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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Our New History Ph.D.s

For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History.  So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class of new UT Austin History PhDs and tell you a little about them and their work.

Each of these students completed at least two years of course work. They read hundreds of books and wrote dozens of papers to prepare for their comprehensive examinations. After that, they developed original research projects to answer questions no one had asked before. Then they did a year or so of research in libraries and archives, before sitting down to write their dissertations. They did all this while working, teaching, caring for their families, having at least a little fun, and, in some cases, writing for Not Even Past!

Here they are, with their dissertation titles (and abstracts, if we have them). CONGRATULATIONS DOCTORS!

Sandy Chang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Florida
“Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s”

Across the South Seas explores the migration of Chinese women who embarked on border-crossing journeys, arriving in British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Between the 1870s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women traveled to the Peninsula at a time when modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial exclusion, curtailing Asian mobility into white settler colonies and nation-states. In colonial Malaya, however, Chinese women encountered a different set of racial, gender, and sexual politics at the border and beyond. Based on facilitation rather than exclusion, colonial immigration policies selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement across the Peninsula. Weaving together histories of colonial sexual economy, Chinese migration, and the globalization of border control, this study foregrounds the role of itinerant women during Asia’s mobility revolution. It argues that Chinese women’s intimate labor ultimately served as a crucial linchpin that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia.

Sandy Chang on Not Even Past:
Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

Itay Eisinger
“The Dystopian Turn In Hebrew Literature”

From its inception in Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement promoted, leveraged and drove forward a utopian plan for a Jewish national revival, in the biblical Land of Israel, and in essence framed these plans as a pseudo divine right of the Jewish people. Numerous intellectual, cultural and literary historians therefore have focused on the role of utopian thinking in the shaping of Zionist ideology and Hebrew literature. By way of contrast, this dissertation focuses on the transformation, or evolution, of dystopian poetics within the realm of modern Hebrew literature. … Recent scholarship argues that while early “totalitarian” dystopias tended to focus on the dangers of the all-powerful state, tyranny, and global isolation as the main sources of collective danger to a prosperous and peaceful future, more recently published dystopias – both in the West and in Israel – have moved their focus to other topics and hazards, such as catastrophic ecological or climate disasters, patriarchy, sexism and misogyny, and the rise of surveillance and the integration of the  intelligence community into the all-powerful well-oiled capitalist machine. While I do not disavow such arguments completely, I argue that most Israeli dystopias are still driven primarily by the traditional depiction of an authoritarian-fascist regime run amok – in alignment with the Huxley-Orwell model – while at the same time, explore creatively a vision of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s prediction in 1967 that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably force Israel to become a “police state.” … I examine the common themes found in these novels, including the dystopian depiction of an instrumentalization of the Shoah and manipulative abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to promote political agendas, allusions to the nakba, the over-militarism and nationalism of the state, the effects of the Occupation on Israeli society, and Israel’s neoliberal revolution…. By examining these novels from this perspective, and creating a dialogue between these works and different critical scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to the study of Israel by rethinking its history – through the prism of dystopia.

Itay Eisinger on Not Even Past:
Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

Carl Forsberg, 2019-2020 Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale’s International Security Studies Program and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. 
“A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: The Transformation Of The US-Middle East Alliance System In The 1970s”

This dissertation charts the agency of Arab, Iranian, and US elites in transforming the structure of Middle Eastern regional politics and constructing a coalition that persists to the present.  In the decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the regimes of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, and Shah Mohamad Reza Pahlavi in Iran set out to overturn the legacy of Nasserism and Arab socialism.  Animated by a common fear that their internal opposition gained strength from a nexus of Soviet subversion and the transnational left, these regimes collaboratively forged a new regional order built around the primacy of state interests and the security of authoritarian rule.  They instrumentally manipulated a range of US-led peace processes, including Arab-Israeli negotiations, US-Soviet détente, and conciliation between Iran and its Arab neighbors to advance their diplomatic counter-revolution.  US administrations at times resisted these efforts because they read the region through the polarities of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  After the 1973 War, however, the opportunity to marginalize Soviet influence in the region proved too enticing for US officials to ignore.  My project deploys multi-lingual research conducted in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, and the US.  To overcome the lack of open state archives in Arab countries, the dissertation examines US, British, Iranian, and Israeli records of discussions with Arab leaders, as well as memoirs, periodicals, and speeches in Farsi and Arabic, to triangulate the strategies and covert negotiations of Arab regimes.

Celeste Ward Gventer, Post-doc, The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
“Defense Reorganization For Unity: The Unified Combatant Command System, The 1958 Defense Reorganization Act And The Sixty-Year Drive For Unity In Grand Strategy And Military Doctrine”

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles at the White House in 1956

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why, in 1958 and as part of the Defense Reorganization Act (DRA) passed that year, did U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower remove the chiefs of the military services from the chain of operational command and instead empower the so-called “unified combatant commands” to lead American military forces in war? The answer, this dissertation will argue, is that Eisenhower had found himself competing with his military service chiefs for his entire first administration and the first half of his second over national (grand) strategy and military doctrine. Taking those service chiefs out of the chain of operational command would, in effect, diminish the role of those officers. Eisenhower had found that simply getting rid of refractory officers was insufficient to quiet their rebellion: only by suppressing their role permanently in the bureaucracy did he hope to unify American strategy- and policy-making. This interpretation is at odds with the few accounts of the 1958 DRA that do exist, which tend to take Eisenhower’s stated purposes—to enhance “unity of command”—at face value. The circumstances that led Eisenhower to take this step were decades, if not longer, in the making. … The situation resulted from the inherent pluralism in American military policy making … it was also a product of the decades that preceded Eisenhower’s administration during which the American military was consistently forced to “fill in the blanks” of national strategy. What drove matters to a head in the 1950s was the steady growth of American power after the 1898 Spanish-American War and, especially, after the Second World War. It is necessary to also appreciate several legacies Eisenhower confronted and that colored his own views: the history of American military thinking about command and about civilian control; the creation of military staffs and the process of reform and professionalization inside the military services during the twentieth century; and the development of independent service doctrines. … This work will trace these conceptual threads over the sixty-year rise of the United States to a global power, culminating in Eisenhower’s standoff with his service chiefs in the 1950s.

Lauren Henley, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
“Constructing Clementine: Murder, Terror, and the (Un)Making of Community in the Rural South, 1900-1930”

Deirdre Lannon, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
“Ruth Mary Reynolds And The Fight For Puerto Rico’s Independence”

Ruth Mary Reynolds (Women in Peace)

This dissertation is a biography of Ruth Mary Reynolds, a pacifist from the Black Hills of South Dakota who after moving to New York City became involved in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence…. She bucked the social norms of her conservative hometown to join the Harlem Ashram…. Her work within the Ashram connected her to the web of leftist coalition activism launched by the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 1940s, and to A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for black equality. She became involved with organized pacifism, most notably through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and her close friendship with its U.S. leader, Dutch-born theologian A.J. Muste. In 1944, Ruth decided to make the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence her own. She helped form a short-lived organization, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence, which was supported by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck among others. She became close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos and his family, as well as other Puerto Rican independence activists. She traveled to Puerto Rico, and in 1950 found herself swept into the violence that erupted between the government and Albizu Campos’s followers. Her experiences in New York and Puerto Rico offer a unique lens into the ways in which the Puerto Rican independence movement functioned, and how it was quashed through governmental repressions. Her friendship with Pedro Albizu Campos, the fiery independentista who remains a figurehead of Puerto Rican identity and pride, helps to humanize the man behind the mission. Ruth never abandoned her friend, or their shared cause. She fought for Albizu Campos to be freed, bucking the climate of repression during McCarthyism. This dissertation traces her efforts until 1965, when Albizu Campos died. She remained an active part of the Puerto Rican independence movement until her own death in 1989.

Holly McCarthy
“The Iraq Petroleum Company In Revolutionary Times”

Signe Fourmy, Visiting Research Affiliate, Institute for Historical Studies and Education Consultant, Humanities Texas.
“They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”

“They Chose Death Over Slavery,” … examines enslaved women’s acts of infanticide as maternal resistance. Enslaved women occupied a unique position within the slaveholding household. As re/productive laborers, enslavers profited from work women performed in the fields and house, but also from the children they birthed and raised. I argue that enslaved women’s acts of maternal violence bear particular meaning as a rejection of enslavers’ authority over their reproduction and a reflection of the trauma of enslavement. This dissertation identifies and analyzes incidents of infanticide, in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri. Using a comparative approach to consider geographic location and household size—factors that shaped the lived experiences of the enslaved—I ask what, if any, patterns existed? What social, economic, and political considerations influenced pivotal legal determinations—including decisions to prosecute, punish, or pardon these women? Expanding on the work of Laura Edwards and Paul Finkelman, I argue that public prosecution and legal outcomes balanced community socio-legal interests in enforcing the law while simultaneously protecting slaveowners profiting from their (re)productive labor. The existing scholarship on slavery, resistance, and reproduction shows that enslaved women were prosecuted for infanticide, yet the only book-length studies of enslaved women and infanticide center on one sensationalized case involving Margaret Garner. Infanticide was more prevalent than the secondary literature suggests. Building upon the work of historians Darlene Clark Hine and Jennifer L. Morgan, I explore how enslaved women re-appropriated their reproductive capacity as a means of resistance. In conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, Sasha Turner, and Marisa Fuentes, I ask what this particular type of violence reveals about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives. Additionally, I explore what these acts of maternal violence reveal about enslaved motherhood—or more specifically an enslaved woman’s decision not to mother her child.

Signe Fourmy on Not Even Past:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor

Sean Killen
“South Asians and the Creation of International Legal Order, c. 1850-c. 1920: Global Political Thought and Imperial Legal Politics”

This dissertation argues that South Asians used international legal discourse both for ideological disputation and to mount political challenges to the domination and subjugation that accompanied British imperial rule between roughly 1850 and 1920. South Asians instigated political and legal disputes in India and Britain, throughout the empire, and overseas, and gained promises and partial concessions to Indian opinions and demands that limited British options in imperial and international relations. In so doing, they compelled the British state to alter the ideology, the policies, and the practices of the state, in India and in its relations with other states both within and outside the empire. Britain’s power, ultimately, meant that South Asians’ argumentation and actions shaped the contours of global order after the First World War….Traditional histories of international law argue that international law originated in Europe and regulated European states’ relations until colonized states were granted international legal recognition at the time of decolonization. Recent revisionist scholarship argues that the existence and experience of empire and colonial rule shaped the development of international law and global order throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation approaches empire in a way that emphasizes the global exchange of ideas and the active connections between colonizers and the colonized. Elite, English-speaking South Asians acted as cultural translators or intermediaries. They engaged in debates as public intellectuals, and they carved out spaces for themselves in the social and political communities that created public opinion. Consequently, South Asians’ ideas about relations among different peoples and between states, and South Asians’ mobilization of these ideas throughout the empire and overseas to make political claims about the obligations of the imperial state and the rights of imperial subjects shaped ideas about global order and the structure of international legal relations.

Jimena Perry, Teaching Instructor, East Carolina University
“Trying to Remember: Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia, 2000-2014”

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia.

Since the turn of the century, not only museum professionals but grassroots community leaders have undertaken the challenge of memorializing the Colombian armed conflict of the 1980s to the early 2000s. In an attempt to confront the horrors of the massacres, forced displacement, bombings, and disappearances, museums and exhibitions have become one of the tools used to represent and remember the brutalities endured. To demonstrate how historical memories are informed by cultural diversity, my dissertation examines how Colombians remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the countryʼs internal war.  The chapters of this work delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and represent at the National Museum of the country.  The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their particular way of remembering, which emphasizes their peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. Bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, my work contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. In addition, my case studies exemplify why it is necessary to hear the multiple voices of conflict survivors, especially in a country with a long history of violence like Colombia. Drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, I study how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. My work also analyzes museums and displays as arbiters of social memory. It asks how representations of violence serve in processes of transitional justice and promotion of human rights for societies that have been racked by decades of violence.

Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:
When Answers Are Not Enough: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
More Than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellin, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig
History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogatá, Colombia
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Christina Villareal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Resisting Colonial Subjugation: The Search for Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803”

This dissertation is a history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, it traces the physical movement of Native Americans, soldiers, and African and indigenous slaves who fled conscription, reduction to Catholic missions, or enslavement in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands of the eighteenth century. It reconstructs geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of the dissertation is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the dissertation. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Native Americans, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.

Christina Villareal on Not Even Past
The War on Drugs: How the US and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullusa and Mike Wallace

Andrew Weiss
“The Virgin and The Pri: Guadalupanismo And Political Governance In Mexico, 1945-1979”

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and political governance in Mexico from 1945 until 1979 through the lens of Guadalupanismo. Guadalupanismo (devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe) is a unifying nationalistic force in Mexico. After 1940, Church and state collaborated to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe as a nationalist emblem following decades of divisive state-led religious persecution. Mexico, however, remained officially anticlerical sociopolitical territory. I analyze flashpoints of Guadalupan nationalism to reveal the history of Mexican Church-state relations and Catholic religiosity. These episodes are: the 1945 fiftieth anniversary of the 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe; the construction of the New Basilica in the 1970s (inaugurated in 1976); and Pope John Paul II’s trip to Mexico and the Basilica in 1979. Each of these occasions elicited great popular enthusiasm and participation in public ritual. And each brought politicians in contact with the third rail in Mexican politics: religion. The essential value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as I show, is that as both a Catholic and a nationalistic icon, she represented an ideal symbolic terrain for the renegotiation and calibration of Church-state relations under PRI rule. I follow these Guadalupan episodes to track the history of Guadalupanismo and interpret the changing Church-state relationship at different junctures in the course of the single-party priísta regime. These junctures (1945, 1962, 1976, and 1979) are relevant because they are representative of classical and degenerative phases of priísmo (the ideology of the ruling party [PRI] that governed Mexico from 1929 until 2000) and cover the episcopates of three major figures who ran the Archdiocese of Mexico for over sixty years. The Church-state covenant was renegotiated over time as seen by the Guadalupan episodes I analyze.

Andrew Weiss on Not Even Past
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey

Pictured above (Clockwise from top center): Sandy Chang, Andrew Weiss, Deirdre Lannon, Jimena Perry, Celeste Ward Gventer, Christina Villareal, Itay Eisinger.
Not pictured: Signe Fourmy, Lauren Henley, Sean Killen, Holly McCarthy, Carl Forsberg,

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past.  Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)


Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows (1998)

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)


Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

 

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

 

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008) 

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring

By Jonathan Parker

Fifty years ago Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague.  Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces entered Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, and within two days occupied the entire country. The Soviet Union and its allies had decided that the reformist experiment, “socialism with a human face,” in communist Czechoslovakia was too dangerous, and might provoke a wave of democratization across the Eastern Bloc. When the tanks came in August 1968, thousands of Czechoslovaks were abroad in western Europe and the U.S., taking advantage of recent visa liberalizations to go on vacation and do business. Once it became clear in the days after the invasion that the “normalized” regime would return to the old days of communist repression and isolation, many decided not to go home, instead opting to seek asylum where they were. Before long the U.S. and its allies were beset by refugees from Czechoslovakia, fleeing the imposition of what would become one of the most brutal, authoritarian, and isolationist regimes in the Communist Bloc. How did the U.S. and its allies respond to this wave of political and economic refugees?

Men carrying national flag while a Soviet tank burns during the Prague Spring. (via Wikipedia)

This story begins with a telegram sent from the U.S. mission in Geneva, Switzerland, to Washington D.C. sometime in August after the invasion. The telegram notes the presence of “several thousand” Czechoslovak citizens abroad. It then requests instructions from D.C. on how to handle the situation, as most of these citizens are expected to seek asylum. It also recommends that the U.S. commit up to $100,000, nearly three quarters of a million dollars in today’s money, in order to “insure needs [of] asylum seekers [are] adequately met.” The main concern of the message was not to keep people out or send them back to Czechoslovakia, but to meet the needs of the refugees, presumably granting as many of them asylum as possible.

Walt Rostow (vie Wikipedia)

A couple of weeks later at the start of September, then President Lyndon Baines Johnson exchanged a flurry of memos with his advisers, in particular Walt Whitman Rostow. A staunch anti-communist and right-wing economist, Rostow advised the president, in a memo dated September 4 to allocate $20 million (about $145 million adjusted for inflation) to pay the costs of “reception, interim care and maintenance, resettlement processing, transportation, [and] integration.” He also notes that the refugees will be shared out among American allies, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, while Germany and Austria will take the majority, indicating that there was significant international cooperation on this issue. Most interestingly, Rostow appeals to “our national heritage, our traditional humanitarian role, and our foreign policy interests” to make the case for accepting and resettling refugees. This rhetoric obviously stands in stark contrast to contemporary attitudes and policies in many of these same governments. Rostow also prepared a draft statement for the President that would have had the President saying “I declare that our doors are open as they always are to those who seek freedom.”

However it seems that this statement was only the first draft, and subsequent drafts toned down the “open door” message substantially while still stating that the U.S. government will still make provisions for the “orderly entry, in accordance with our immigration laws, of those Czechoslovak refugees who desire to come to the United States.” Nevertheless, the administration confirmed that they would spend money to process and resettle Czechoslovak refugees.

A Photo of Czech Children in front of a Bandstand in the United States (via Immigrationtous.net)

While the current administration has adopted a violently combative stance in reaction to migration into the United States (including not only policies implemented at the U.S.-Mexico border, but also the blanket ban on travelers from several predominately Muslim countries), fifty years ago the U.S. government was planning to spend a significant amount of government funding to process and accommodate refugees from Soviet-style communism. The President’s advisors explicitly argued for this policy not just on cynical, “Cold Warrior” grounds, but also out of a sense of American history and tradition. Johnson and his advisors saw this policy as the American thing to do to welcome refugees fleeing violence, at least in the context of the Cold War in Soviet-dominated Europe. The contrast between these two events highlights how important contemporary politics are in shaping responses to humanitarian crises. During the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies was generally willing to welcome anyone fleeing from communist regimes throughout Eurasia. Finally, it also highlights the fact that migrants and refugees from some parts of the world are treated with greater sympathy by the U.S. government than people from others.

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Sources:

The Prague Spring Archive (at the LBJ Library and Museum)
Box 180, Folder 2:
#39 “Memo for President Johnson Regarding Czech Refugees”
#70 “Telegram Regarding Czech Refugees and Border Closings”
#19 “White House Memo for Rostow Regarding Czech Refugees”
#25 “Statement of President Johnson on the Admission of Czech Refugees to the United States”

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Other Articles You Might Like:

Texas Czech Culinary Traditions
Fifty Years since the Prague Spring
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey

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A Longhorn’s Life of Service: Tom Ward

Black and white photograph of a headshot of Tom Ward

By Nicholas Roland

On March 23, 1961, recently-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy held a press conference at the State Department on Laos, a country little-known to most Americans at the time. Using a series of oversized maps, Kennedy detailed the advance of Communist Laotian and North Vietnamese forces in the country’s northeastern provinces. Rejecting an American military solution to the situation, Kennedy argued for a negotiated peace and a neutral Laos in hopes of containing the advance of communism in Southeast Asia. Before the Bay of Pigs disaster, before the Cuban missile crisis, and before serious escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, Laos presented the young president with his first major foreign policy dilemma. Kennedy’s wish for a peaceful, neutral Laos would be nominally achieved the following year, after months of negotiations. In accordance with the peace settlement, the United States withdrew its military advisors. The North Vietnamese did not.

In Austin, Texas, a University of Texas graduate and staff member, Tom Ward, was one of the few Americans paying keen attention to the situation in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. Born in 1931, Ward grew up in Austin, in the 1930s and 1940s a sleepy college and government town hardly recognizable as the rapidly developing, cosmopolitan capital that Texans are familiar with today. In a recent interview, Ward recalled his upbringing in the Old Enfield neighborhood, when the street’s paving ended at the Missouri-Pacific Railroad tracks, now Mo-Pac. At that time the University of Texas loomed even larger than it does today. As a boy, Ward attended a nursery school run by the university’s Department of Home Economics. He later attended many UT football games, paying a quarter to sit with his friends in a children’s section in the north endzone dubbed “the Knothole Gang.” In the pre-air-conditioned summers, Ward played in Pease Park and swam at Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. “I had a very pleasant experience growing up in Austin,” he remembers.

After graduating from Austin High School in 1949, Ward entered the University of Texas. He initially majored in business administration and pre-law, but finally decided to pursue his real interests: government and history. After graduating in 1954 with a degree in government and substantial coursework in history, Ward volunteered for the military. Having grown up during the Second World War, Ward said, “I felt that there was definitely an obligation to be in the service.” In 1955, Ward was sent to Fort Ord, California, for basic and advanced infantry training. He was initially designated to be sent as a replacement to Korea, but when it was discovered that he had a college degree he was reassigned to an anti-aircraft guided missile battalion at Fort Bliss, Texas. After serving out his time in the El Paso area, Ward returned to Austin, where in 1957 he began graduate work. He accepted an offer to work in the university admissions office the following year. It was at about this time that American involvement in Southeast Asia began to make headlines.

Black and white photograph of a twin-engine airplane dropping supplies via parachute during flight
Air drop of supplies

Ward had long held interests in government, history, and international relations, especially regarding Southeast Asia. He recalls with fondness that these interests were nurtured during his years at UT through courses in history, jurisprudence, and international relations with professors like William Livingston, James Roach, and Malcolm MacDonald in government; R. John Rath, Walter Prescott Webb, Otis Singletary, and Oliver Radkey in history; and George Hoffman in geography. In 1961, Ward had even taken a leave of absence from his position at UT to travel in Asia with a fraternity brother, a six-month trip that took them from Japan through East and Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Europe, contracting hepatitis A along the way after drinking rice wine with a group of locals in Burma (now Myanmar). His adventures in 1961 were a harbinger of things to come. Ultimately, Tom Ward was destined for a life of service and overseas adventure far from the small, slow-paced Texas city where he had grown up.

In 1962, after the short-lived farce of Laotian neutrality, President Kennedy responded to the continued Communist insurgency in the country by increasing America’s aid to the Royal Lao government through the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) channels. Kennedy hoped that a combination of assistance to ethnic minorities and economic aid to the country in general could stem the advance of the Communist Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies without drawing US conventional military forces into the conflict. Given his experience and interests, it is little wonder that a professor at UT subsequently recommended Tom Ward to one of the State Department recruiters that fanned out over the country in search of potential aid workers for the American effort in Southeast Asia. With USAID in its infancy, Ward was interviewed by an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the closest thing the US government had at the time to a source of expertise in working with indigenous populations. Despite his awareness of the ongoing conflict in the country, Ward recalled, “I volunteered for Laos. … And the reason I wanted to go to Laos, [was] because of my experience at the university and I knew about Laos.” Before his new adventure commenced, however, one last memorable occasion on the Forty Acres came on March 9, 1962, when Ward was one of 1,200 students who packed into the Texas Union to hear an address on civil rights by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ward became one of six recruits selected to serve in Laos, with another twelve destined for Vietnam. Several months were spent at the University of California at Berkeley for training in local languages, Southeast Asian studies, and community development. Although they were civilian aid workers, Ward recalls, “community development training could also be considered counterinsurgency.” By April 1963, Tom Ward had become a foreign service officer and arrived in Laos, joining what became known as America’s “Secret War” in the small country.

Upon arrival in Laos, Ward found himself living with the Hmong ethnic minority group in a village called Sam Thong, working to coordinate the delivery of food, medical care, basic education, and other forms of humanitarian relief. Ward’s partner was the irascible Edgar “Pop” Buell, a former Indiana farmer and widower who had come to Laos in 1960 to work for International Voluntary Services, a private forerunner to the Peace Corps. It was in the mountainous northeastern provinces that the Pathet Lao guerillas were most active, and the indigenous Hmong formed the backbone of the CIA’s clandestine anti-Communist fighting force. In other words, Ward was now in a war zone.

Black and white photograph of Tom Ward with Hmong children in Sam Thong, Laos in 1965
Tom with Hmong children in Sam Thong, Laos, 1965

Ward and Buell’s humanitarian work was necessitated by the Communist forces’ disruption of the traditional cycles of Hmong agriculture. By providing the Hmong with aid and basic services, the US and Laotian governments hoped to maintain a counterinsurgency in the country and to strengthen the legitimacy of the Royal Lao government. “I lived in a grass hut with bamboo walls, a grass roof, dirt floor, no electricity, no plumbing, [and] a [55]-gallon drum out back for water. That’s where you bathed, and you lived like the local people did and ate their food,” recalls Ward. In addition to Ward and Buell, a CIA intelligence officer and a paramilitary officer were stationed nearby to coordinate training and military support for the Hmong.

Black and white photograph of Americans distributing relief supplies to Hmong villagers
Distribution of relief supplies

Although Ward’s work in Laos was focused on humanitarian relief, the dangers of operating in a war zone were a fact of daily life. The only two roads leading into northern Laos were both blocked, so Ward and other American personnel were forced to move around the countryside on small short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft operated by Air America, a CIA-owned dummy corporation that played a vital role in the agency’s paramilitary efforts. Although “these were the best pilots in the world,” Ward says, travel in the war-torn country was filled with danger. Ward recounts many landings on airstrips that were shorter than 250 feet in length, or in some cases simply clearings on the side of a mountain. The planes negotiated low visibility and rugged terrain without instruments and avoided enemy anti-aircraft fire by flying as high as 10,000 feet, despite a lack of onboard oxygen. Once, Ward was supposed to go back to the capital city of Vientiane for a break, but a fellow aid worker had a date planned with a local woman and wanted Ward’s seat on the next plane. Ward gave up his spot on the flight. He learned later that the plane had crashed in the forest and had not been located for three days. Incredibly, the aid worker with whom he had swapped flights was still alive, albeit with severe burns that forced his evacuation from the country. On another occasion, mortar rounds began to land on a nearby position. With helicopter transportation seemingly unavailable at the time, Ward and his fellow workers prepared to walk out of the danger zone to safety. Finally, helicopters came and they were evacuated. Another memorable incident was the recovery of a US pilot who had been shot down and rescued by the Hmong.

Tom Ward served in Laos until January 1968, just before the Tet Offensive in neighboring Vietnam, at which time he was reassigned to the US mission in Thailand. As US military involvement in Vietnam escalated, both aerial bombardment and ground fighting spilled over into Laos and Cambodia. Ultimately, all three countries would fall to Communist forces in 1975. Reflecting on the trajectory of events in Southeast Asia, Ward believes that the joint effort between the CIA and USAID was a successful counterinsurgency campaign that was derailed by US military escalation in the region. “I think we… were there for the right reason and we did a good job,” says Ward, “and that forces beyond us took over and that’s why it ended up like it did.” Ward continues, “overemphasis on the military was counterproductive as far as I’m concerned.” Rather than a conventional military victory achieved through massive air power and ground combat, Ward believes that a counterinsurgency campaign could have achieved much different results in Southeast Asia.

Black and white photograph of eight armed Hmong fighters
Hmong fighters

In contrast to Laos, for a variety of reasons anti-Communist efforts in Thailand were ultimately successful. Like other Southeast Asian countries at the time, in the 1960s the Thai government sought American help to counteract a rural Communist insurgency. Ward worked for USAID in the Accelerated Rural Development program (ARD) between 1968 and 1975. This joint Thai-US program sought to improve the local economies of the country’s troubled rural areas, thereby relieving their grievances and instilling confidence in the central government. Ward says the program was “like in the New Deal.” “I was in Chiang Rai for two years,” he continues, “and [I] worked with these programs in education, in health, and providing … improved rice seed to farmers, building roads so they could get their crops to market and this sort of thing.” Although the Communist insurgency continued in Thailand until 1989, Ward believes that “the standards of living were definitely raised in those areas. And if you go look at them today, it’s unbelievable the difference. You know, you have universities in a lot of these different places, a lot of these provinces where there was little economic development.”

After twelve years in Laos and Thailand, Ward returned to Washington, D.C., to work for the USAID Office of International Training. For the next five years, his career took him on short-term assignments to Nigeria, Tanzania, Egypt, Burma, Nepal, and Pakistan, helping to select candidates identified by their governments for graduate degrees and specialized technical training in the United States. From its founding to the time that he departed the program, Ward recalls, “we’d trained over 10,000 people” in fields such as agriculture, public health, finance, education, and a variety of governmental functions.

Ward was then assigned to Indonesia as a Development Training Officer working with the Indonesian government to select candidates for graduate training in American universities and short-term technical training with various US government agencies. USAID’s training programs had a long-term impact on participating countries: at one point, six members of Indonesia’s governing cabinet had been trained in the United States. The goal, Ward says, was “to work yourself out of a job” as participating countries built indigenous governance capacity and technical expertise. Although the work was generally not as dangerous as his experiences in previous assignments, Ward still found himself in proximity to momentous events around the world. He was in Nigeria during a “transition from one dictator to another,” and he visited Kabul in 1978, on the eve of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989).

In 1985, Tom Ward was called back to Washington, D.C., where he became a career counselor for foreign service officers.  In 1991, after thirty years in service – twenty of them spent overseas – Ward retired from the State Department. Ward continued to work for a time as a government consultant in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. Today he splits time between Washington, D.C., and Austin, punctuated with continued trips overseas.

Black and white image of "Pop" Buell with three Hmong fighters
“Pop” Buell with Hmong fighters

Reflecting on his decades of experience as a foreign service officer, Ward was often astonished at the ignorance and apathy toward international events that he would encounter on visits home. While stationed in Laos, he says, “I’d come home on leave and they’d say, ‘Well, where [have] you been?’ ‘Well, I’ve been in Asia.’ ‘Oh, that’s interesting, tell me about it.’” Ward laughs. “And I’d get maybe two or three sentences, and then they’d change the subject: ‘Oh by the way, did you see ‘I Love Lucy’ last night?’” Ignorance of foreign cultures could also be a problem in government agencies and the military. Although he believes that in Southeast Asia, “a lot of these people were very dedicated officers and men… they were not taught to learn about the culture, speak the language, learn how the people felt about things, and how to work with them from their point of view, if at all possible.” This lack of understanding failed both the United States and the people of Laos and Vietnam. Ward believes that the situation has improved over time, but familiarity with foreign cultures and political systems remains a key variable in the success or failure of US efforts overseas.

After a career spent in public service, Ward has not been content to simply focus on personal pursuits in retirement. Over time he has become increasingly active in supporting the institution that molded his interests and opened the door to his career: The University of Texas at Austin. Ward has found ways to volunteer his time and leadership over the years, joining the College of Liberal Arts Advisory Council shortly after his retirement and the Department of History Visiting Committee a few years later. He is currently in the process of establishing a chair in international relations in the College of Liberal Arts.

Ward’s career has informed his involvement with UT. In his experience, the best way to improve lives is “through education, in this country or overseas.” He continues, “What we were doing overseas [was] giving them development opportunities they didn’t have.” As a foreign service officer Tom Ward worked to improve the economies and governments of other countries. Now he sees similar opportunities closer to home, through UT’s ability to increase American understanding of the international context and in the university’s potential to aid underserved and non-traditional student populations.

Dr. Nicholas Roland is a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, D.C. He earned his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin in 2017. A revised version of his dissertation, Violence in the Hill Country: The Texas Frontier in the Civil War Era,  is forthcoming from UT Press. 

Sources:

Tom Ward oral history, April 19, 2018

//www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-020.aspx

//history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/laos-crisis

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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.

Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

By Marcus Golding

Nikita Khrushchev is one of the most important men of the last century. Moreover, he was the main protagonist of Soviet foreign policy during the most perilous period of the Cold War which climaxed with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. How dangerous was the Soviet Union to the West during Khrushchev’s term? Which factors contributed to sow distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to what extent the Soviet menace was more bluff than real capabilities? Fursenko and Naftali answer these questions successfully by presenting an extensive and well-researched study that uncovers Soviet foreign policy during the Khrushchev’s Era.

In Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, the authors explore the complicated balance between cooperation with the West and competition for Third World support that undergirded the Soviet diplomatic strategy from 1955 to 1963.To understand these diplomatic maneuvers, Fursenko and Naftali focus on Khrushchev’s complex policies of building détente with his penchant for risky brinkmanship and coercive diplomacy which, he hoped, would yield substantive geopolitical gains. From the two Germanys question to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the final outcome of this dual diplomatic approach proved contradictory. The competition for Third World allies diverted scarce economic resources from domestic problems, and exacerbated tensions between the superpowers effectively undermining any sustainable opportunity for détente.

Fursenko and Naftali underline two elements that contributed to heightened tensions during the Cold War. The first one, perception in international politics, led to the frequent misreading of the adversary’s intentions, fostering a strong and lingering feeling of mistrust and deception. This atmosphere of misunderstanding transformed the years between 1958 and 1962 into the most dangerous period of the Cold War concluding with the perilous Cuban Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

1960s poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev: “Long live the eternal, indestructible friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Cuban peoples” (via Wikipedia)

The second element draws on the first, and involves the crucial role played by Third World leaders in aggravating the perceived threat that each superpower felt from the other. The authors do an excellent job in dispelling one of the greatest myths of the Cold War, the erroneous impression that the United States and the Soviet Union orchestrated and fully controlled events in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To the contrary, leaders like Fidel Castro and Gamal Nasser skillfully courted and played off the superpowers for their own gains. This perspective restores a great deal of agency to social and political actors that in other Cold War narratives have been relegated to the roles of mere pawns.

The authors conclude that Khrushchev’s foreign policy did much to preserve the boundaries of the Soviet empire but less in extracting considerable geopolitical concessions from the West. The inherent military weaknesses of the Soviet Union, coupled with limited economic resources, led Khrushchev to rely more on the appearance rather than the reality of Soviet power. However, his brinkmanship at least succeeded in deterring the United States from invading Cuba and in securing recognition for East Germany in the long run.

The book’s writing style is fluid with a clear prose, making it accessible to any audience. This is quite an achievement in a co-authored work. Fursenko and Naftali also succeed in providing an informative and compelling account of Soviet foreign policy under Khrushchev by relying mostly on declassified material from the Soviet Presidium. It is certainly a pertinent starting point for anyone interested in the intricacies of world affairs and foreign relations from the Soviet perspective.

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The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico 
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Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala 
The Gorbachev Factor

The Gorbachev Factor by Archie Brown (2003)

By Marcus Golding

The fall of the Soviet Union is usually understood from two angles. One argues that the Soviet state could not keep up with the United States’ military superiority and, therefore, collapsed under economic strain. The other perspective suggests that western Europe and the U.S., and specifically the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), played a crucial role in pressuring diplomatically for the end of the “Evil Empire.” Archie Brown suggests that there is another interpretation that rules out military or diplomatic pressures in explaining the undoing of the Soviet Union. Brown argues that the end of the system was exclusively due to the political (glasnost) and economic (perestroika) reforms launched to reform the state. In this process, the author contends that the implosion of the Soviet Union had more to do with the will of one man than with any outside forces in play.

The Gorbachev Factor is a compelling and persuasive analysis that underlines the agency of Mikhail Gorbachev as the most crucial factor explaining the end of Soviet rule. The book is a painstaking examination of Gorbachev’s leadership as a head of state, and the importance of his policy reforms in enacting the political transformation of the Soviet system. As the author argues, despite the structural problems of the USSR during the 1980s, there was no sign of an impending collapse. However, the central thesis of the book is that Gorbachev’s interest in seeking political and economic change led him to believe that those goals were unattainable unless the whole system was transformed. By analyzing the changes introduced by the Soviet leader in the political structure of the state, the economy, the center-periphery relations, and in foreign policy, Brown successfully shows how the Soviet system transitioned from a relative stable state of decline into a phase of terminal crisis. Despite failing to prevent the end of the USSR during his term (1985-1991), Gorbachev oversaw the emergence of political pluralism, the democratization of the former Soviet Republics, and the inauguration of a new foreign policy with the west that ended the Cold War.

From the four areas he deemed necessary for a complete transformation of the system, Brown identifies political reforms and the reformulation of Soviet foreign policy as the most successful ones. The introduction of contested elections to create a legislature with real powers in 1988 is perhaps the most significant reform in explaining the growing democratization of the Soviet Union but it also accounts for the gradual erosion of state control over the political process. Domestic political changes also reflected a new foreign policy mentality. Gorbachev reconfigured Soviet diplomacy by emphasizing the freedom to choose and by renouncing violence as a way to sustain other communist regimes in power. As Brown contends, the Gorbachev factor in Soviet foreign policy cleared the way for the overthrow of Communist systems in Eastern and Central Europe from 1989 on.

The liberalization of the system presented Gorbachev with intractable problems. In relations between the central Soviet state and the non-Russian republics within its borders, the delegitimization of Marxism-Leninism triggered by the political reforms, and the revelations of the failures and atrocities of the Soviet system, left an ideological vacuum for which nationalism was the most obvious candidate. Unable, or unwilling to control the centrifugal forces unleashed by his reforms, Gorbachev’s ability to keep the Soviet Union intact imploded when political rivals, such as Boris Yeltsin, torpedoed any opportunity for a union-wide arrangement. In the implementation of economic reforms, Gorbachev’s zig-zag approach not only proved to be ineffective because of the opposition of the ministerial bureaucracy to the full implementation of his policies, but also because the Soviet leader was more hesitant and less clear on how to proceed towards the gradual adoption of a market economy.

Mikhail Gorbechev (left) with President George Bush (right) – (via Wikipedia)

Finally, Gorbachev’s personality played a key role in the political transformation of the system. His status as a consensus-builder served him well to implement several reforms without facing concerted resistance from the Communist Party or the emergent cohort of Soviet dissidents and liberals. However, this same trait later exposed Gorbachev to the attack of radicals on both sides of the political spectrum, undermining his power. This, coupled with the misplaced trust in some of his appointees, seriously complicated Gorbachev’s plans to control the transformation of the system.

Brown’s book succeeds in providing a refreshing and persuasive angle that underlines the domestic causes in the demise of the Soviet Union. The author relies primarily on personal interviews and memoirs from the most influential Soviet political leaders of the time (including Gorbachev) to build his argument. For anyone interested in this momentous historical process of the 20th century Brown’s insightful interpretation will not disappoint.

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US History at the Movies

Films about historical events have enormous power to affect us, both to enlighten and to mislead.  Historical films are perennially popular, often because they tell history through individual lives, because they invent characters and add personal, emotional drama to events that we want to learn about. Those same fictionalizing qualities make them great tools for teaching history. It has never been more urgent to train students to recognize how all stories — from those told by the most inventive narrator to the most professional historian — are told from particular points of view, shaped by the context of the story-tellers’ lives.

During academic year 2019-2020 Not Even Past sponsored a history film series to accompany the U.S. History survey course. As part of this, we wanted to make titles available to teachers of U.S. history at any level or institution, to use in their classrooms, to supplement lectures and other activities with films.

The list of films that follows is just the beginning. We are starting now so that we can collect as extensive a list as possible, from which to choose the films that we will screen and that anyone can choose to watch or teach.

PLEASE HELP US EXPAND OUR LIST OF FILMS. You can use the “Contact” form at the bottom of this page to send us the titles of your favorite films about U.S. History, of films you love to teach, or that you think would be good to use in the classroom.

What’s included: This list includes general theatrical release feature films and feature-film length television films.

What’s not included: Documentaries, TV series and individual TV episodes.

Medieval North America, Colonial America, American Republic
Civil War and Reconstruction
Slavery
Expansion and Westward Movement
Industrial Age (1871-1914)
WWI-Depression
WWII
Cold War
Civil Rights, Segregation, and Jim Crow
1960s-1970s
1980s-Present

Medieval North America, Colonial America, American Republic 

1776 (1972, Peter. H Hunt)

Based on a broadway musical of the same name, 1776 follows the political struggle of the Continental Congress in the days leading to the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

April Morning (1988, Delbert Mann, TV Movie)

An adaptation of the classic novel by Howard Feast, this film’s name refers to that April morning – April 19, 1775 – when ‘the shot heard around the world’ signaled the start of the American Revolution. A coming-of-age story in which a young teenager must grow up quickly to survive violence and death during the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

The New World (2008, Terrence Malick)

A dramatization of Pocahontas’ relationships with John Smith and John Rolfe.

The Crucible (1996, Nicholas Hytner)

Arthur Miller’s classic play about the Salem Witchcraft Trials.

The Crossing (2000, Robert Harmon, TV film)

Follows George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River and the Battle of Trenton. Based on a novel of the same name by Howard Fast,

The Devil’s Disciple (1959, Guy Hamilton, Alexander Mackendrick)

When Dick Dudgeon (Kirk Douglas) learns his father was executed by the British for treason at the onset of the Revolutionary War, he steals the body for a proper burial after minister Anthony Anderson’s (Burt Lancaster) pleas for it are in vain. While visiting with the minister and his wife, the British mistakenly arrest Dick, who says nothing, choosing to stand in the minister’s place. Can Anderson and the rebels convince Gen. Burgoyne (Laurence Olivier) to free Dick before he’s hanged? (via Google)

Johnny Tremain (1957, Robert Stevenson)

An apprentice silversmith (Hal Stalmaster) is there at the Boston Tea Party and other highpoints of the Revolution. (via Google)

Last of the Mohicans (1992, Michael Mann)

The last members of a dying Native American tribe, the Mohicans — Uncas (Eric Schweig), his father Chingachgook (Russell Means), and his adopted half-white brother Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) — live in peace alongside British colonists. But when the daughters (Madeleine Stowe, Jodhi May) of a British colonel are kidnapped by a traitorous scout, Hawkeye and Uncas must rescue them in the crossfire of a gruesome military conflict of which they wanted no part: the French and Indian War. (via Google)

The Patriot (2000, Roland Emmerich)

A widowed farmer decides not to join the fight when the British arrive in 1776, but he must when his son enlists and is captured by the enemy, forming a regiment of Carolina patriots.

The Rebels (1979, Russ Mayberry)

After the Battle of Lexington kicks off the Revolutionary War, the Americans are rallying to fight the British. American soldier Philip Kent (Andrew Stevens) is set to fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill while his wife, Anne (Kim Cattrall), is at home looking after their child. While Kent is engaged in combat alongside Gen. George Washington, his friend Judson Fletcher (Don Johnson) becomes a member of the newly formed Second Continental Congress. (via Google)

Revolution (1985, Hugh Hudson)

A trapper (Al Pacino) joins the fight against the British in 1776 after his teenage son is tortured by a redcoat (Donald Sutherland). (via Google)

Sons of Liberty (1939, Michael Curtiz)

The life of Haym Salomon, an American patriot and financier of the American Revolution. (via Google)

The Spirit of ’76 (1917, Frank Montgomery)

The Spirit of ’76 was a controversial silent film that depicted both factual and fictional events during the American Revolutionary War. The film was directed by Frank Montgomery and produced and written by Robert Goldstein (via Wikipedia).

Sweet Liberty (1986, Alan Alda)

Michael has written a scholarly book on the revolutionary war. He has sold the film rights. The arrival of the film crew seriously disrupts him as actors want to change their characters, directors want to re-stage battles, and he becomes very infatuated with Faith who will play the female lead in the movie. At the same time, he is fighting with his crazy mother who thinks the Devil lives in her kitchen. (via Google)

Civil War and Reconstruction

Andersonville (1996, John Frankenheimer)

Hunger, exposure and disease plague Union soldiers interned at an overcrowded Confederate prison camp in 1864 Georgia. (via Google)

Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith, USA)

Controversial film following relationships between two families during the Civil War and Reconstruction era that portrays negative racial stereotypes of black men and depicts the KKK as a historic force.

Birth of a Nation (2016, Nate Parker)

Nat Turner is an enslaved Baptist preacher who lives on a Virginia plantation owned by Samuel Turner. With rumors of insurrection in the air, a cleric convinces Samuel that Nate should sermonize to other slaves, thereby quelling any notions of an uprising. As Nate witnesses the horrific treatment of his fellow man, he realizes that he can no longer just stand by and preach. On Aug. 21, 1831, Turner’s quest for justice and freedom leads to a violent and historic rebellion in Southampton County. (via Google)

Burying My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007, Yves Simoneau)

In the 1880s, after the U. S. Army’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the government continues to push Sioux Indians off their land. In Washington, D.C., Senator Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn) introduces legislation to protect Native Americans rights. In South Dakota, schoolteacher Elaine Goodale (Anna Paquin) joins Sioux native and Western-educated Dr. Charles Eastman in working with tribe members. Meanwhile, Lakota Chief Sitting Bull refuses to give into mounting government pressures.

Cold Mountain (2003, Anthony Minghella)

In this classic story of love and devotion set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, a wounded Confederate soldier named W.P. Inman (Jude Law) deserts his unit and travels across the South, aiming to return to his young wife, Ada (Nicole Kidman), who he left behind to tend their farm. As Inman makes his perilous journey home, Ada struggles to keep their home intact with the assistance of Ruby (Renée Zellweger), a mysterious drifter sent to help her by a kindly neighbor. In this classic story of love and devotion set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, a wounded Confederate soldier named W.P. Inman (Jude Law) deserts his unit and travels across the South, aiming to return to his young wife, Ada (Nicole Kidman), who he left behind to tend their farm. As Inman makes his perilous journey home, Ada struggles to keep their home intact with the assistance of Ruby (Renée Zellweger), a mysterious drifter sent to help her by a kindly neighbor. (via Google)

The Conspirator (2010, Robert Redford)

Following the assassination of President Lincoln, seven men and one woman are arrested and charged with conspiring to kill Lincoln, the vice president and the secretary of state. Lawyer Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) reluctantly agrees to defend the lone woman, Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), who owns a boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and others met to plan their crimes. Aiken realizes that Mary may be innocent and being used as bait to capture her son, a suspect who is still at large. (via Google)

Fort Apache (1948, John Ford).

When arrogant and stubborn Civil War hero Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) arrives in Arizona with his daughter, Philadelphia (Shirley Temple), to assume command of the Fort Apache outpost, he clashes with level-headed Captain Kirby York (John Wayne). Viewing the local Native Americans through an ignorantly negative lens, Thursday is determined to engage them in battle for his own glory, despite the warnings of York — an act of folly that will have dire consequences (via Google)

Free State of Jones (2016, Gary Ross)

In 1863, Mississippi farmer Newt Knight serves as a medic for the Confederate Army. Opposed to slavery, Knight would rather help the wounded than fight the Union. After his nephew dies in battle, Newt returns home to Jones County to safeguard his family but is soon branded an outlaw deserter. Forced to flee, he finds refuge with a group of runaway slaves hiding out in the swamps. Forging an alliance with the slaves and other farmers, Knight leads a rebellion that would forever change history. (via Google)

Friendly Persuasion (1956, William Wyler)

The patriarch of a peace-loving Quaker family, Jess Birdwell (Gary Cooper), begins to question his pacifist values when the Civil War moves toward his close-knit Indiana community. Meanwhile, Jess’s daughter, Mattie, is in love with a soldier, and her brother, Josh (Anthony Perkins), contemplates picking up arms to defend his home lest he be considered a coward. As Confederate forces draw nearer, the Birdwells must make some difficult, life-altering decisions. (via Google)

Gettysburg (1993, Ronald F. Maxwell)

This war drama depicts one of the biggest events of the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg. The massive three-day conflict begins as Confederate General Robert E. Lee (Martin Sheen) presses his troops north into Pennsylvania, leading to confrontations with Union forces, including the regiment of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels). As the battle rages on and casualties mount, the film follows both the front lines and the strategic maneuvering behind the scenes (via IMBD).

Gods and Generals (2003, Robert F. Maxwell)

Epic prequel to `Gettysburg’ examining the early days of the American Civil War through the experiences of three historical figures. Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain must leave behind his quiet academic life, General Thomas Stonewall Jackson must contend with his great religious faith, and General Robert Lee is forced to choose between his loyalty to the USA and his love of the Southern states. (via Google)

Gone With the Wind (1940, Victor Fleming)

Epic Civil War drama focuses on the life of petulant southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh). Starting with her idyllic on a sprawling plantation, the film traces her survival through the tragic history of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and her tangled love affairs with Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) (via IMBD)

Glory (1989, Edward Zwick)

Following the Battle of Antietam, Col. Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick) is offered command of the United States’ first all-African-American regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. With junior officer Cabot Forbes (Cary Elwes), Shaw puts together a strong and proud unit, including the escaped slave Trip (Denzel Washington) and the wise gravedigger John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman). At first limited to menial manual tasks, the regiment fights to be placed in the heat of battle.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, Sergio Leone)

In the Southwest during the Civil War, a mysterious stranger, Joe (Clint Eastwood), and a Mexican outlaw, Tuco (Eli Wallach), form an uneasy partnership — Joe turns in the bandit for the reward money, then rescues him just as he is being hanged. When Joe’s shot at the noose goes awry during one escapade, a furious Tuco tries to have him murdered. The men re-team abruptly, however, to beat out a sadistic criminal and the Union army and find $20,000 that a soldier has buried in the desert. (via Google)

Lincoln (2013, Steven Spielberg).

With the nation embroiled in still another year with the high death count of Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) brings the full measure of his passion, humanity and political skill to what would become his defining legacy: to end the war and permanently abolish slavery through the 13th Amendment. Having great courage, acumen and moral fortitude, Lincoln pushes forward to compel the nation, and those in government who oppose him, to aim toward a greater good for all mankind (via IMBD)

The Keeping Room (2014, Daniel Barber)

During the waning days of the Civil War, two Southern sisters (Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld) and a slave (Muna Otaru) must defend themselves against two Union Army soldiers. (via Google)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, Clint Eastwood)

Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) watches helplessly as his wife and child are murdered, by Union men led by Capt. Terrill (Bill McKinney). Seeking revenge, Wales joins the Confederate Army. He refuses to surrender when the war ends, but his fellow soldiers go to hand over their weapons — and are massacred by Terrill. Wales guns down some of Terrill’s men and flees to Texas, where he tries to make a new life for himself, but the bounty on his head endangers him and his new surrogate family. (via Google)

The Red Badge of Courage (1951, John Huston)

Henry Fleming (Audie Murphy) is a young Union soldier in the American Civil War. During his unit’s first engagement, Henry flees the battlefield in fear. When he learns that the Union actually won the battle, shame over his cowardice leads him to lie to his friend Tom (Bill Mauldin) and the other soldiers, saying that he had been injured in battle. However, when he learns that his unit will be leading a charge on the enemy, Henry takes the opportunity to face his fears and redeem himself. (via Google)

Ride with the Devil (1999, Ang Lee)

On the fringes of the Civil War, Missouri Bushwackers engage in guerrilla warfare with Union Jayhawkers. Bushwackers Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), out to avenge the murder of Jack’s father, are joined by George Clyde (Simon Baker) and his former slave, Daniel (Jeffrey Wright). Hiding out for the winter, Jack has a short romance with a war widow (Jewel) before dying. Jake steps in to take care of her and her newborn before joining Quantrill’s famous Kansas raid. (via Google)

Rio Lobo (1970, Howard Hanks)

Union leader Cord McNally (John Wayne) is protecting a routine gold shipment when his troops are attacked by Confederate forces. Not only does he lose the gold, but one of his strongest officers is killed in the raid. At the end of the Civil War, McNally learns that the raiders had help from the inside, and he vows to uncover the two traitors. After a chance encounter with one of the turncoats, McNally travels to the town of Rio Lobo and makes an unexpected discovery. (via Google)

Shenandoah (1965, Andrew V. McLaglen)

American Civil War film about a wealthy widower who has remained steadfast in his opposition to the war on moral grounds. However, he is forced to become involved in the conflict when his son-in-law is called upon to serve in the Confederate forces, his youngest son is captured by the Union army, and another son and his pregnant daughter-in-law are killed by looters. (via Google)

Slavery

12 Years a Slave (2013, Steve McQueen)

This is the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man in New York who was kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years before he was able to get word to his family in the North and be rescued. (via Google)

Amistad (1997, Steven Spielberg, USA)

Based on true story of 1839 slave ship mutiny on board the La Amistad off the coast of Cuba. (via Google)

Beloved (1998, Johnathan Demme)

In 1873 Ohio, Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) is a mother of three haunted by her horrific slavery past and her desperate actions for freedom. As a result, Sethe’s home is haunted by a furious poltergeist, which drives away her two sons. Sethe and her daughter (Kimberly Elise) endure living with the spirit for 10 more years, until an old friend, Paul D. Garner (Danny Glover), arrives to run it out. After Garner moves in, a strange woman named Beloved (Thandie Newton) enters their lives, causing turmoil. (via Google)

Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino)

Two years before the Civil War, Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave, finds himself accompanying an unorthodox German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) on a mission to capture the vicious Brittle brothers. Their mission successful, Schultz frees Django, and together they hunt the South’s most-wanted criminals. Their travels take them to the infamous plantation of shady Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), where Django’s long-lost wife (Kerry Washington) is still a slave. (via Google)

Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (1993, Ed Bell, Thomas Lennon)

Documentary film about the stories of former slaves interviewed during the 30s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. (via IMBD)

Roots (1977, Martin J. Chomsky, John Erman, David Greene, Gilbert Moses)

Based on Alex Haley’s family history. Kunta Kinte is sold into the slave trade after being abducted from his African village, and is taken to the United States. Kinte and his family observe notable events in American history, such as the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, slave uprisings and emancipation. (via Google)

Expansion and Westward Movement

Dances with Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner).

Story of a Civil War solider whose post is in the 1870 Dakotas and becomes friends with the Lakota Sioux.

Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955, Norman Foster)

This big-screen movie featuring the coonskin-capped Davy Crockett (Fess Parker) consists of the first three episodes that aired on the Disneyland TV show in 1954. Crockett and his pal George Russel (Buddy Ebsen) battle Native Americans, and Russel gets captured. Crockett does what it takes to save his friend. After the wars, Crockett runs a successful political campaign to become a congressman. But the Texas Revolution calls him back to fight, and he makes his last stand at the Alamo. (via Google)

High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)

Former marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is preparing to leave the small town of Hadleyville, New Mexico, with his new bride, Amy (Grace Kelly), when he learns that local criminal Frank Miller has been set free and is coming to seek revenge on the marshal who turned him in. When he starts recruiting deputies to fight Miller, Kane is discouraged to find that the people of Hadleyville turn cowardly when the time comes for a showdown, and he must face Miller and his cronies alone. (via Google)

Red River (1948, Howard Hawks)

Headstrong Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) starts a thriving Texas cattle ranch with the help of his faithful trail hand, Groot (Walter Brennan), and his protégé, Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift), an orphan Dunson took under his wing when Matt was a boy. In need of money following the Civil War, Dunson and Matt lead a cattle drive to Missouri, where they will get a better price than locally, but the crotchety older man and his willful young partner begin to butt heads on the exhausting journey. (via Google)

The Searchers (1956, John Ford)

In this revered Western, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns home to Texas after the Civil War. When members of his brother’s family are killed or abducted by Comanches, he vows to track down his surviving relatives and bring them home. Eventually, Edwards gets word that his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) is alive, and, along with her adopted brother, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), he embarks on a dangerous mission to find her, journeying deep into Comanche territory (via IMBD)

Powwow Highway (1989, Jonathan Wacks)

Two Cheyenne Indian friends set off on a road trip and journey of self discovery.

Santa Fe Trail (1940, Michael Curtiz)

Follows abolitionist John Brown.

Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)

John Ford’s landmark Western revolves around an assorted group of colorful passengers aboard the Overland stagecoach bound for Lordsburg, New Mexico, in the 1880s. An alcoholic philosophizer (Thomas Mitchell), a lady of ill repute (Claire Trevor) and a timid liquor salesman (Donald Meek) are among the motley crew of travelers who must contend with an escaped outlaw, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), and the ever-present threat of an Apache attack as they make their way across the Wild West. (via Google)

Shane (1953, George Stevens)

Enigmatic gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd) rides into a small Wyoming town with hopes of quietly settling down as a farmhand. Taking a job on homesteader Joe Starrett’s (Van Heflin) farm, Shane is drawn into a battle between the townsfolk and ruthless cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer). Shane’s growing attraction to Starrett’s wife, Marian (Jean Arthur), and his fondness for their son Joey (Brandon de Wilde), who idolizes Shane, force Shane to realize that he must thwart Ryker’s plan. (via Google)

Little Big Man (1990, Arthur Penn)

When a curious oral historian (William Hickey) turns up to hear the life story of 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), he can scarcely believe his ears. Crabb tells of having been rescued and raised by the Cheyenne, of working as a snake-oil salesman, as a gunslinger, and as a mule skinner under Gen. Custer (Richard Mulligan). As if those weren’t astonishing enough, he also claims to be the only white survivor of the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn. (via Google)

Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood)

When prostitute Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Thomson) is disfigured by a pair of cowboys in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, her fellow brothel workers post a reward for their murder, much to the displeasure of sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), who doesn’t allow vigilantism in his town. Two groups of gunfighters, one led by aging former bandit William Munny (Clint Eastwood), the other by the florid English Bob (Richard Harris), come to collect the reward, clashing with each other and the sheriff. (via Google)

They Died with their Boots On (1941, Raoul Walsh)

George Armstrong Custer (Errol Flynn) is a rebellious but ambitious soldier, eager to join the Civil War. During the war, Custer has numerous successes to his credit, even though he disobeys orders. After the war concludes, he marries Libby Bacon (Olivia de Havilland) and is assigned to the Dakota Territory. Custer negotiates honestly with the Sioux on land, but due to corruption from others, a battle with Sitting Bull’s forces occurs at Little Big Horn. (via Google)

The Alamo (2004, John Lee Hancock)

In 1836 Gen. Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid) organizes a rebel army to liberate Texas from the brutal rule of Mexican dictator General Santa Anna (Emilio Echevarría). Though vastly outnumbered, Gen. Houston’s volunteer army includes such folkloric figures as Jim Bowie (Jason Patric) and Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton). As Santa Anna’s forces advance on San Antonio, the legendary general and his men prepare for a final heroic standoff at a battle-worn mission called the Alamo. (via Google)

Industrial Age (1871-1914)

The Winds of Kitty Hawk (1978, E.W. Swackhamer)

After many years of trying, Orville and Wilbur Wright succeed in making their heavier-than-air aircraft fly, south of Kitty Hawk, on December 17, 1903. They later try to sell their invention to the US government (via IMBD)

Far and Away (1992, Ron Howard)

Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise play Irish immigrants who take part in the Land Run of 1893.

Gangs of New York (2002, Martin Scorsese)

In 1863, Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points area of New York City seeking revenge against Bill the Butcher, his father’s killer (via IMBD)

WWI-Depression (1914-1940)

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone)

The film follows a group of German schoolboys, talked into enlisting at the beginning of World War I by their jingoistic teacher. The story is told entirely through the experiences of the young German recruits and highlights the tragedy of war through the eyes of individuals. (via Google)

Cinderella Man (2005, Ron Howard)

During the Great Depression, ex-boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) works as a day laborer until his former manager Joe Gould (Paul Giamatti) offers him a one-time slot against a rising young contender. After he wins a shocking upset, Braddock goes back into the ring full time, against the wishes of his frightened wife, Mae (Renée Zellweger). Dubbed “The Cinderella Man” for his rags-to-riches story, Braddock sets his sights on the defending champion, the fearsome Max Baer (Craig Bierko). (via Google)

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford)

The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, become migrant workers and end up in California (via Wikipedia)

The Long Grey Line (1955, John Ford)

High-spirited Irish immigrant Marty Maher (Tyrone Power) is an awkward misfit at West Point until he’s taken in as an assistant by kindly athletic director Capt. Herman J. Koehler (Ward Bond). A budding romance that turns into a happy marriage to a fellow Irish immigrant, housemaid Mary O’Donnell (Maureen O’Hara), also helps Maher mellow into a beloved and long-standing fixture at the military academy, where his career as an officer and mentor spans 50 years. This film is based on a true story (via IMBD).

Greatest Game Ever Played (2005, Bill Paxton)

Blue-collar Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf) fights class prejudice while mastering golf, a game guarded by the upper crust. Employed as a caddy at the exclusive Brookline Country Club, Francis fine-tunes his skills during off hours. His father, Arthur (Elias Koteas), disapproves, but a few admirers help Francis enter the 1913 U.S. Open. The underdog competes against British star Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane) and finds common ground with his boyhood idol. The film is based on a true story. (via Google)

Iron Jawed Angels (2004, Katja von Garnier)

Fiery American suffragette Alice Paul lights a fire under the older women’s leaders in Washington DC. President Wilson refuses to give all women the vote, but Paul is prepared to go to prison for her cause (IMBD)

Life (1999, Ted Demme)

During Prohibition, loudmouth Harlem grifter Ray (Eddie Murphy) and the no-nonsense Claude (Martin Lawrence) team up on a bootlegging mission to Mississippi that could bring them big bucks. But they run into trouble when a crooked lawman hits them with a phony murder charge. Ray and Claude are given life sentences and shipped off to jail, where they must think of a way to prove their innocence and avoid the brutal guards while battling their biggest enemies — their opposing personalities. (via Google)

Matewan (1987, John Sayles)

Dramatization of the Battle of Matewan, a coal miners’ strike of 1920 in a small West Virginian town.

Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)

The main character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)

During World War I, commanding officer General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders his subordinate, General Mireau (George Macready), to attack a German trench position, offering a promotion as an incentive. Though the mission is foolhardy to the point of suicide, Mireau commands his own subordinate, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), to plan the attack. When it ends in disaster, General Mireau demands the court-martial of three random soldiers in order to save face. (via Google)

Red-Headed Woman (1932, Jack Conway)

Starring Jean Harlow, this film follows a woman who uses sex to advance her social position.

Seabiscuit (2003, Gary Ross)

In the midst of the Great Depression, a businessman (Jeff Bridges) coping with the tragic death of his son, a jockey with a history of brutal injuries (Tobey Maguire) and a down-and-out horse trainer (Chris Cooper) team up to help Seabiscuit, a temperamental, undersized racehorse. At first the horse struggles to win, but eventually Seabiscuit becomes one of the most successful thoroughbreds of all time, and inspires a nation at a time when it needs it most. (via Google)

Sgt. York (1941, Howard Hanks)

Prize-winning Tennessee marksman Alvin York (Gary Cooper), a recent convert to Christianity, finds himself torn between his non-violent beliefs and his desire to serve his country when recruited to fight in World War I. Kindly Major Buxton (Stanley Ridges) convinces York to engage in battle, where the pacifist’s prowess with a rifle earns him honors as he continues to struggle with his decision to kill. Howard Hawks directs this adaptation of the real York’s memoirs.

Within Our Gates (1920, Oscar Micheaux)

In this early silent film from pioneering director Oscar Micheaux, kindly Sylvia Landry (Flo Clements) takes a fundraising trip to Boston in hopes of collecting $5,000 to keep a Southern school for impoverished black children open to the public. She then meets the warmhearted Dr. Vivian (William Smith), who falls in love with Sylvia and travels with her back to the South. There, Dr. Vivian learns about Sylvia’s shocking, tragic past and realizes that racism has changed her life forever. (via Google)

WWII (1941-1945)

Bless Me, Ultima (2013, Carl Franklin)

Set in New Mexico, A young man and an elderly medicine woman try to end the battle between good and evil that is waging out of control through their village during World War II. (via Google)

Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), who owns a nightclub in Casablanca, discovers his old flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) is in town with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Laszlo is a famed rebel, and with Germans on his tail, Ilsa knows Rick can help them get out of the country. (via Google)

Flags of our Fathers (2006, Clint Eastwood)

In February and March of 1945, U.S. troops fight and win one of the most crucial and costly battles of the war on the island of Iwo Jima. A photo of U.S. servicemen raising the flag on Mount Suribachi becomes an iconic symbol of victory to a war-weary nation. The individuals themselves become heroes, though not all survive the war and realize it (via IMBD).

From Here to Eternity (1953, Fred Zinnermann)

At an Army barracks in Hawaii in the days preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, lone-wolf soldier and boxing champion “Prew” Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) refuses to box, preferring to play the bugle instead. Hard-hearted Capt. Holmes (Philip Ober) subjects Prew to a grueling series of punishments while, unknown to Holmes, the gruff but fair Sgt. Warden (Burt Lancaster) engages in a clandestine affair with the captain’s mistreated wife (Deborah Kerr). (via Google)

The Great Escape (1963, John Sturges)

Imprisoned during World War II in a German POW camp, a group of Allied soldiers are intent on breaking out, not only to escape, but also to draw Nazi forces away from battle to search for fugitives. (via Google)

Hacksaw Ridge (2016, Mel Gibson)

The true story of Pfc. Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield), who won the Congressional Medal of Honor despite refusing to bear arms during WWII on religious grounds. Doss was drafted and ostracized by fellow soldiers for his pacifist stance but went on to earn respect and adoration for his bravery, selflessness and compassion after he risked his life — without firing a shot — to save 75 men in the Battle of Okinawa. (via Google)

Hiroshima (1995, Roger Spottiswoode, Koreyoshi Kurahara)

After the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Vice President Harry Truman (Kenneth Welsh) is suddenly forced to deal with the difficult task of taking control of the United States during the closing stages of World War II. Though the Germans have been beaten down and are on the verge of surrender, Japanese forces refuse to back down. Meanwhile, President Truman is getting conflicting advice regarding the necessity of dropping a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. (via Google)

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, Clint Eastwood)

Long-buried missives from the island reveal the stories of the Japanese troops who fought and died there during World War II. Among them are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic champion; and Shimizu (Ryô Kase), an idealistic soldier. Though Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) knows he and his men have virtually no chance of survival, he uses his extraordinary military skills to hold off American troops as long as possible. (via Google)

Patton (1970, Franklin J. Schaffner)

Biopic of General George S. Patton.

Pearl Harbor (2001, Michael Bay)

This sweeping drama, based on real historical events, follows American boyhood friends Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) as they enter World War II as pilots. Rafe is so eager to take part in the war that he departs to fight in Europe alongside England’s Royal Air Force. On the home front, his girlfriend, Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), finds comfort in the arms of Danny. The three of them reunite in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (via Google)

Red Tails (2012, George Lucas, Anthony Hemingway)

During World War II, the Civil Aeronautics Authority selects 13 black cadets to become part of an experimental program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The program aims at training “colored personnel” to become fighter pilots for the Army. However, discrimination, lack of institutional support and the racist belief that these men lacked the intelligence and aptitude for the job dog their every step. Despite this, the Tuskegee Airmen, as they become known, more than prove their worth. (via Google)

Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg)

Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) takes his men behind enemy lines to find Private James Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed in combat. Surrounded by the brutal realties of war, while searching for Ryan, each man embarks upon a personal journey and discovers their own strength to triumph over an uncertain future with honor, decency and courage. (via Google)

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970, Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku, Toshio Masuda)

This dramatic retelling of the Pearl Harbor attack details everything in the days that led up to that tragic moment in American history. As United States and Japanese relations strain over the U.S. embargo of raw materials, Air Staff Officer Minoru Genda (Tatsuya Mihashi) plans the preemptive strike against the United States. Although American intelligence agencies intercept Japanese communications hinting at the attack, they are unwilling to believe such a strike could ever occur on U.S. soil. (via Google)

Watch on the Rhine (1943, Herman Shumlin)

Anti-Fascist German engineer Kurt Muller (Paul Lukas), with his American-born wife, Sara (Bette Davis), and their three children, returns to the United States in 1940 after spending 17 years in Europe, where Kurt has engaged in underground resistance to the rising Nazi threat. Unscrupulous Romanian count Teck de Brancovis (George Coulouris), a houseguest of Sara’s family in Washington, D.C., discovers Kurt’s secret and threatens to expose his activities to his contacts at the German embassy. (via Google)

Postwar to Cold War (1945-1960s)

Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

Fred, Al and Homer are three World War II veterans facing difficulties as they re-enter civilian life. Fred (Dana Andrews) is a war hero who, unable to compete with more highly skilled workers, has to return to his low-wage soda jerk job. Bank executive Al (Fredric March) gets into trouble for offering favorable loans to veterans. After losing both hands in the war, Homer (Harold Russell) returns to his loving fiancée, but must struggle to adjust. (via Google)

Desert Bloom (1986, Eugene Corr)

In post-World War II Las Vegas, the Chismore family teeters on the brink of collapse, headed by alcoholic stepfather Jack (Jon Voight) and his wife, Lily (JoBeth Williams). Teen daughter Rose (Annabeth Gish), powerless to change the horrific cycle of abuse in the household, takes comfort in a budding romance with local boy Robin (Jay Underwood). Rose’s family life undergoes a significant transformation, however, when her somewhat quirky Aunt Starr (Ellen Barkin) arrives. (via Google)

Dr. Strangelove (1964, Stanley Kubrick)

A film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button — and it played the situation for laughs. U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper goes completely insane, and sends his bomber wing to destroy the U.S.S.R. He thinks that the communists are conspiring to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people (IMBD)

Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper)

Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), two Harley-riding hippies, complete a drug deal in Southern California and decide to travel cross-country in search of spiritual truth. On their journey, they experience bigotry and hatred from the inhabitants of small-town America and also meet with other travelers seeking alternative lifestyles. After a terrifying drug experience in New Orleans, the two travelers wonder if they will ever find a way to live peacefully in America. (via Google)

Edgar (2001, Clint Eastwood)

As head of the FBI for nearly 50 years, J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) becomes one of America’s most-powerful men. Serving through eight presidents and three wars, Hoover utilizes methods both ruthless and heroic to keep his country safe. Projecting a guarded persona in public and in private, he lets few into his inner circle. Among those closest to him are his protege and constant companion, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), and Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), his loyal secretary. (via Google)

Fences (2016, Denzel Washington)

Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) makes his living as a sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh. Maxson once dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player, but was deemed too old when the major leagues began admitting black athletes. Bitter over his missed opportunity, Troy creates further tension in his family when he squashes his son’s (Jovan Adepo) chance to meet a college football recruiter. (via Google)

Goodnight, and Goodluck (2005, George Clooney)

Drama film following conflict between veteran radio and television host Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols)

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just finished college and, back at his parents’ house, he’s trying to avoid the one question everyone keeps asking: What does he want to do with his life? An unexpected diversion crops up when he is seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a bored housewife and friend of his parents. But what begins as a fun tryst turns complicated when Benjamin falls for the one woman Mrs. Robinson demanded he stay away from, her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). (via Google)

Inherit the Wind (1960, Stanley Kramer)

In the 1920s, Tennessee schoolteacher Bertram Cates (Dick York) is put on trial for violating the Butler Act, a state law that prohibits public school teachers from teaching evolution instead of creationism. Drawing intense national attention in the media with writer E. K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly) reporting, two of the nation’s leading lawyers go head to head: Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) for the prosecution, and Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) for the defense. (via Google)

JFK (1991, Oliver Stone)

This acclaimed Oliver Stone drama presents the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). When Garrison begins to doubt conventional thinking on the murder, he faces government resistance, and, after the killing of suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman), he closes the case. Later, however, Garrison reopens the investigation, finding evidence of an extensive conspiracy behind Kennedy’s death. (via Google)

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948, H.C. Potter)

When advertising executive Jim Blandings (Cary Grant) discovers his wife’s (Myrna Loy) plan to redecorate their New York apartment, he counters with a proposal that they move to Connecticut. She agrees, and the two are soon conned into buying a house that turns out to be a complete nightmare. Construction and repair bills accumulate quickly, and Jim worries that their future hangs in the balance unless he can come up with a catchy new jingle that will sell ham. (via Google)

The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956, Nunnally Johnson)

Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) is a suburban father and husband haunted by his memories of World War II, including a wartime romance with Italian village girl Maria (Marisa Pavan), which resulted in an illegitimate son he’s never seen. Pressed by his unhappy wife (Jennifer Jones) to get a higher-paying job, Rath goes to work as a public relations man for television network president Ralph Hopkins (Fredric March). Drawn into poisonous office politics, Tom finds he must choose his career or his family. (via Google)

Mission to Moscow (1943, Michael Curtiz)

Joseph E. Davies (Walter Huston) is the American ambassador to the Soviet Union between World War I and World War II. Moving to the communist state, Davies records his impressions of Soviet life, politics and foreign policy. (via Google)

My Family (1995, Gregory Nava)

A second-generation Mexican immigrant narrates his family history, beginning with the journey of his father, Jose (Jacob Vargas), across Mexico to Los Angeles where he meets Maria (Jennifer Lopez) and starts a family. Each subsequent generation contends with political and social hardships, ranging from illegal deportations in the 1940s to racial tensions and gang fights in the ’60s and ’70s. Yet through it all, or perhaps because of it, the family remains strong. (via Google)

On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan)

Crime drama starring Marlon Brando focusing on union violence and corruption on the waterfronts of Hoboken, New Jersey. (via Google)

Salt of the Earth (1954, Herbert J. Biberman)

At New Mexico’s Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacon) helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza (Rosaura Revueltas), with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home (via Wikipedia)

12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)

Courtroom drama film in which 12 jurors decide the fate of a man on trial for the murder of his father. Each of the jurors expose their own prejudices and character flaws – produced in pandemonium of McCarthyism, threat from within, citizen responsibility. (via Google)

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan)

Scout Finch (Mary Badham), 6, and her older brother, Jem (Phillip Alford), live in sleepy Maycomb, Ala., spending much of their time with their friend Dill (John Megna) and spying on their reclusive and mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall). When Atticus (Gregory Peck), their widowed father and a respected lawyer, defends a black man named Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) against fabricated rape charges, the trial and tangent events expose the children to evils of racism and stereotyping. (via Google)

West Side Story (1961, Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise)

A musical in which a modern day Romeo and Juliet are involved in New York street gangs. On the harsh streets of the upper west side, two gangs battle for control of the turf. The situation becomes complicated when a gang members falls in love with a rival’s sister. (via Google)

Civil Rights, Segregation, Jim Crow

The Butler (2013, Lee Daniels)

After leaving the South as a young man and finding employment at an elite hotel in Washington, D.C., Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he is hired as a butler at the White House. Over the course of three decades, Cecil has a front-row seat to history and the inner workings of the Oval Office. However, his commitment to his “First Family” leads to tension at home, alienating his wife (Oprah Winfrey) and causing conflict with his anti-establishment son. (via Google)

The Color Purple (1985, Steven Spielberg)

An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie’s abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing “Mister” Albert Johnson (Danny Glover), things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa. Based on the novel by Alice Walker (IMBD).

Detroit (2017, Kathryn Bigelow)

In the summer of 1967, rioting and civil unrest starts to tear apart the city of Detroit. Two days later, a report of gunshots prompts the Detroit Police Department, the Michigan State Police and the Michigan Army National Guard to search and seize an annex of the nearby Algiers Motel. Several policemen start to flout procedure by forcefully and viciously interrogating guests to get a confession. By the end of the night, three unarmed men are gunned down while several others are brutally beaten. (via Google)

Criticism in HuffPost: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/detroit-is-the-most-irresponsible-and-dangerous-movie-this-year_us_5988570be4b0f2c7d93f5744

Freedom Riders (2010, Stanley Nelson Jr)

Renowned director Stanley Nelson chronicles the inspirational story of American civil rights activists’ peaceful fight against racial segregation on buses and trains in the 1960s. (via Google)

Freedom Song (2000, Phil Alden Robinson)

Owen (Vicellous Reon Shannon) is a young man living in Mississippi at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Surrounded by racism, Owen looks for inspiration in dealing with oppression, while his father, Will (Danny Glover), prefers to keep his head down after his bad luck with protests in the past. Will expects his son to follow suit, but their relationship is put to the test when Owen starts joining in peaceful protests organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. (via Google)

Ghosts of Mississippi (1996, Rob Reiner)

Tells the story of the murder of Medgar Evans in 1963.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1964, Stanley Kramer)

When Joanna Drayton (Katharine Houghton), a free-thinking white woman, and black doctor John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) become engaged, they travel to San Francisco to meet her parents. Matt Drayton (Spencer Tracy) and his wife Christina (Katharine Hepburn) are wealthy liberals who must confront the latent racism the coming marriage arouses. Also attending the Draytons’ dinner are Prentice’s parents (Roy E. Glenn Sr., Beah Richards), who vehemently disapprove of the relationship. (via Google)

The Help (2011, Tate Taylor)

In 1960s Mississippi, Southern society girl Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns from college with dreams of being a writer. She turns her small town on its ear by choosing to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent white families. Only Aibileen (Viola Davis), the housekeeper of Skeeter’s best friend, will talk at first. But as the pair continue the collaboration, more women decide to come forward, and as it turns out, they have quite a lot to say. (via Google)

Hidden Figures (2016, Theodore Melfi)

Three brilliant African-American women at NASA — Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) — serve as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race and galvanized the world. (via Google)

I am Not Your Negro (2016, Raoul Peck)

In 1979, James Baldwin began writing “Remember This House,” a radical account of the lives and assassinations of three men he was quite close to: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. However, Baldwin had only written 30 pages of the manuscript before passing away in 1987. This documentary, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, imagines what could have come of this never-finished book. (HuffPost)

The Jackie Robinson Story (1950, Alfred E. Green)

After a successful baseball career in college and as a coach in the military, Jackie Robinson (playing himself) attracts the attention of Major League Baseball’s Branch Rickey (Minor Watson). Rickey wants Robinson to play in the minor leagues, believing he can become the first player to break the color barrier and play in the majors. The only catch: He is forbidden from defending himself against racial bigotry. Supported by his wife (Ruby Dee), Robinson is steadfast in his determination to win. (via Google)

The Loving Story (2012, HBO Documentary)

On June 2, 1958, a white man named Richard Loving and his part-black, part-Cherokee fiancée Mildred Jeter travelled from Caroline County, VA to Washington, D.C. to be married. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in 21 states, including Virginia. Back home two weeks later, the newlyweds were arrested, tried and convicted of the felony crime of “miscegenation.” To avoid a one-year jail sentence, the Lovings agreed to leave the state; they could return to Virginia, but only separately (via HBO)

Malcolm X (1992, Spike Lee)

A tribute to the controversial black activist and leader of the struggle for black liberation. He hit bottom during his imprisonment in the ’50s, he became a Black Muslim and then a leader in the Nation of Islam. His assassination in 1965 left a legacy of self-determination and racial pride. (via Google)

Mississippi Burning (1988, Alan Parker)

When a group of civil rights workers goes missing in a small Mississippi town, FBI agents Alan Ward (Willem Dafoe) and Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman) are sent in to investigate. Local authorities refuse to cooperate with them, and the African American community is afraid to, precipitating a clash between the two agents over strategy. As the situation becomes more volatile, the direct approach is abandoned in favor of more aggressive, hard-line tactics. (via Google)

Mudbound (2017, Dee Rees, Netflix)

“In the post-World War II Jim Crow South, two families, one black and one white, struggle to keep their farms and lives intact in rural Mississippi. Featuring Mary J. Blige, directed and written by black creatives and nominated for four Oscars (including Best Picture)..” (HuffPost)

Remember the Titans (2000, Boaz Yakin)

In Virginia, high school football is a way of life, an institution revered, each game celebrated more lavishly than Christmas, each playoff distinguished more grandly than any national holiday. And with such recognition, comes powerful emotions. In 1971 high school football was everything to the people of Alexandria. But when the local school board was forced to integrate an all black school with an all white school, the very foundation of football’s great tradition was put to the test (IMBD).

Rosewood (1997, John Singleton)

Rosewood, Florida, is a small, peaceful town with an almost entirely African-American population of middle-class homeowners, until New Year’s Day 1923, when a lynch mob from a neighboring white community storms the town. Among the carnage, music teacher Sylvester (Don Cheadle) and mysterious stranger Mann (Ving Rhames) stand tall against the invaders, while white grocer John (Jon Voight) attempts to save the town’s women and children. The film is based on a true story.

Selma (2014, Ava DuVernay)

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally desegregated the South, discrimination was still rampant in certain areas, making it very difficult for blacks to register to vote. In 1965, an Alabama city became the battleground in the fight for suffrage. Despite violent opposition, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and his followers pressed forward on an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, and their efforts culminated in President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (via Google)

Something the Lord Made (2004, Joseph Sargent)

Although Vivien Thomas (Mos Def), a black man in the 1930s, is originally hired as a janitor, he proves himself adept at assisting the “Blue Baby doctor,” Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman), with his medical research. When Blalock insists that Thomas follow him to Johns Hopkins University, they must find a way to skirt a racist system to continue their study of infant heart disease. Thomas is indispensable to Blalock’s progress, but Blalock is the only one who is allowed to receive the acclaim. (via Google)

Walkout (2006 Edward James Olmos)

A teacher (Michael Peña) becomes a mentor to Chicano high-school students protesting injustices in public schools in 1968. (via Google)

1960s-1970s (Vietnam)

All the President’s Men (1976, Alan J. Pakula)

Two green reporters and rivals working for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), research the botched 1972 burglary of the Democratic Party Headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex. With the help of a mysterious source, code-named Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), the two reporters make a connection between the burglars and a White House staffer. Despite dire warnings about their safety, the duo follows the money all the way to the top. (via Google)

Apollo 13 (1995, Ron Howard)

This Hollywood drama is based on the events of the Apollo 13 lunar mission, astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) find everything going according to plan after leaving Earth’s orbit. However, when an oxygen tank explodes, the scheduled moon landing is called off. Subsequent tensions within the crew and numerous technical problems threaten both the astronauts’ survival and their safe return to Earth. (via Google)

Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

In Vietnam in 1970, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) takes a perilous and increasingly hallucinatory journey upriver to find and terminate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer who has reportedly gone completely mad. In the company of a Navy patrol boat filled with street-smart kids, a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer (Robert Duvall), and a crazed freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), Willard travels further and further into the heart of darkness. (via Google)

Argo (2012, Ben Affleck)

On Nov. 4, 1979, militants storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking 66 American hostages. Amid the chaos, six Americans manage to slip away and find refuge with the Canadian ambassador. Knowing that it’s just a matter of time before the refugees are found and likely executed, the U.S. government calls on extractor Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) to rescue them. Mendez’s plan is to pose as a Hollywood producer scouting locations in Iran and train the refugees to act as his “film” crew. (via Google)

Born on the Fourth of July (1989, Oliver Stone)

In the mid 1960s, suburban New York teenager Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise) enlists in the Marines, fulfilling what he sees as his patriotic duty. During his second tour in Vietnam, he accidentally kills a fellow soldier during a retreat and later becomes permanently paralyzed in battle. Returning home to an uncaring Veterans Administration bureaucracy and to people on both sides of the political divide who don’t understand what he went through, Kovic becomes an impassioned critic of the war. (via Google)

Casualties of War (1989, Brian De Palma)

Pvt. Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) is stationed in Vietnam under Sgt. Tony Meserve (Sean Penn). Though Meserve saves Eriksson’s life during battle, the two men clash when the callous senior officer orders the abduction of Than Thi Oanh (Thuy Thu Le), a young Vietnamese woman, to be used as a sex slave. When Eriksson refuses to take part in the abuse of Oanh, tensions between him, Meserve and the rest of the unit heat up and finally explode during a firefight with Viet Cong troops. (via Google)

Cesar Chavez (2014, Diego Luna)

Famed labor organizer and civil-rights activist Cesar Chavez (Michael Peña) is torn between his duty to his family and his commitment to securing a living wage for farm workers. (via Google)

Coming Home (1978, Hal Ashby)

Fonda plays a woman whose husband serves in active combat in Vietnam and volunteers at a local VA hospital. There she meets (and begins an affair with) a paraplegic Vietnam vet who struggles to reconcile his experience in the war—and his re-introduction to a country in which he feels unwelcome (via Esquire).

Crooklyn (1994, Spike Lee)

There are so few coming-of-age movies about young black girls, which makes Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” such a vital part of black movie history. Starring Zelda Harris and Alfre Woodard, the film is set in the 1970s and follows the young tomboy Troy (Harris) during her both idyllic and difficult childhood in Brooklyn. (HuffPost)

The Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino)

In 1968, Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), lifelong friends from a working-class Pennsylvania steel town, prepare to ship out overseas following Steven’s elaborate wedding and one final group hunting trip. In Vietnam, their dreams of military honor are quickly shattered by the inhumanities of war; even those who survive are haunted by the experience, as is Nick’s hometown sweetheart, Linda (Meryl Streep). (via Google)

Frost/Nixon (2008, Ron Howard)

In 1977, three years after the Watergate scandal that ended his presidency, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) selects British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) to conduct a one-on-one, exclusive interview. Though Nixon believes it will be easy to mislead Frost, and the latter’s own team doubts that he can stand up to the former president, what actually unfolds is an unexpectedly candid and revealing interview before the court of public opinion.

Full Metal Jacket (1987, Stanley Kubrick)

Stanley Kubrick’s take on the Vietnam War follows smart-aleck Private Davis (Matthew Modine), quickly christened “Joker” by his foul-mouthed drill sergeant (R. Lee Ermey), and pudgy Private Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio), nicknamed “Gomer Pyle,” as they endure the rigors of basic training. Though Pyle takes a frightening detour, Joker graduates to the Marine Corps and is sent to Vietnam as a journalist, covering — and eventually participating in — the bloody Battle of Hué. (via Google)

Good Morning, Vietnam (1988, Barry Levinson)

a DJ who goes to Vietnam to bring an inspired liveliness and entertainment to the Armed Forces Radio. He naturally clashes with the top brass who find his comic delivery too unorthodox for such a serious environment. But he also experiences the realities of war first-hand in his interaction with the Vietnamese, and slowly learns the truths that don’t wind up on the broadcast (Esquire)

The Green Berets (1968, John Wayne, Ray Kellogg, Mervyn LeRoy)

A cynical reporter (David Janssen) who is opposed to the Vietnam War is sent to cover the conflict and assigned to tag along with a group of Green Berets. Led by the tough-as-nails Col. Mike Kirby (John Wayne), the team is given a top-secret mission to sneak behind enemy lines and kidnap an important Viet Cong commander. Along the way, the reporter learns to respect why America is involved in the war and helps to save the life of a war orphan whose life has been destroyed by the conflict. (via Google)

Hamburger Hill (1987, John Irvin)

Over the course of 10 days in May 1969, an infantry squad led by Lt. Frantz (Dylan McDermott) and composed of both seasoned troops and new recruits, attempts to take a hill during the Vietnam War. In between attacks, the squad members deal with the other psychological stresses of the war, including the effect on morale of the antiwar movement back home and flashes of racial hostility between white and African-American soldiers, all mediated by the cool-headed medic, Doc (Courtney B. Vance). (via Google)

Hearts and Minds (1974, Peter Davis)

Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson’s phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality. (via Google)

The Ice Storm (1997, Ang Lee)

In the 1970s, an outwardly wholesome family begins cracking at the seams over the course of a tumultuous Thanksgiving break. Frustrated with his job, the father, Ben (Kevin Kline), seeks fulfillment by cheating on his wife, Elena (Joan Allen), with neighborhood seductress Janey (Sigourney Weaver). Their teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), dabbles in sexual affairs too — with Janey’s son Mikey (Elijah Wood). The family’s strained relations continue to tauten until an ice storm strikes.

In the Valley of Elah (2007, Paul Haggis)

A police detective (Charlize Theron) helps a retired Army sergeant (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his son, a soldier who went missing soon after returning from Iraq. Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam War veteran, learns that his son may have met with foul play after a night on the town with members of his platoon. (via Google)

The Killing Fields (1985, Roland Joffe)

New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) is on assignment covering the Cambodian Civil War, with the help of local interpreter Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) and American photojournalist Al Rockoff (John Malkovich). When the U.S. Army pulls out amid escalating violence, Schanberg makes exit arrangements for Pran and his family. Pran, however, tells Schanberg he intends to stay in Cambodia to help cover the unfolding story — a decision he may regret as the Khmer Rouge rebels move in. (via Google)

Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt)

Fictionalized account of the textile workers union’ campaign to unionize the J.P. Stevens textile mills in the 1970s. Norma Rae, a young Southern woman working at a cotton mill, encounters a union organizer and decides to join the effort to reform working conditions. (via Google)

Platoon (1986, Oliver Stone)

Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) leaves his university studies to enlist in combat duty in Vietnam in 1967. Once he’s on the ground in the middle of battle, his idealism fades. Infighting in his unit between Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), who believes nearby villagers are harboring Viet Cong soldiers, and Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), who has a more sympathetic view of the locals, ends up pitting the soldiers against each other as well as against the enemy. (via Google)

Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone)

Having long-since abandoned his life as a lethal soldier, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) lives a solitary life near the Thai border. Two weeks after guiding a missionary (Julie Benz) and her comrades into Burma, he gets an urgent call for help. The missionaries have not returned and although he is reluctant to embrace violence again, Rambo sets out to rescue the captives from the Burmese army. (via Google)

Rescue Dawn (2006, Werner Herzog)

During the Vietnam War, German-born US pilot Dieter Dengler is shot down over Laos and taken prisoner. Tortured and starved, Dieter resolves to escape with fellow prisoners Duane and Gene. When they finally make their daring break into the jungle, the escapees discover that the dense, humid rainforest can be a terrifying prison in itself. (via Google)

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973, Ivan Dixon)

A former CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) organizes black teenagers into well-trained guerrilla bands bent on overthrowing the white establishment. (via Google)

Spotlight (2015, Tom McCarthy)

In 2001, editor Marty Baron of The Boston Globe assigns a team of journalists to investigate allegations against John Geoghan, an unfrocked priest accused of molesting more than 80 boys. Led by editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), reporters Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Matt Carroll and Sacha Pfeiffer interview victims and try to unseal sensitive documents. The reporters make it their mission to provide proof of a cover-up of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. (via Google)

Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city. When Travis meets pretty campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), he becomes obsessed with the idea of saving the world, first plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate, then directing his attentions toward rescuing 12-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster). (via Google)

We Were Soldiers (2002, Randall Wallace)

Based upon the best-selling book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and journalist Joseph L. Galloway, this compelling war drama depicts the true story of the first major battle between the United States and North Vietnamese forces. It is a film about uncommon valor and nobility under fire, loyalty among soldiers, and the heroism and sacrifice of men and women both home and abroad. (via Google)

Zoot Suit (1981, Luis Valdez)

Mexican-American gangster Henry Reyna (Daniel Valdez) and others in his group are accused of a murder in which they had no part. They are then rounded up by the police because of their race and their choice of clothing. The gang members are thrown into prison and put through a racist trial. As Henry considers his fate, he has a conversation with El Pachuco (Edward James Olmos), a figure from his own conscience who makes him contemplate a choice between his heritage and his home country. (via Google)

1980s-present

9 to 5 (1980, Colin Higgins)

Office satire about three female secretaries who decide to get revenge on their tyrannical, sexist boss by abducting him and running the business themselves. The trio, one of whom has been passed over for promotion because she is a woman, spend a night together having drug-induced fantasies of killing the slave-driving chauvinist. One of them panics the following day when she suspects she really has poisoned the tyrant. (via Google)

American Beauty (1999, Sam Mendes)

A telesales operative becomes disillusioned with his existence and begins to hunger for fresh excitement in his life. As he experiences a new awakening of the senses, his wife and daughter also undergo changes that seriously affect their family. (via Google)

American History X (1998, Tony Kane)

Living a life marked by violence and racism, neo-Nazi Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) finally goes to prison after killing two black youths who tried to steal his car. Upon his release, Derek vows to change his ways; he hopes to prevent his younger brother, Danny (Edward Furlong), who idolizes Derek, from following in his footsteps. As he struggles with his own deeply ingrained prejudices and watches their mother grow sicker, Derek wonders if his family can overcome a lifetime of hate. (via Google)

Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Salvatore “Sal” Fragione (Danny Aiello) is the Italian owner of a pizzeria in Brooklyn. A neighborhood local, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), becomes upset when he sees that the pizzeria’s Wall of Fame exhibits only Italian actors. Buggin’ Out believes a pizzeria in a black neighborhood should showcase black actors, but Sal disagrees. The wall becomes a symbol of racism and hate to Buggin’ Out and to other people in the neighborhood, and tensions rise. (via Google)

Falling Down (1993, Joel Schumacher)

A middle-aged man dealing with both unemployment and divorce, William Foster (Michael Douglas) is having a bad day. When his car breaks down on a Los Angeles highway, he leaves his vehicle and begins a trek across the city to attend his daughter’s birthday party. As he makes his way through the urban landscape, William’s frustration and bitterness become more evident, resulting in violent encounters with various people, including a vengeful gang and a dutiful veteran cop (Robert Duvall). (via Google)

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982, Robert M. Young)

After Gregorio Cortez (Edward James Olmos), who speaks no English, is falsely accused of stealing a horse by Texas Rangers, a scuffle breaks out in which Gregorio kills a sheriff and his own brother is shot. Now forced to go on the run, Gregorio has to leave his family and set out alone. Meanwhile, a reporter starts to piece together the story and realizes the incident stemmed from a tragic misunderstanding. Eventually, Gregorio is caught and put on trial for murder. (via Google)

Barry (2016, Vikram Ghandi)

Barack Obama arrives in New York in the fall of 1981 for his junior year at Columbia University. He struggles to stay connected to his mother, his estranged father and his classmates. (via Google)

Black Hawk Down (2001, Ridley Scott)

The film takes place in 1993 when the U.S. sent special forces into Somalia to destabilize the government and bring food and humanitarian aid to the starving population. Using Black Hawk helicopters to lower the soldiers onto the ground, an unexpected attack by Somalian forces brings two of the helicopters down immediately. From there, the U.S. soldiers must struggle to regain their balance while enduring heavy gunfire. (via Google)

Boyz in the Hood (1991, John Singleton)

Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is sent to live with his father, Furious Styles (Larry Fishburne), in tough South Central Los Angeles. Although his hard-nosed father instills proper values and respect in him, and his devout girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long) teaches him about faith, Tre’s friends Doughboy (Ice Cube) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut) don’t have the same kind of support and are drawn into the neighborhood’s booming drug and gang culture, with increasingly tragic results. (via Google)

Crash (2004, Paul Haggis)

Writer-director Paul Haggis interweaves several connected stories about race, class, family and gender in Los Angeles in the aftermath of 9/11. (via Google)

Flight 93 (2006, Peter Markle)

In this dramatization, unsuspecting passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 board the aircraft on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. After three other planes strike their intended targets, al-Qaida terrorists on Flight 93 make their move, threatening the passengers into submission by claiming to have an explosive onboard. But calls to loved ones reveal the truth, and the passengers — including Todd Beamer (Brennan Elliott) and Tom Burnett (Jeffrey Nordling) — plan to take back the flight. (via Google)

Paris is Burning (1991, Documentary)

This classic 1991 documentary gives a vivid and dynamic (though cursory) glimpse into the gay ballroom culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s that was dominated by young queer black and Latino people who used the scene as not only a form of escape, but also survival. (HuffPost)

Selena (1997, Gregory Nava)

In this biographical drama, Selena Quintanilla (Jennifer Lopez) is born into a musical Mexican-American family in Texas. Her father, Abraham (Edward James Olmos), realizes that his young daughter is talented and begins performing with her at small venues. She finds success and falls for her guitarist, Chris Perez (Jon Seda), who draws the ire of her father. Seeking mainstream stardom, Selena begins recording an English-language album which, tragically, she would never complete. (via Google)

Three Kings (1999, David O. Russell)

Just after the end of the Gulf War, four American soldiers decide to steal a cache of Saddam Hussein’s hidden gold. Led by cynical Sergeant Major Archie Gates (George Clooney), three of the men are rescued by rebels, but Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) is captured and tortured by Iraqi intelligence. The Iraqi rebels beg for the American trio to help fight against the impending arrival of Hussein’s Elite Guard. The men agree to fight in return for help rescuing Troy. (via Google)

The Hurt Locker (2008, Kathryn Bigelow)

Following the death of their well-respected Staff Sergeant in Iraq, Sergeant JT Stanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge find their Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit saddled with a very different team leader. Staff Sergeant William James is an inveterate risk-taker who seems to thrive on war, but there’s no denying his gift for defusing bombs. (via Google)

The Watermelon Woman (1996, Cheryl Dunye)

An aspiring black lesbian filmmaker (Cheryl Dunye) researches an obscure 1940s black actress billed as the Watermelon Woman. (via Google)

Civil War and Daily Life: Snapshots of the Early War in Guatemala

by Vasken Markarian

(All photos here are published with the permission of the photographer.)

Two young Guatemalan soldiers abruptly pose for the camera. They rush to stand upright with rifles at their sides. On a dirt road overlooking an ominous Guatemala City, they stand on guard duty. This snapshot formed the title page of an exhibit at the University of Texas at Austin’s Benson Latin American Collection in 2018. A collection of these and other documents by Rupert Chambers will become part of a permanent archive at the library. The photographs depict the year 1966, a time of martial law and increasing state repression of leftist movements and supporters of reform. A storm was brewing in Guatemala.

Historians can situate this collection of photographs in the context of Guatemala’s civil war. The Guatemalan military was mobilizing to eliminate leftist guerrilla armies, which had recently arrived on the scene. Leaders of these rebel armies framed their struggle in the hope of democratic reform.  The Guatemalan state would not budge.  The state military agenda rested on two pillars:  fierce Cold War anti-communism and protection of the Guatemalan oligarchs’ monopoly on land and labor. Nearly two decades later Guatemalans would learn of the brutality of a military regime that would go to any lengths, including genocide against innocent indigenous-Mayan civilians, to suppress the insurgency.

Was this snapshot of two young foot soldiers a sign of what was to come? It is convenient to position these two soldiers as symbols of the violence that ensued in coming decades. But in 1966, terror had not yet reached its apex. The conflict was still, in part, a “gentlemen’s war,” fought between members of the upper and middle classes. At the time, foot soldiers, many of whom came from poor Mayan communities, were unaware of the military operations that would define the ensuing decades. They experienced the same ominous environment of uncertainty that most Guatemalans did.

This past February, the author of these photographs, Rupert Chambers, reflected on his work for a public audience at the Benson Latin American Collection and took time to answer my questions. He visited Guatemala in 1966 as a UT graduate student doing historical research. There, Chambers documented the streets and people of Guatemala City and rural towns. He photographed Mayan women at local markets, children selling goods, and funeral processions through the streets. The camera lens captures citizens who continued to make a living, coping through poverty, violence, and discrimination. How do these photographs help us understand the context of the civil war?

As an American in a highly fragile moment in Guatemala, Chambers reflects on the lack of awareness among Americans in Guatemala about the military and political conflict at the time. “They [Guatemalans] knew we [the U.S. Government] had overthrown their revolution in 1954; we had not yet admitted it to ourselves.”  He was referring to the CIA administered revolt that replaced Guatemala’s 10-year old democratic government with a right-wing regime.

In 1966, roughly a decade into the Vietnam war, U.S. military advisers were exporting their anti-communist military infrastructure into their neighbor in Central America. Guatemalan generals obligingly received aid in the form of training, as well as technical and material support. The American military also authorized thousands of Guatemalan military commissioners to help combat the perceived communist threat. In the 1980s, the military collaboration was more obvious to American observers. In 1966, however, Americans in Guatemala were still in the dark. Chambers remembered how “few of us were aware of the full extent of U.S. support and intervention.”

An air of uncertainty occupied the minds of ordinary Guatemalans as well. Chambers spoke about this overall atmosphere, pointing out that most Guatemalans were aware of the conflict but not the extent, and no one would have used the term “civil war” at that juncture.  “While not exactly the calm before the storm, the mid-1960s gave only clues and portents.”

Behind the scenes, networks of right-wing terror groups flowed in the capital city. Signs of terror reared their ugly heads. Chambers described witnessing street signs of the mano blanco (white hand). The “white hand” was a symbol for a clandestine terror organization that used death lists to assassinate democratic leaders and decorated the corpses of their victims with threatening notes. In the 1960s, Guatemala would become one of Latin America’s first settings of “forced disappearances.”

Despite this violent background, Rupert Chambers’ photographs provide an important perspective on the “day-to-day.” As Chambers states, “Guatemalans had lived in a context of violence for so long that in the mid-sixties this all appeared to them as more of the same, a constantly fluctuating level of violence, a cause for concern but not yet something very much out of the ordinary as it was soon to become.”

Chambers prompts historians to consider whether we can we document a tragedy before it happens. Photographer Sally Mann once stated that “photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”  Historians may examine such photographs for clues of terror, silence, and ambiguity. There is something deceptive, however, about looking at these photographs solely through the prism of what was to come; something deterministic. The precariousness of Guatemala’s situation was as much a product of history as it was an unfortunate feature of daily life. And while Guatemalans feared the past and future, their dignity remained in the present.

Photo documentary evidence of state violence also has a history. About a decade after Chambers’ 1966 photographs, a new wave of visual records would help document the violence in Guatemala, spearheaded by the likes of Jean-Marie Simon, in her book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, and Pamela Yates, in her documentary, When the Mountains Tremble.  Such visual documentation propelled human rights efforts to combat the impunity of the Guatemalan state apparatus, which was responsible for around of 90% of civilian deaths during the war.

Chambers’ photographs embodied one of the earlier stages of the documentation of the civil war. His photographs document an underexamined area of history in the ambiguities and fears of daily life under violent regimes. While photography was Chambers’ hobby, he intentionally set out to document human dignity, something he claimed to learn much about from the people of Guatemala. Chambers continues this work in his new project in Mexico.

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum by Edward Shore

Black Amateur Photography by Joan Neuberger

Media and Politics from the Prague Spring Archive by Ian Goodale

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War (2016)

By Marcus Oliver Golding

The role of the United States during the Cold War is one often marked by tragedy, repression and the support for authoritarian regimes throughout the western hemisphere. That perception is shared throughout Latin America, which makes one wonder if there are cases in which U.S. foreign policy actually helped Latin Americans in their quest for socio-economic development and democratization during this turbulent period. Aragorn Storm Miller invites us to rethink US-Latin American relations by exploring the unusual case of Venezuela during the 1960s. In Precarious Paths to Freedom, he examines the economic and military partnership between these two countries that proved to be essential to achieving the twin goals of economic development and democratization while fending off political extremism. As many other places in Latin America at the end of the 1950s, Venezuela emerged from ten years (1948-1958) of military dictatorship looking to democratize and modernize. Soon, however, the Cuban revolution offered an alternative path to socio-economic development in the region. The rivalry between the United States and Cuba  would threaten the stability of the hemisphere. To navigate these turbulent waters, politicians in Venezuela had to strike the right balance between appeasing popular demands and suppressing political extremism to preserve democracy and achieve economic prosperity.

Miller shows how the administrations of Rómulo Betancourt (1959-1964) and Raúl Leoni (1964-1969) deftly courted American policymakers for economic resources while severing diplomatic ties with Latin American autocracies regardless of their ideology. The Betancourt Doctrine, as it became known, stood as a norm of Venezuelan diplomacy during the 1960s despite the constant support that the United States provided for military dictatorships elsewhere in the hemisphere. By studying these diplomatic episodes, Miller also underlines the fact that U.S. power was not absolute, and that Latin American agency weighed heavily in shaping the histories of the region.

Throughout the book the author analyzes how this joint effort in democratization and modernization connected local developments to the broader ideological clashes between Cuba and the United States, and between these two and China and the Soviet Union globally. In the struggle for political peace, Venezuela became the target of internal and external extremism testing the resolve of moderate politicians and the centrist government coalition. Likewise, the American-Venezuelan partnership went through several trials from radicals on both sides of the political spectrum that threatened to derail the prospects for democratic governance. First came right-wing reactionaries who carried out several failed attempts to unseat Rómulo Betancourt between 1958 and 1960. The most shocking of these plans was spearheaded by a traditional ally of the U.S., the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961) of the Dominican Republic.  who financed a mission to kill Betancourt. The plan consisted in detonating a bomb near the passing presidential motorcade that killed the driver but only wounded the Venezuelan president. After this episode, the demise of the extreme right was succeeded by leftist insurgencies from 1962 to 1969.

The Venezuelan Communist Party and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left first tried to achieve power in alliance with disaffected leftist officers in the army with whom they engineered two failed military uprisings (El Carupanazo and el Porteñazo both in 1962). The next phase of the insurgency involved guerrilla warfare with significant support from external communist allies. The discovery of crates full of Cuban weapons at the Paraguaná Peninsula in 1963, and the successive landings of Venezuelan guerrillas with some Cuban troops and instructors in Tucacas (1966) and Machurucuto (1967), are only some of the episodes that the author addresses in order to show how Venezuela became the prime target for Cuba’s hemispheric plans during this decade.

Miller devotes approximately two thirds of the book exploring the genesis of the guerrilla movement, the divisions that plagued it early on, its financial connections with Cuba and the Italian Communist Party, its lack of popularity among ordinary people, and its failure to achieve power through violent means. However, the Venezuelan government perpetually struggled to eliminate this threat from the urban and rural areas of the country. Through a two-prong strategy that involved beefing up the Venezuelan military in counterinsurgency methods and national civic actions, coupled with the issuing of presidential pardons of imprisoned insurgents to reintegrate them to mainstream politics, the administration of Raúl Leoni dealt the final blow to the guerrillas. In this shared effort to preserve democracy the United States’ contribution in military aid became crucial.  Its funding is what allowed the Venezuelan government to create multiple ranger battalions that were decisive in the final offensives against the guerrilla in 1967 and 1968.

By 1969, the second peaceful transfer of power from one civilian government to another (and the first in the country’s history from a governing party to the opposition )  seemed to mark the triumph of moderate forces over extremism and the consolidation of democracy in Venezuela. Miller concludes by pointing to three factors that made possible this extraordinary political outcome. The special rapport that existed between the American and Venezuelan presidents during this period assured a sound footing for diplomatic cooperation and economic and military aid. On the other hand, The Puntofijo Pact, a formal arrangement signed in 1958 between the mainstream political parties in Venezuela (AD, COPEI and URD), enshrined the commitment of the political elite to preserve democracy at all costs. Finally, the deep-seated popular beliefs in a democratic regime led the Venezuelan people to constantly support the system through massive participation in electoral politics.

Using a concise and enjoyable writing style, Miller reminds us that despite the appalling record of authoritarian violence in the hemisphere, American foreign policy also showed some bright spots through the successful democratization of a Latin American country during the Cold War.

The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (2014)

by Paula O’Donnell

On March 24, 1976, a junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew the president of Argentina in order to install a military dictatorship that they believed would counter the threat of communism . In the seven years that followed, this new government launched a “national reorganization process” or proceso, designed to eradicate Marxist guerillas and their sympathizers. Through censorship and propaganda, kidnapping and torture, and the forced disappearance of tens of thousands of civilians, the state succeeded in subduing insurgents while also taking countless innocent lives. Many scholars have written about this period, known as the Argentine “dirty war,” with emphasis on its most obvious protagonists: the vanquished guerrilla fighters, the military officials, and the radicalized and left-leaning sectors of the population that resisted the government’s atrocious policies at great personal risk.

In his excellent book on this period and the decade preceding it, Sebastián Carassai uncovers the memories and ideological sensibilities of a group that abstained from deliberate political activism during military rule; a sector of the Argentine middle classes that he names the “silent majority.” To highlight variations in the experiences of this heterogeneous social group, the author interviews two hundred middle class individuals, of different ages, from three different municipalities: Buenos Aires, San Miguel de Tucuman, and Correa.

Carassai begins his text by exploring the durable significance of “anti-Peronism,” to middle class political sensibilities. Juan Peron was a populist president who served two terms between 1946 to 1955, and was elected again in 1973. Memories of his administration as a fascist, authoritarian, immoral, and “anti-cultural” regime definitively shaped how Carassai’s subjects engaged with subsequent political events. Perón’s return to power via a landslide electoral victory in 1973 discouraged anti-Perónists to such an extent that many thereafter withdrew from politics entirely.

Beginning in 1969, a series of student-led uprisings against the policies of General Juan Carlos Onganía forced sectors of the middle classes to confront political conflict and state violence. Student demonstrators, many of them young and middle class, were viciously suppressed by police forces, provoking sympathy among Carassai’s subjects. Many of the interviewees remember offering protesters places to hide and items with which to construct barricades. Then, media reports characterizing the young activists as Perónist, subversive, dangerous, and foreign transformed how many middle class individuals outside of these movements came to perceive student activism.

Several left-wing revolutionary factions launched guerrilla campaigns against Ongania’s regime and the administrations that followed. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, these insurgents employed a variety of methods, including kidnappings and assassinations, in a multipronged effort to overthrow the federal government. Carassai examines how “nonpolitical” members of the middle class perceived these armed insurrections. Refuting allegations that the middle classes initially supported revolutionaries, Carassai points to a frequently overlooked study indicating that a large majority of the middle classes strongly disapproved of guerrilla violence by 1971. A famous soap opera and prominent literature are used as evidence for the silent majority’s growing anxieties regarding armed revolution. Mounting violence hardened middle class reproach of the guerrillas, fueling support for state-led repression in some sectors of the population.

The military coup of 1976 heralded a period of repression and terror unrivaled in Argentine history. However, state violence had already existed under the previous administrations, and many middle class sectors remained hopeful that the new military regime would improve the enforcement of law and order. Carassai cites Michael Taussig’s theory of “state fetishism” to explain middle class justification for the disappearances of their fellow citizens. The impulse to rationalize state violence emerged from a civil superstition that the state knew who was guilty and who was innocent.

Carassai also examines symbolic violence in Argentine culture during the decade prior to the “Dirty War.” Images of guns in advertising evoked positive connotations of status, adventure, and sex appeal. Besides the frequent representations of guns, bombs, and death in magazines, violent metaphors (“liquidiation”), slang (“killing it”), and satirical violence proliferated in a manner that trivialized the act of murder within popular culture. Carassai draws upon the theories of Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu to decipher how this “banalization” of violence explains his interview subjects’ broad acceptance of state terror after 1976.

Carassai employs a huge variety of sources, such as public opinion polls, electoral results, censuses, periodicals, and cultural productions, to illuminate the political sensibilities and memories of his informants. The author’s most impressive contribution, however, is his innovative approach to oral history. After an initial session in traditional interview format, Carassai showed all of his subjects a two-part chronological montage of television clips, popular songs, political speeches, comedy shows, cartoons, advertisements, historical photographs, and news clippings to stimulate their memories of the years being investigated. The images nearly always triggered additional reflections on the events and years depicted. The author’s evident sympathy for his subjects does not deter him from noting contradictions and falsehoods in their testimonies. The book’s main flaw is the absence of any discussion of race, which is a glaring omission when considering the racialized imagery found in many of the cultural products and propaganda which Carassai uses as evidence. Even so, this is a marvelous study of political identity formation, memory, and the cultural origins of violence which should be required reading for all scholars of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” as well as any informed reader interested in Latin America during the twentieth century.

The montage Carassai created and used during interviews can be found at this link:

You may also like:

The Cold War’s World History and Imperial Histories of the US and the World by John Munro

The Battle of Chile by Nathan Stone

History of Modern Central America Through Digital Archives by Vaskan Makarian

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