20th Century Archives - Not Even Past

Lesson Plans: The Vietnam War and American Society

These lesson plans were developed through a partnership between Not Even Past, AVAnnotate, the This Is Democracy podcast, and the LBJ Presidential Library. Built around curated podcast excerpts and interactive audio annotation, each lesson provides a complete, classroom-ready resource that offers educators an engaging alternative to traditional history instruction while requiring minimal preparation.

The series is continuing to grow, with additional lessons covering a wide range of historical topics in development. Educators with questions, feedback, or requests are encouraged to contact us at notevenpast.uthistory@gmail.com.

Lesson Plans: Protest and Social Unrest

Lesson Plans: Radio and Communications Technology

Lesson plans: radio and communication technology

The Long-Lasting and Perpetuating Effects of Lynching Postcards and Photography

Throughout U.S. history, Black Americans have been victims of a range of violent and coercive systems, including slavery, segregation, and state-sanctioned violence, leaving enduring strains on the nation’s past and present. Among the most overt and brutal manifestations of this history was lynching, which made racial domination visible through public acts of terror. Emerging in the early nineteenth century, lynching in the United States functioned as widespread extrajudicial violence, most often carried out by White mobs against Black Americans and other marginalized groups [SH1] .^[1] These killings typically involved an accused individual being seized by a mob and publicly executed, often after prolonged torture that included burning, cutting, drowning, or shooting. Victims were frequently left hanging in public spaces as a warning to others.^[2]Such acts were routinely justified under the language of “social justice” and rarely resulted in legal consequences for perpetrators.^[3]

Dogwood trees in bloom in Dixieland, postcard. Ca. 1930

Crucially, lynching was not only enacted as violence but also staged, documented, and circulated. Many of these events were photographed, with images reproduced as postcards and distributed among White communities, extending the spectacle beyond the immediate site of the killing and embedding it within a broader visual culture of racial domination.^[4]

Since the mid-nineteenth century, photography has played a significant role in shaping popular culture and historical memory through the use of violent imagery. [SH2] During the American Civil War, photographs of battlefields and soldiers’ daily lives were widely produced to document the conflict. Yet Black soldiers, who also fought in large numbers, appear only rarely in this visual record. Instead, Black people were more often depicted as civilians attached to the military or as refugees, a pattern that reinforced racial hierarchies by presenting Black subjects in subordinate or dependent roles relative to their White counterparts.^[5]

Postcards, known as “Patriotic Covers”, started appearing at the end of the Civil War era in 1865, with portraits of White patriots to commemorate and honor them for their service and sacrifice.^[6] To most people during the late nineteenth century, postcards were a modern form of visual communiqué mainly marketed to White audiences as pictographic collectibles of important places, events, and individuals. By 1908, 677 million postcards were mailed, increasing to nearly one billion in 1913.^[7] Picture postcards became a popular visual communication medium in the United States and are often used as a tactile method to commemorate leisure outings and activities.^[8]

Photo postcard of a man seated in front of a postcard display in a souvenir shop.

Papa Jony, Farmers City, IL sitting in a store, which sold postcards. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Purchasing and collecting postcards became a way to signal taste and social identity, with the style and quality of the images reflected in the postcards people possessed, mailed, and exchanged with others.^[9]Within this broader visual culture, racialized imagery also circulated widely. Some postcards depicted Black figures deliberately darkened with ink and positioned alongside White subjects, reinforcing racial hierarchy and representations of Black inferiority.

Therefore, postcards produced and disseminated racist stereotypes, particularly through images of Black children depicted as primates or ape-like figures in degrading and stylized poses, such as eating watermelon, sitting on the ground, or walking barefoot in cotton fields.^[10] Consequently, since the 1860s, lynchings also started being photographed across the country, especially in the South. These visual depictions of racial violence were widely reproduced and sold on the streets and local shops, primarily to White southerners from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.^[11] These states, where most lynchings happened, sold postcards for an average of ten cents each, which would later be sent throughout the country to relatives who shared the same racist views.^[12] The dissemination of these postcards conveyed the message of the superiority of White individuals in the picture, who often posed in front of the camera with a grin of satisfaction.^[13] These expressions not only asserted White superiority and power but also framed Black suffering as an expected outcome for those accused of defying the dominant group, regardless of guilt.

Image from 1908 that reads: The Dogwood Tree.
This is only the branch of the Dogwood tree: An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY. A lesson once taught in the Pioneer's school. That this is a land of WHITE MAN'S RULE. The Red Man once in an early day, Was told by the Whites to mend his way. The negro, now, by eternal grace, Must learn to stay in the negro's place. In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free, Let the WHITE SUPREME, forever be. Let this a warning to all negroes be. Or they'll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE. -Pub. by Harkrider Drug Co., Center, Tex. Copyrighted. Fig. 6. "US. Postcard", 1908.

The Dogwood Tree, 1908. Credit: Without Sanctuary

In Sabine County, Texas, in 1905, the lynching of Will Manuel, Cleve Williams, Moses Spellman, Will Johnson, Jerry Evans, and a male whose last name was [SH3] identified as Williams was preserved in postcard form (See Figure above) and remains one of the few surviving examples to include pro-lynching poetry. Such postcards often featured explicit language that endorsed and reinforced White supremacy, whether through printed text or handwritten annotations. Not only did these postcards show the contemporary mindset of that time, but they also influenced future generations and their connotations of non-white people, as families often saved these postcards as memorabilia. Indeed, the writer’s supposed sense of righteousness and objectivity present in their words are material proof of their views and attitudes toward minorities and their support for a White supremacist America and the perpetual subjugation of Black people.

Public understanding of lynching remains uneven, and discussions of this history are often avoided or marginalized within broader narratives of the nation’s past.^[14] Many White Americans have the perception that extremist racist behavior in society is an issue of the past and that the nation is long past violent and racially driven crimes and behaviors.^[15] However, the legacy of lynching, and particularly its visual documentation, has influenced public policy and social attitudes, with lasting consequences for Black communities. Public lynchings continued until the mid-twentieth century, and so did the dissemination of postcards and photographs through the mail, even after the outlawing of their mailing in 1908.^[16] Presently, lynching postcards and physical souvenirs of the deceased, such as clothing items, locks of hair, and bones, can be found in family albums, attic trunks, online sales, thrift stores, pawn shops, and flea markets, with some selling for up to thousands of dollars. Therefore, this indicates that objects considered to be lynching memorabilia were frequently hidden among family possessions or discarded as a means of avoiding the law or, in contemporary times, out in society, ready for acquisition by those who actively seek the items out.^[17]

While the historical contexts differ, scholars note that visual documentation of racialized violence continues to shape public perception today. Similarly, lynching photographs have given way to “othering” of Black Americans in the US by the general population and the police force. The brutality shown in those postcards can still be seen today in the proliferation of images featuring police violence against Black people. Historically, many police forces have been “official” perpetrators of violence against African Americans in the South. In some cases, law enforcement agencies carry out a brutal and lengthy legacy of maintaining peace through state-sanctioned coercion and fearmongering among the minority population because of preconceived, racist, and stereotypical notions that are woven into the threads of American society.^[18] For example, in contemporary conversations around police body cams, the proliferation of images of police violence against Black people is evident. The evidence can tell us that this Black person is doing nothing and is not a threat, yet they are handcuffed, or worse, their lives are taken from them.^[19]

Memorial corridor at the national museum for peace and justice

Memorial Corridor at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The photographs act, still to this day, as a moment frozen in time where lynching victims were suffering at the hands of the White mob and are a permanent display of power, race, and White supremacy. Indeed, lynching photographs today stand as tokens of the most sensationalistic aspects of lynching: photographers selling torture and death through pictures and postcards for profit and spectators who bought them, sent them to friends and family, and preserved them for generations. Nevertheless, at the turn of the last century, they served as “proof” of something more; the shots photographers chose to take, develop, and sell, and how senders chose to present themselves through writing, ultimately came to visually substantiate the ideologies of White supremacy and White solidarity that both justified and incited lynching.^[20] These images have allowed racist individuals throughout time to rationalize or obscure the brutality of lynching by reframing it as social justice or civic duty. In this sense, lynching photography not only documented racial terror but also functioned as a tool of denial—reinforcing the shared narratives and symbols of the past that both celebrated White dominance and concealed the depth of Black suffering. Regardless of the era, whether it involves a lynching postcard or the killing of a Black individual at the hands of the police, visual evidence of outright violence against the Black community struggles to raise awareness of the structural problem in a society that has long been accustomed to the inequalities and subjugation of Black Americans. Treating and understanding lynching photography as historically rooted yet still active in shaping the present enables us to recognize its enduring influence on the way race is perceived. Confronting these images, therefore, is not only about acknowledging a dark past but also about addressing the ongoing structures of racism they helped create, to prevent their repetition in new forms.

Alejandro Soto Camacho is a Ph.D. student in sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his BA in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Forensic Science from North Carolina State University. Currently, his research interests are in historical and environmental sociology.

Rasul A. Mowatt is the Department Head of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management in the College of Natural Resources and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. His interests and concerns are strongly centered on critiquing society for issues that are most prevalent in impacting quality of life.

Full article link: https://www.proquest.com/openview/240faeda045d4a5bb108212017cc5541/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=5531555

References:

Brown, Kimberly J. 2024. “The Absence of Black Soldiers in Civil War Photos Speaks Volumes.” The MIT Press Reader, June 19. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/theabsence-of-Black-soldiers-in-civil-war-photos-speaks-volumes/.

Haydel, Nia Woods. 2007. “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a Case Study of a Higher Education Partnership for Social Justice Education.” PhD diss., Georgia State University. ProQuest (3301005). https://www.proquest.com/dissertationstheses/without-sanctuary-lynching-photography-america/docview/304843783/se-2.

Jordan, Meghan Lynn. 2017. “Lynching Photographs and Their Aftermath: The Overlay of the Gaze.” PhD diss., The University of Arizona. ProQuest (10622868). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/lynching-photographs-theiraftermath-overlay-gaze/docview/1966211490/se-2.

Mowatt, Rasul A. 2012. “Lynching as Leisure.” American Behavioral Scientist 56 (10): 1361– 1387. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212454429

Natividad, Ivan. 2022. “Confronting America’s Traumatic History of Lynching.” Berkeley News, June 16. https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/16/confronting-americastraumatic-history-of-lynching

O’Neill, Aaron. 2024. “Lynchings by State and Race in the U.S. 1882–1968.” Statista, February 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/.

Raiford, Leigh Renee. 2003. “‘Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare’: History, Memory, and the Photography of Twentieth-Century African American Social Movements.” PhD diss., Yale University. Pro Quest (3084356). https://www.proquest.com/dissertationstheses/imprisoned-luminous-glare-history-memory/docview/305285177/se-2.

Scott, T. A. 2015. “‘Don’t Fail to See This’: Race, Leisure, and the Transformation of Lynching in Texas.” PhD diss., The University of Chicago (3725551). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/dont-fail-see-this-race-leisuretransformation/docview/1734444871/se-2.

Staff, Frank. 1966. The Picture Postcard and Its Origins. Frederick A. Praeger.

Stewart, Amy R. 2014. “Witnessing Horror: Psychoanalysis and the Abject Horror of Lynching Photography.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 19 (4): 413–434. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.40.

Tucker, Linda. 2005. “Not Without Sanctuary: Teaching About Lynching.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 16 (1): 52–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/trajincschped.16.2.0070

Wood, Amy Louise. 2005. “Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy.” American Nineteenth Century History 6 (3): 373–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664650500381090.

^[1] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017

^[2] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017; Mowatt 2012.

^[3] Haydel 2007; Jordan 2017; Mowatt 2012.

^[4] Raiford 2003; Stewart 2014.

^[5] Brown 2024.

^[6] Brown 2024.

^[7] Scott 2015.

^[8] Scott 2015

^[9] Staff 1966.

^[10] Scott 2015.

^[11] O’Neill 2024; Scott 2015

^[12] O’Neill 2024; Scott 2015

^[13] Mowatt 2012.

^[14] Jordan 2017; Tucker 2005

^[15] Jordan 2017; Haydel 2007

^[16] Scott 2015

^[17] Jordan 2017

^[18] Raiford 2003

^[19] Natividad 2022.

^[20] Wood 2005.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Lesson Plans: The Cold War

Lesson Plans: Civil Rights and Civic Participation

What is MACRI? Meet the Organization Showcasing Mexican American Civil Rights History in San Antonio and Beyond

This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia

MACRI Executive Director Dr. Sarah Z. Gould will be at UT Austin on February 19th, 2026. You can find more information about her talk at the end of this article.

Nestled in the heart of San Antonio, Texas, just west of downtown, lies the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute (MACRI), an organization dedicated to chronicling and sharing the history of Mexican American civil rights in the United States. It lies within the field of public history, which moves history beyond university classrooms and academic journals, bringing it into museums, community spaces, and online platforms where the public can engage with it directly. On October 22, 2025, I sat down with its executive director, Dr. Sarah Zenaida Gould, to talk about the organization, its beginnings, and its mission.

“2018 and 2019, these were two big anniversary years in San Antonio,” Gould said, explaining that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Hearings had been held in December of 1968 in the city. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was established in 1957 by the federal government to address issues like discrimination that concern race, ethnicity, and culture in the United States. The 1968 hearing in San Antonio was “one of the first times that the federal government officially heard testimony about experiences of discrimination that Mexican Americans had throughout the Southwest” specifically. The hearings occurred just a few years after the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which were aimed at reducing discrimination for African Americans and set a precedent for civil rights to later be expanded to other minority groups. A conference was held in November 2018 in San Antonio to commemorate the event.

This was followed by a second conference in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the Edgewood school walkouts, an event that took place in May of 1968, when over 400 Mexican American students protested for better and more equitable education by walking out of Edgewood High School in San Antonio. The conferences were significant as people involved in both the walkouts and the commission hearings gave testimonies about their experiences and how the events got more people involved in the Chicano Movement, politics, and community activism. These back-to-back conferences reignited interest in Mexican American history and, more importantly, in how to preserve it.

For Gould, the conference was not just a spotlight on San Antonio’s Mexican American civil rights history, but also a race against time. “At the next big anniversary,” she warned, “most of those people would no longer be with us.” The question was simple and urgent: “how do you keep that history alive?” That question ultimately led to the creation of MACRI. The initial plan was just to create an exhibit that depicted Mexican American civil rights icons in San Antonio, but support from the city council, Mayor Ron Nirenberg, and the community was much more substantial than anticipated. Gould explained that it was at a cultural moment when a lot of people were thinking about equity within history. “One thing that we kept hearing from city council members and members of the public was why haven’t we had this before?”

National Farm Workers Association protest buttons. Source: Wikimedia Commons

MACRI began organizing itself with funding from the city and was officially incorporated on May 29, 2019. Gould was involved from the beginning and was asked to step into the position of Executive Director in 2020, partially to help the organization transition into a virtual space during the pandemic. This was when MACRI first began to flourish in its engagement and reach, creating a community despite everything happening in the world at the time. They began by having conversations about Mexican American civil rights in online events with historians and other experts, and noticed that over half the viewership was from outside the San Antonio area. “They were from all over,” Gould said. “That was particularly exciting.” Even when MACRI began to transition to having mostly in-person events as the pandemic eased up, they still received emails from people across the country, asking that virtual involvement remain in some form so that they could continue to participate in Mexican American history.

One of MACRI’s goals is to make San Antonio’s role as the birthplace of Mexican American civil rights to the general public. This is already happening among guests who attend MACRI’s in-person and virtual events, celebrating moments when people stood up against injustice. Gould discussed how “for so many people, this history is part of their living present moment,” as they often had a personal connection to the stories MACRI was telling. Still, others were learning about it for the first time. Nearly all wanted to learn more.

MACRI hosts a number of different events, including talks and exhibits with historians, activists, and more. These usually have themes, such as civil rights trailblazers or landmark court cases involving Mexican Americans. Their September 27 to November 26, 2025 exhibit was on Cisneros v. Corpus Christi ISD, an important civil rights case that extended school desegregation from Brown v. Board of Education to Mexican Americans. Brown occurred in 1954 and Cisneros in 1970. “So it takes a while for these things to happen,” Gould said. “You have to have those precedent-setting cases so that you can move the legislation forward.”

Gould is already planning events well into next year, which will be the 250th anniversary of the United States. The events will aim to “[make] sure we’re inserting Mexican Americans into how we understand America.” They will start with Spanish colonial Texas and will move forward in time over the course of the year. The events and exhibits will include discussions of important court cases involving due process, and in the summer of 2026 they will host screenings for the 30th anniversary of the Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement documentary series that originally aired on PBS in 1995. Gould will also be visiting a number of universities throughout the state, including the University of Texas at Austin, where she will be sharing more about what MACRI does with current students.

A man walking in the old Mexican market area just west of downtown San Antonio

In the old Mexican market area just west of downtown San Antonio. Source: Wikimedia Commons

When creating their in-person exhibits, MACRI tries to identify a scholar for whom that area of history is their subject matter expertise, whom they consult with. Their first exhibit was based on Dr. Cynthia Orosco’s biography Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S.

Perales for their trailblazers series. For the current exhibit on Cisneros, MACRI worked with Dr. Isabel Araiza at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. Their goal with each project is to make the information accessible. “The idea with most exhibits is to give people just a slice of what that is, so that they have a basic understanding,” and then if they are interested in learning more, MACRI points them to more resources.

MACRI has also done exhibits that were created through collaborations with local schools. Earlier in 2025, they did an exhibit for Dolores Huerta’s 95th birthday. Huerta is a Mexican American civil rights activist who is best known for being the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, a labor rights organization, alongside Cesar Chavez. MACRI’s exhibit on Huerta was created by sending out a call for art submissions to schools across the San Antonio area. “I have to thank the teachers whom we sent this out to, because clearly they talked to their kids about who she was,” Gould commended. “A number of them incorporated quotes from her into their artwork, and in their artist statement… You could just tell that they had been really reflecting on ‘Why does she matter to me?’ ‘Why does she matter to my family?’ ” She praised the teachers multiple times, stating that MACRI had only given them parameters and a brief synopsis of Huerta’s life, but she “could tell the teachers went above and beyond what we provided them, because the students clearly put a lot of thought into what they were drawing or painting, and connecting that to her life.” This was part of an initiative to get students more involved with history museums, which tend to cater to and attract an adult audience, unlike art and science museums. But the success of the project showed that it is far from impossible to get children to engage with history.

Gould also discussed the challenges and opportunities that working beyond academia brings. The most difficult thing she cited was the lack of infrastructure available to her and the other employees at MACRI, including things like access to research databases. But there are positives too, the most prominent of which is the freedom from constraints of university timelines. Historians who work for universities are tied to both the academic calendar and making sure they are hitting the goalposts in their careers, such as tenure review. But as a public history organization, MACRI can do things on its own time.

Still, Gould has hope for bridging the divide between the two fields. “I would love to see more collaboration between universities and people who are independent historians outside of academia,” Gould said. “Because you know, the universities do have resources that public historians could really benefit from, and public historians do have typically… connections to real grassroots-type history that could be of a benefit to students to know about.” With its exhibits, events, and media outreach, MACRI is working to bridge the gap. But to reach this goal, universities and historians within academia have to do their part to connect with public history as well. By remaining dedicated to continued collaboration between the public, academics, and everyone in between, MACRI is a model example of what these types of connections can look like, reshaping how American history is told.

Flyer for Dr. Sarah Z. Gould's talk at UT Austin. February 19, 2026, 2:30 pm at Garrison Hall 4th floor

Kara Alexandra Culp is a current history PhD student at UT Austin, focused on Latina/o history in the 20th-century United States. Her dissertation project aims to explore the effects of education policy and law on Latina/o immigrant students in the borderlands in the 1970s and beyond.

Sarah Zenaida Gould, interview with author. October 22, 2025.

Review of Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City 1940-1977 (2022).

banner for Puerto Rican Chicago book review

In Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City 1940-1977, Mirelsie Velázquez provides an eye-opening account of Puerto Ricans’ relationship to colonialism and education as they migrated to the city of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century. The book presents a thorough examination of how these migrants built and fought for a community through the lens of K-12 and postsecondary education systems, showing how colonial education policies and principles followed Puerto Ricans in their schooling across the United States. It fits well within the literature of Latino education history, specifically involving civil rights, alongside books like Brown Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston by Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., while also providing an important contribution to the growing field of Latino studies in the Midwest, and it aims to bring public schools into the discussion as a transformative force in the region.

The book is shaped by the author’s experiences as a Puerto Rican woman who spent her formative years in Illinois and now teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Velázquez states that intersectionality (the interconnectedness of different social categories which lead to discrimination) “of schools, oppression, and liberation” was a guiding influence for the diasporic Puerto Rican community and argues that its history cannot be separated from its relationship to colonialism (p.19). She uses this to analyze the intersection of concepts such as Coloniality of Power (the understanding of power structures that remain after decolonization) to diaspora studies as well as urban history, as the Puerto Rican communities she studies only formed in the large cities of New York and Chicago.

Book cover of Puerto Rican Chicago (2022).

Puerto Rican Chicago is the product of archival and oral history methodology. Velázquez notes that a challenge she encountered was the silences in primary sources directly depicting Puerto Ricans during the early decades of their mass migration. This created gaps in the narrative “from the community’s own voices,” something she skillfully supplemented with oral interviews (p. 20). The strength of her use of the archives is found in her sources from the 1960s—discussed most heavily in chapter five—which delves into print media produced by and for Puerto Ricans in their own words. The methods she uses shape her argument that schools were an essential place of the community fighting against inequality by providing the personal reasons and motivations behind their actions.

The author emphasizes the connectedness of Puerto Rican civil rights movements in Chicago to other cities and movements by other groups, including African Americans and Chicanos. She depicts the Chicago community as intricately connected to New York City, both as a legacy of migration and an ongoing relationship that tied the two communities together through familial relations, organizations like the Young Lords, and print media. By placing her own findings within the context of existing literature on New York’s Puerto Rican communities and other civil rights movements, especially those where African Americans and Chicanos fought for their right to a just education, she further solidifies this connection.

Midway of Riverview Park, Chicago. Ca. 1950s or 1960s

Midway of Riverview Park, Chicago ca. 1950s-1960s. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Velázquez frames her study as an effort to center women and their activism, but the source material she draws on more often reveals the limits placed on women’s participation in community organizing, a limitation she herself acknowledges. For example, even Que Ondee Sola, a newspaper that she states was notable for its inclusion of women, did not include the depiction of women as part of its mission, nor were women “equally represented on the writing staff” (p. 149). This also remains true for the women depicted in the involvement of schools, who were exceptions to the rule rather than the norm. Her argument could have been strengthened by reframing her claim to emphasize that women’s involvement was silenced even by their contemporaries as it aligns more with the information she presents on women’s sidelining in their participation in community organizing and activism.

The book is organized into five chapters. Chapters One and Two discuss Puerto Ricans’ historical relationship with colonial schooling and argue that the school system in Chicago is a continuation of Americanizing practices. In both, she discusses that schools were a reflection of the community’s struggles with issues of adequate housing and labor. She also creates a cyclical narrative of how Puerto Ricans adjusted to the city, how the city responded to them, and how the group reacted to their systematic treatment. Chapters Three and Four focus on school systems, with the first depicting community involvement in K-12 public schools and the latter on universities. Velázquez stresses the importance of student involvement in both, as students and their communities fought for adequate services and against discriminatory practices. Chapter Five discusses Puerto Rican newspapers and journals in Chicago and across the country, which highlighted community voices and needs with varying degrees of radicality.

Paseo Boricua in Chicago. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As debates over education and immigration continue to shape American politics, understanding the fight for civil rights in the nation’s public schools remains essential. Puerto Rican Chicago is an important contribution to the intersection of education, immigration, and cultural history, all in the burgeoning field of Latinos in the Midwest. It is also a beautiful exploration of the strength of the Puerto Rican immigrant community building in the face of systemic oppression, which in their case uniquely stems from the United States in both their place of origin as citizens of a U.S. territory and their destination as migrants to Chicago. The book can easily find a home on immigration, Latino, and education history syllabi, as well as on the bookshelf of anyone who has faced their own experiences with the U.S. education system as part of a diaspora. As this book importantly reminds us, Americanization is something that is constantly occurring in U.S. schools, a continuing legacy of colonialism and empire. But it is not the unstoppable force that it strives to be.

Review of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City

Many history books share a lie, not their entirety but a still crucial aspect. They strut and pretend to speak from an authoritative state, authors who know that even a few hundred pages on a topic cannot encompass the multitudes of contexts and perspectives or even the fullness of their research. Pride is often integral to their presentation. Otherwise, what is the point of their existence? And yet, a rebuttal, adjustment, or an alternate take is always in the offing.

Michael Engelhard’s No Place Like Nome is a highbrow raconteur of a read meant for a layperson, though any scholar of Alaska will recognize the significant research underpinnings. Not quite a historical account or an anthropological study, it is instead a woven narrative that seeks to define the Alaska town through snapshots. And it is an honest book for it.

Book cover for Review of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City

Each of us operates within our various spheres with imperfect knowledge. At best, we possess limited understandings of other people, other systems, and even ourselves. At our worst, there is the utter absence of knowledge, ignorance of context and cultures. Of course, there is no other choice, no other reality to this world. “I don’t know” is the truest sentence ever written, uttered, or thought.

More than most towns, Nome exists partly as myth, particularly as a place understood by the outsider. It is a million things at once to different people at different times. Tall tales from the Gold Rush mix with ancient indigenous culture and the mundanity of everyday modern life. There is no real divide between the present and the past, only shifting quantities of each in uneasy proportions, a weight shifting by moments and preferences. There was indeed gold in the beaches. Dogs of legend like Baldy and Balto and Togo ran here. John Wayne and Willem Dafoe pretended to live here. And there are also people struggling to find proper warm clothing, to scrape a living off the land without time to wonder about how the saloon dancehall ladies did what they did.

Engelhard explicitly acknowledges this uncertainty and does not pretend to a single Nome. Books of that ilk already exist, focused monographs in great numbers and more on their way. In his own words, “I am offering much material of less than earthshaking significance simply to fill in the colors of the personal, the idiosyncratic, or the purely eccentric that too rarely enliven anthropological and historical reconstructions.”

Picture of Eskimo high kick during the July 4th, 1915 celebrations — *Eskimo high kick during the July 4th, 1915 celebrations.*
*Library of Congress*

The book’s structure abandons the timeline, bouncing back and forth across the years, between seemingly unrelated topics that share only a geographic proximity. A chapter about the prevalence of jade abuts a yarn about an Italian airship’s demise. A Jesuit priest organizes a football game on King Island, introducing the sport to the middle of the Bering Sea. Locals hunt for precious qiviut (muskox wool).

To be sure, widely recognized characters make passing appearances, from lawman turned saloon proprietor Wyatt Earp to prospector turned author Rex Beach to musher turned Serum Run hero Leonhard Seppala. Bars and gold eventually appear in any sufficiently lengthy Nome narrative, no matter any authorial intent for originality. But there are also fossils, wars ranging from Indigenous to international, drumming, bicycles, and herbalism—both past and contemporary.

Picture of Placer mining on Glacier Creek. — *Placer mining on Glacier Creek, 1910.*
*Library of Congress*

Each section is revelatory in its own way, some admittedly more than others. Nome and its gold rush will be more familiar to the average reader than Nome and its reindeer velvet trade. But prospectors and quack male virility supplements exemplify legitimate aspects of this remote outpost. Engelhard willfully ambles through these legacies, histories, cultural detritus, and ongoing capitalistic affairs, revealing the place in much the same way as a literal stroll through the community might. Revelations come in pieces, glances, and curiosities. It is a humble, deeply human approach, denying the possibility of a singular take, offering entertainment and more than occasional enlightenment.

Honesty is neither perfection nor utility, and disparate sampling is not for everyone. Baggage-laden personages, such as missionary educator Sheldon Jackson, photographer Edward Curtis, and geologist-filmmaker Bernard Hubbard, pass uncritically through the narrative. Their relative failings, from cultural genocide to base exploitation, are left to other texts, which is perhaps the intent. The consumer has their choice, between more targeted interventions or the wandering trail laid down by No Place Like Nome.

All books on Alaska must plot their course in relation to the mythos of the territory, whether to accept, contradict, or, more rarely, acknowledge that perception and reality are intimately linked. This choice is particularly relevant in a place like Nome, a town surrounded by older cultures but more often regarded as a relic of a gold rush peak that ended over a century ago. In this way, Engelhard accomplishes what few others have achieved, bridging the lore of a romantically distant Alaska city with the grittier reality of trying to live in an actual place.

David Reamer is a public and academic historian in Anchorage, Alaska. He is the author of a weekly column for the Anchorage Daily News and co-author of the 2022 Black Lives in Alaska.

Converging Roads: Researching and Working at the Forty Acres

I learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Café near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project. I was sad about this not because I miss the food—the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste. My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the fact that the Star Seeds Café had been at the nexus of important professional and personal roads for me since my early 20s. And I have never attended the University of Texas as a student or lived in Austin. This requires some explanation…

I am a professional historian. I’ve taught at Portland State University in Oregon, down the highway at Texas A&M University, and, since last fall, have begun what I expect will be my final faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin. So this is an interesting time for me, one of reflection. At the age of 54 after more than three decades of a professional career studying U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history at these other institutions, these days I find myself spending a good deal of time learning how things work at my new university, where to go, and building relationships with a lot of new folks in and out of Garrison Hall.

Picture of Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin — *Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

As exciting as it is, this newness can also be humbling. For example, I participated in a faculty orientation process before fall classes began. This old dog was eager to learn new tricks. In those training sessions I distinctly remember a presenter chuckling about the first time they experienced the “passing period.” I had no idea why everyone thought this was funny, though context clues told me it involved students leaving class early. Oh well, I thought, each school has its own traditions. I resolved to be on the lookout for this so-called passing period on my teaching schedule, did not see it, and felt relieved—too bad for all those other suckers whose classes abutted this mysterious time! And then on my first day, I found out what it really was and how class times really worked. I had a chuckle…this time at myself. I’ve had additional little, surprising revelations in my new job, none of them quite so foolish. This is all a part of joining a new university, a universal experience for all faculty. And yet, I am in a slightly different position in that I’ve known this place in an entirely different context for decades. In fact, I’ve been coming to the University of Texas at Austin (and the Star Seeds Café) for over 30 years. The road to my historical research runs through this place.

As a historian of U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history, I have visited libraries and other archival repositories all over the country, though none so often and so deeply as the places of learning on this campus. The products of this research are my published books and essays. My first major research project, an extension of my Rice University dissertation, was a study of education policy and bilingualism in Texas schools. This resulted in some published essays in academic journals as well as a book, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M Press, 2004). My next major project was a biography of the famed University of Texas educator and civil rights advocate, Dr. George I. Sánchez, whose name graces UT’s College of Education building. That project resulted in another book, George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration (Yale University Press, 2014). All told I’ve authored over 20 essays in books, journals, or magazines and edited one other book, but it is those two major projects that have cemented my longstanding connection to this university and the treasures in its libraries. In all this work I find hidden, obscured voices of the past and bring them to light; I study not just conflict and injustice, but also the passion and joy that infuse those who try to make their worlds better places; I connect the dots between past and present, always believing that our shared future can be positively shaped by studying our shared past. It’s hard not to feel romantic about that mission! For years now, I have experienced those feelings whenever I conduct research. And I’ve had many of those feelings here on the 40 acres.

Book cover for The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas

I find research highly personal. I form a strong emotive connection to the places it takes me. Whether I am spending a week or two in Sleepy Hollow, New York to work in the General Education Board papers, in Nashville, Tennessee to work in the Julius Rosenwald Fund papers, in Pasadena, California at the beautiful Huntington Library, or College Park, Maryland’s mammoth National Archives II facility, each place I visit leaves an imprint. For example, the panoptical monitoring in the reading room at the Rockefeller Archives with constant reminders about breaking the rules of how many pages one can access on one’s desk or how folders are filed back in their containers are as vivid to me as are the New York-style pies from The Horsman, the neighborhood pizzeria, and its views of the spectacular Hudson River. And that was two decades ago.

As a historian with my particular interests in Texas and Mexican American history, most of the sources I need, however, are in Austin and, more specifically, in the libraries here at UT. I started doing work at the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) in 1993-94 working on my history MA at nearby Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (now Texas State University) where I researched the history of higher education expansion in Texas during the 1960s. In the second half of the 1990s my PhD research at Rice University on bilingual education in Texas involved exploring the university’s archival holdings, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Barker Texas History Center (now the Briscoe Center for American History), and the Benson Latin American Center. Since then I have continued to visit these archival repositories (and others in town) for biographical research on the University of Texas faculty member Dr. George I. Sánchez and for other projects.

So UT Austin has been an integral part of my professional life for decades now. What was all this time on campus like? It had a monotonous rhythm that, I’m sure, must seem tedious to anyone without a passion for history. These trips for the past three decades have entailed staying at several hotels, but most often at the I-35 Rodeway Inn near campus for a week or two at a time. This was usually during the summer months. On these trips I would get up early, scarf down a heavy breakfast knowing that I would work through lunch, and hustle across Dean Keaton Street to the Benson, Brisco, or LBJ archives to begin the day’s work as soon as they opened. I worked non-stop until closing time near 5:00 PM.

What scholars actually do in archives might seem mysterious. It’s not really. My day typically involved sifting through hundreds of pages of old documents, including old carbon copies of letters on onionskin paper. Unfortunately this work creates for me a wave of allergy-related ailments ranging from cold-like symptoms to uncomfortable skin rashes. It is a small price to pay for learning about the past as I see it. I try my best to ameliorate the expected physical response by daily prophylactic antihistamine doping, an obsessive regime of handwashing every hour or more, using gloves and masks, and a habit (learned the hard way) of not touching my face with my hands or fingers while handling documents. It may sound like odd workplace behavior, but I’ve often thought of this as equivalent to a professional athlete’s pre-game stretching and taping rituals or a singer’s voice exercises. It is necessary to get the job done. It is a built-in cost rather than a burden.

After being kicked out of the archives at closing time, I would seek an early dinner (and an urgent one due to having skipped lunch) at nearby eateries, which frequently involved the now extinct Star Seeds Café. After dinner I would walk around campus to stretch my legs. Since most of my research happened in the summer, this meant sweltering walks in athletic gear with copious amounts of sunscreen in a mostly empty University of Texas campus. These post-workday walks were solitary. I wandered campus lost in thought about what I learned that day and how it could inform the larger project.

When I was working on the Sánchez biography, I would walk past the education building bearing his name, touch the plaque, and sometimes have a few silent moments in which I reflected about the remarkable human being I was studying who taught oversubscribed courses to decades of UT students all while running his department and quietly organizing groundbreaking civil rights efforts (and suffering consequences for it) from his office in Sutton Hall. My long day of allergy-related symptoms that ended with quiet reflection on hot concrete seemed like a small lift next to Sánchez’s herculean burdens. After these walks, I placed an evening call to my girlfriend who eventually became my spouse and in time these calls also involved our growing children. They punctuated a very long day and lead to a much-needed sleep to prepare for another similarly long day. I can still remember one evening during a two-week research trip in the late 1990s having an evening cheeseburger and a Shiner Bock (or a few…) at the Star Seeds while reading a monograph on early 20^th century anarcho-syndicalism along the U.S.-Mexico border by the dimmed, neon light of the bar. In that moment I was as happy as a lark, doing what I loved, though with enough self-awareness to realize I must have seemed a weird sight to the other bar patrons, who left me to my book.

*A plaque at the entrance to the George I Sánchez Building, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

However, these trips to Austin and the University of Texas contained much-needed moments in which the world outside of work joyfully broke up my owlish solitude. In the first half of the 1990s, for example, after my visits to the PCL, I would spend time with a dear cousin. We would have the kind of long chats about life that are such a part of being in one’s early 20s. In those days I also would visit a high school friend who happened to be a Longhorn football player. On one occasion this resulted in my tagging along with some very large guys to a country dance hall off of Ben White Boulevard, one of my few ventures into the famed Austin nightlife. That was fun! By the 2000s I was more personally settled. My Austin trips brought me to visit family who had moved to the area—tias, tios, and primos—at lovely dinners they provided for their vagabond relative temporarily living in a hotel near the interstate. We traded family stories and I would listen, especially to the older generations, to their lived experiences of the very things I was reading about in the archives that day.

Book cover for George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration

My sense of this campus and city is, in part, also an idealized connection. As the center for intellectual and cultural life in this state, Austin always had a special meaning for me even going back to when I was an aspiring, wannabe teen intellectual living a small South Texas town. And my academic research has always felt as if it were tapping into different parts of my personal history. Going through letters written by a young Lyndon Johnson in the 1920s about teaching Mexican American children at a segregated school brought to mind my mother and her family and the stories they told me. They would have gone to the same kinds of schools from their ranches, farms, and towns in the South Texas brush country of that era; they also would have been as unknowledgeable of the English language as young Lyndon’s students in Cotulla, Texas. For my biography of George I. Sánchez, I could not but help to compare his life and choices to my own as his work gradually revealed itself to me over many years of going through his manuscript collection at the Benson Latin American Center. I even caught myself using his own rhetorical flourishes in my daily emails!

All those experiences, the jumbling of my personal and professional selves that are so firmly rooted to this university, have now evolved. In my early 50s I find myself no longer on the outside looking into an idealized UT, but on the inside looking out in a very real and now lived-in space. Being here regularly means a different kind of connection. Now I can feel the bustle of the university when the students are going to and from class (in the passing period, of course). I now teach my classes and attend meetings in the very buildings that I once only knew as exteriors from my middle-of-summer, sweaty, evening hikes. And I now notice how many things have changed since the 1990s: the campus is more walkable, but less drivable than it once was; the massive Jester parking lot has been replaced by an art museum bearing my surname (no relation); and for the first time ever I got to actually go up “The Tower” for a reception. It was a revelation after so many years staring at it from the outside wondering what it was like on the inside. I am making all-new personal connections to this place, which remains the site of so much of the intellectual odyssey that led me here. My excitement at having new colleagues and students is only enhanced by my sense of how they are deepening and expanding upon those existing memories.

The 40 acres is a special place. For me, it’s a site both familiar and unknown—one that I’m constantly rediscovering as my roads of personal and professional discovery merge in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Sadly I’ll be having these new experiences without the Star Seeds Café, but I’m sure there is plenty more to discover on the converging road ahead.

Dr. Carlos Kevin Blanton is the Barbara White Stuart Professor of Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of History. Blanton’s books and articles involve the intersection of Chicana/o history with education, civil rights, immigration, politics, and Texas history. His George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2014) won the NACCS Best Book Award; The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004) won the TSHA’s Tulls Award; and the article “The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952” in the Western Historical Quarterly (2009) won the WHA’s Bolton-Cutter Award. He has edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (Texas 2016) and published additional articles in professional journals such as the Journal of Southern History, the Pacific Historical Review, the Teacher’s College Record, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and Texas Monthly. Carlos holds a 1999 PhD from Rice University, a 1995 MA from Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University in San Marcos), and a 1993 BA from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University-Kingsville). He has held faculty positions at Portland State University (1999-2001) and at Texas A&M University, College Station (2001-2024) before joining the University of Texas at Austin community in the fall of 2024.

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