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?

December 3, 2025: Urban Legends: Sewer Gators

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two figures who together helped spread an urban legend, and one broader way to AmericanStudy it.

From what I can tell, it has for some bizarre reason occasionally been the case that New Yorkers have bought baby alligators as pets, decided that they don’t want to keep them, and flush them down the toilet, leading to the genuine (if usually tragically brief, as they can’t really survive down there) presence of these tiny gators in the city’s sewers. But the urban legend that there are full-grown alligators living in New York’s sewer system is largely due to one unique individual, the public worker Teddy May. I can’t sum up May any better than do the three extended passages featured at that hyperlinked sewergator.com page, but I will highlight this quote from Sewer Division Chief John T. Flaherty, featured in the 1999 book Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends: “Yes, Professor, there really was a Teddy May…almost as much of a legend as the New York City Alligator [Alligator cloaca novum Eboracum] itself.”

If May was apparently notorious among his fellow public workers, and perhaps to a degree in the city’s conversations more broadly (at least during his mid-20^th century life), it took an author and book to extend that legend beyond the Big Apple. That text is NYPD officer turned journalist and acclaimed novelist Robert Daley’s first book, The World Beneath the City (1959), an ostensibly documentary work that leans well into the realms of both folklore and humor, with Teddy May as its primary guide for both. Daley writes, “Sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators about 1935, Teddy May being Superintendent at the time. Neither May nor anyone else believed them.” But Flaherty notes that “in the fullness of time, [May] rose to become a Foreman or, perhaps, a District Foreman.” So it is apparently Daley whose belief should have been a bit more hard-earned, and May whose stories are likely as mythic as those full-size sewer gators.

But even if the gators aren’t really there, the legend certainly is, and like all such tales has a lot to tell us about its and our worlds. In this case, I’d say this urban legend is particularly illustrative of the ways we think about the first word in that phrase, our urban spaces. For at least the last 150 years, many American narratives have been dedicated to spreading fears about our cities, and more exactly about the unseen dangers that lurk around every corner in these urban landscapes. In B.V. Hubbard’s Socialism, Feminism, and Suffragism, the Terrible Triplets, Connected by the Same Umbilical Cord, and Fed from the Same Nursing Bottle (1915), one of the worst books in American history despite having one of our best titles, he writes that “In large cities people do not know their nearest neighbors, and it is sometimes dangerous, both from the moral and financial point of view, to make indiscriminate acquaintances without some investigation of the proposed acquaintance.” Hubbard is using the idea as an analogy for the dangers of Suffragism, but it also succinctly reflects this fundamental fear of the urban unknown—and what could be more unknown nor more fearsome than the legendary creatures lurking in a city’s sewers?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 1, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bell Witch

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three telling stages in the development of a local legend.

1)      Word of mouth: The basic outline of the Bell Witch legend is that between 1817 and 1821, in Robertson County, Tennessee, the family of farmer John Bell Sr. was repeatedly haunted by a female spirit who came to be known as Kate, and who seemed to be particularly obsessed with Bell’s teenage daughter Betsy. Meanwhile, a young military officer named John R. Bell (apparently not related to the farmer, which is cray cray but might also explain why the name “Bell Witch” caught on for this legend) was part of Stephen H. Long’s 1820 expedition to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and recorded in his detailed journal that during a stop in Robertson County he was told the story of a young woman who was haunted by a ghostly voice. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get an urban legend going, some oral history storytelling and a figure and text that can help pass the word of mouth along.   

2)      Media Investigations: One explorer’s journal wouldn’t likely be enough to perpetuate a legend for generations, though—for that, it takes the kinds of repeated rediscoveries and reports that media outlets can provide. One of the main such outlets for the Bell Witch legend was none other than my public scholarly home The Saturday Evening Post, which supposedly reported on the legend sometime around 1850 (the details are, appropriately, sketchy). Those reports were then picked up later in the 1850s by two New England periodicals, the New England Farmer and Green Mountain Freeman, both of which credited the Post. A few decades later, we see another example of this trend, as a pamphlet associated with the 1880 Nashville Centennial Exposition included a new account of the Bell Witch legend, presumably based on one or more of these earlier versions. The legend continues!

3)      An obsessed author: Those various versions would likely have ensured that the Bell Witch legend didn’t die out completely, but they seem sufficiently isolated in both time and place that they would likely not have been enough to lead to tons of 20^th and early 21^st century pop culture representations. For that, it took what it often takes, an obsessive individual willing to do a very, very deep dive. In this case, that individual was the strikingly named Martin Van Buren Ingram, a Kentucky Civil War veteran turned journalist who became interested in the legend around 1890 and in 1894 published a book with a title I am obligated to repeat in full: An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. The Wonder of the 19th Century, and Unexplained Phenomenon of the Christian Era. The Mysterious Talking Goblin that Terrorized the West End of Robertson County, Tennessee, Tormenting John Bell to His Death. The Story of Betsy Bell, Her Lover and the Haunting Sphinx. If I told you that its publisher, Clarksville’s W.P. Titus, reported a delay due to the witch herself haunting the premises—well, what’s more urban legend than that?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

October 18-19, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Nintendo Classics

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ve blogged about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to this weekend post on Nintendo classics!]

Life lessons from some of the legendary system’s most iconic games.

1)      Super Mario Bros.: There’s a lot I could go with here: the importance of siblings (for my boys); the need to yeet some turtles (for my wife). But perhaps the wisest lesson from Nintendo’s most enduring game is that we have to descend into the most potentially crappy places if we’re gonna find hidden treasures and save the day.

2)      Double Dragon: From what I can tell, Double Dragon was the first console game to introduce two-player cooperative gameplay; certainly it was one of the most prominent early examples of that trend. I don’t think I really need to say much more about why we need solidarity and support to take down all the bad guys, do I?

3)      The Legend of Zelda: I didn’t play Zelda back in the day (what can I say, I was more of a Gauntlet kid), but one thing I know is that at the start of the game Link has only a shield, and he has to talk with a mysterious old man to gain the sword that will be crucial to his survival. Don’t discount the wisdom of us elders, y’all.

4)      Tecmo Bowl: There are various ways that one of the first football video games pales in comparison to 21^st century classics like Madden. But one of those ways—the fact that individual players like Bo Jackson could become completely overpowered and dominate the game—I kinda dig. You all know I’m a huge fan of teamwork, but sometimes we gotta just do the damn thing ourselves, y’know?

5)      Kirby’s Adventure: No matter how much the world throws at us, we just have to keep our appetite for adventure, taking it what life gives us and turning it into fuel for our continued growth and success. Kirby was a real one.   

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 16, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: GTA

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

Forgive me for focusing this post less on Grand Theft Auto itself and more on broader gaming topics. But to be honest I think the game’s lasting significance lies more in what it has to tell us than in the silly and over-the-top gameplay itself. So to wit, here are three aspects of video games that a focus on GTA can help us discuss:

1)      Their Effects: The elephant in the room when it comes to GTA, and really all violent video games for that matter, is the question of their potential effects on (especially) impressionable young players. From what I can tell, the first GTA featured mostly just cartoonish car violence; it was with the series’ fifth game in particular that the stakes were significantly raised, with players for example having the ability to rob and kill prostitutes after sleeping with them (and, it seems, being rewarded by the game for choosing to do so). I don’t believe that any form of art (which games on, on which more in a moment) can or should be directly correlated with any particular effects on their audiences; it’s nowhere near that simple. But at the same time, it’s worth noting that unlike most other art forms, video games ask their audiences to make many of the choices themselves, and it would be disengenous to suggest that choosing to kill a woman is the same as watching a character do so in a film (for example). So while I don’t believe a game like GTA makes its players more violent, it does at times ask them to act violently in troubling ways that are worth recognizing and critiquing.

2)      They’re Art: Perhaps it’s now widely accepted that video games are an art form; certainly disciplines like Fitchburg State’s groundbreaking Game Design Major have that idea as a key starting point. But I’m not sure that the communal conversations about games tend to incorporate that definition, as it seems to me that they are still often seen more as a combination of toys (and thus more appropriate for children than any other age bracket) and distractions (and thus taken less seriously than other cultural forms and media). Obviously any definition of art is open to interpretation and argument, so I can’t claim with absolute authority that video games are an art form (although I believe very strongly that they are). But I will say that narratives which treat games more dismissively lead directly to less thoughtful and helpful engagements with questions like the ones I raised in point one, to perceptions of games as (for example) simply delivery systems for violence rather than an art form featuring artistic subgenres that include violence as a key element (just as action and horror films do, to name two other such art forms).

3)      They’re Flexible: If we do see video games as an art form (as I do), what differentiates them from most other such forms (other than Choose Your Own Adventure books, I suppose!) is that they are interactive, depending on the choices of their audience members (who of course are far more than just audience members) for how their stories and thus their art are ultimately created. I know that’s a well-known point, but I have a specific and surprising GTA anecdote related to it. When my sons were relatively young, a babysitter took them to his house and let them play one of the GTA games on his gaming system. I was initially horrified when they told me this, but then they described their game play at length, which involved all sorts of driving craziness and silliness (driving into swimming pools, trying to drive off bridges onto moving trains, etc.) and relatedly only self-directed violence (seeing what would happen if they climbed to the top of a tall crane and jumped off, for example). Not exactly the highest form of art, perhaps, but far different from a game focused on killing others. In this case, at least, the game’s flexibility had allowed my sons to make it their own in a silly but also, I would argue, very significant way.

Last GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 15, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Oregon Trail

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On three takeaways from the pioneering educational game.

I used “pioneering” there not just for the Dad Joke-worthy pun (although duh), but also because it highlights the most obvious and important historical issue with The Oregon Trail, one I wrote about in this blog post: the absence of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and really any ethnic American communities from its vision of the West. I didn’t notice that absence at all as a kid enthralled by the game, and that’s precisely the point: Oregon Trail played into stereotypical visions of American pioneers, and indeed like all popular art that traffics in stereotypes it also amplified and further entrenched those limiting images. I’m not suggesting that the game should have focused centrally on Native American communities, nor that a children’s video game had to include graphic depictions of war; every game has the right to choose its own subject and to present it in a way that’s appropriate for its audience. But a game set in the mid-19^th century American West needs at least to include the communities and cultures that are part of that world, and on that question Oregon Trail came up very short.

With that most important thing said, there are also other historical lessons we can learn from what Oregon Trail’s designers did choose to include. Another one that would be easy to miss (and that I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about at all until brainstorming topics for this post) is the deeply solitary nature of the Trail as the game portrays it. I didn’t have a chance to play the game while researching this post, but as I remember it at least the player really doesn’t see any other wagons or people between leaving Independence, Missouri and arriving in Oregon. Perhaps players do encounter waystations for supplies or the like along the way, but I’m thinking here about other travelers, about the idea of wagon trains (which as I understand it were a typical way for families to traverse the Trail). I understand the game’s goal of forcing players to deal with all the myriad challenges themselves, rather than offering them the possibility of relying upon other families for aid—but that choice does seem to reinforce another stereotypical American image, that of “rugged individuals” (rather than what to my mind is a far more shared historical experience, of communal survival).

I don’t want to emphasize only frustrations with the game’s portrayal of its historical subjects, though. After all, there are reasons why Oregon Trail was one of the most successful video games of its era, and indeed why it remains successful today, as it’s one of the only games from my childhood that my sons have also heard of and played. And one of the things I think Oregon Trail does best is capture the profoundly fraught and contingent nature of life (and death) in its mid-19^th century moment. The most famous such element is the constant threat of illness, especially that damn dysentery. But while some such negative outcomes (like getting one of those diseases) were mostly due to chance and bad luck, many others emphasized contingency—how one bad decision could produce disastrous and even fatal outcomes, not only immediately (ie, if you choose to ford a river that’s too deep or wild) but also far down the road (ie, if you purchase the wrong supplies and end up stuck or dead hundreds of miles later). Given hindsight, the past can sometimes feel inevitable or predetermined—but it was of course just as contingent and unfolding as our present and future, and in its specific but significant way Oregon Trail highlighted those realities quite potently.

Next GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 14, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Pac-Man

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On three of the many ways Namco’s smash 1980 launch helped changed the game(s).

1)      Character: Arcade and video games had certainly diversified in the decade or so since the release of yesterday’s subject Pong, with the biggest hits in the years before Pac Man arrived space shooters like Space Invaders and Asteroids. But one thing that no game had quite featured until the little yellow dude was a recognizable and marketable main character, one who could become the mascot and (literal) face of the game and franchise. That focus allowed the game to include another innovation: cutscenes in between levels, brief mini-movies featuring that main character in wacky adventures. It allowed for hugely successful sequels like 1981’s Ms. Pac-Man that would not have been possible without a distinct character at the heart of the franchise. And it paved the way for many of the most popular video games and franchises of all time: the Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, the Angry Birds, and more.

2)      Artificial Intelligence: One of the game’s vital coding innovations was that the enemies—the four cute but deadly “ghosts” (Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, natch) who pursue Pac-Man as he tries to eat all those delicious dots and fruits—were programmed with artificial intelligence and could respond to the player’s moves. I don’t imagine it was the most sophisticated such AI—Ex Machina this wasn’t, that is—but nonetheless, even the idea that every time you played Pac-Man, you could have an entirely different experience depending on your own choices and what effects they had on the ghosts’ behaviors was a profoundly new element to video gaming. I talked in Monday’s post about the flexible and interactive qualities to video games; of course that was somewhat true even with the Pong’s of the world, but adding artificial intelligence in this way (and at any level of complexity) really began to illustrate the possibilities for that kind of player-game interactivity.

3)      Winnability: That artificial intelligence and its promises of constantly evolving gameplay certainly contribute to a sense of Pac-Man as a particularly replayable arcade and video game, one that grossed over $1 billion in quarters (!) in its first year of release. But another important element was Pac-Man’s seeming yet elusive sense of winnabililty; as Atari’s Chris Crawford put it in an 1982 interview with Byte magazine, “An important trait of any game is the illusion of winnability ... The most successful game in this respect is Pac-Man, which appears winnable to most players, yet is never quite winnable.” Indeed, Pac-Man was designed to have no final level, although apparently if a player beats 255 consecutive levels, a bizarrely split-screen and supposedly unbeatable 256^th final level does appear. Even that strange, glitch-like detail, however, would only add to that sense of potential yet also ephemeral winnability, making playing Pac-Man again and again that much more appealing. Which, for nearly forty years now, is just what gamers have done.

Next GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

October 13, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Pong

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On two lesser-known and telling moments in the history of the first blockbuster arcade game.

While I’m sure video game historians would point to many moments and games as possible origin points for the genre, some as that hyperlinked timeline indicates from as early as the 1940s, there’s no doubt that high on any such list would be Atari’s 1972 arcade release Pong. Debuting in late November 1972, Pong would quickly become a national and worldwide phenomenon, helping establish the viability of video game arcades in commercial spaces (and then eventually in spaces all their own), contributing (if in a complex way on which more in a moment) to the successful launch of the first home gaming system (the Magnavox Odyssey), spawning numerous sequels and copycat games, and generally changing the landscape of not only gaming and technology, but also entertainment, social spaces and interactions, and childhood. If that seems like an awful lot to attribute to one video game, well, that was the remarkable power of those two white paddles and that frustratingly bouncy little white ball. Indeed, I would say that only Star Wars measures up to Pong when it comes to 1970s popular culture landmarks that have influenced the next half-century of American and human life.

That overall influence is pretty well-known, but in researching this post I learned about a couple of a lesser-known and equally telling moments in Pong’s early history. For one thing, the game was the subject of a 1974 lawsuit from Magnavox (and its parent company Sanders Associates). In May 1972 Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had attended a Magnavox event and seen a demonstration of the company’s own table tennis game, and he himself later admitted that seeing the game prompted him to ask his own employee, engineer Allan Alcorn, to make a table tennis game for Atari; as Bushnell put it, “The fact is that I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever.” Despite protesting innocence from any patent infringement, Bushnell and Atari decided to settle out of court with Magnavox, with the case concluding in June 1976. I can’t really weigh in on the merits of the lawsuit; the two games do look pretty similar to me, but I suppose all table tennis games, especially in that very early era of game design, would likely seem similar. What I can say, however, is that the subsequent history of video games has been defined again and again by competing games and systems, a trend very much foreshadowed by Pong’s controversial relationship to Magnavox table tennis.

The other telling moment is far less weighty than a lawsuit, but just as socially significant I’d say. In describing why and how Pong became such an arcade hit, Bushnell would later note, “It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there's nobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other ... As you became better friends, you could put down your beer and hug. You could put your arm around the person. You could play left-handed if you so desired. In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong,' and that's kind of a nice thing to have achieved.” This is of course another important side to the flexible and interactive qualities of video games that I highlighted in yesterday’s post—while of course many games can be played solo (not Pong, though, at least not in its first arcade iteration—it was two-player only), there is a fundamentally social element to gaming, and perhaps especially to arcade gaming. The art is often created, that is, through a communal experience, and one that, as Bushnell’s quote illustrates, links to other communal experiences like social interactions, friendship, and romantic relationships. All part of what Pong helped initiate as well!

Next GameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?

July 23, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: Stamps

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On six telling stamps that help trace the history of this essential postal element.

1)      Franklin and Washington (1847): Nearly 75 years after the founding of the USPS, the system began using federally-issued postage stamps (privately-produced stamps had been available for some time). As highlighted by Monday’s post, Ben Franklin makes a lot of sense for one of those first federal stamps; and George Washington, well, is George Washington. In any case, those were the first two, and we’ve been stuck with stamps ever since.

2)      Queen Isabella (1893): You could win a lot of trivia contests by betting your friends that they can’t guess the first woman to appear on a USPS stamp—and you could give them quite a few guesses at that. (One of their guesses might be Martha Washington, and she was indeed the first American woman to appear, in 1902.) Part of the iconic 1892-93 Columbian anniversary celebrations that also gave us the Chicago Exposition and the Pledge of Allegiance, the Isabella stamp is quite the surprising pioneer.

3)      Booker T. Washington (1940): Washington was the first African American to dine publicly at the White House, and it only took four more decades (that’s sarcasm, to be clear) for him to become the first African American to appear on a USPS stamp. (Indeed, only one other African American, George Washington Carver, got a stamp of his own for another 25+ years.) With the nation just emerging from the Great Depression, Washington is a particularly telling choice, one focused on economic and educational emphases rather than (for example) civil rights.

4)      Liberty Bell (2007): I could keep going with other first figures, but I do think that the “Forever” stamp represented a particularly important innovation, if not indeed the most significant USPS change since the first stamps 160 years prior. And clearly many other folks agree, as the initial Liberty Bell “Forever” stamp debuted on April 12, 2007 and by July of that year the USPS had sold 1.2 billion (that’s not a typo, billion with a “b”) of them.

5)      Repeal of the Stamp Act (2016): This one is a suggestion from my wife, and really just a damn funny (in the ironic, wry smile way) fact: that for the 250^th anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act, the USPS issued, you guessed it, a stamp. What else do I need to say?

Next USPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?

February 27, 2025: AlaskaStudying: Nenana Ice Classic

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

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

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

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

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

Last AlaskaStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

August 29, 2024: American Catholics: The Catholic Worker

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

Three telling details about Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s groundbreaking newspaper.

1)      The Origins: Day and Maurin published the first issue of The Catholic Worker on May Day 1933, launching not just this new periodical but really the whole of their Catholic Worker Movement in the process. Apparently Maurin preferred the name The Catholic Radical, but Day, rooted in both her prior experiences with Communism and her overall sense of solidarity with all who labor in any way, successfully advocated for calling it The Catholic Worker. Clearly that chosen title and the newspaper’s contents (largely written by Day, both in that initial issue and for most of them thereafter) did resonate with readers, perhaps especially in that Depression-era moment, and after an initial print run of 2500 copies (which Day sold in New York’s Union Square, calling out “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” while she did so) the circulation numbers exploded to 20,000 in September 1933 and 150,000 by 1936.

2)      The Tides of History: The Great Depression was only the first of many significant historical events with which The Catholic Worker engaged forthrightly and controversially. The next such controversy did significantly affect the paper’s circulation numbers—Day was committed to an unpopular pacifist stance during World War II, and as a result circulation decreased by 75% during the war, from a high of nearly 200,000 to 50,000. But this trend in no way affected Day and the paper’s dedication to taking principled stances on unfolding histories, as illustrated just five years after the war: in the July 1, 1950 issue the paper published a letter from the African American nurse, educator, and Catholic activist Helen Caldwell Day Riley that represented an early and powerful argument for wedding the Catholic Worker Movement to the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

3)      The Price!: I’m not sure I’ll ever write a more striking sentence in a blog post than this one: the price for each issue of The Catholic Worker has remained steady at 1 cent (that’s one pretty penny) from that first May 1933 issue up to the present moment. If you want an annual subscription (which gets you the paper’s seven issues a year by mail), however, you do have to be willing to shell out 25 cents (that’s one shiny quarter). I genuinely can’t imagine a more impressive way to put philosophy and ideology into practice than that, and I’m apparently not alone; according to this 2023 The Nation article, the paper still has more than 25,000 subscribers. Amen to that!

Last CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

July 17, 2024: ElvisStudying: Graceland

[July 19^th was a doubly significant day for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On mythic façades, the realities behind them, and a third way to look at Elvis’ historic home.

In her book Graceland: Going Home with Elvis (1996), scholar Karal Ann Marling writes that Graceland is “a Technicolor illusion. The façade is Gone with the Wind all the way. The den in the back is Mogambo with a hint of Blue Hawaii. Living in Graceland was like living on a Hollywood backlot, where patches of tropical scenery alternated with the blackened ruins of antebellum Atlanta.” I think it’s quite nicely telling that Marling references not actual Southern plantations and other interconnected settings (such as Mogambo’s Africa) but cultural representations of them, and specifically cinematic representations, including not just specific films but an overarching, mid-20^th century technological innovation like Technicolor. As I traced in yesterday’s post, Elvis had only just begun his film acting career when he purchased Graceland in March 1957, but it seems clear that he (or at least his designers and team, but likely with his input and perspective as well) worked hard from then on to turn the house into a cultural and cinematic text in its own right, one that echoed both Southern and global tropes that were equally famous and fraught.

While he may have and likely did make such changes (especially to interior spaces like the famous Jungle Room) during the two decades that he and his family lived in Graceland, however, Elvis did not in any sense build it from scratch—it was an existing home as well as property that he purchased. The property and the name Graceland both long predated the mansion—in the late 19^th century the land belonged to the well-known Memphis printer Stephen C. Toof, who named the site Graceland after his daughter. After Grace inherited it from him upon his 1894 death, in the early 20^th century her niece Ruth Moore inherited the land from Grace, and in 1939 Ruth and her husband Thomas Moore commissioned the architects Max Furbringer and Merrill Ehrman to build a 10,000 square foot Colonial Revival style mansion. That style alone reminds us that the Moores too were participating in a cultural project driven as much by narratives and nostalgia as by any contemporary realities, and thus that Graceland featured those layers already by the time Elvis acquired it. But nonetheless, it’s worth being clear that his $102,500 purchase was of an existing home in every sense, one that he built upon but (like every other part of his career) did not himself invent.

As I imagine every post in this series will exemplify in its own ways, though, there’s nothing in Elvis’ life nor his legacy that isn’t intertwined with the development of the collective mythos around the man, and that’s unquestionably the case when it comes to Graceland as well. Perhaps the most striking example of turning Graceland into a holy site for this sanctified American icon is the literal pilgrimage to the place, an annual procession known as Elvis Week that takes its pilgrims to and through the home and past his grave (along with other sites such as the Elvis Mass at the city’s St. Paul’s Church). And no artist or text has summed up this collective phenomenon better than Paul Simon in the chorus of his song “Graceland” (1986): “I’m going to Graceland, Graceland/Memphis, Tennessee/I’m going to Graceland/Poor boys and pilgrims with families/And we are going to Graceland.” In the song’s final verse, he adds, “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/We all will be received/in Graceland,” and I would use this idea to link the collective vision of the place to Elvis’ own—that is, perhaps his own mythic reimaginings likewise sought to turn a real place into a sacred shrine, to the ideas of America that he was also always seeking.

Next ElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Elvis?

March 18, 2024: American Magic: Fakir of Ava

[This coming weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150^th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ll perform some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to a special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]

On three ways that the first famous American magician paved the way for the profession.

1)      Persona: Isaiah Harris Hughes (1813-1891) was born in England and immigrated to the U.S., but the Fakir of Ava, Chief of Staff of Conjurers to His Sublime Greatness the Nanka of Aristaphae, was born sometime later. I don’t think too many future magicians have gone to quite the lengths that Hughes did to imagine and inhabit their constructed persona, as besides creating an entire fictional backstory (although not the character’s geographic origin, as Ava was the Anglicized name of a real city in Burma [now Myanmar]), he also put on blackface, wore elaborate costumes, and claimed that his tricks were “Oriental feats.” But at the same time, it seems clear to me that Hughes expected his audience to be in on the act, or at least to recognize it as a performance—“Fakir” is a pretty telling name for an invented role, after all. And once Hughes got successful enough, he apparently ditched most of the costume, but not the name—a persona is a persona.

2)      Publicity: The Fakir achieved that level of success not only because of his impressive bag of tricks, but also because he was equally adept at making people aware of them and him. He did so through a variety of techniques beyond his own elaborate advertising (although that was impressive as well, as that hyperlinked broadside illustrates), including befriending reporters to gain favorable newspaper coverage, joining popular existing shows like P.T. Barnum’s to tap into their audiences, and coming up with new promotional ideas like the “gift show” (offering lucky audience members prizes in the course of the act). Magic isn’t much without the show that accompanies it, and those shows aren’t much without an audience to trick and misdirect and amaze. Hughes’ mastery over connecting to and amplifying his audience certainly modeled that skill for future magicians.

3)      Passing it on: Some of those future magicians learned from Hughes quite literally, as his apprentices. I’ll write more about the two most famous, Howard Thurston and Harry Kellar, in tomorrow’s post, but will note here that both overtly claimed to be Hughes’ heirs: Thurston by arguing “The historian of magic can trace an unbroken line of succession from the Fakir of Ava in 1830 to my own entertainment”; and Kellar by performing under the Fakir of Ava name when Hughes became too old to travel and retired to his Buffalo home. It’s easy to think of magicians’ helpers as the stereotypical pretty girls in spandex—and maybe they too should be seen as apprentices instead—but the truth is that both persona and publicity are often intended to live on beyond the performer’s career, and heirs are a vital part of that goal. One more way that the Fakir set the standard!  

Next MagicStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

February 2, 2024: Quirky American Traditions: Groundhog Day

[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]

On two ways to try to make sense of the most famous and one of the strangest of our quirky traditions.

First things first: I blogged about the film Groundhog Day (1993) as part of a weeklong BillMurrayStudying series two years ago this week, and if you thought I wouldn’t take this chance to ask you to check out a freaking BillMurrayStudying blog series, well you thought wrong. Plus, I do think that excellent film is very much about both the Groundhog Day tradition and the community of Punxsutawney that hosts it, so check out that post if you would and then come on back for more GroundhogStudying.

Welcome back! It’s important to note that there are at least a half-dozen other weather-predicting groundhogs (or woodchucks, as the same animal is known in much of the rest of the country) out there in these quirky United States, and yet there’s no doubt that it is Punxsutawney Phil who embodies the tradition and the holiday for most of us (including this AmericanStudier). Part of that is the influence of the film itself, I believe; I don’t remember for sure how much attention was paid to Groundhog Day when I was growing up in the 1980s, but it seems clear that since the 1993 film the attention (like the annual event and gathering on this day) has grown significantly. But I’d argue that another factor, as again the film knows well, is the community of Punxsutawney itself—from its unique name to its Groundhog Club to many other layers to the tradition and how it is commemorated and celebrated every February 2^nd, this small Pennsylvania town exemplifies both the randomness and the appeal of quirky local traditions. As with all of the week’s subjects, I’d love the chance to take part in that tradition at least once if it worked out.

At the same time, there’s something distinct about Groundhog Day from all of the other quirky traditions I’ve focused on this week: it is as an actual holiday, one with a longstanding tradition dating back hundreds of years in both the U.S. and Canada. To be clear, in many ways that only makes the whole thing that much quirkier still, that the Pennsylvania Dutch folk belief that groundhogs can predict the seasons based on whether they see their shadow on a particular midwinter day has evolved into a full-on holiday that is celebrated by communities far beyond that particular culture or heritage. Yet at the same time, many of our most prominent holidays likewise began with folk traditions and stories that evolved into the widespread and far more universal celebrations they now entail, with Christmas at the very top of that list of course. And I’d take this line of thought one step further, and argue that almost all holidays are themselves an example of not just a tradition but a quirky one, a collection of random details and practices that gradually get cemented into what seem to be inevitable and essential shared experiences. In that way, Groundhog Day offers a great way to further contextualize the week’s overall topic and how it works in our society.

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?

February 1, 2024: Quirky American Traditions: Nenana Ice Classic

[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]

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

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

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

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

Last quirky tradition tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?