morbid much?

[truepenny]

So I've figured out why American history always bored me stupid in school. It's because I could care less about the Narrative of Progress which is how American history is generally taught. I'm fascinated by the disasters.

• Tombstone and the Gunfight Near the O.K. Corral
  
• Little Big Horn
  
• the Donner Party

(There's a reason one of my tags is clusterfucks of the old west.)

• the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
  
• murders like those of Mary Rogers and Helen Jewett¹

And something reminded me this morning--I can't even tell you what--of what may be the first of these obsessions with morbid Americana: the terrible death of Floyd Collins. I first learned about Floyd Collins on a Girl Scout trip to Mammoth Cave when I was fourteen or so, and I've had a sort of aversion/compulsion complex about him ever since. Someday, I am going to figure out the story that wants to be written around him and write the damn thing.

But in the meantime--yes, what interests me is the underbelly² of the American Dream.

---
¹On the other side of the Atlantic, I was fascinated by Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary, which is of the same morbid genre.
²Like Shelob's: "Her vast belly was above him with its putrid light, and the stench of it almost smote him down" (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers 428).

Comments

[davidlevine]

Ah yes, Floyd Collins, possibly the first American media celebrity of the "trapped in a cave" subgenre. I wrote a fantasy story inspired by him: http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/story.php?s=9

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The US section of our history bookshelves is kind of hilarious. It's got the thing we were taught as the French and Indian War in school, and it's got several books on utopian communes, and it's got books about weird social movements in the Jazz Age, and it's got books about McCarthy and the Red Scare. (Manhattan Project stuff and space program stuff are sorted into History Of Technology.) And then you can see where my grandpa's collection is creeping in, because there are some very well done but quite traditional histories of the Civil War and the railroads. It's...really transparent, which stuff was ours originally and which was inherited. Really transparent.

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

I, too, have always liked history that points out that "progress" is not nearly so linear a concept as we'd like to believe. The older the better, of course; the more recent it is, the more infuriating it's likely to be. But there's a reason my personal motto has always been "Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that..."

[libskrat]

I think this is why I've been fond of Edna Ferber novels for many a year.

[midnightsmagic.livejournal.com]

I love American History. I like what actual, real historians do, which often involves taking the narrative of progress and poking holes in it.

My U.S. History textbook in high school was Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and I fell in love with the idea that not much in American history is straightforward. Which is why I went on to major in it in college.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My U.S. History textbook in high school was this thing you could kill burglars with, full of excruciatingly boring information. I blame that textbook for my only recently destroyed belief that the American nineteenth century was the most boring century ever.

[g33kgrrl]

Does that include the disappearance of the original Roanoke colony? That has never stopped boggling my mind. Someone must have written speculative fiction about it at some point.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

YES.

[g33kgrrl]

Heehee. I thought that would also be up your alley! :)

I was lucky enough to have a historian for a mother (actually an archivist - I gave her The Bone Key for mother's day once, which she loves, and is also excited for the chapbook), so I grew up being told history like stories. I remember my favorite for a while was hearing stories about Jesse James and the Younger Brothers. And our family trip out west included a stop at Deadwood to watch the reenactment of Wild Bill Hickok's murder (after which, at 8 years old, I never again liked sitting with my back to the door) and the trial, and visiting the cemetery there. I also fell in love with Calamity Jane.

Now I'm focusing on the underbelly of Chicago, after moving here, and there is sooo much to read about! Especially 19th century. So far some books are better than others, of course, but you might enjoy Sin in the Second City if you haven't already read it.

[spreadsothin.livejournal.com]

there's an eponymous musical about Floyd Collins by the brilliant Adam Guettel.
Highly recommended.

[akaten.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me? It's a great deconstruction of... well, just about every American historical myth, and he's tough but fair in how he picks apart various high school textbooks.