[Many, many, many times over the last year, I’ve wished that more Americans would have the chance to read my writing and learn even a few of the many lessons I believe it offers for us in 2025. So for my annual Wishes for the Holiday Elves series, I wanted to revisit my six books, highlighting something specific from each that I think we could takeaway today. Leading up to a special post on my awesome wife’s Christmastastic new book!]
Given that the Trump administration has proposed various new policies that amount to a sequel to the Chinese Exclusion Act, I don’t know that I need to make much of a case for rereading my book The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us about America (2013) here in 2025. I’ve also learned a lot more about that subject in the dozen years since, and would recommend my podcast The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, & the Battle for America (2024) for those more up-to-date thoughts. But one section in my third book that I’d say holds up particularly well is the Introduction: Teaching Americans the Chinese Exclusion Act. In that intro I make the case for something that I have come to believe even more strongly over the last dozen years: that public scholarship is a form of teaching, in the best senses of the term and the classroom (conversational, multivocal, civil, rigorous, and more). I’d like to think that both this book overall and the many book talks I had the chance to deliver over the year or so after its publication exemplified that vision of both public scholarship and education, and I’d say that I’ve never expressed it more succinctly than I did in that Introduction.
Next wish tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? (Also, I have an e-copy of this book that I’m happy to email anyone who’s interested, so lemme know if you’d like one!)
Leave a Reply