November 21, 2012: AmericanThanking, Part Three

[When things are tough, it’s that much more important to remember the best things, those for which we should say a big thanks. So for this week’s series, I’ll highlight some American moments, figures, and texts for which I’m particularly thankful. Please add your own nominations, those things for which you’re thankful, for the weekend post—thanks!]

On an American voice I’m very thankful we have the opportunity to hear.

To my mind, one of the most fundamental American voices that has been unfortunately lost, or at least severely limited, in our public conversations over the last couple of decades is that of the progressive and socially critical preacher. Some of the most significant religious voices and perspectives in American life, from John Woolman and Jonathan Edwards all the way up to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr., have used their deep spirituality and knowledge of scripture to, as the saying goes, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, to challenge the status quo and advance their own visions of the socially radical ideas that are at the heart of the New Testament and Christ’s teachings. It can be difficult, in this era of megachurches on the one hand (with their seeming perfection of televangelist practices and goals) and fundamentalist opposition to gay marriage on the other (with its cooption of Christian beliefs for deeply intolerant ends), to remember in fact just how radical and counter-culture religious voices in America have often been.

No American preacher fits that description better than William Apess. Born to mixed-race parents and into extreme poverty in the last years of the 18^th century, Apess’s bio reads like a hyperbolic mashup of Early Republic and Native American issues: he lived (as he narrates it, at least) in the woods near Colrain, Massachusetts until he was five; the next decade or so spent as an indentured servant to various families in the area; enlisting in a New York militia at the age of 16 and fighting in the War of 1812; battling alcoholism throughout that time, and eventually finding hope in both marriage and his baptism and later ordination as an itinerant Methodist preacher during the period that came to be known as the Second Great Awakening; publishing both his own autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829, the first published autobiography by a Native author) and the conversion narratives of “Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe” (1833); helping instigate and lead the peaceful Native American protest known as the Mashpee Revolt (1833), against state and national land and governance policies; becoming increasingly radical and cynical, culminating in his controversial speech and pamphlet Eulogy on King Philip (1836); and descending after that point into a brief final period of obscurity, alcoholism, and poverty, ending with his 1841 death in New York City. Each of those stages and experiences can open up its own complex window into, again, a whole range of local, ethnic, and national issues and identities in the period, making Apess one of the most rich subjects of study of all those American voices rediscovered in the last couple decades of scholarly work.

But if I had to boil that hugely full and complex life and work down to one text, it would have to be the pseudo-sermon “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” a work that Apess appended, almost as an afterthought, to the “Five Christian Indians” collection. The piece’s first sentence alone is I believe sufficient to introduce its striking combination of orality (Apess could and usually did write perfectly grammatical sentences, but doesn’t feel the need to do so consistently in this piece, and all I can say is that it works), strident and impassioned tone, and deeply radical and leveling religious themes: “Having a desire to place a few things before my fellow creatures who are travelling with me to the grave, and to that God who is the maker and preserver both of the white man and the Indian, whose abilities are the same, and who are to be judged by one God, who will show no favor to outward appearances, but will judge righteousness.” Damn straight. Later, Apess hits upon maybe the single most convincing religious rebuttal to racial prejudice ever constructed: “If black or red skins, or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he has made fifteen colored people to one white, and placed them here upon this earth.” Say Amen, somebody, as my personal favorite radical revivalist preacher, Bruce Springsteen, has been known to put it.

What Apess does in those moments, and throughout this amazing, provocative, and powerful piece, is exactly what his title promises, and what all of these radical preachers have done so successfully in their own ways: holding a mirror up to the most hypocritical and horrific American attitudes and realities, comparing those attitudes and realities to the spiritual values that so many Americans have professed, and demanding of their audiences that they begin to take responsibility for what they see and what they say and what they do. We could use a few more such voices, I believe, and should be very thankful for the ones we’ve got. Thanksgiving post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Moments, figures, and/or texts you’re thankful for?

11/21 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Lewis Henry Morgan, for his pioneering anthropology but also for his legal and political activism and his inspiring friendship; and Isaac Bashevis Singer, for his singular, cross-cultural, and profoundly American stories.

November 20, 2012: AmericanThanking, Part Two

[When things are tough, it’s that much more important to remember the best things, those for which we should say a big thanks. So for this week’s series, I’ll highlight some American moments, figures, and texts for which I’m particularly thankful. Please add your own nominations, those things for which you’re thankful, for the weekend post—thanks!]

On one of the Americans I’m most thankful for—and the moment in his life that illustrates why.

When it comes to sheer intellect and talent, Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) takes a backseat to nobody in his candidacy for the American Hall of Inspiration. His novel All the King’s Men (1946) might well merit its own blog post someday, partly for the ways in which it forces us to take a longer look at controversial Louisiana governor Huey Long than our main narratives of the man might allow, but mostly for its incredibly rich and complex perspectives on history, historical fiction, and American identity. His Collected Poems (1998, but including poems written as early as the 1920s and as late as the late 1980s) is the kind of book where you can open to any page (and it runs over 800 pages) and be blown away. And throughout his sixty-year career he was also one of America’s most prominent and important literary critics, historians of the South and the Civil War, biographers (his first book, a biography of John Brown, was published when he was twenty-four and is one of the best works on that hugely complex American life), and public intellectuals.

But Penn Warren’s most inspiring text and moment cannot, for better and for worse, be separated from what seems clear to me to be his lowest point (at least of his publications and career). During his time in college and graduate school at Vanderbilt Penn Warren became a part of a group of poets and scholars (including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson) who called themselves the Fugitives; in the late 20s they shifted to a more political and social (and explicitly conservative) focus, renamed themselves the Southern Agrarians, and published a manifesto entitled I’ll Take My Stand (1930). The book’s essays touched on a variety of interconnected and overtly reactionary topics and themes; Penn Warren’s contribution, “The Briar Patch,” was to his discredit a defense of segregation as an imperfect but still the best option through which the South could address the issue of race. Issues of prejudice and racism are difficult to define in absolute ways, without keeping in mind the specific contexts of time period and community and upbringing; and yet Warren was (and, more exactly, was already at the age of twenty-five) one of the most brilliant and well-read American writers, and so I can’t find any way to explain “The Briar Patch” away through such contexts. Du Bois had published The Souls of Black Folk over twenty years before; Penn Warren could and should have known better.

As I have argued about earlier focal figures here, however, the genuine sources of inspiration are not necessarily—or at least not just—found in ideals, but rather in realities, in attempts to grapple with the complexities of history and community and identity, both national and (more difficult still) our own. And to his great credit, Penn Warren revisited, very publicly and honestly, the question of segregation and his own ideas about it, and did so at a time when, if anything, Southern opinion in general had hardened even more fully against integration. His 1956 essay “Divided South Searches Its Soul” appeared in Life magazine, perhaps the most prominent national publication; in it Penn Warren examined his own prior beliefs, fully admitted their inadequacy, took stock of the nascent Civil Rights Movement and found it just as inspiring as we could hope, and became, from then on, a firm supporter of the Movement and of racial integration (culminating in his 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro?, which featured interviews with black leaders like Malcolm X and King). It might seem from afar as if such a reversal, coming two years after Brown v. Board of Education, is a sort of social frontrunning, but I would argue that nothing could be further from the truth—this was the era of Little Rock, of the collective white South (or at the very least its most vocal and powerful leaders and representatives, virtually across the board) entrenching its heels and resisting the Court in every way and beginning the move toward George Wallace’s 1963 embrace of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Penn Warren didn’t reexamine and radically revise his views because it was convenient or appropriate; he did so, it seems clear to me, because it was right.

Nothing in life is a zero-sum game, and so the second essay does not cancel out the first; any assessment of Penn Warren’s legacy must, I believe, acknowledge and include his connection to the Agrarians in general and his work in “The Briar Patch” in particular. Yet one of the surest ways to get a good grade in a class taught by me is to demonstrate improvement, to work hard to strengthen one’s voice and ideas, to grow as a writer and thinker and analyzer and, through them, as a student and person. And In “Divided South,” Penn Warren, in the face of imperatives of his community and region and contexts, models such growth. Color me thankful. Next post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Moments, figures, and/or texts you’re thankful for?

11/20 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Peregrine White, who was the first European American born in Massachusetts; and Robert F. Kennedy, who I would argue represents one of the state’s and nation’s most inspiring sons.

November 19, 2012: AmericanThanking, Part One

[When things are tough, it’s that much more important to remember the best things, those for which we should say a big thanks. So for this week’s series, I’ll highlight some American moments, figures, and texts for which I’m particularly thankful. Please add your own nominations, those things for which you’re thankful, for the weekend post—thanks!]

On one of the historical turning points for which I’m most thankful, and the man who made it happen.

If I’m wary about identifying distinct literary transitions and turning points—as I’ve argued in this space, just before identifying one of course—then I’m even more wary about doing so with historical events. Of course it’s easy, and not inaccurate, to highlight singular and significantly influential events like presidential elections (or, on the bleaker side, like the Wilmington coup and massacre with which I began this blog); but to attribute sweeping historical changes or shifts to those, or any other individual events, seems to me to elide the subtleties and nuances and gradualism and multipart nature of historical movement and change. All of this might be especially true when it comes to wars, since they’re so overt and striking and can seem to hinge so much on singular moments and battles and choices. And yet—and you knew this was coming—I think it is possible to boil down the whole trajectory of the Civil War to a single moment and incredibly bold and risky choice, made by perhaps the most unlikely military leader in our nation’s history.

This moment, and everything surrounding it, is a central focus of both Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning historical novel The Killer Angels (1974) and the Hollywood film Gettysburg (1993), so it may be a bit better known than many of my focal points in this space. But then again, every time I’ve told it to someone—and I have done so not infrequently, as it’s one of my favorite American stories—it has been new to them; both of those things (the newness and the favorite-ness) make me feel that it’s okay to include it here. For the contexts, it’s worth noting first, as Shaara does at length, how much the future of the Civil War, and thus America as a whole, hinged on the outcome of Gettysburg—not just militarily but also and more importantly diplomatically, since Confederate General Robert E. Lee was carrying a letter given him by CSA President Jefferson Davis in which, to be brief, the English government basically promised to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy if its army could win a decisive victory on Northern territory. If the war and the American future thus hinged on this battle, the battle itself largely hinged on what happened on the hill called Little Round Top—it was at the extreme Southern end of the Union lines and was the high ground, and if the Confederate army managed to take it, it was likely that the Union army would have to retreat, thus quite possibly giving the battle to Lee. And by the most random but crucial quirk of fate, the Union officer whose regiment was charged with holding Little Round Top was Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of the 20^th Maine.

Whole books, including much of Shaara’s, have been written about Chamberlain, so here I’ll just highlight a couple of things: he was a college professor of rhetoric and modern languages who had volunteered for the Union army out of a sense of duty; and prior to Gettysburg his principal battlefield experience had been a horrific night (chronicled in his diary) spent huddled amongst corpses during the brutal Union defeat at Fredericksburg (an event that, among others, had led Chamberlain in that same diary to admit to some significant uncertainty about whether he was capable of adequately leading men in battle; and it’s worth adding that many of his men had come to share those doubts, and had nearly staged a mutiny against his leadership not long before Gettysburg). Throughout the second day of the fighting at Gettysburg (July 2^nd, 1863), Chamberlain and the 20^th Maine were assaulted again and again by Confederate troops trying to take Little Round Top; they managed to hold off those attackers by the late afternoon were virtually out of ammunition (many men were entirely out) and likely could not withstand another charge. No historian or strategist could fault Chamberlain if he had retreated under those circumstances, but instead he called for the ultimate bluff: he ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge the Southern regiment that was preparing for another charge at them. Taken by surprise, and of course unaware of how little ammo their attackers possessed, the Confederate troops surrendered to Chamberlain; Little Big Top did not fall, the Union army took the advantage into the third and final day of fighting, Lee in desperation ordered the infamous Pickett’s Charge, and the rest, of the battle and in many ways the war, was history.

It’s impossible, to reiterate where I started this post, to know for sure what would have happened, in any historical moment or situation, had things gone differently. But it is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that had Chamberlain made a different choice, the battle and war could have gone to the Confederacy, and from then on American history would have looked so different as to be unrecognizable. Chamberlain, who won the Medal of Honor for this moment, would go on to a very diverse and distinguished career, including four one-year terms as governor of Maine, a decade as president of Bowdoin College, and many other posts and accomplishments. But it doesn’t get any more meaningful than that July 2^nd bluff—and we should all be thankful for it. Next post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Moments or figures you’re thankful for?

11/19 Memory Day nominee: Allen Tate, whose perspective on America and race was as complex as for the rest of his fellow Agrarians, but whose poems and novel engage with great power with key regional and national questions of history and identity.

November 17-18, 2012: Crowd-sourcing Public Scholarship

[This week marks AmericanStudies’ two-year anniversary (I began the blog, not coincidentally, right after the 2010 elections). So I’ve celebrated that occasion by highlighting five posts in which I’ve considered some of the reasons, possibilities, and issues related to public scholarship, blogging, and related work. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from other AmericanStudiers’ responses to those questions—please add yours!]

Lito Velasco links Monday’s post on Beck University to “how many of the textbooks in America are just plain full-of-crap. I compare the books I used in high school to those used by some people I know (my wife's, for instance) and it amazes me to see the liberties, exaggerations, and really...flat out lies being espoused and taught to kids by some of those books. But...if they're being used by an educational institution, people take it as ‘truth.’ When really, it's a ‘version’ of the truth being spread to hundreds (if not more) of kids because of the agenda of one group of people who wish to partially rewrite American and even global history.”

Mike Parker responds to Wednesday’s post on attitudes toward universities by writing that “Since the election, I've been viewing my college experiences with a renewed appreciation. It's interesting watching so many white newscasters and politicians expressing their surprise at the ‘new’ America that emerged out of this election, referring of course to the impact the minority vote had on the outcome. Some are dumbfounded, some are saddened, some are outright scared. And yet, thanks to the Liberal Arts education I received in Comparative Literature and Spanish, which exposed me to diverse American and international works of literature and allowed me to interact with a wide array of young American and International students, I'm free of the above-mentioned struggles others are having with this so-called ‘new’ America. The fact is my education had me prepared for this ‘new’ America even before it became a mainstream story. In attending a multicultural university, where Affirmative Action had ensured a diverse student population, and where professors were committed to teaching diverse voices and perspectives, I was able to address many of my own negative emotional reactions to diversity and shared power at a time when my mind was still open to new ideas. I guess what I'm saying is that this election, and the struggle many whites are having with it, is a vindication of higher education in the Humanities and the Liberal Arts, where professors have been way ahead of the game in preparing students for the future, and providing students with the tools to function in this world with understanding and empathy, and without fear or hatred.”

Jeff Renye follows up Mike’s thoughts, adding, “I quote from the end of Chapter 8 of Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, the latest edition, 2011 [This quote is a mix of Ravitch and citations from a 1988 statement made by the National Academy of Education on the value of the National Assessment of Educational Progress]: "'While these competencies [reading, mathematics, and writing, which the NAEP test is meant to measure] are important prerequisites for living in our modern world and fundamental to general and continuing education, they represent only a portion of the goals of elementary and secondary schooling.' They represent neither the humanities nor the 'aesthetic and moral aims of education' that cannot be measured. The scholars warned that 'when test results become the arbiter of future choices, a subtle shift occurs in which fallible and partial indicators of academic achievement are transformed into major goals of schooling...Those personal qualities that we hold dear--resilience and courage in the face of stress, a sense of craft in our work, a commitment to justice and caring in our social relationships, a dedication to advancing the public good in our communal life--are exceedingly difficult to assess. And so, unfortunately, we are apt to measure what we can, and eventually come to value what is measured over what is left unmeasured.'" To play off of a title from a book written by the scientist and historian Stephen Jay Gould, here is the mismeasure of education. And the miscalculation of what it is and what it is worth.”

11/17 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique, influential, and very impressive American educators and activists, Yung Wing and Grace Abbott.

11/18 Memory Day nominee: Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nation and a lifelong activist and voice for Native American rights and communities.

November 16, 2012: Public Scholarship, Part Five

[This week marks AmericanStudies’ two-year anniversary (I began the blog, not coincidentally, right after the 2010 elections). So I’m going to celebrate that occasion by highlighting five posts in which I’ve considered some of the reasons, possibilities, and issues related to public scholarship, blogging, and related work. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those questions, or any other 21^st century forms and conversations, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the perils and benefits of complexity and nuance for public scholars.

I once had a pretty unpleasant Facebook-thread argument—in the immediate context of the summer 2011 debt ceiling nonsense and President Obama’s responses to it—with a leftist political activist (not someone I know personally, but such are the promise and peril of Facebook and the internet) who feels that “academic liberals” are “the lamest, most clueless, most useless motherfuckers in the world.” Since he said this to me directly, after I had offered him what he admitted was “unreciprocated civility,” the line certainly reflects most centrally the guy’s particular and unattractive online voice and personality. But leaving the insults aside, his broader points, which focused on how academic liberals (and perhaps liberals more generally) don’t have the will or tenacity to do whatever it takes to “win” political arguments and thus are ultimately powerless in the face of win-at-all-costs conservatives like those currently running the show in DC, are ones I have myself considered often, including in and in regard to this space.

For example, much of my yesterday’s post focused explicitly on the question (in response to a few prompts, including William Hazlitt’s still relevant 1820 essay “On the Spirit of Partisanship” and the work of Reconstruction-era activist and writer Albion Tourgée) of whether liberals should fight conservative fire with fire or with complexity, should (at least at times and when necessary) abandon the high roads of historical awareness and knowledge and context (among many others) and play dirty in order to take on conservative movements that seem often to rely heavily, even depend, upon propaganda and misrepresentations and bald-faced lies. Since this blog began I have, I will admit, included more contemporary and political topics among my focal points here than I had initially planned; but I have not, I devoutly hope, abandoned even a fraction of my desire for nuance and context, for awareness and knowledge, for connecting such issues thoroughly to the long and multi-part threads that can be traced from them to so much of our national history and identity and narratives. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, and as I certainly believe, trying to provide all of those layers is the right thing to do; but what my Facebook interlocutor might ask (if with more vulgarity), and what I certainly ask myself frequently as well, is whether it’s the best thing to do, at least for those of us seeking to enter into and even ideally influence broader national conversations.

I’d be lying if I said I had the answer to that question. But I think another 2011 news story illustrates, if I do say so myself, the real and urgent need in our national conversations not only for the voices of public AmericanStudies scholars in general, but in this particular case for the argument at the heart of my second book specifically. In this story, the despicable anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller, about whom I wrote in my July 25^th and July 26^th, 2011 posts, comes out in support of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik; Geller makes that disgusting case in a variety of ways, but in one particularly telling comment (later scrubbed from her site but caught in a screen capture) she captions a photo of the kids at the Norwegian youth camp (taken the day before the shooting) by asking her readers to “note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.” Geller may think that she’s making a point there about Norway specifically or European societies more generally—and certainly she, like Breivik and the rest of their anti-Muslim ilk, are indeed intertwined with social changes and concurrent hate movements throughout the continent—but to my AmericanStudier’s mind the loudest echoes are of deeply American narratives about who is and is not a “pure” or “real” American, narratives which have been and continue to be constructed in direct response both to immigration and to racial and cultural mixture. And narratives, yes, that represent precisely a crucial inspiration for much of my own attempt to define American identity precisely through the concept of such mixtures, to make them the most “pure” version of who and what we have been and are.

If I had to guess, I’d say that my Facebook conversant would argue that the best, and perhaps the only, way to respond to somebody like Geller is to publicly attack and shame her, to put her bigotry and vitriol on display for all to see—and to make clear at the same time how deeply interconnected she and they are to the current Republican party (note the photo of her with House Majority Whip Eric Cantor in that linked news story). Again, he might well have a point. But to me, responding by first noting the deep-seated national narratives to which her bigotry and vitriol connect, and then positing some alternative and more genuinely communal narratives in their place, can and, I still believe, will ultimately allow us to move into a future where we all stand a better shot of winning, maybe not immediate prizes of power or influence but fundamental and more meaningful ones of equality and hope. At the end of the day, I’m going to keep making that point, here and everywhere else.

Crowd-sourced post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. So what do you think? Responses to any of the week’s posts and questions, or any related issues, for that weekend post?

11/16 Memory Day nominee: W.C. Handy, the factory worker and son of ex-slaves who became one of America’s most pioneering and significant ragtime and blues musicians and composers.

November 15, 2012: Public Scholarship, Part Four

[This week marks AmericanStudies’ two-year anniversary (I began the blog, not coincidentally, right after the 2010 elections). So I’m going to celebrate that occasion by highlighting five posts in which I’ve considered some of the reasons, possibilities, and issues related to public scholarship, blogging, and related work. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those questions, or any other 21^st century forms and conversations, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On what public scholars can and should do, these days and all days.

Over the last couple of years I’ve found myself, in thinking about my goals for a wide variety of my pursuits—from this blog to my future book projects, from certain aspects of my classroom work to other public commitments like those with the New England ASA—somewhat torn between a couple of distinct emphases, both answers to King Theoden’s question, “What can men do against such reckless hate?” Which is to say, in a moment when upward of 60% of Republicans consistently buy into Birtherism, when a significant number of our national conversations and narratives seem to have entirely unhinged from any discernible or even debatable reality, what is the role of a public scholar?

At times I find myself agreeing with the constant refrain of one of my favorite bloggers, Digby, who believes that far too often writers and thinkers on the left attempt to take such a high road that they cede the most traveled paths to those voices on the right who are willing to shout their arguments as loudly and as passionately (and often, yes, as falsely) as possible. In a recent post she linked to an 1820 essay by William Hazlitt, entitled “On the Spirit of Partisanship,” which illustrates just how much the two sides have long (and perhaps always) been unfairly matched in this sense: “Their object is to destroy you,” Hazlitt writes to his fellow liberals about their conservative opponents, “your object is to spare them.” Yet as tempting, and at times certainly as necessary, as it can be to fight fire with fire, at the end of the day I still believe that the most central goal of any liberal writer—and doubly so of any public scholar—should be to push back against oversimplifying narratives, to argue for more complex and dense and genuine understandings of American culture and history and identity and even politics. It’s a long arc for sure, but if enough such voices make themselves part of the conversation, it can still bend to justice.

It’s important to add, though, that providing such a measured and complex perspective is not mutually exclusive to fighting for an era’s most significant causes, a fact that is exemplified by today’s nominee for the American Hall of Inspiration, Albion W. Tourgée (1838-1905). Tourgée managed to be, for many decades, both one of America’s most thoughtful public scholars and commentators and a passionate advocate for the issue (racial equality) about which he felt most strongly: a Civil War veteran who was struggling with his wounds in the climate of his native Ohio, he moved with his wife to North Carolina and became a Radical Republican supporter of Reconstruction and freedmen’s rights there; he wrote a pair of profoundly complex and self-reflective and at times ironic and cynical novels about that experience, A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880), and continued to publish works of fiction for the rest of his career; but even after moving back north in 1881 he published a syndicated newspaper column (“A Bystander’s Notes) in which he argued passionately for racial equality on a variety of fronts (and against racial violence and discrimination on at least as many). His opposition in that space to Louisiana’s segregated railways led to his selection to argue Homer Plessy’s 1896 case before the Supreme Court; in those arguments Tourgée advanced his belief that justice should be “color-blind,” a phrase which Justice John Harlan borrowed for his passionate dissenting opinion from the Court’s pro-segregation (“separate but equal”) decision.

Tourgée was always, I believe, able to view himself and his writing with the kind of distance that keeps one from becoming a caricature, a windbag so fond of one’s own voice and arguments that no one not already convinced will even listen. Yet he most certainly did not fear to tread into some of his era’s most divisive and difficult questions, and in fact advanced the same kind of measured and reasoned and profoundly impressive ideas there that his Reconstruction novels force an audience to confront. Inspiring on every level for sure. Final post in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? What are the roles of public scholars, and what aren’t? Why?

11/15 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two pioneering, talented, and inspiring modernist artists, Marianne Moore and Georgia O’Keeffe.

November 14, 2012: Public Scholarship, Part Three

[This week marks AmericanStudies’ two-year anniversary (I began the blog, not coincidentally, right after the 2010 elections). So I’m going to celebrate that occasion by highlighting five posts in which I’ve considered some of the reasons, possibilities, and issues related to public scholarship, blogging, and related work. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those questions, or any other 21^st century forms and conversations, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On some of the most threatening and most inspiring sides to 21^st century public scholarship.

Just after I wrote yesterday’s Severson and Gingrich post, a couple more developments had me continuing to think in more self-reflective ways about what I’m doing, here and in general. First, I read a New York Times article that documents how what was done to Professor William Cronon (on which see this brief post) was just the tip of the iceberg; Republican groups in Michigan had now begun making sweeping public records requests involving the emails of numerous labor studies professors at three (so far) public universities in the state. I’ve long felt that the various kinds of anti-intellectual and anti-academic hostilities present in our national narratives are by far the worst—and perhaps even the only bad—aspect of this profession, and I can honestly say that in my fifteen or so years of genuine awareness of the profession (although I was certainly aware to at least a degree through my Dad for years before that as well) this is certainly the worst that things have gotten. I would, I hope, feel that way even if I were not myself employed by a public university; but the fact that I am only amplifies my sense of the profoundly un-American qualities of these invasions of privacy and attacks.

It’s true that many academics, at least in the humanities, are politically liberal; there are plenty of possible reasons for that preponderance, and while I have my own theories they’re not the point here. It’s also absolutely and profoundly true, in my significant experiences across multiple institutions and disciplines and classrooms, that the vast majority of academics, whatever their personal views on politics (or anything else), do not bring those views into the classroom; moreover, of the small minority who do make such views clear at times, I am even more certain that virtually (if not literally) none of them require of their students that they adhere to such views in order to receive high grades or the like. And above and beyond such specifics, it seems to me that what college classes most fully offer is the opportunity for students to learn how to think and analyze and argue and read and write and be a part of their world in stronger and more successful ways, skills that prepare them for not only any political conversation (from any perspective) but every other arena of life and identity. To attack college professors for (the only possible charge behind these kinds of document requests) indoctrinating their students or the like is thus, to my mind, not only false on the specifics but even more false, directly backwards even, on the broader work that we do and ask of our students.

I came home that day, disheartened by having read that article, to find the advance copies of my second book waiting for me. The book is, like this blog, certainly not a-political; its concluding chapter analyzes Barack Obama’s first book and his identity more broadly as profoundly representative of all early 21^st century Americans’ identities and relationships to our shared national heritage. But my sincere and most ideal hope for the book, as for this blog, is that it contributes to our communal understandings and conversations and knowledge and narratives in ways that transcend any particular partisan or contemporary debates, that in fact remind us of how much we share and how much stronger and better we are as a nation when our focus is there. Holding in my hands the book, the result of at least five years of thinking and writing, and of innumerable conversations in classrooms, in colloquiums and conferences, in faculty reading groups, with family and friends, and, yes, online, is one of the very best times that this profession has to offer. But even better, I have to admit, is allowing myself to contemplate those ideal contributions it and I could make to our national conversations and narratives.

I don’t imagine that the worst of times vibe is going to go away any time soon. But when I’m posting here, as when I hold the book, as when I step into my classes, I can remember some of the best of times, within my profession and within our nation. And I have to believe that they’re stronger and more lasting than even the very worst of where we can go as a nation. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think, of the worst sides of public scholarship, the best ones, or anything in between?

11/14 Memory Day nominee: Aaron Copland, perhaps one of the first genuinely American classical composers and one whose best compositions continue to define our national landscape.