Happy 60th to #DrNo & the James Bond film franchise! We all have those pop culture things for which we mostly turn off our brain, & for me the Bond films are definitely atop that list. I'm able to analyze & criticize them for sure, but I also get great pleasure from the series.
But I also greatly value those folks & works helping contextualize & analyze the films & character, including @DrLisaFunnell, YouTube channels like @calvindyson's, books like James Chapman's License to Thrill, & much more. google.com/books/edition/…
I've blogged about Bond twice so far, both in relationship to AmericanStudies topics:
This one on the most thoroughly (& at times frustratingly) American & Western Hemispheric film, Live & Let Die:
I love me some Jason Bourne films (well, the original trilogy; ie, the Only Bourne Films in This Household), & I think there's a place for very different spy & action films. But I'll always have a soft spot for 007, & I'm excited to see where the films & franchise go post-Craig.
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Taught my favorite poet, Sarah Piatt, last week in online Am Lit II & this week in Honors Lit Seminar on the Gilded Age, & have been thinking a lot in the process about two layers to why we should all read & talk about poetry. (Cf. this @AWMuseum post.) americanwritersmuseum.org/why-we-should-…
First & foremost, like all our greatest poets, Piatt uses the form & genre to open up familiar questions & themes in profoundly new & illuminating ways. Take "A Pique at Parting," for example, which we're talking about this week in Honors Lit:
Courtship & relationship dynamics in the late 19C, women's perspectives on their own identities & possibilities/limits as well as on men & the world, domesticity & work, religion--it's all there, & so much more, in a stanza & rhyme structure that moves us through Piatt's ideas.
One of the central ideas underlying my new project is the question of historical inevitability, & more exactly challenging our understandable sense that things had to play out how they did. Every moment was contingent, & changeable based on individual & collective actions alike.
Some of the most influential such actors in American history specifically, of course, have been our presidents. & those influences have often been, well, pretty bad. So this week, in honor of Rutherford B. Hayes' 200th birthday, I'm blogging about a handful of Bad Presidents.
Starting today with James Buchanan, & how his badness helps us challenge the idea that the #CivilWar was inevitable by the 1850s. #twitterstorians
Here it is, my 93rd #ScholarSunday thread of great public scholarly writing & work, podcast eps & convos, new & forthcoming books from the last week. Share more below & enjoy, all! #twitterstorians
On this #ConstitutionDay, it's certainly worth remembering some of the truly radical ideas in that complicated & flawed document, with the separation of church & state at the top of the list for me. saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/10/consid…
& of course it's vital to remember the flaws & failures, as well as the foundational battles to make the Constitution truly work for all Americans. See for example Gordon Barker's masterful book: google.com/books/edition/…
If, as Eric Foner & others have so convincingly argued, Reconstruction was a Second Founding, I'd say that this is a moment we could consider a Third. A moment to either extend our ideals to all Americans or give in further to white supremacist exclusion. google.com/books/edition/…
Getting set to teach (virtually) the first week of my next 5-week @WISEinWorcester adult ed class, my most controversial yet as the course title alone makes clear: "Our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer": How White Supremacy Erodes the American Ideals It Claims to Love.
That title is quoting my favorite single line in American literature, from Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition: werehistory.org/tulsa-riots/
& the provocative topic of today's first class will be how white supremacy has consistently undermined the American ideal of religious freedom, as I argued in this column: saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/08/consid…