November 4, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Origin Points

[This week marks this blog’s 9^th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]

On the most overt and a couple subtler reasons why I started AmericanStudying.

I didn’t say this explicitly in any of my first blog posts, but I remember quite clearly the most proximate and very specific cause of my starting this blog in the first week of November, 2010: that week’s historic midterm elections. The strident opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency had been building for more than a year by that time (indeed, since the first moments of that presidency), both in terms of the rise of the Tea Party and through widespread, telling phrases like “I want my country back,” but it was those midterm elections which made clear just how deep those sentiments ran. The “I want my country back” narrative, along with the power of political and cultural voices like those of Glenn Beck and his “Beck University,” exemplified for me how much those seemingly contemporary political debates were driven by particular, and to my mind mythologized and propagandistic, visions of American history, culture, and identity. I knew I wanted to space to challenge those visions and write about such topics with the nuance and thoughtfulness they deserved, and to that end decided to start my second daily and first scholarly blog (my first, Ben’s Thought for the Night, was a far more personal one in 2007-2008).

The absence of such a public scholarly space in my life prior to the creation of AmericanStudier reflects a second layer to the causes of my starting the blog, although not one of which I was consciously aware at the time. I believe I had already begun trying to place op eds here and there by that time, but entirely haphazardly and without any particular expectation that I would be able to land one (and certainly with no specific knowledge of how to do so). I was still a couple years away from finding and joining the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), which represented a vital further step in my public scholarly career (and on which more later in this week’s series). So in most ways in late 2010 I still thought of my scholarly writing as existing within the traditional academic spaces of peer-reviewed publications (both journal articles and book projects). I knew that such spaces wouldn’t work for what I felt I needed to do in response to the elections, though (not least because it takes literally years to publish in most of those formats), and so starting a daily scholarly blog comprised an attempt to create a new, more suitable such space.

My mention of SSN also reflects one other and perhaps even less conscious factor in my creation of AmericanStudier: a need for community. I was in my 6^th year in the Fitchburg State English Studies Department that fall, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that FSU didn’t offer a variety of important and meaningful professional communities; it most certainly did and still does 9 years later. But I think I did feel (again, without being able to put this into words at the time) that those wonderful communities, from the department to the classroom, the university as a whole to treasured friendships with colleagues, needed to be complemented with another type, with connection to fellow scholars interested in public engagement and public scholarship. Much of the story of my professional life over these last 9 years (as the next few posts in this series will trace) has been a continuing and deepening set of steps into such a public scholarly community, one that I have found even more supportive and sustaining and challenging and crucial than I could have imagined, and at the heart of that ongoing and evolving process has been AmericanStudier.

Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?

November 2-3, 2019: October 2019 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

September 30: Recent Reads: The Overstory: A series on great books I’ve recently read starts with Richard Powers’ ambitious, messy, vital climate change novel.

October 1: Recent Reads: The Nickel Boys: The series continues with Colson Whitehead’s stunning, bracing new novel.

October 2: Recent Reads: There There: How Tommy Orange’s debut novel importantly challenges my critical optimism, as the series reads on.

October 3: Recent Reads: Heaven, My Home: The newest mystery thriller from one of our great contemporary writers, Attica Locke.

October 4: Recent Reads: The Sweetest Fruits: The series concludes with the new historical novel from Monique Truong, which I’ll be teaching in my Spring Capstone course!

October 5-6: Crowd-sourced Recent Reads: Another great crowd-sourced post full of suggestions for further reading—add yours in comments!

October 7: Domestic Terrorism: The KKK: Inspired by the 50^th anniversary of the Days of Rage protests, a domestic terrorism series starts with under-remembered histories of our oldest such organization.

October 8: Domestic Terrorism: The Weathermen: On that anniversary, the series continues with the difficulty and importance of writing about domestic terrorists with whose positions we agree.

October 9: Domestic Terrorism: McVeigh and Militias: How to see the Oklahoma City bomber as a “lone wolf” and why we shouldn’t, as the series rolls on.

October 10: Domestic Terrorism: Edward Abbey and Environmental Terrorism: Three distinct and contrasting ways to contribute to environmental activism.

October 11: Domestic Terrorism: Cultural Representations: The series concludes with three cultural texts that reflect three different perspectives on domestic terrorists.

October 12-13: 21^st Century Domestic Terrorism: A special weekend post featuring an excerpt from my new book on how to contextualize contemporary domestic terrorists and mass shooters.

October 14-20: Present and Future Book Talks for We the People: Speaking of that new book, a brief update on my current and future talks—and a request for ideas for more!

October 21: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis: A series on a forgotten Worcester convention starts with the Renaissance woman who served as its president.

October 22: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Sarah H. Earle: The series continues with the local convention organizer who embodies the era’s many different forms of social activism.

October 23: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Sojourner Truth: The benefits and limitations of remembering a striking individual’s communal contexts, as the series rolls on.

October 24: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: The Men: Remembering, but not over-emphasizing, the male participants at a women’s rights convention.

October 25: The 1850 Women’s Rights Convention: Harriet Martineau and Harriet Taylor Mill: The series concludes with two English women who reveal the convention’s Transatlantic influences.

October 26-27: Ariella Archer’s Guest Post: My Scary Thoughts: The Evolution of Three Horror Subgenres: A Halloween series kicks off with my latest Guest Post, the great Ariella Archer on past and present evolutions of horror films!

October 28: ScaryStudying: Scary Stories: My annual HalloweenStudying begins with my analytical prejudice against scary stories, and how House of Leaves helped challenge that perspective.

October 29: ScaryStudying: Five Masterpieces: The series continues with a handful of the spookiest works in American literature—and a bunch more nominations in comments!

October 30: ScaryStudying: American Horror Stories?: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s complaint about the difficulties of writing Gothic stories in America, and how to find horror in the everyday here.

October 31: ScaryStudying: The Shinings: How the endings of Stephen King’s and Stanley Kubrick’s Shinings embody hopeful and cynical forms of horror, as the series scares on.

November 1: ScaryStudying: Sleepy Hollow: The series concludes with the foundational scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.

Special blog anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

November 1, 2019: ScaryStudying: Sleepy Hollow

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]

On the original American scary story that’s also an ironic American origin story.

I never got the chance to watch any episodes of the recent Sleepy Hollow TV show—if you did, please feel free to share your thoughts in comments!—but it’s certainly further proof of the lasting influence of one of America’s earliest professional writers, Washington Irving. Certainly much of Irving’s extensive body of work, including the History of New York about which I wrote in that hyperlinked post, has largely vanished from our collective national consciousness; but two of the stories in his first collection of fiction, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), have endured across those nearly two hundred years about as fully as any American literary works (from any century) have. I’m referring of course to that hen-pecked sleeper Rip Van Winkle and to the focus of today’s post, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

“Sleepy Hollow” has endured because at its heart, as the TV show seemed (from the previews and clips I saw anyway) to understand, it is about a simple conflict that is at the heart of many scary stories: between an extremely ordinary everyman (awkward and shy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane) and an equally extraordinary supernatural foe (the terrifying Headless Horseman). Like many scary story protagonists, Ichabod has an idealized love interest, the buxon Katrina Von Tassel; and finds himself competing for her affections with a far more popular and confident rival, Brom Bones. The culminating intersection between the two plotlines—between Ichabod’s supernatural and romantic encounters—engages the audience on multiple emotional levels simultaneously, just as so many contemporary horror films strive to do. Indeed, the only significant divergence from the now well-established formula is that the everyman hero loses—the Horseman scares Ichabod Crane away, Brom Bones escorts Katrina Von Tassel to the altar, and Ichabod’s story becomes the stuff of local legend.

That resolution lessens the story’s scariness factor (it seems clear that Brom was masquerading as the Headless Horseman), but at the same time amplifies its status as an originating American folktale. For one thing, Irving’s fictional narrator and historian Diedrich Knickerbocker presents Ichabod’s story, like Rip Van Winkle’s, as precisely such a folktale, a part of the collective memory of his turn of the 19^th century Dutch New York and thus of Early Republic America more broadly. And for another, it’s possible to read Brom Bones’ triumph, and his resulting union with the town’s powerful Von Tassel family, as an ironic reminder—much like Rip’s concluding images—that the more things seem to have changed in this post-Revolutionary America, the more in at least some ways they have stayed the same. America’s landed elites maintain their power, manipulating our folk legends (even our scary stories) to do so—and our overly ambitious schoolteachers flee in terror before that social force, remembered simply as a funny and telling part of those stories.

October Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?