January 30, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Cultural Representations

[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 telling examples of three forms of media’s depictions of the Challenger.

1)      TV Movies: The live broadcast of the Challenger launch (and thus the explosion) that I discussed at length in Wednesday’s post was without question one of the most gripping TV-watching experiences of all time for those of us who were in that audience. So it stands to reason that TV would lead the way in depicting those events through subsequent works. The quickest to production, and to this day the most controversial, was the ABC TV movie Challenger (1990), which starred Karen Allen as Christa McAuliffe and was criticized as inaccurate by multiple astronauts’ family members. But equally interesting was the much later BBC film The Challenger Disaster (2013), which focused on Richard Feynman’s (played by the great William Hurt) controversial role in the Rogers Commission investigation and report that I highlighted in yesterday’s post.

2)      TV Shows: Those kinds of long-form TV films have been a principal vehicle through which the medium has depicted the Challenger, but it also has made its way into individual shows and episodes in interesting ways over the last decade or so. More exactly, both the drama This Is Us and the sitcom Mixed-ish have used entire episodes focused on the explosion as a way to develop character relationships and identities: This Is Us with a Season 6 flashback to the explosion as part of its ongoing portrayal of Jack and Rebecca Pearson’s youthful marriage and family; and Mixed-Ish, which was a prequel to the show Black-ish and thus was set in the 1980s, with its first-season episode “When Doves Cry” about the whole family’s reactions to the tragedy. Both of those episodes suggest that by the 2010s, the explosion had become shorthand for how historic tragedies can affect individuals, much like the Kennedy assassination has been for Baby Boomers.

3)      Memoirs: As you would expect, there have been plenty of books published about the Challenger over these last four decades, from first-hand journalism to scholarly analyses. But I’m particularly interested in a pair of memoirs through which individuals directly connected to the explosion and especially its investigations sought to advance their own case for what happened. Very soon after the explosion, Feynman published his second autobiographical book, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character (1988), which devoted roughly half its length to discussing the Rogers Commission. A couple decades later, NASA engineer Allan McDonald published (with co-author James Hansen) his book Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (2009), which highlights his and others’ pre-launch concerns and criticizing NASA for going forward with the mission. Memoir is always a complex and often a strikingly self-serving genre, but these books really drive home such fraught motivations for life writing.

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

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

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 7, 2026: 2026 Anniversaries: Published in 1876

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

For their 150^th anniversary, five distinct but interconnected literary works published during the Centennial year.

1)      Sidney Lanier’s “Centennial Cantata”: As I briefly highlighted in that hyperlinked post, Lanier was a Confederate veteran as well as a poet, and the invitation to write the opening poem for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was thus a striking and telling one. But unlike the second text I’ll highlight, Lanier’s poem took a decidedly unifying tone, from its hope that all Americans would “Toil, and forgive, and kiss o’er, and replight” to its final image of the opening ceremony’s “music…waving the world’s best lover’s welcome to the world.”

2)      James D. Lynch’s “Robert E. Lee, or Heroes of the South”: I included Lynch’s poetry in that weeklong blog series on Confederate memory because his works took and reflect a very different tone from Lanier’s Cantata. Before turning to poetry the Confederate veteran Lynch was a neo-Confederate lawyer in Reconstruction Mississippi, and his first published poem “Robert E. Lee” extended that work in particularly subtle and insidious ways, portraying the Confederate general as an epic hero whom all Americans should admire and celebrate.

3)      Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land: Melville was no Confederate, as his excellent book of Civil War poetry Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) makes very clear. And his complex and multilayered epic poem Clarel is mostly not about the U.S. at all, focusing on his titular character’s literal and spiritual journey through the Middle East and his own faith. But the poem’s fourth and final part, “Bethlehem,” does feature as an important supporting character Ungar, a mixed-race (white and Native American) Confederate veteran exploring his own past and faith on the pilgrimage. Clarel is fascinated by Ungar, a small but significant reminder of the appeal of such perspectives in 1876 America.

4)      Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Twain’s first solo novel (he had co-written The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner) is set in the antebellum South, but unlike its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) isn’t particularly interested in historical or cultural questions of region and race. But as those two hyperlinks to my Dad’s Mark Twain in His Times website indicate, I’m filially obligated to include Twain’s 1876 publication in this list. And in truth, no American author who dominate the rest of the 19^th century (and in many ways our collective conversations about American literature ever since) like Sam Clemens did.

5)      Sarah Piatt’s That New World: If I was filially obligated to include Twain’s novel, I’m personally obligated to feature a collection from my favorite American poet. That New World doesn’t feature any of my favorite individual Piatt poems, but in every poem it illustrates her unique, dense, and compelling dialogic style, and how she uses it to capture so many layers to parenting and family, marriage and relationships, identity, and more. And while her titular poem doesn’t specifically refer to America, I can’t help but imagine that for a Centennial-year publication Piatt was considering her still young nation as part of her contexts at least.

Next historic anniversary tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 24, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

On a moving memoir that’s also much more.

I’ve had a lucky lifelong connection to Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to my grandfather Art Railton’s enduring love for the island and the multigenerational family story that he inaugurated there: first as a 1930s teenager working with his fisherman uncle, then as a 1950s husband and father bringing his own young family on vacation, and finally as a 1970s retiree who became the island’s leading historian. The family has finally had to sell my grandparents’ house, but we were determined to keep the Vineyard connection going in some form this year, and were able to do so in late June thanks to my older son running (and running damn well) in the Chappy Point to Point road race. While we were there, we happened into a gift shop near the Aquinnah Cliffs, and there I learned of a wonderful forthcoming (and now published) book written by the shop owners’ son: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity.

Lee’s book is first and foremost a memoir, the story of growing up part of the island’s longstanding, challenged, and still evolving Aquinnah Wampanoag community (along with other layers to Lee’s multiracial heritage, family, and identity that he includes in the book as well). We can see the power of that personal perspective in this early passage: “In tribal summer camp, I learned our versions of first contact between Wampanoags and the English and the First Thanksgiving. These stories, stripped of the usual patriotic flourishes, made me grow to resent the standard narrative of America’s founding. I proudly announced to my first-grade class that I did not want to be friends with any ‘Europeans’ since they were the ones responsible for the killing of my ancestors. But the contrast between my tribal experience and what my history textbooks said confused me.” Lee’s voice is an intimate and vital one that we should all read, this week and all year long.

But like many of the other indigenous-authored memoirs I’ve discussed in this space, including those by the subjects of the next two posts in this week’s series (William Apess and Sarah Winnemucca), Lee’s book would best be characterized as an autoethnography, as interested in communal stories and identities as in personal ones. Not long after that opening anecdote about Lee’s educational experiences in and out of school, he turns his attention to one of his first such autoethnographic topics: the amazing historical document known as Mittark’s Will. As the last will and testament of a 17^th-century Wampanoag leader, this document is certainly part of Lee’s legacy as a 21^st-century descendant. But it also opens up the historical, contemporary, and profoundly significant lenses on land, community, and power that Lee’s title and subtitle suggest, and that he likewise introduces early on: “Over time, I’ve learned that land is not something that is simply lost forever, but something that Indigenous people across the country have been fighting over—losing, regaining, losing again, and rebuilding—for as long as any of us can remember.”

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 15-16, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: Three 21C Stories

[For Veterans Day, I’ve AmericanStudied five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to this weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

Three texts and voices that can help us commemorate 21^st century veterans’ communities:

1)      Miyoko Hikiji’s memoir All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq (2013), on which see that hyperlinked post;

2)      Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment (2014), on the stunning and heartbreaking title story of which see that article;

3)      and Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn’s The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History (2019); Ross is an Iraq War veteran as well as one of my favorite former students, and this project embodies veteran critical patriotism amazingly well;

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 12, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: A Fool’s Errand and the Civil War

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On how the protagonist’s status as a veteran adds to a novel’s ironies, and why that’s not the whole story.

Earlier this year, I dedicated a post in my April Fool’s series to the great Albion Tourgée’s historical and autobiographical Reconstruction novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879). I focused there on the novel’s ironies, so would ask you to check out that prior post and then come on back from some thoughts on how that element can be connected to veterans’ stories.

Welcome back! Like Tourgée, the novel’s protagonist Comfort Servosse—the narrator mostly just calls him The Fool—is a Civil War veteran, with the opening few chapters depicting his service with the Union army. Although the novel then jumps ahead four years to focus on Servosse’s move to North Carolina and time in that state during Reconstruction, that Civil War service thus becomes a foundation for everything that follows, on at least two ironic levels. More obviously, Servosse chooses to move his young family and blossoming legal career alike into the heart of enemy territory, a choice that immediately foreshadows why this might indeed be the titular “fool’s errand.” And more subtly but even more ironically, that time in the Reconstruction South will constitute, at least in the novel’s presentation of it, a far more difficult and painful battle than did his Civil War military efforts. Given how badly Reconstruction ultimately went for African Americans and their allies, that’s a very telling and bracing irony to be sure.

But it’s not the whole story, not of this novel and certainly not of Reconstruction. More exactly, the fact that white supremacists, both in the former Confederate states and (especially) on the national stage, successfully managed to sabotage and torpedo Reconstruction and move the country even closer to a white supremacist exclusionary state than it had been in the antebellum period, shouldn’t in any way minimize the impressive and inspiring work of African Americans and allies (like Albion Tourgée) in fighting for a more equal and just South and America. While the tortured irony of A Fool’s Errand can be difficult to parse, or at least to reduce to any single clear point, I would argue that the title itself is meant ironically as well—that this Reconstruction-era work was genuinely a knight’s errand, the most worthy thing this character and author alike could be part of at that moment, indeed a fully worthy extension and amplification of their Civil War service; and that it was not them but rather all of us who were fools, as much for failing to support those efforts as in all the other ways in that painful period.

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

October 29, 2025: AmericanStudying a Springsteen “Lost” Album: “The Aztec Dance” y Anzaldúa

[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]

On one importantly specific and one beautifully universal layer to my favorite song on the album.

In this May 2021 post I both highlighted a number of prior posts on Gloria Anzaldúa and her book Borderlands/La Frontera and added some additional thoughts. I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back here for a couple of ways in which Springsteen’s “The Aztec Dance” can be put in conversation with that author and text.

Welcome back! I could spend all day listing things I love about Borderlands/La Frontera, but high on the list would have to be Anzaldúa’s use of language, mythology, perspective/narration, and many other stylistic elements to capture the presence of indigenous history, spirituality, sexuality, and more in her identity as a Mexican American woman. In “The Aztec Dance” Springsteen uses a conversation between two Mexican American female characters to do much the same: when teenage Teresa, wearing a traditional flower crown and performing the titular dance at her “high school gym,” righteously complains to her mother that “Ma they call us greaser, they call us wetback/Here in this land that once was ours,” her mother responds (for the rest of the song’s lyrics) with an extensive descriptive of Aztec culture, community, and history. She concludes by recognizing both what has been lost but what endures in her daughter: “Our city gone and left in ruins, they cry bitter tears in another world/But here in this world, my daughter, they have you.” I don’t think even the great Gloria Anzaldúa could have said it any better.

That’s a powerfully specific layer to this wonderful song, and I don’t want to minimize it in any way. But I also believe that this song, like Anzaldúa’s book as well, is an incredible rumination on universal themes of heritage and memory, loss and persistence, that are present for each and every person, family, and community. That’s probably true everywhere, but it’s unquestionably true here in the United States, a nation defined by both the inspiring cross-cultural transformations I traced in my second book and the tragic discriminations I’ve written about throughout my work. In the best and the worst ways, the story of America can make it difficult for us to hold onto the heritages that pre-date our contemporary American experiences and identities, something I’ve thought about a lot when it comes to my own Eastern European Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side for example. But as Springsteen’s beautiful song, and especially its very moving conclusion, reminds us, those heritages are still with us whether we overtly remember them or not—they are literally and figuratively embodied in the young Americans who carry them forward into our vitally diverse future.

Next InyoStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?

October 11-12, 2025: American Crime Fiction: Elmore Leonard

[This weekend marks the 100^th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers, leading up this weekend post on Elmore himself!]

One of the highest cultural compliments an author can receive is for their works to be adapted for other media, and very few American writers have been adapted as frequently as Elmore Leonard. So here are LeonardStudying and AmericanStudies takeaways from five such adaptations for film and TV:

1)      3:10 to Yuma (1957): Before Leonard settled into his groove as a writer of contemporary crime fiction, he started (as so many 20^th century genre writers did) with Westerns. One of his most successful early short stories was “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953), which was also one of his first works to be adapted as a film. It’s an excellent story that was made into a strong film, as is also the case with the 2007 remake; but I think the broader AmericanStudies point is just how ubiquitous Westerns were in mid-century, to the point that even one of our best contemporary crime writers began with that more historical genre.

2)      The Big Bounce (1969): Leonard’s first contemporary crime novel was 1969’s The Big Bounce, and it was enough of a smash that it was adapted into a film in the same year. Unfortunately, the adaptation was, let’s say, less successful—indeed, in 2009 Leonard called it “the second-worst movie ever made,” with the first being the 2004 remake! Rather than further bury those two films, I’ll just note how unique and strongly developed Leonard’s storytelling and style were at this still-early point, which is evidenced both by the immediate adaptation and by the difficulty of adapting him well.

3)      Get Shorty (1995): Leonard published 22 novels in the 21 years between The Big Bounce and Get Shorty (1990), and a number of them were likewise adapted. But I think Get Shorty represents a significant turning point in his career, as it’s both a crime novel and a novel about Hollywood, one clearly based on Leonard’s own complicated and often frustrating experiences with film adaptations of his works and that industry overall (ironically enough, Get Shorty is one of the more successful such adaptations). Few of our novelists have careers both long and successful enough where they can arrive at such a meta-point, and it’s fascinating to trace Leonard’s journey through that lens.

4)      Touch (1997): I’d say those three stages (Westerns, crime novels, and meta-fiction) reflect the most prominent beats in Leonard’s career arc overall. But of course anyone as prolific as Leonard has of course also ventured into other territory, and one of the more interesting examples is Touch (1987), a black comic thriller that satires evangelicals, the mass media, and the commercialization of religion in late 20^th century America. From what I can tell, the 1997 film adaptation doesn’t work as either comedy, thriller, or satire—but the fact that this off-brand Leonard novel still garnered an adaptation reflects just how much the man could do no wrong.

5)      Justified (2010-2015, 2023): I said most of what I’d want to say about this fabulous TV show, an adaptation of Leonard’s novels and stories about U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (especially “Fire in the Hole”), in that hyperlinked weeklong series. (I couldn’t get into the 2023 reboot, based on Leonard’s non-Givens-related 1980 novel City Primeval.) I’ll just add this: Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder are two of the greatest characters ever put on the small screen, and (with all due respect to those two great actors and everyone involved with the show) that too is a testament to Elmore Leonard’s stunning talents.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

October 10, 2025: American Crime Fiction: Presumed Innocent

[This coming weekend marks the 100^th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers, leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

On the multiple layers of revelations built into the best mystery fiction (major SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read Scott Turow’s novel or seen the Harrison Ford film or the Jake Gyllenhaal TV series, and might at some point).

Even before this week’s series, I’ve blogged frequently enough about mystery fiction (and films) to illustrate just how seriously I take the genre as art well worth our analytical time. There are lots of reasons why, but a prominent one would have to be just how much the genre, by its very nature, can teach us about society. That is, the detective’s job, or at least a necessary corollary to his or her job, is to learn about the world around him or her, whether specific (as in Agatha Christie’s town of St. Mary Mead or Ross MacDonald’s California) or broad (as in the mysteries of human nature with which Sherlock Holmes seems so frequently to grapple). And while it’s not impossible for those deductive revelations to include inspiring lessons (about love or courage in the face of threats, for example), the genre’s nature likewise means that most of the time the lessons entail literal falls from innocence, recognitions of the guilt not only in those who commit crimes but (much of the time) in the world as a whole.

I know of few mystery novels that better exemplify those multi-layered, sobering revelations about the world than Scott Turow’s legal thriller Presumed Innocent (1987). Turow’s first-person narrator, prosecutor Rusty Sabich, stands accused of killing the woman with whom he was having an extra-marital affair; the evidence against Rusty is overwhelming, and although he is eventually acquitted, the cause is simply another level of guilt: Rusty and his lawyer discover that the case’s judge has been taking bribes, and use the information as leverage to force an acquittal. Moreover, virtually every other character in the novel is guilty of something significant as well; the cop who first investigates the case, for example, is a longtime friend of Rusty’s and illegally disposes of evidence in an (unsuccessful) attempt to shield Rusty from suspicion. Rusty’s story and world are so choked with guilt, so driven by it from start to finish, in fact, that the title begins to feel less like a legal concept and more like a sardonic social commentary.

Moreover (double SPOILER ALERT for this paragraph!), the novel’s final revelation adds two intimate and even more compelling falls from innocence to the mix. In the closing pages, Rusty discovers evidence that makes clear that the murderer was his wife, who had uncovered the affair, confronted and killed the mistress, and then tried to frame Rusty for the crime instead (going so far as to plant his semen at the scene of the crime). Even on its own terms, this fall from innocence, connected as it is to the woman with whom he has spent his life and has a family, is the novel’s most shocking and damning. But Rusty chooses not to turn his wife in, and the reason is his recognition of the story’s fundamental layer of guilt, its original sin, the fall from innocence that started it all: his affair. Which is to say, the book’s ultimate revelation is that its first-person narrator, its voice and perspective, and (as in almost any first-person book) its most intimate connection to its audience, is the most guilty party of all.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Crime or mystery stories or writers you’d share?

October 9, 2025: American Crime Fiction: Tana French

[This coming weekend marks the 100^th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers, leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

[NB. This is a post that originally appeared a few years back, and since then French has published a trio of standalone mysteries that are just as excellent as her Murder Squad books, just FYI!]

On two ways to AmericanStudy the talented and popular Irish mystery novelist.

Although Tana French was apparently born in Vermont (a fact I only learned while researching this post, for the record) and retains her American citizenship (ditto), I’m not going to pretend that her series of six (to date) bestselling mystery novels set in and around her longtime home city of Dublin isn’t deeply and crucially Irish. As virtually every post in this week’s series has reflected, mystery novels are almost always as much about their settings as their plots: Ross MacDonald’s Southern California, Tony Hillerman’s Southwest, and Attica Locke’s Houston are all central and crucial presences in their mysteries (as of course are Dupin’s Paris, Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, and many more). Moreover, one of Tana French’s most important and ingenious formal choices—to rotate the first-person narration of her books between different detectives in Dublin’s Murder Squad, introducing such detectives in earlier books and then shifting the narration to them in later ones—has allowed her novels to trace the distinct Irish backgrounds and situations, experiences and heritages, lives and identities, of her six detective-narrators just as fully as those of her murder victims and their worlds. I’m no IrishStudier (obviously), but I’d be hard-pressed to imagine that any writer has captured 21^st century Ireland with more breadth and depth than has French in her stunning series.

Yet French’s novels can and do still speak to us AmericanStudiers, and here I’ll highlight one thematic and one formal such transatlantic connection. Each of the six novels has dealt with different central themes; while all of them could be productively linked to American contexts, I would argue that that’s particularly the case with her best novel to date, Broken Harbour (2012). Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the crimes and mysteries of Broken Harbour (including those involving the detective-narrator as well, as always with French) unfold in a family, home, and community economically and psychologically devastated by the mortgage and financial crises of 2008. One of French’s greatest skills is her ability to take such social and cultural issues and connect them to universal human questions and themes, and Broken links that post-2008 historical moment to a layered and powerful examination of both the ideals and the limits (and of course the dangers) of home and family. I would link all those aspects of French’s amazing novel to a parallel but more distinctly American text, Karl Taro Greenfeld’s psychological and horror thriller short story “Horned Men” (2012). [Greenfeld’s 2015 novel The Subprimes seems to mine the same vein, but I haven’t had a chance to read that yet.] On their own, but even more as a pairing, French’s and Greenfeld’s stories present and plumb the very human horrors in these recent histories.

French’s formal use of the rotating first-person narrators can also be interestingly connected to American contexts and mysteries. As I wrote in this post on Lethem and O’Brien, first-person narration is always a tricky element of mystery fiction, and French’s novels largely sidestep the questions I raised in that post; I don’t believe we’re supposed to see these narrators as writing their stories, but they’re clearly remembering them from some unspecified future point (they consistently, purposefully use foreshadowing, for example). But what I’m particularly interested in is the way that French uses her first-person narrations to explore the personal and psychological sides to these police detectives. As always, feel free to correct me, dear readers, but my sense of mystery novels is that they tend more often to present police protagonists with third-person narration (as does Hillerman), and other protagonists (whether private detectives like Lew Archer or sidekicks like Dr.Watson) with first-person narration. If that is indeed the case, it would seem to me that it might relate to our sense of police officers as public figures, ones whose roles are less tied to their private or personal identities than might be those of private detectives or others. Whereas French’s narrators and novels make clear that the lines between private and public, personal and professional, are as blurry and ambiguous for police detectives as they are for all of us.

Last crime fiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

October 8, 2025: American Crime Fiction: Attica Locke

[This coming weekend marks the 100^th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers, leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

This is going to be one of my link-tastic posts, as I’ve already written about the great Attica Locke many times in this space but had to include her in this week’s series as well. So check out:

This post on why her first two mystery novels grabbed me like they did;

This post featuring her 2017 novel Bluebird, Bluebird;

This post on Locke as a worthy successor to the great Walter Mosley;

And this post on her 2019 novel Heaven, My Home.

I haven’t had a chance yet to check out Locke’s latest book Guide Me Home (2024), the third novel in her Highway 59 series about Texas Ranger Darren Mathews. But I hope all those prior posts reflect just how highly I think of this contemporary crime novelist, who also happens to be one of our most thoughtful and talented 21^st writers.

Next crime fiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?

October 7, 2025: American Crime Fiction: Tony Hillerman

[This coming weekend marks the 100^th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers, leading up a weekend post on Elmore himself!]

On a great mystery series that captures the lure of the Southwest, then and now.

There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park stood out to me among the many amazing stops on my family’s 1990 trip to visit Southwestern U.S. National Parks. Exploring thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved petroglyphs, surprising a lone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds of experiences that will hit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way. But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the question of why the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliff dwellings less than a century into their time there, and what happened to them after their departure. Archaeologists and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s fate will always remain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers (and all the rest of us) coming back to Mesa Verde.

Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominant features of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas, dwellings in the sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lend themselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on that element more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor who wrote (among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteries focused on Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee (now also two of the three main characters in the excellent TV series Dark Winds). I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but I’m pretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I know that I won’t ever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking of how Hillerman captures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and pitch-perfect opening to that novel.

Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known) also interestingly complement another Southwestern writer about whom I’ve written in this space: Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved to New Mexico for his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeply interested in and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, and communities. (As he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the Navajo felt about Hillerman’s books, from everything I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman treated his focal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and admiration he did his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps the one thing that links the many different Southwestern authors and artists about whom I’ve blogged over the years is how much they found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, to its histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.

Next crime fiction tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?