November 9, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Saturday Evening Post in 2018

[This week AmericanStudier celebrates its 13^th anniversary! For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and pieces in my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

I dedicated a weeklong series at the start of this year to the 5^th anniversary of my first Considering History column for the Saturday Evening Post, and would mostly ask you to check out that week’s blog posts to get a sense of why and how this longest-running online writing gig (almost at the six-year mark now, and I plan to keep writing them as long as they’ll have me) has been so meaningful for me. One additional reason that I didn’t overtly discuss in that series, however, was that this has been my first truly dedicated column space, not just me contributing writing to an online site/community but a column (Considering History) that is 100% mine, started with my first column, has only ever been written by me, etc. One of my strongest arguments for everyone getting into some form of blogging (if they have any interest in public scholarship, that is) is that it reminds us that online public scholarship can be and for many us most definitely is a gig, a consistent and defined area of work, not just one-off op-eds or other more haphazard versions. My blog is one key part of that gig for me of course, but Considering History has been a second, and one shared as part of a much broader community and publication (one that can be traced back to Ben Franklin, no less!). That has really helped me see these last half-dozen years as a new stage in my online public scholarly career, one that emerged out of this space but has gone to surprising and wonderful places.

Last anniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 8, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Talking Points Memo in 2014

[This week AmericanStudier celebrates its 13^th anniversary! For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and pieces in my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

I wrote at length in this prior post about my first truly viral piece of online writing, a November 2014 column for Talking Points Memo that garnered well north of 100,000 views, became one of their ten most-read columns of the year, and launched an 18-month gig writing columns every couple weeks for TPM. I don’t want to repeat the things I said in that prior post, in which I tried to trace many layers to what made that moment such a turning point for me and my online public scholarly writing career, so here I’ll highlight one additional layer: reading and engaging with the comments. For whatever reason, my blog posts have almost never gotten comments (feel free to break the trend below, though!), and I’d say that’s true for many public scholarly sites. But TPM columns get a ton of comments, including the most troll-y and the most thoughtful and everywhere in between. And I always made it a point to read every one and to respond to as many as deserved any kind of response (and, yes, even to troll back the trolls on occasion), a process I started with that November 2014 column and which I consistently found at least somewhat meaningful (if always somewhat infuriating as well). Public scholarship is, after all, about public engagement and public conversations, and I’ve really tried to be part of them always, in all ways, throughout this evolving career.

Next anniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 7, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: The Historical Society in 2013

[This week AmericanStudier celebrates its 13^th anniversary! For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and pieces in my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

In my first couple years of scholarly blogging, I had the chance to guest post on others’ blogs on occasion, generally folks like Rob Velella and William Kerrigan whose work I was fortunate enough to share in Guest Posts here as well. I treasured each of those opportunities, but they didn’t feel distinctly different from what I was already doing here. The first online writing opportunity that did feel more distinct came from The Historical Society, a collective public scholarly website co-edited by Heather Cox Richardson. THS reached out to me in mid-2013 both to write a new post on public scholarship and then to re-share a weeklong series of mine on Newport, Rhode Island. Both of those opportunities—to write something new for a public scholarly online community, and to see my public scholarly blogging appearing in such as space—significantly changed my sense of myself in these spaces and roles, and really helped me realize that I was becoming an online public scholar as well as helping to grow collective spaces for that work. I had the chance to do the same for a few other sites around the same time, including Richardson’s next and even bigger venture, We’re History. But The Historical Society was really the first, and I can’t overstate how influential it was in helping me redefine myself and my work in these evolving ways.

Next anniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 6, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: 2010 Origins

[This week AmericanStudier celebrates its 13^th anniversary! For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and pieces in my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

For technological reasons that I quite frankly do not remember at all (13 years is a long time!), my introductory first blog post on W.E.B. Du Bois has sadly been lost. But the first regular and full post, this one from exactly 13 years ago on the Wilmington Massacre and The Marrow of Tradition, is still there. A great deal has changed since that November 2010 origin point, both in my knowledge and analyses of that day’s specific subjects and in my voice and style as a public scholarly blogger (among many, many other things). But a lot has stayed remarkably similar, from a seemingly small but crucial thing like the three-paragraph structure (not present in special posts like this week’s but still my default for almost all posts) to my huge overarching goals of adding to our collective memories in both nuanced and engaging ways. I honestly can’t remember a time when this blog wasn’t a central part of my writing and work and career, and given all that it has meant and opened up on all those levels—as the rest of the week’s posts will I hope illustrate—I also very much don’t want to. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this has been my most defining life’s work, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Next anniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

November 3, 2023: Contested Elections: 2000

[75 years ago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close and contested enough that one newspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that election and a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because it really wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum and talented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On three frustrating aftermaths of the most hotly contested presidential election in our history.

1)      The climate crisis: It’s hard to remember exactly where our narratives stood in 2000, but I think it’s fair to say that Al Gore’s central role in raising the alarm about climate change (or global warming, as it was generally known then) was seen by many as at least slightly kooky, if not outright silly, somewhat akin to the whole “Al Gore invented the internet” conversations. As that hyperlinked article argues, those latter critiques of Gore were pretty off-base—but not nearly as off-base as any and all downplaying of his climate change activism. I don’t know for sure what a Gore administration might have been able to do over those four or eight years to address the climate crisis, but I will always regret—and believe every one of us humans should regret—that we weren’t able to find out.

2)      The Supreme Court: No electoral aftereffects could ever be as important as those, certainly not on a global scale. But closer to home, I would argue that the 2000 election, and more exactly the hugely and rightfully controversial Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision that ultimately decided said election, played a crucial role in shaping one of the most significant stories in 21^st century American politics and society: the ever-more-overtly politicized presence of our highest court. As I argued in this 2016 HuffPost piece, the Supreme Court has always been political, and those origins and histories are important to keep in mind. But nonetheless, the Court’s blatant and (to this AmericanStudier, among many others) unconstitutional intervention in a presidential election marked a decidedly more political role still, and at the very least foreshadowed one of the single worst and most destructive court decisions in our history, Citizens United (2010).

3)      January 6^th: Obviously—and I do mean obviously—the November 2000 “Brooks Brothers riot” in Florida that sought to end the electoral recount there (and that most definitely did influence the Supreme Court’s ruling) was far from the first such expression of mass outrage and potential violence seeking to affect the outcome of an American election. But I nonetheless agree with this excellent Chris Lehmann piece for The Nation that the 2000 riot was a direct predecessor to the January 6^th, 2021 insurrection, most especially in the ways that it demonstrated that far-right rage and violence could dictate our national politics. Not sure any single factor more directly contributed to the rise and age of Trump, and I know that no single event better encapsulated those trends than did January 6^th. One more reason to (as sarcastically as possible) thank the 2000 election.

Special Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 2, 2023: Contested Elections: 1960

[75 years ago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close and contested enough that one newspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that election and a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because it really wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum and talented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On two clear and important factors in one of our closest elections ever, and one significantly more ambiguous but perhaps even more meaningful one.

1)      TV: I ended yesterday’s post on the 1948 election with a comparison to the role of TV specifically and mass media more generally in 1960, which is often seen as the first truly modern election as a result of that influence. As those three hyperlinked articles (and the many others I could have included) reflect, this is a factor that has been very thoroughly explored, and for good reason: it’s difficult to overstate how much TV and mass media have shifted our politics, and continue to do so even in the age of the internet (which is of course its own form of mass media). I don’t have a great deal to add to all those voices, but will say that I wrote a good bit in my recent book Of Thee I Sing about the “Camelot” mythos around the Kennedy administration as an exemplification of celebratory patriotism, and that whole narrative was deeply intertwined with Kennedy’s boyish good looks and media-friendly charm.

2)      Johnson: Kennedy’s TV appearances (in both senses of the word) unquestionably influenced such narratives, and likely brought folks out to vote as a result. But in American presidential elections voting matters more in a state-by-state way than an individual voter way, and to my mind the single biggest influence on state voting patterns in the 1960 election was Kennedy’s choice for a running mate: Texas Senator and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. It’s not just that Johnson was a masterful party leader and political negotiator, although those roles were never more crucial than in such a tightly contested election. It’s also that the Dixiecrat revolt about which I wrote in yesterday’s post had only continued and deepened, and without a VP who could truly bring in Southern Democrats there’s no way Kennedy would have won the electoral votes of the majority of the Southern states. Like Lincoln’s VP choice Andrew Johnson, similarly chosen for strategic reasons, this one also became president himself due to a tragic assassination—but that’s a story for another post.

3)      Religion: The combination of Kennedy on TV and Johnson on the political landscape probably played the largest role in deciding this very close election (and it seems pretty clear that fraud did not, despite the contemporary and persistent arguments to the contrary). But throughout the campaign, there was a consistent debate which overshadowed either of those and any other factors: the questions surrounding Kennedy’s Catholicism. I wrote for my Talking Points Memo column back in 2015 about those debates, and won’t rehash the same points here (although they’re worth remembering in an era when the majority of our Supreme Court are devout Catholics, a clear reflection that these narratives have changed). Instead I’ll just note that whatever the effects of these religion debates on the election—and that’s a very complicated question, since Kennedy’s religion may at the same time have pushed some voters away and brought in other new ones—they, and Kennedy’s significance as the first Roman Catholic President (and only one until our current administration), remind us that no election exists in a vacuum, and that historic significance often goes far beyond the winners and losers in a given year.

Last contested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 1, 2023: Contested Elections: 1948

[75 years ago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close and contested enough that one newspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that election and a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because it really wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum and talented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]

On a couple significant AmericanStudies stories beyond “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Don’t get me wrong, “Dewey Defeats Truman” was a unique historical moment, and the shot of a jubilant Truman holding a copy of that November 3^rd Chicago Tribune is one of the more rightfully iconic 20^th century photographs. The moment also reminds us of just how much American newspapers have always been affiliated with partisan politics—the Tribune was a solidily Republican-leaning paper with no love lost for the incumbent Democrat, and its choice to allow veteran political analyst Arthur Sears Henning’s electoral prediction to determine their next day’s front page (the paper went to press prior to the close of polls on the West coast) was no doubt due at least in part to editorial wishful thinking. It’s easy to decry the partisanship of contemporary newspapers and news media, but in truth that’s been part of their identity throughout American history.

But even if the Tribune had gotten its prediction right, the 1948 presidential election would still be a hugely significant one. For one thing, there was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and his third-party run as a Dixiecrat (or, officially, States’ Rights Democrat). Few American histories have been more influential than the long, gradual realignment of politics, race, and region, a story that starts as far back as Tuesday’s focal figures Lincoln and Johnson and extends right up to our present moment. Yet despite that century and a half long arc, the splintering of the Democratic Party at the 1948 national convention represents a striking and singular moment, a fulcrum on which those political and social realities permanently shifted. There were all sorts of complicating factors, not least Thurmond’s own secrets and hypocrises when it came to race—but at the broadest level, few election-year moments have echoed more dramatically than did the Dixiecrat revolt.

For another thing, both Truman and Dewey used the mass media in an unprecedented way in the campaign’s closing weeks. The two campaigns created short newsreel films that were played in movie theaters across the country, reach an estimated 65 million filmgoers each week. The first televised 1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon is often described as the first national political moment of the media age—or even as a moment that “changed the world”—and certainly its live broadcast to a national audience represented something new in American electoral politics. But since so much of politics in the media age has not been live, has instead comprised constructed and produced media images and narratives, it’s fair to say that Truman’s and Dewey’s competing movies likewise foreshadowed a great deal of what was to come in the subsequent half-century and more of elections.

Next contested election tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?