October 28-29, 2023: October 2023 Recap

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

October 2: LGBT Histories: The Society for Human Rights: An LGBT History Month series kicks off with three contexts for America’s first gay rights organization.

October 3: LGBT Histories: Harvey Milk: The series continues with the complexities of any historical event, and the vital broader issues nonetheless.

October 4: LGBT Histories: 1950s Discriminations: Two horrific 50s decisions and whether we can find light in such dark moments, as the series remembers on.

October 5: LGBT Histories: Stonewall: The undeniable significance of violence for civil rights movements, and the need to remember beyond it.

October 6: LGBT Histories: 1970s Advances: The series concludes with three 1973 moments that helped advance the movement.

October 7-8: LGBT Rights in 2023: A special weekend follow-up on progress, regression, and a crucial fight here in 2023.

October 9: Vice President Studying: Aaron Burr’s Trial: For the 50^th anniversary of Spiro Agnew’s resignation, a VP series kicks off with takeaways from the most controversial VP.

October 10: Vice President Studying: Andrew Johnson’s Nomination: The series continues with one good and one horrific thing about a crucial wartime VP choice.

October 11: Vice President Studying: Henry Wilson’s Book: How a Vice Presidential publication helps us rethink an entire administration, as the series rolls on.

October 12: Vice President Studying: John C. Calhoun and Spiro Agnew: A significant difference between the two VPs who resigned, and a linking thread.

October 13: Vice President Studying: Dick Cheney’s Power: The series concludes with a key explanation for a Vice President’s unprecedented power grabs.

October 14-15: Vice President Studying: Kamala Harris: Another special weekend follow-up, this one on a couple ways the current VP represents real and meaningful progress.

October 16: Basketball Stories: James Naismith: With the WNBA season concluding and a new NBA season upon us a basketball series tips off with contexts for the sport’s iconic inventor.

October 17: Basketball Stories: Chamberlain and Russell: The series continues with a clear distinction between two iconic greats, and why it’s not quite so clear.

October 18: Basketball Stories: Magic: Genuine low and high points for the legendary Laker, as the series dribbles on.

October 19: Basketball Stories: The Harlem Globetrotters: Couldn’t feature a basketball studying series without sharing my recent Saturday Evening Post column on the Globetrotters!

October 20: Basketball Stories: WNBA Stars: The WNBA too often plays second fiddle to the NBA, but as the five greats in this series concluding post illustrate, it’s always had plenty of star power as well.

October 23: New Scholarly Books: A Seat at the Table: A series on great recent publications kicks off with a vital new anthology co-edited by frequent Guest Poster Hettie Williams.

October 24: New Scholarly Books: Resistance from the Right: The series continues with an important recent book that helps us understand the longstanding and most dangerous threat to higher ed.

October 25: New Scholarly Books: A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: A wonderful new bio that reminds us of the best of our Congressional leaders, as the series reads on.

October 26: New Scholarly Books: The Vice President’s Black Wife: Coming up with titles for public scholarly books ain’t easy, so when one gets it right, it’s really worth celebrating.

October 27: New Scholarly Books: Democracy Awakening: And the series and month concludes with the most successful scholarly book of the year from our most prominent public scholar.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

October 27, 2023: New Scholarly Books: Democracy Awakening

[It’s been a bit since I dedicated a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books—so this week I’m dedicating a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books. Please add more recommendations, new, old, and anywhere in between, in comments!]

On the one hand, when a scholarly book by a public historian reaches #1 on the New York Times bestseller list it clearly doesn’t need a blog mention from me (or anyone). But on the other hand, that is an achievement very, very much worth highlighting and celebrating everywhere—and as someone who has been talking with the wonderful Heather Cox Richardson about public and online scholarship since she was first creating the idea for the great We’re History site, I couldn’t be more excited that her latest book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, has taken her voice and work to even one more level of well-deserved prominence. Clearly I don’t need to tell y’all to check out this book, but I do need to say that it’s one of those things that gives me hope for the future, as long as we can keep learning and talking about the past.

October Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books or publications you’d recommend?

October 26, 2023: New Scholarly Books: The Vice President’s Black Wife

[It’s been a bit since I dedicated a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books—so this week I’m dedicating a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books. Please add more recommendations, new, old, and anywhere in between, in comments!]

As someone who has struggled at times to come up with catchy book titles, and who has recently changed the title of his work in progress, I’m always impressed when a scholarly author can come up with a title that is both extremely catchy yet at the same time truly captures key subjects of the project (ie, isn’t just clickbait, understandable as that goal always would be). No recent publication manages that difficult balance better than Amrita Chakrabarti Myers’ The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn—that title sounds like a sleazy campaign attack ad, and indeed this figure was used in precisely those ways to destroy the career of Martin Van Buren’s VP Richard Mentor Johnson; but it’s also a genuine reflection of the nuanced layers of Chinn, Johnson, their marriage, and the many early 19^th century historical and cultural issues to which Myers connects them in this fascinating book. Come for the title, stay for the whole thing!

Last book rec tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books or publications you’d recommend?

October 25, 2023: New Scholarly Books: A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington

[It’s been a bit since I dedicated a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books—so this week I’m dedicating a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books. Please add more recommendations, new, old, and anywhere in between, in comments!]

The recent clusterfuck (pardon my French, but there really is no other word that works) around the Speaker of the House is just the latest of so many reminders that our current Congress has almost entirely ceased to function as a governing body, and certainly seems unable to address in any consistent or successful way the myriad crises facing the nation and world. In such a moment, it’s even more important that we remember the historical figures who have embodied the best of that governing body and have helped achieve significant progress on such important issues. A great new biography focuses on one such figure and achievement: Will McLean Greeley’s A Connecticut Yankee Goes to Washington: Senator George P. McLean Birdman of the Senate. Senator McLean advised five presidents and played a role in countless early 20^th century histories, but it was his sponsorship of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, one of America’s first and most influential conservation laws, that Greeley rightly highlights as a truly exemplary legacy. I can’t imagine a more important moment to revisit and be inspired by such legacies, nor a book that can help us do so more powerfully than Greeley’s!

Next book rec tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books or publications you’d recommend?

October 24, 2023: New Scholarly Books: Resistance from the Right

[It’s been a bit since I dedicated a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books—so this week I’m dedicating a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books. Please add more recommendations, new, old, and anywhere in between, in comments!]

One of the most frustrating misunderstandings in our current social and political conversations (a very competitive category, of course) has to do with where and from whom the threats to free speech in higher education are coming: many of our narratives suggest those threats come from the “intolerant left”; while I would argue that the far, far more widespread and influential such threats come from conservative critics. And that’s not a new phenomenon, as historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd argues in her vital new book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives & the Campus Wars in Modern America. Shepherd connects mid-20^th century debates and forces to our own moment and climate with nuance and complexity, while making an unassailable case for what’s really been happening in and to higher ed for more than half a century. If you read one book about higher education this Fall, make it Resistance from the Right!

Next book rec tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books or publications you’d recommend?

October 23, 2023: New Scholarly Books: A Seat at the Table

[It’s been a bit since I dedicated a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books—so this week I’m dedicating a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books. Please add more recommendations, new, old, and anywhere in between, in comments!]

Readers of this blog are already familiar with the awesome Dr. Hettie Williams, who has contributed not one, not two, but three excellent Guest Posts (tying her for the all-time lead!). Which makes me even more excited than I already would have been to highlight her phenomenal new collection A Seat at the Table: Black Women Public Intellectuals in US History and Culture, co-edited with Melissa Ziobro and published by the University Press of Mississippi (and featuring a number of chapters by Hettie herself, among many other awesome contributors including another AmericanStudies Guest Poster Tanya Roth). That a number of the chapters also intersect with my own recent and ongoing work on African American critical patriotism is just the icing on the cake, and puts A Seat at the Table in conversation with other exemplary recent works like the 1619 Project. For all those and many other reasons, this is my must-have Fall 2023 scholarly publication!

Next book rec tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books or publications you’d recommend?

October 20, 2023: Basketball Stories: WNBA Stars

[With a new NBA season upon us, a series AmericanStudying some of basketball’s many interesting figures, stories, and debates. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, debates, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]

Before Colin Kaepernick began his protests in the summer of 2016, WNBA stars were already doing so; but as is too often the case, we don’t recognize these female athletes as fully as we do their male counterparts. So I wanted to make sure to end this NBA and bball series by highlighting and briefly AmericanStudying a handful of the many phenomenal WNBA stars, past and present, on and off the court:

1)      Sheryl Swoopes: Swoopes, Lisa Leslie, and Rebecca Lobo were the first three players signed to the WNBA when it launched in 1996, and honestly any one of them could occupy this spot on my list. But Swoopes was the first signed, and I’m highlighting her in particular for that reason and because of this sentence from her Wikipedia page: “She returned only six weeks after giving birth to her son to play the last third of the WNBA inaugural season and led the Comets in the 1997 WNBA Championship.” If that doesn’t sum up the badassery of WNBA stars and female athletes everywhere, I don’t know what could.

2)      Cynthia Cooper-Dyke: While Swoopes was a big part of that inaugural Houston Comets championship team, Cooper-Dyke was the unquestionable centerpiece of their dynasty (the Comets won the first four WNBA championships), winning two regular-season MVPs and all four Finals MVPs in the process. What makes that resume even more impressive, however, is that Cooper-Dyke had finished her college career at USC a full decade earlier, after the 1985-86 season. She spent the next decade playing on European teams, and then signed with the Comets at the age of 34, making her stunning subsequent dominance of the league that much more striking still.

3)      Dawn Staley: Not gonna lie, this is something of a homer pick: I grew up watching Dawn Staley work her point-guard magic at the University of Virginia, and have been a huge fan ever since. She went on to make great contributions to both the US National Team and the WNBA, but it’s really as a coach that Staley has distinguished herself from other WNBA stars: literally, as Staley began coaching the Temple University women’s bball team while she was still in the WNBA; and then through her subsequent successes, with Temple, with her current coaching job at the University of South Carolina, and with the US National Team. She’s the first person to win the Naismith Award as both a player and a coach, which just about says it all.

4)      Maya Moore and Renee Montgomery: I’m grouping these last two stars together because of the similar reason why I’m highlighting them: each left a promising WNBA career over the last few years in order to pursue social justice work and activism. Moore did so in 2019, putting her career with the Minnesota Lynx on hiatus to work for criminal justice reform, as illustrated by her successful efforts for the release of her partner Jonathan Irons from prison. Montgomery did so in 2020, retiring from the WNBA in order to take part in that year’s protests and activisms for racial justice and equity. These two inspiring stars have extended the legacy of those 2016 protests and remind us that WNBA athletes have long contributed to well more than the world of sports stardom.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other bball stories, histories, or contexts you’d share (in comments or by email)?