diverse mid-19^th century Western world. One of the most complex is season 2’s “Day of Reckoning,” which features a number of Bannock Native American characters with a range of perspectives on neighboring whites, the future of the West, and more. While the fact that the main such character, Matsou, was played by the Mexican American actor Ricardo Montalban, is a telling one when it comes to indigenous representation in the early 1960s, it also adds one more layer to the episode’s and show’s depiction of the 19^th-century West, and could be a way in to highlighting for white audiences both indigenous and Mexican communities in that place and time.

3)      “The Wish”: As is often the case with long-running shows, by the later seasons some of the show’s stars had the chance to direct episodes, and the season 10 episode “The Wish” was helmed by none other than Michael Landon (Joe Cartwright). It tells the story of a formerly enslaved man, Sam Davis (the great Ossie Davis), who moves to the area with his family and faces post-Civil War racism. Building on earlier such plotlines, including season 5’s “Enter Thomas Bowers” in which the titular touring Black opera singer (played by William Marshall) is mistaken for a runaway slave and apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act, “The Wish” makes clear that diverse individuals aren’t just visitors to the world of Bonanza, but were part of its community alongside the Cartwrights.

Next TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 12, 2026: The Boob Tube in the 60s & 70s: Batman

[This week marks the 60^th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50^th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]

How three surprising figures and groups help tell the story of an iconic and influential camp classic.

1)      Hugh Hefner: After 60 years of Batman on the small and big screen (as well as continuing on the pages of comic books throughout those decades of course), it might seem like a given that there would be demand for a Batman TV show. But that wouldn’t necessarily have been the case in January 1966 without none other than Hugh Hefner, who in 1964 had screened all 15 installments of the 1943 film serial called The Batman at his trendy Playboy Club in Chicago. Those screenings led Columbia Pictures to rerelease the entire serial in theaters in 1965 as An Evening with Batman and Robin, and the success of that rerelease in turn contributed to the development (or at least the greenlighting, as it seems to have already been in early development) of the TV show.

2)      The Temptations: That same relative lack of built-in audience—or at least an uncertainty from network executives about whether it was there—meant that the show had to be marketed a lot more aggressively than we might expect. Perhaps the most striking such marketing was Batman Live!, a concert series that toured the country in the summer of 1966. Stars Adam West (Batman) and Frank Gorshin (The Riddler) appeared at each stop, alongside a number of musical groups—and at least at the June 25^th concert at New York’s Shea Stadium, that roster included The Temptations! Talking ‘bout my guy—indeed, my Boy Wonder (although Burt Ward’s Robin wasn’t part of the tour it seems).

3)      Conan O’Brien: Batman was prolific, airing twice a week for its first two seasons; but it was short-lived, as the audience did not entirely emerge and it was canceled after its third season, in March 1968 (it did total 120 episodes in those three seasons). But as its presence in this blog series indicates, its legacy and influence have extended far beyond that moment. Critics agree, as Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz ranked Batman the 82^nd greatest show of all time in their 2016 TV (The Book). And perhaps even more importantly, comedians agree, with Conan O’Brien calling it one of his favorite shows on a 2012 podcast and noting its influence on subsequent successful and likewise influential parodies like Airplane! I’m sure West et al would have liked more than three seasons, but they have to have been very happy with the show’s long and meaningful tail (cape?).

Next TVStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?

January 10-11, 2026: 2026 Anniversaries: Spring 2026 Plans

[The start of a new year meant my annual series on historic anniversaries. Leading up to this weekend post on some of what I’m planning for my Spring semester sabbatical!]

Two works in progress for which I’d love your input and ideas, and one even more direct request.

1)      Podcast season two: Back in September I noted that one main plan for my sabbatical this semester was to work on a second season for my narrative history podcast The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, & the Battle for America. I’m still hoping to get that going soon, with a goal of having it drop around Opening Day in late March; and I’m still interested in the baseball diamond that was built and used at the Manzanar Japanese incarceration camp during World War II as a possible focus. So I’d love any ideas or info you might have about those or related histories; but I’m also not wedded to that topic, so if you have other ideas for a baseball or sports history season two subject, share them in comments or feel free to email me!

2)      Resources for our website: Our awesome new Black & White & Read All Over public scholarly website has been live for just over four months now, and my wife Vaughn continues to put in the work to expand and strengthen it. That’s especially the case with the Resources tab; so far that means the Pitchables page under that tab, but Vaughn and I are also interested in expanding that Resources section with additional helpful links and support for public scholars, AmericanStudiers, cultural studies folks, teachers, and more. If you have ideas for either things we should include or things you’d find helpful, once again share them in comments or feel free to email me!

3)      Guest Posts: The 100-plus Guest Posts I was able to share on the old blog remain my favorite part of that site, and I’m so glad that I’ve been able to share the first three Guest Posts on the new site (they’re at the top of that blog page as all Guest Posts will always be) over the last couple months. But when it comes to Guest Posts, I can never get enough, and I’d really love to share at least one every month. So if you have either specific ideas, general interest, or questions of any kind about Guest Posting on this blog, once more with feeling, share them in comments or feel free to email me!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!