November 16-17, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Thankful Tributes

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now, leading up to these special weekend tributes!]

Along with the obvious, AKA my favorite people in the world—my sons, my wife, and my folks—here are a handful of people who have helped make this blog a favorite of mine as well.

1)      Irene Martyniuk: One of my very first Guest Posters, my colleague and friend Irene has also become my most consistent reader, and one who frequently takes the time to share thoughtful responses as well (some of which I’ve gotten to feature in Crowd-Sourced Posts). We all want to know we’re being read and read well, and nobody has helped me feel that better than Irene!

2)      Rob Velella: I wrote in that hyperlinked post about what Rob’s blog and work have meant to me. But I’m not sure I said clearly enough how much it helped to have an existing public scholarly blogger, one whose blog was a model for what I was hoping to create, be so supportive and collaborative from the jump. I hope I’ve paid that forward!

3)      Heather Cox Richardson: I likewise wrote in that hyperlinked post about how much it meant to have Heather and her excellent Historical Society website support and share my blog at any early point (and I could say the same about her even more excellent We’re History website, for which I was able to write many times). Now that Heather has become one of the most prominent and successful public scholars in American history, I can add, “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person!”

4)      Robin Field: That Guest Post of Robin’s was impressive and inspiring, as was the 2023 NeMLA paper of hers I highlighted in this post (and as is all of her work). But Robin has also connected me with a number of her students over the last few years, all of whom have contributed phenomenal Guest Posts in their own right (and who collectively have largely kept the Guest Post layer to the blog going). Am I suggesting that you all should connect me to awesome students who also might want to Guest Post on this blog? Yes, yes I am.

5)      You: Whether you connect me to students or not, I’m so damn thankful for y’all. And not just in the colloquial Southern 2^nd-person sense—for each and every one of you all. I try not to dwell on blog stats, as they’re outside my control and can and do fluctuate and in any case are just numbers. But I get somewhere in the range of 30,000 discrete views each month, and I really am profoundly grateful for each and every one of those folks who finds their way to this blog. So thanks, and here’s to the next 14 years!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 15, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Communal Crowd-Sourcing

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

If you click on the tab for Crowd-Sourced Posts in the list of “Labels” to the right on the blog’s homepage, you’ll notice that there haven’t been any in 2024 and were only four each in 2023 and 2022, compared to the average of about ten each year prior to that. There are all kinds of reasons for that shift, including the growth of my #ScholarSunday threads (first on Twitter, now on their own newsletter) which have become a powerful form of crowd-sourcing in their own right (both in terms of sharing others’ voices and because many of the things I feature there have been shared with me). But even if I never feature another crowd-sourced post—and I hope and believe I will, at the very least for next year’s non-favorites series!—I don’t think I can overstate how much those posts have meant to me over the course of my blogging career. Scholarly blogging, like most every other part of scholarly work, can feel individual and isolated at times; some degree of that is likely inevitable, but I’ve still spent my whole career seeking ways and places to challenge that feeling and offer a communal alternative. I love that my blog has featured precisely such an alternative, and hope it always feels like it can.

Tribute post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 14, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Great Guests

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

Two years ago, I dedicated my entire anniversary series to sharing my 25 most recent (at that time) Guest Posts, a tribute as I noted to how much such connections to others, and the opportunity to share their words and ideas, has helped me keep the blog going. In recent years the roster of Guest Posters has included a growing number of Fitchburg State students as well as both of my sons, making this aspect of the blog even more meaningful than ever (although the very first Guest Post was written by Mom, so they’ve always been plenty meaningful!). But even with the many Guest Posters whom I’ve never met in person—and in some ways especially with that cohort, to whom I would never have become connected without the blog—the chance to feature their work here has been a true privilege as well as a pleasure. When I ask y’all to consider Guest Posting, it’s at least as much for me as it is (I hope) an opportunity for you—and in any case, it’s one of the things that most definitely keeps me coming back.

Last post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 13, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Teaching Thoughts

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

In mid-May 2011, almost exactly six months into my blogging career, I decided to end the Spring 2011 semester with a few consecutive posts (starting with that hyperlinked one) reflecting on that semester’s classes, teaching, and other work in my roles at Fitchburg State. I won’t pretend to remember if I planned at that time to make such end-of-semester reflections a consistent part of the blog, nor exactly when I decided to complement them with beginning of semester posts (I featured one individual such post in September 2011, but featured the first full pre-semester series in January 2012, and likewise featured a weeklong end of semester series that May). All I know is, it’s been a long time since I’ve started or ended a semester without blogging about it, and I really love how much the two go hand-in-hand for me: the promise of a new semester and the opportunity to express those hopes in this space; the culminating moments of a semester and the chance to think about takeaways from that work here. Other than my sons, teaching and blogging have been my two true constants over the last 14 years, and I love that they’re so intertwined.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 12, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Lifelong Learning

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

For some time in the blog’s early days (and really its early years), I’d say my posts tended to focus on the kinds of familiar topics I highlighted yesterday—sometimes favorites, sometimes frustrations, but most of the time subjects about which I knew a decent amount before I began planning and writing. It was really when I began planning weekly series around a particular topic that I likewise started creating posts—not all of them, but at least a couple in each series, let’s say—from an initially less well-informed place, and thus needing to research before (and while) writing. As a result, there’s absolutely no doubt that I have learned a great deal from this blog, about an unbelievably wide variety of topics: including, to cite just a few from my early moves into such weekly series, San Diego, satire, and Sendak. I hope I’ve modeled lifelong learning as a collective goal in the process, but in any case that goal has kept the blog fresh for its author, and thus without question kept me going.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 11, 2024: AmericanStudies’ 14th Anniversary!: Foregrounding Favorites

[14 years ago this week, this blog was born. For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the types of posts that have kept me blogging for nearly a decade and a half now. Leading up to some special weekend tributes!]

For folks who know me, it’s likely no surprise that the first month of this blog included posts that featured The Marrow of Tradition, Thunderheart, Boston’s Shaw/54^th Massachusetts Memorial, The Grandissimes and The Squatter and the Don, The Best Years of Our Lives, and the Chinese Educational Mission and its Celestials baseball team. That is, all of those things are favorites of mine in their respective cultural and historical categories, and I can’t imagine creating a daily blog without getting the chance to share such favorites with y’all (I’m honestly just surprised I didn’t get to Springsteen or Sayles for as long as I did, although I’ve more than made up for it since). While I got a lot of those favorites into the mix very quickly, I’ve certainly returned to favs every month and year since, including further attention to those but also to other subjects such as (to name just a few from this past year) Kane Brown, House of Leaves, Deadwood and Justified, and many many more. I’m still doing this 14 years down the road for lots of reasons, as I hope this series will illustrate, but high on the list is that I’m having a lot of fun, and favorites help make it so.

Next post on posts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Give me a great anniversary present and say hi in comments, please!

November 9-10, 2024: 2024 Election Reflections

So that happened. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking and writing about the worst and best of America, and somehow I’m still surprised and saddened when we lean into our worst. We can try to understand and analyze these results in all sorts of ways, but the bottom line is that more than 70 million of my fellow Americans voted for a candidate who expresses and embodies not just the worst attributes of human behavior and the worst impulses toward fascism, but also (and most relevantly to this blog) the worst of our shared histories and national identity.

The only other thing I want to say here is this: over the last few days, I’ve started to work hard to lean in myself, into the people and things I love, into the best in my life, from the biggest (my younger son as he moves through his senior year, my older son as he continues to rock his freshman year in college, my parents, my wife) to the smallest (a Reese’s ice cream cake for no reason other than all the reasons). And one of the things I love most is the best of the work I get to do—in the classroom, on my podcast, in this blog, everywhere I get to do this AmericanStudying thing. La lucha continua, and as ever I’m very proud to be in it with y’all.

Blog anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?