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

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

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

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

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

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

Next love/hate place tomorrow,

Ben

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

October 22, 2024: Prison Stories: Alcatraz

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On why it’s okay to turn a prison into a tourist attraction—and what we could do instead.

San Francisco’s Pier 39 is one of the more interesting tourist areas I’ve seen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and now seemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that has sprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like a combination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also the launching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, National Park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. As a result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiary, not the action film starring Connery and Cage at their most, well, Connery and Cage), Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothes designed to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).

When I first encountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crass commercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’d still say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings do support the National Park and thus (as I understand it) the very deserving National Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, like the National Park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhaps even like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has the potential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—and that such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead as well to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, with the broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans with our histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify that past, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has the potential to produce such engagement.

On the other hand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963 closure and before its 1973 opening as a National Park, that isn’t part of the gift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s tourist narratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the island by a group of Native Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” and hoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, this activist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) it also produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of the occupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even more complex histories and obviously unable to be turned into a gift shop product; but why couldn’t Alcatraz become the site of a cultural center, one that could include not only Native American communities and stories but those of the many other cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Not sure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.

Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?

March 9-10, 2024: National Park Studying: National Historic Parks

[On March 3^rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ve celebrated Interior’s 175^th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to this post on National Historic Parks!]

On one particularly impressive thing each at three of America’s many wonderful National Historic Parks.

1)      Appomattox Court House: I visited Appomattox with my sons on a number of our annual Virginia trips, and each time I was struck by the same thing: the incredibly impressive short informational film at the visitors center. That might be a strange thing to highlight at a site surrounded by such history, but at the same time the informational film is a key part of any historic site visit and experience. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better one than Appomattox’s: in just a few minutes it manages to feature not only the specific military and diplomatic contexts of the Civil War’s closing moments, but also broader histories of the build-up to the war, the war overall, and (most importantly and impressively) the aftermaths of peace and abolition for African Americans and the nation as a whole. If you’re ever in the Lynchburg, Virginia area, I recommend Appomattox Court House National Historic Park for that wonderful film alone (and a lot more, but the film by itself is enough to get you there)!

2)      Lowell: I’ve been to the Lowell Mills National Historic Park a handful of times, including two wonderful visits with my sons’ respective 5^th grade class field trips. That has given me a unique appreciation for how the site teaches its histories and stories to elementary school kids, and I have nothing but great things to say about those educators and their tours and programs. But on those two visits, just as on my prior and subsequent ones, I was most struck by one particular exhibit: Mill Girls & Immigrants, an exhibit that makes perfect use of one of the mill’s early 19^th century boardinghouses. There’s a lot of great stuff in that exhibit, but it features perhaps my favorite single museum space: a recreated boardinghouse bedroom where, at the press of a button, the voices of a group of mill workers (quoting from actual letters and journals) emerge from different corners of the bedroom, overlapping and fading and reemerging in a combination of individual identities and communal experience. I can’t possibly do it justice, so if you’re ever in Lowell, be sure to visit the second floor of that Mill Girls & Immigrants exhibit and see and hear it for yourself!

3)      Minute Man: My sons’ other big 5^th grade field trips were to Concord’s Minute Man National Historic Park, but I didn’t get to tag along on those. I’ve been to Minute Man a few times, however, and have each time been particularly struck by one core element of the park. While the park features a visitors center and a number of individual sites, its main attraction is the long winding path on which visitors can follow the trail of the colonial Minute Men and the British Redcoats on that historic April 1775 day. While the highway is visible from certain spots along the path, from many others it’s not; and overall the path, the surrounding historic buildings, and even I believe the woods and other natural landmarks have largely been preserved as they were in 1775. The effect reflects the best kind of immersive experience that these National Historic Parks can create, a sense that we have truly entered into a historic world and are experiencing a partial but powerful version of that place and time.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks, Historic or otherwise, you’d highlight?

PPS. After scheduling this post, I published a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column inspired by our newest National Historic Site and looking at a range of others beyond these three!

March 5, 2024: National Park Studying: Blackstone River Valley

[On March 3^rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ll celebrate Interior’s 175^th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to a post on National Historical Parks!]

On two interesting comparisons for one of our newest National Parks.

Just a few years ago, as a small part of a very large Congressional bill (the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015), the longstanding Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor was upgraded, becoming (after a decade of efforts and activism) the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. As that second linked article suggests, the change is far more than semantic—gaining National Park status brings with it a great deal of development and support, linking the area to the National Park Service and turning it into much more of a organized and coherent entity than had been possible in the prior incarnation. The self-proclaimed (American) “Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,” an area running along the potent Blackstone River from Worcester all the way to Providence, Rhode Island (making it one of the few National Parks to span multiple states), will now be presented and interpreted in all its historical and social significance for generations to come.

This new park’s multi-state span is one of a few things that differentiate it from most of its fellow National Parks, but I would still highlight a couple of comparisons that can shed light on what and how this park might achieve its goals most effectively. Salem, Massachusetts is home to a wonderful park, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Featuring a dozen buildings, multiple wharfs, a reconstructed tall ship, and a number of other elements, the Salem Maritime park does an excellent job interpreting multiple centuries and stages of work, community, and life in the city and region. The Derby Wharf section alone includes all those centuries and stages in its different buildings and placards. Compared, for example, to battlefield national parks such as Gettysburg or Yorktown, which focus on a few days’ worth of historical events and issues, the Blackstone River Valley Park will have to cover more than a century of industrial and social history and culture, and the Salem Maritime National Historic Site provides an excellent model for doing so successfully.

On the other hand, Salem Maritime occupies an area of a few square miles; the Blackstone River Valley Park will cover (as has the Heritage Corridor) a distance of some forty-five miles, to say nothing of how far it extends on both sides of the river. For a comparison with that element, I would turn to one of the national parks around which I grew up: Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. The Skyline Drive, a winding, scenic road atop the Blue Ridge Mountains, travels more than 100 miles, and yet is all part of the same unified national park identity and interpretation, with its many distinct stops and areas comprising their own unique identities yet tied together consistently and coherently. While Shenandoah and Skyline focus much more on natural rather than historical or cultural subjects, this large yet linked and coherent park community offers a rich and successful model for how a park as spacious and far-reaching as Blackstone River Valley can move through its many different places and communities yet maintain that overarching sense identity and history. I’ll be interested to see how Blackstone River Valley takes its next steps!

Next Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

August 24, 2023: Cville Places: The Jefferson School

[For this year’s installment of my annual Charlottesville series—following the boys and my annual trip to my childhood home, natch—I’ll focus on a handful of representative places around town. Leading up to a tribute to the public schools that nurtured this AmericanStudier!]

On what a historic educational place can tell us about three distinct 20^th century eras.

1)      The 1920s: As I’ve written about at length both in this space and elsewhere, it was in the 1920s that Charlottesville erected its infamous white supremacist statues, one of many illustrations of how the second Ku Klux Klan and all it represented had most definitely come to town (or more exactly had been there all along). But the ‘20s were also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, of the continuing legacies of the Great Migration (which meant not only movement between regions but also the search for opportunities and freedoms all over the country), and overall of an African American community willing and able to stand up for its communal rights and needs. And in Charlottesville, members of that community successfully petitioned the City Council in 1926 to create a high school for Black students, who previously had had no educational option beyond 8^th grade in town. That school, the product of the best of Cville (and America) in an era too often defined by the worst, was the Jefferson School.

2)      The 1940s: It took some time for the school to become a full community of its own (although even a bare bones high school was a vast improvement to be sure), but by the 1940s it was as thriving and vibrant a community as any high school could be. It had a Dramatics Club with over 100 members, a music department with a full band (that performed in 1941 at tomorrow’s focal place, the Paramount Theater) and a trio of choral ensembles, multiple sports teams that traveled the state (with the band traveling with the football team), and its own newspaper The Jeffersonian that included not only writers and editors but advertising and circulation managers. It also of course had a high school yearbook, Crimson and Black, and I believe that yearbook’s 1944 dedication reflects just how much this (by which I mean both the school and the African American community) was both an inspiring community in its own right and a powerful part of the era’s American landscape: “To the boys of Jefferson High School who have willingly answered the call of our country and who are serving in the armed forces to bring to our land once more a lasting peace.”

3)      1958: I need to be very, very clear, however: even the most vibrant segregated school was still a segregated school, still a particularly striking embodiment of Jim Crow’s discrimination against young African Americans. Clearly Charlottesville’s African American community felt the same, as in September 1958, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and Little Rock, a number of Jefferson School students and their families applied to white-only schools (high schools and elementary schools) across the city. As I’ve written about at length, the Charlottesville schools literally shut down, closed to all students, rather than admit these African American students, one of the nation’s most extreme examples of massive resistance. They remained closed for a year, but the writing was on the wall, both for segregated education in the city and thus (happily, but nonetheless) for the Jefferson School. But it has remained standing, used occasionally as a substitute school in the city and always as a historic site, one featuring for example placards that commemorate “The Triumph of the Charlottesville Twelve” (the first dozen students who pushed for integration). One more vital and inspiring memory housed in the Jefferson School.

Last Cville place tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Defining places—from your hometowns or anywhere else—you’d highlight?

July 21, 2023: Seneca Falls Studying: The Historic Site’s Site

[July 19-20 marks the 175^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21^st century movement!]

On three of the many interesting things you can find on the Women’s Rights National Historical Park’s website.

1)      The Pictures: One of my favorite things about National Historical Park websites is the way they consistently use photo galleries to capture the kinds of artifacts and elements that might otherwise only be accessible to in-person visitors to the sites. Of the many such photos on that page, my favorites are those which present different angles and views of the statues in the Visitor Center lobby exhibit The First Wave, including for example this evocative close-up of the Frederick Douglass statue in that group. I’ve long argued that raising more statues to inclusive and inspiring historical figures is a key way to challenge our long history of problematic statues, and since I haven’t yet had a chance to get to Seneca Falls, I loved seeing some of these statues through the website’s galleries.

2)      The Research: Historic sites aren’t just representations of the past, of course; they are also repositories of the kinds of documents and evidence through which such representations have to be constructed. That evidence might seem like something that really requires an in-person visit to encounter, but the Seneca Falls site offers an alternative: the Research page, where they present hyperlinked versions of a number of the documents (both historical and scholarly/analytical) out of which they’ve developed their exhibits and interpretations. You could spend a whole day reading through all those pieces, and I know I’m a deeply nerdy AmericanStudier but that sounds like a pretty darn good day to me.

3)      The Map: Those first two are things at the historic site that can also be included on the website; but there are also things that websites can do and offer more easily than an in-person site. One of my favorites on the Seneca Falls National Historical Park’s website is this resource, located under the History & Culture: Stories tab. Many scholars, among them my Dad, are finding new and impressive ways to use digital maps to convey information about history, literature, and more; “The Erie Canal and the Network to Freedom” is a wonderful example of that trend, and something that really utilizes the digital humanities potentials of a historic site’s site.

Contemporary connections this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 23, 2022: Star Wars Studying: A Cross-Cultural Force

[May 27^th will see the much-anticipated release of the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the newest Star Wars show. So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. May the Force be with us all!]

On how the original Star Wars was directly influenced by a Japanese film—and, critiques of the American director notwithstanding, why that influence is a positive thing.

As the 2017 40^th anniversary celebrations illustrate, few cultural texts have had a more significant and ongoing presence over the last four-and-a-half decades than George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and its many sequels, prequels, novelizations, television spinoffs, parodies, merchandising and marketing and material culture connections, animated versions, Wookie-centric Christmas specials, and the like. Because of that lasting presence, and perhaps especially because a whole generation of students and scholars (including this AmericanStudier to be sure) has grown up alongside Luke Skywalker and friends, Lucas’s prominent debt to Joseph Campbell’s analyses of heroism and mythologies has likewise been very well established and documented; which is to say, this is a pop culture text and artist whose multigenerational and cross-cultural (at least in the sense of Campbell’s ideas linking myths from multiple cultures) connections and influences seem already well known.

Far be it for me to disagree with that longstanding and very thoroughly developed assessment—did you note the ridiculously comprehensive Lucas-Campbell chart at that hyperlink?—but there’s another, also very influential and much less broadly known, source for Lucas’s first film. As this website conversation highlights, Lucas’s initial story outline for Star Wars (particularly in the story’s initial events and exposition) closely parallels Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress; Lucas would change certain events and details between that outline and the film’s screenplay, but many of the Kurosawa echoes remained very much present in the finished film, as mashups of the two movies such as this one cleverly highlight. Such mashups could be used as exhibits in a plagiarism case against Lucas, and indeed many who have noted the similarities to Fortress have done so in a critical way, arguing that at least Lucas owed Kurosawa a more overt acknowledgment of the influence as Star Wars gained in popularity and Lucas became one of the most famous and wealthiest filmmakers of all time.

Certainly I believe that Kurosawa’s film should be better known, not only because of its clear influence on Lucas’s early ideas for his own series, but also because it seems (from, admittedly, the handful of clips I have seen and the descriptions I have read) to be an interesting if minor work from one of cinema’s most prolific and talented artists. Yet far from serving as an indictment of Lucas or his film, this additional influence highlights, to my mind, just how genuinely and impressively American Star Wars really is: inspired in equal measure by centuries of cross-cultural mythology and a Japanese film, with the seminal fantasy series by a British author thrown in for good measure; starring young American actors and some of England’s most established screen veterans; shamelessly cribbing from the styles and stunts of early serials and pop culture classics like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; with all those elements thrown into a space opera blender and turned into a hugely unique and engaging entertainment. Lucas had called his first, much more grounded and local and historically nostalgic, film American Graffiti (1973)—but it’s Star Wars that really exemplifies the cross-cultural, multi-genre, intertextual, inspiring mélange that is American culture and art.

Next StarWarsStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?

March 10, 2022: The Pacific Theater: U.S.S. Midway Museum

[March 11^th marks the 80^th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous departure from the Philippines. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, leading up to a special post on the U.S.-Filipino relationship.]

Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego’s unique historic site.

Floating in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. When we visited the city and museum five years ago, my boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and featuring detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.

That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21^st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.

There’s another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for “close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.

Last PacificStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?

March 3, 2022: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting the new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

On two distinct but complementary effects to a foundational AmericanStudier moment.

When I was in 7^th grade, my family and I took a trip out West to visit a number of Southwestern National Parks. We saw Zion, Bryce, Four Corners, and the Grand Motherfucking Canyon (pardon my French, but I’m pretty sure that’s the full official name), and even checked out a bit of Las Vegas when we flew in and out of the city. But there’s no doubt at all that it was Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park that most affected this 12 year old AmericanStudier. There were lots of spaces and moments in Mesa Verde that hit me, but by far the most moving was a post-sunset encounter with a coyote as we explored an aboveground (ie, not a cliff dwelling) Pueblo ruin in the park. Probably didn’t hurt that I had been reading a bunch of Tony Hillerman mysteries on the trip, as the moment felt right out of such evocative Southwestern thrillers (although luckily we didn’t stumble upon a dead body or awaken an ancient curse or the like). But I would say that the moment affected me, and indeed was foundational for my lifelong AmericanStudying, in a couple key ways that go well beyond Leaphorn & Chee mysteries and that also reflect essential elements to a site like Mesa Verde.

For one thing, the moment made crystal clear something that a know-it-all 12 year old (or 41 year old…) can sometimes have difficulties remembering: just how much I didn’t and don’t know. As I wrote in that same blog post on Hillerman, Mesa Verde has long been defined by a couple central mysteries of its own: the question of why the Anasazi people abandoned their cliff dwellings, and what happened to them after they left. It appears that some significant recent progress has been made in answering those questions, which of course is part of the historical and cultural process as well. But in truth, the mystery of Mesa Verde is just a more extreme version of a fundamental but all too easily forgotten fact about all historical knowledge—there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we’ll ever know, and most of the things we do know we only kinda know (to get all Rumsfeldian on ya). And that’s never more true than when it comes to the simple but crucial question of what it meant, or really what it felt like, to live in these historical periods and places. I love the interpretations of the past at places like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, but that’s all they are, interpretations; we’ll never really know what life was like for those folks in those worlds, and I felt that divide, acutely and potently, as I stood atop that darkened Mesa Verde ruin.

But at the same time, I felt something else, something I’d call not contradictory so much as complementary: I wanted to bridge that divide. I wanted to learn as much as I could about periods and places and peoples, really all of ‘em but most especially all those that felt most distinct from me and mine. I wanted to read about them and talk about them and, perhaps most of all, write about them, help create stories that could, not exactly bring them back to life of course, but make them a part of our own moment and world as fully as those unavoidable gaps would allow. I don’t think that was the first time I felt that desire so acutely (I’m sure I did on my Camp Virginia trips, for example), but it was one of the strongest such moments, and it has stuck with me to be sure. I’ve visited and been inspired by a lot of cultural and historic sites in the decades since, including a number of federal National Historic Parks, and will write about some of my favorites in that latter category in the weekend post. But Mesa Verde remains striking and perhaps singular in that regard, a place and moment with which I was confronted with especial force with both the challenges and the call of all that I’ve tried to spend my career doing. So, y’know, it’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way!

Last Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

March 1, 2022: National Park Studying: Blackstone River Valley

[On March 1, 1872 Yellowstone became America’s and the world’s first National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting the new book on Yellowstone from the amazing Megan Kate Nelson!]

On two interesting comparisons for one of our newest National Parks.

Just a few years ago, as a small part of a very large Congressional bill (the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015), the longstanding Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor was upgraded, becoming (after a decade of efforts and activism) the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. As that second linked article suggests, the change is far more than semantic—gaining National Park status brings with it a great deal of development and support, linking the area to the National Park Service and turning it into much more of a organized and coherent entity than had been possible in the prior incarnation. The self-proclaimed (American) “Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,” an area running along the potent Blackstone River from Worcester all the way to Providence, Rhode Island (making it one of the few National Parks to span multiple states), will now be presented and interpreted in all its historical and social significance for generations to come.

This new park’s multi-state span is one of a few things that differentiate it from most of its fellow National Parks, but I would still highlight a couple of comparisons that can shed light on what and how this park might achieve its goals most effectively. Salem, Massachusetts is home to a wonderful park, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Featuring a dozen buildings, multiple wharfs, a reconstructed tall ship, and a number of other elements, the Salem Maritime park does an excellent job interpreting multiple centuries and stages of work, community, and life in the city and region. The Derby Wharf section alone includes all those centuries and stages in its different buildings and placards. Compared, for example, to battlefield national parks such as Gettysburg or Yorktown, which focus on a few days’ worth of historical events and issues, the Blackstone River Valley Park will have to cover more than a century of industrial and social history and culture, and the Salem Maritime National Historic Site provides an excellent model for doing so successfully.

On the other hand, Salem Maritime occupies an area of a few square miles; the Blackstone River Valley Park will cover (as has the Heritage Corridor) a distance of some forty-five miles, to say nothing of how far it extends on both sides of the river. For a comparison with that element, I would turn to one of the national parks around which I grew up: Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. The Skyline Drive, a winding, scenic road atop the Blue Ridge Mountains, travels more than 100 miles, and yet is all part of the same unified national park identity and interpretation, with its many distinct stops and areas comprising their own unique identities yet tied together consistently and coherently. While Shenandoah and Skyline focus much more on natural rather than historical or cultural subjects, this large yet linked and coherent park community offers a rich and successful model for how a park as spacious and far-reaching as Blackstone River Valley can move through its many different places and communities yet maintain that overarching sense identity and history. I’ll be interested to see how Blackstone River Valley takes its next steps!

Next Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

November 27-28, 2021: Emily Lauer’s Guest Post on Afrofuturism in Museums

[I’ve been fortunate enough to share a couple Guest Posts from my NeMLA colleague and friend Emily Lauer, and am excited to share another this weekend!]

In New York City on Museum Mile, both the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art now feature Afrofuturist rooms. At the Cooper Hewitt, the temporary exhibit is called “Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects” and the museum’s website explainsthat this “Selects” room “is the 19th installation in the exhibition series that invites designers, artists, architects and public figures to explore and interpret Cooper Hewitt’s collection of more than 215,000 objects. The exhibition will be on view [through]  Feb. 13, 2022.” A few blocks down at the Met, “’Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room’” opened on November 5^th of this year, and will be an ongoing exhibit, nestled amongst other period rooms.

 

Both of these exhibits are richly imagined and immersive, as one might expect from their hosting institutions. Further than that, I was interested to realize that they both imagine Afrofuturism similarly. Each concocts a speculative scenario in which free, relatively comfortable and homed Black people intentionally enact the role of the museum, adventuring around time and/or space to gather items that are then put on display.

 

At the Cooper Hewitt, Jon Gray’s premise is that a post apocalyptic future has a Black adventurer gathering artifacts from the ruins, and those artifacts are displayed in this gallery. At the Met, the premise of the room is that the people who lived in Seneca Village discovered time travel and the “period room” is full of the residents’ finds they’ve gathered while time traveling.

 

Just as Hollywood loves making movies about Hollywood, and authors love writing novels about authors, so too it should not be surprising that the speculative fiction scenarios of museums feature their protagonists enacting the role of the museum. Of course the scenarios envisioned for these rooms make good use of the setting of their fictions, but in doing so they are offering one very specific take on what Afrofuturism is. If either of these rooms was a visitor’s first exposure to the idea of “Afrofuturism,” the visitor would come away with an incomplete understanding of the concept.

 

By envisioning Afrofuturist protagonists enacting the role of the museum, both rooms seem to imply that Afrofuturism is concerned with collecting and exalting vestiges of the past. In fact, many Afrofuturist visions don’t do that and the relationship between Afrofuturism and museums is more fraught in pop culture than implied by these rooms.

 

For instance, think of the scene in the 2018 film Black Panther when Killmonger liberates an African artifact held by a western museum, immediately using it. Or even more analogously, consider how Janelle Monae’s music video for Q.U.E.E.N. from 2013 explicitly features time-traveling rebels “frozen in suspended animation” in a “living museum” who break free of these bonds, perhaps the opposite of the premise of the Afrofuturist rooms currently on display on Museum Mile.

 

Thus, these rooms seem like they are explicitly looking for ways that museums could take part in a Afrofuturist vision. Instead of seeing the museum as the pillaging colonizing force, or a symbol of stultifying repression, the Cooper Hewitt and the Met want to see themselves, and their roles as museums, in more positive ways. Both of their Afrofuturist rooms, therefore, have the effect of putting the museum’s role on a kind of pedestal by imagining the protagonists of their Afrofuturist visions engaging in museum behavior, a “cool” way to see curatorship, and a way to see curatorship as cool.

 

If the video for Q.U.E.E.N. might be said to be Afrofuturism for musicians, both the new immersive rooms at the Cooper Hewitt and the Met might be said to be Afrofuturism for museums.

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Museums or museum spaces you’d highlight?]

October 27, 2021: GhostStudying: Haunted Sites

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]

First, no post on American haunted sites should fail to acknowledge Colin Dickey’s wonderful book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016). Dickey’s book is the gold standard for all things haunted sites and AmericanStudies, and you should check it out! Here, I just wanted to highlight briefly three examples of representative, telling such haunted American spaces:

1)      San Diego’s El Campo Santo Cemetery: No post on haunted sites should fail to include at least one cemetery, and San Diego’s El Campo Santo is a good choice, not only because it’s old (first used in 1849) and reported to be haunted, but also and especially because those hauntings, like San Diego itself, reveal the region’s and nation’s truly multiethnic history. Both Native American and Hispanic ghosts have been reported in El Campo Santo, and that would only be fitting for a city in which the multi-century multi-cultural histories that include those among other cultures are both officially minimized at times and yet ever-present and impossible to escape. Nothing scary about that, unless you find yourself in El Campo Santo after the San Diego sun has set…

2)      Savannah’s William Kehoe House: Savannah has long been known for its mysterious and supernatural sides, as illustrated by the popular 1994 John Berendt book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (and its successful 1997 film adaptation). The city has lots of supposedly haunted sites to choose from, but the 1892 William Kehoe House is certainly a good example: haunted by the apparently friendly apparitions of Irish immigrant turned iron magnate (and, yes, Confederate veteran—this is postbellum Georgia we’re talking about) William, his wife Annie, and a few of their ten children; and now turned into a popular bed and breakfast, because who wouldn’t want to spend the night amongst the ghosts? If El Campo Santo is the yin of haunted sites, the Kehoe House certainly seems like the yang.

3)      Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary: And then there’s Eastern State, which is kind of a combination of those two types: a ruined prison that’s supposedly haunted by the lost souls of many of its former inmates; and yet a commercial enterprise, one that particularly makes money come Halloween season by marketing those haunted souls as a tourist attraction (although it seems that that tradition has come to an end this year). The line between history and tourism, supernatural and commerce, is always somewhat blurry when it comes to these haunted sites, but Eastern State just steps all over that line and asks us to cross back and forth freely to explore these different American histories and stories. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t sound scary at all, so much as important and fun!

Next GhostStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

August 19, 2021: Cville Updates: UVa Memorials to Enslaved Laborers

[For the rest of this week, I’ll be providing updates on a few topics from my hometown of Charlottesville about which I’ve blogged previously. Leading up to a special weekend tribute to an influential Cville figure I got to see again earlier this summer!]

Two core things I love about a new University of Virginia memorial.

In one of the posts in my annual Virginia/Cville series six years ago (but who’s counting?!), I wrote about the in-progress efforts to uncover and commemorate a forgotten burial ground for enslaved workers. Check out that post if you would, and then come on back for more.

Welcome back! As far as I can tell those efforts remain in-progress at that particular site (although they definitely are ongoing, thanks to the work of awesome folks like Kirt von Daacke), but that’s at least in part because in the meantime the university has completed and dedicated a memorial to those enslaved laborers elsewhere on the Grounds. And indeed, one of the things I really love about that memorial, which I had the chance to visit with the boys and my Mom when we were down in Cville in June, is precisely is location, just down the hill from the Rotunda and Thomas Jefferson’s original Lawn. After all, there would be no such places without the work of the enslaved laborers memorialized, and going forward it will be very difficult for any tourist, visitor, prospective student and family, etc. to walk through the Grounds without seeing this memorial. The memorial’s design, the way it is dug into and (I would argue) deeply rooted in the ground of those Grounds, means that such walkers can be almost upon it before they see its full, deeply moving scale, but that too feels fitting to me for the lives and histories it commemorates.

Those aspects of location and design would make this memorial one of my favorites regardless of the content, but I very much love the balance presented by the latter as well. The main outer wall of the memorial features the names of (or, in the many cases where names are tragically unknown, other identifiers for) all of the enslaved laborers historians have been able to locate. It would have been easy and understandable for the memorial to stop there, or perhaps to feature one plaque at the entrance with contextual information. But instead, along the wall of its inner fountain the memorial presents an extended chronology of those laborers and numerous historical contexts for their lives and work (in language that consistently engages with the harshest and most horrific realities of enslavement, racism, white supremacy, and more). Commemoration and education are not identical purposes, and of course too much information can take away from the emotion and potency of a memorial; but I believe this one achieves a perfect balance, commemorating these too-long overlooked figures and lives while also providing visitors with a great deal of vital detail about them and their (and our) world. I love this memorial, and I look forward to visiting it on many more Cville trips.

Last update tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Favorite memorials or public art you’d highlight?

March 22, 2021: Indigenous New England: The Wampanoag

[March 22^nd marks the 400^th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Indigenous New England histories, leading up to a weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

Rather than pretend that I’m any kind of expert on the Wampanoag tribes, I wanted to start this series by highlighting a handful of vital voices and resources from which I’ve learned and we can all learn a great deal about these New England native nations:

1)      Linda Coombs: I’ve had the chance to work with and learn from Linda since the 2011 New England American Studies Association Conference at Plymouth Plantation, and am still learning from her through our work together on America the Atlas this year. In my experience, there’s no voice, historian, scholar, activist, and community member who has more to tell us about the histories, identities, and ongoing story of the Wampanoag than Linda.  

2)      The Aquinnah Cultural Center: While Linda lives and works in the Cape Cod Indigenous community of Mashpee (on which more in a moment), she is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard, and has worked quite a bit over the years at the tribe’s Aquinnah Cultural Center (also known as the Aquinnah Wampanoag Indian Museum, and located near the historic Gay Head cliffs and lighthouse). I don’t know any space, in-person or online, that has more to tell us about the tribes and their histories and culture.

3)      Dawnland Voices: Much of what I’d want to say about the wonderful Dawnland Voices anthology (now also an evolving website) was said by my friend and the project’s editor Siobhan Senier in that hyperlinked Guest Post. It can feel at times difficult to connect with the voices and perspectives of pre-contact Indigenous communities (including the Wampanoag), in part because much of what was published for many centuries came from (or at the very least was filtered by) European American arrivals and cultures. But Dawnland Voices has helped change all that, and as a result is a truly must-read text and collection of voices.

4)      The Wampanoag Homesite: After a few years when I spent quite a bit of time at and around that Plimoth Plantation (now renamed Plimoth Patuxet), both because of my 2011 NEASA Conference and because both boys went there on 4^th grade field trips, I haven’t had the chance to get down there in a while (not since the renaming, in fact). So I’m not sure whether and how they’ve continued to develop my favorite element, the Wampanoag Homesite. But I sure hope that visitors (post-COVID, at least) can continue to learn from the indigenous performers and historians who share Wampanoag and other cultural and communal histories, information, and present realities at that vital interpretative space.

5)      Mashpee: I’ve written a lot, in this space and elsewhere, about the complex and vital histories of the Mashpee community, as well as their ongoing 21^st century battle for sovereignty and survival. It’s that final subject that I want to emphasize once more here: the Mashpee Wampanoag, like the Aquinnah Wampanoag and every other Indigenous tribe and nation, are entirely present in our 21^st century American society, in its political and social divisions and debates, and in our overarching identity and community. All the more reason to listen to and learn from these voices and resources.

Next Indigenous history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?