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Not Even Past

NEP Author Spotlight – Gwendolyn Lockman

NEP Author Spotlight – Gwendolyn Lockman

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of faculty and graduate student writers. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing together all of their published content across the site together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the many significant contributions to the magazine made by Gwendolyn Lockman.

Gwendolyn Lockman is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History. Her dissertation project, “Recreation and Reclamation: Parks, Mining, and Community in Butte, Montana,” investigates the history of outdoor leisure spaces, union identity, and environmental health in an industrial copper mining city. Her work is supported by the Carrie Johnson Fellowship, the Charles Redd Fellowship in Western American History, the Mining History Association Research Grant, and Dumbarton Oaks through the Garden and Landscape Studies Workshop, part of the Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies. At UT, Gwen is an affiliate of the Center for Sports Communication and Media in the Moody College of Communication, completed a Women’s and Gender studies portfolio, and has contributed to the History Department as a co-leader of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality, social media manager, History Graduate Student Council Representative, and web news assistant. She earned her MA in History at UT in 2020. Before graduate school, Gwen worked in the legal department for the Washington Nationals. She earned her BA in American Studies from Georgetown University. She is originally from Poplar, Montana, and calls Missoula, Montana home. 

Review of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020)

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War. 

Read the full review here.

Forward-Looking Perspectives upon Returning to the Classroom and the Zoomroom

We hoped we would face a more “normal” fall for 2021. Instead, we face another semester that will demand flexibility in the face of anxiety as we continue to teach through the Coronavirus pandemic and the Delta variant surge. After scrambling to adapt to online learning environments in March 2020, many of us are returning to in-person classrooms as well as modified learning environments for the Fall 2021 semester. Online teaching and learning revealed many valuable intangibles from the physical classroom. However, we also have an invaluable opportunity to discard old habits that hindered both faculty and teaching assistants, and exhausted students. What follows is a handful of suggestions about what to enthusiastically reinstate in the classroom, what to leave in 2020 without looking back, and what to adopt from online learning for face-to-face instruction.

Read the full article here.

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

Past the local dump and the interstate, and separated by foothills from the nearby historic neighborhoods of Missoula, Montana, the Moon-Randolph Homestead can be found, steeling itself against the modern world but not quite stuck in the past. It is an unusual historical site where the ecological and the human, and the past and the present melt into one another.

Before U.S. westward expansion and federal homesteading efforts, Indigenous people traversed the North Hills of Missoula on the Trail to the Buffalo. They passed through nearby Hell Gate Canyon, named both for the cold, rough waters of the river and for the ambushes between tribes that occurred at the canyon. Once the U.S. seized the land in the late nineteenth century, homesteaders in the Missoula valley tried to raise subsistence crops and livestock there. These small parcels of land had little of the potential for profit that large, thousand-plus acre ranches enjoyed.

Read the full article here.

“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library

The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to protest the police brutality against Eric Garner. In the summer of 2016, the WNBA joined the conversation with the “Change Starts with Us—Justice & Accountability” and #BlackLivesMatter, #Dallas5, #__ demonstrations by the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty. The current moment is most defined, of course, by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests that began in the 2016 NFL preseason. “Get in the Game” charts a legacy of barrier-breaking and justice-seeking athletes from the late 19th century to the present with an emphasis on the current relationship between athlete activism and American politics.

Read the full article here.

Year in Review – Academic year 2021-2022

Year in Review - Fall 2021/Spring 2022

It’s been another busy year for Not Even Past with more than 130 articles published across the academic year. To celebrate all this incredible academic content we have compiled everything in one page below. Not Even Past‘s reach also continues to grow, and we just broke a million page views over the past 12 months, making the magazine an important resource not just for the University of Texas community but for Public History online. As we conclude the academic year, Not Even Past would like to thank Gabrielle Esparza our amazing Associate Editor whose energy, creativity and brilliance as an editor has been a key part of the magazine’s success this year. We would also like to recognize Dr Joan Neuberger, our Founding Editor who will be retiring from UT over the summer. Not Even Past is unimaginable without Joan’s tireless work and we have published a brief tribute to her remarkable achievements here. Finally we would like to thank all our contributors and partners across the past academic year and of course our readers.

To view specific sections, use the links below:

Features

Features

My life’s story has come to be entwined with the history of the Relaciones. My intellectual place of origin, Bogotá, Colombia, facilitated my first encounter with them. My continued engagement with these sources from Latin American classrooms and special collections to Spanish archives has culminated in my current dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin – the principal observatory and repository of these documents in the Americas. My life and research paths have allowed me to explore this neglected historical terrain. I argue that by drawing together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as a genre of documents, we can better envision how people from diverse ethnic compositions on both sides of the Atlantic produced a massive number of descriptions of local nature and societies around the same period. This perspective may allow us to see and understand the complex knowledge networks of Atlantic towns that the Spanish Crown wove together. Consider, for instance, how the Relaciones go beyond the famous Mexican indigenous charts as revealed by Map 2, the Relación of Valledupar, a township located in what is now Colombia.

Rafael Nieto-Bello

Robert Runyon was an astoundingly prolific photographer of the Texas-México borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. The University of Texas at Austin hosts over 14,000 photographs donated by the Runyon family, along with related manuscript materials. Much of the collection is available digitally, and the Briscoe Center for American History also houses Runyon’s glass negatives, lantern slides, nitrate negatives, prints, postcards, panoramas, correspondence, and business records. The sheer scope of his work, which ranges from botanicals to portraiture to quotidian scenes of daily life, has rendered his imagery—in regard to Texas and the U.S.-México border—ubiquitous.

Annette M. Rodríguez

The largest green space in downtown Austin, Waterloo Park takes its name from the Waterloo hamlet, a frontier settlement that Austin replaced. It sits in a basin along Waller Creek, encompassing a particularly flood-prone stretch of Austin’s most central, urbanized stream. Though the park was built in 1975 as part of the Brackenridge Urban Renewal Project, its history dates to the end of the US Civil War, when formerly enslaved people began migrating to southern cities in search of work, education, lost family members, and haven from anti-Black violence. Many migrants were skilled farmers and craftsmen and had saved money to purchase land. As a rule, white landowners sold Black people only their “poorest” properties, relegating most Black communities to low-lying and otherwise hazardous spaces.

Katherine Leah Pace
books

Books

I remember the stink of the fishmeal plants in Iquique. During the austral winter of 1983, the vapors that turned tons of whole anchoveta into high protein fish flour lingered over the beach with the coastal fog until the customary afternoon breeze came and carried it away. Local residents called it “the smell of money.” Domestically produced fish flour had become the primary source for fish food in the new salmon farms that had begun to scar the pristine beauty of the lakes and fiords in the Chilean south. It would also become dog food, and the “high protein cookies” on school lunch menus for the undernourished children that General Pinochet’s second recession in ten years had pushed dangerously down the path of deficiency disease. But the smelly fishmeal extracted from the seemingly infinite Pacific coast of northern Chile had already become a vital element in an increasingly global ecosystem of profit-driven food production. Economists and technocrats called it a “non-traditional export.” Along with the farmed salmon, the fresh fruit out of season and the world’s finest red wines for a little less money, Chilean fishmeal would help reduce the local economy’s absolute dependence on the roller coaster of international copper prices. It would fatten pigs in Germany and chickens in California to satisfy the voracious appetites of a competing species now referred to simply as “the consumer.”

Nathan Stone

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War.

Gwendolyn Lockman

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft-power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals.

Jon Buchleiter
Teaching

Teaching

In Spring 2021, my course, “Preserving Austin’s Queer History,” trained undergraduate students to conduct oral history interviews with LGBTQ community members past and present. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the February 2021 weather disaster, the fifteen students in this class conducted oral history interviews with nineteen people. These oral history narrators range in age from thirty-four to eighty-four years old. They include gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans and non-binary people, as well as artists and performers, grassroots activists, and small business owners. They are white, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and multi-racial. And they have contributed to Austin’s LGBTQ history and to local struggles against injustice in a variety of ways. 

Lauren Gutterman
Digital and Film

Digital and Film

In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind. The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers. Not only was the real “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (as several writers have noted) much taller, darker, and heavier than she is depicted in the film, she was probably much queerer as well.

Candice Lyons

A key thread running through Dr. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen’s career is access—to language, to history, and to education. She recognizes that linguistic research on Indigenous languages is insufficient if members of Indigenous communities cannot access it. Therefore, throughout her career she has sought to remove barriers to such access via creative, collaborative research that goes beyond traditional academic practice.

May Helena Plumb

Throughout the last two years of the global pandemic, digital research has surged among graduate students and faculty alike. Travel restrictions prevented scholars from accessing important sources. Project Arte Colonial and the continuing efforts of Jaime H. Borja Gómez have provided invaluable access to colonial Spanish resources to individuals across the world who are unable to conduct research in-person. The digital humanities have become critical components to fields across the social sciences. ARCA works to create an easily accessible gateway that simultaneously serves veterans and newcomers of remote research. Historians must adopt new and diverse ways to engage with the public and other scholars through the medium of technology.

Haley Schroer
Blog

Blog

My Guatemalan father was born in the middle of a civil war. His childhood house was built from corrugated metal and adobe brick. He grew up clinging to my abuela’s back wrapped in a blanket as she weaved to sustain the family. He did not have shoes until he was 8 years old. He dropped out of school after the second grade. Before he reached my age, he was nearly murdered by the army three times. He worked as a trench digger and then as a laborer before fleeing his home in Huehuetenango. 

Ilan Palacios Avineri

In New York City, buildings are like wallpaper. If you peeled back the facades and peeked into their histories, you’d find something different, something out of style. The buildings’ old identities wouldn’t match the modern character of the neighborhood. On the Lower East Side, if you peel back the layers of luxury apartments, churches, and fusion restaurants, you’d notice a trend. Many buildings that now house fashionable venues used to be synagogues.

Amy Shreeve

Mauricio Tenorio thinks with his feet. As his soles touch the asphalt, he feels a piece of one of his dearest obsessions: the city. Not Mexico City specifically, although it might be the one he feels closest to, but the idea of the city. Cities have so much to say. A street in Barcelona, an old building in Chicago, an awkward monument in Washington. D.C., a park in Berlin: they all have stories and a history. And Tenorio, a Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Profesor Asociado at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through his work. I like to repeat one about a hidden monument in Mexico City. Inside the column of the Independence monument, the capital’s famous postcard-ready landmark with angel’s wings, the white statue of an obscure figure guards the ashes of Mexico’s founding fathers—a monument of a seventeenth-century Irishman. Tenorio tells the story of Guillerme de Lampart, the “Irish Zorro” who plotted an independence movement with religious undertones in the 1640s—a peculiar reading of the Bible led him to believe that Spain did not have sovereign rights over the Americas. He became a controversial figure in Mexican history. The Inquisition burnt Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr for anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing his monument publicly would have surely triggered heated historiographical and political debates, weakening the process of national reconciliation. Thus, Lampart made his way into one of the nation’s central monuments: discretely.[1] Yet Tenorio’s driving curiosity lies elsewhere: it is not so much about what cities have to say, but how they say it. The location and concealment of Lampart’s monument suggest broader discussions on religion and independence, heroes and martyrs, history and the city. Tenorio explores how cities dictate these stories.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

For the plebiscite of ‘88, Chile had its first political campaign in fifteen years. La Campaña del NO tried to make it fun. We all had many dark tales to tell, and maybe a moral obligation to tell them, but sad stories don’t get votes. Moreover, a very fine line, invisible to carabineros, divided protesting and campaigning. Opposition supporters had to resort to clever strategies. We would drive around with their windshield wipers on, on a dry day. Like saying “no” by moving your index finger from left to right. The cops couldn’t exactly arrest you for using your windshield wiper.

Nathan Stone
IHS & Public History

IHS and Public History

Hungry for Revolution (2021) is an ambitious book that, through the social history of food production, distribution and consumption and through a cultural history of the knowledge and science of nutrition, agriculture, and political economy of rural landholdings, offers a radical new chronology of the political history of 20th century Chile.  Hungry for Revolution masterfully goes over the nitrate export boom in the fin-de-siècle mining towns of northern Chile and the creation of the new-deal welfare state of Alessandri and the Frente Popular in the 1930s and 1940s to offer a striking new genealogy of Allende’s Socialist Revolution.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

For most individuals, the Counter Reformation sought to quash new forms of democratic spiritual participation in the form of Lutheranism and Calvinism. The so-called Galileo affair epitomizes this narrative of the Counter Reformation as retrograde and even villainous. In the popular imagination, Galileo stands as the victim of the Counter Reformation’s stifling prosecution of skepticism, experimentation, and modernity. Yet Dr. Madeline McMahon begs to differ. In her manuscript the Catholic Creation of Early Modern Knowledge, McMahon argues that by creating the institution of the resident (non-absentee) bishop, the Counter Reformation became the lynchpin to the new confessional, interventionist, technocratic early-modern state.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Author Spotlights

Texas

Texas

In our exhibit Black Cowboys: An American Story, visitors from Texas, and beyond will be introduced to a diverse group of African American cowhands, from Johana July, a free Black Seminole born in 1860 to Myrtis Dightman, called “The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo” who broke the color line at professional rodeos in the late 1960s. In addition to presenting the public with depictions of numerous Black cowboys, enslaved and free, the Witte Museum introduces the audience to the legacy of Black ranches and freedom colonies throughout Texas. The audience learns about several Black owned ranches that have stood the test of time, outlasting white supremacy and Jim Crow. These ranching families, who continue to ranch the land purchased and maintained by their ancestors in the nineteenth-century, display a tenacity of will and a commitment to their family traditions. They often withstood destruction of their family legacy by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan while also weathering continual threats of encroachment from neighbors and state governments.

Ronald Davis
Author spotlights

Resources For Teaching Black History

Over the past decade, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources connected to Black History written by faculty and graduate students at UT and beyond. To mark Black History Month, we have collected them into one compilation page organized around 11 topics. These articles showcase groundbreaking research, but they are also intended as a concrete resource for teachers and students. This is an evolving compilation that is continually updated.

Compiled by Alina Scott and Gabrielle Esparza

Topics
  1. Economy of Slavery
  2. Slavery & the Family
  3. Urban Slavery
  4. Key Figures
  5. Medicine & Healthcare
  6. Civil Rights & Black Power
  7. On #BlackLivesMatter
  8. Gender & Sexuality
  9. Diasporic Blackness
  10. Primary Sources
  11. Reviews

Economy of Slavery

White slave-owning women were not the only ones to insist on their profound economic investments in the institution of slavery; the enslaved people they owned and white members of southern communities did too. The testimony of formerly enslaved people and other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery, situating those relationships firmly at the center of nineteenth-century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. These sources reveal that white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

STEPHANIE E. JONES-ROGERS

Slavery & the Family

I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman and a Mexican man who had lived as husband and wife in the 1840s, twenty-five miles northeast of Victoria, Texas. She was a woman forced to live in bondage in Jackson County, near the town of Texana, in present day Edna, Texas. Her husband was a Mexican man who was likely indentured, employed, or a peon in that same vicinity.

MARIA ESTHER HAMMACK

Urban Slavery

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

CLIFTON SORRELL III

Key Figures

Lucy Parsons’s biography offers several overlapping narratives— a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the evolution of race as a political ideology and social signifier, and the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal. She was a bold, enigmatic woman. Her power to inform and fascinate is enduring and her story, in all its complexity, remains a remarkable one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.

JACQUELINE JONES

In 1921, while reflecting on the height of the cattle drive era, between 1865 and 1895, then President of the “Old Time Trail Drivers’ Association” of Texas, George W. Saunders, estimated that “fully 35,000 men went up the trail with herds…about one-third were negroes and Mexicans.” Eminent historians of African Americans in the West such as Kenneth Porter argue that, “twenty five percent” of all cowboys who participated in cattle drives out of Texas were Black. Yet, this is just the beginning. Some Black cowhands never journeyed to Kansas, driving herds of 2000 to 5000 cattle. Some of these women and men, stayed to work on ranches throughout Texas rather than “go up the trail.” They were cooks, and cowboys, horse breakers and trainers. There was more to being a cowboy than eating dust and crossing swollen rivers.

RONALD DAVIS

Medicine & Healthcare

Civil Rights & Black Power

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

ASHLEY FARMER

On #BlackLivesMatter

In less than a month, our nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. This should be a time of celebratory reflection, yet Wednesday night, after another grand jury failed to see the value of African-American life, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Black lives matter!” As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY AND JENNIFER L MORGAN

Gender & Sexuality

Black is beautiful.  The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s popularized this slogan and sentiment, but almost half-a-century earlier, black beauty companies used elaborate advertisements like the one pictured here to sell their vision to uplift and beautify black women.  African American women like Madam C.J. Walker produced beauty products and trained women to work as sales agents and beauticians. and in the process, developed an enduring enterprise that promoted economic opportunities and connections with African descendant peoples throughout North and South America.

TIFFANY GILL

Diaspora

Primary Sources

Reviews in Black History

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. 

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes, Reviewed By Tiana Wilson

Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Labor and Citizenship in the United States

Five Books I Recommend from Comps - Labor and Citizenship in the United States

by Gwendolyn Lockman

The best part of reading for comprehensive exams in graduate school is getting to read scholarship that inspires, even if it is not directly related to your dissertation research. I am a historian of labor and leisure in the U.S. West, so my comprehensive exams encompassed readings in U.S. History, divided into pre-1865 and post-1865 sections. Here are five books, which I enthusiastically recommend, spanning 1750 to the present, from Baltimore and New York to Southern California and Navajo Country.

1. Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2016.

Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2016.

Chandra Manning examines the role of the Union army in facilitating emancipation during the Civil War. She categorizes formerly enslaved people as refugees, though the term is more often associated with twentieth and twenty-first century stateless people. She argues that looking at contemporary refugee camps is perhaps the best comparison with the “contraband camps” of the Civil War, where those who escaped slavery sought refuge with the Union army. She emphasizes that the Union army was not necessarily prepared to act as massive humanitarian organization, nor was it perfectly aligned with the aspirations of freed people. Rather, an alliance of necessity arose. The most urgent takeaway from Manning’s book is that it took all the force of the Union army to begin emancipation, but the abolitionist effort lost this powerful ally with the war’s end and re-enslavement was a distinct possibility. Manning assures us that there is nothing predestined about the past. Emancipation, citizenship, and voting rights legislation could have turned out differently. Even the Thirteenth Amendment nearly had language that forbade Black citizenship. Terrorization of Black people by white people following Emancipation made it evident that slavery could stay very much alive in culture and practice, laws be damned.

2. Molina, Natalia. How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Molina, Natalia. How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Molina’s book describes race in terms of historical processes around law, language, and culture. In theorizing what she calls “racial scripts,” Molina emphasizes the power of language and ideas as relational structures that set patterns for discrimination. The ways in which law and media “racialize” groups in American culture depends on the recycling of stereotypes, biases, and suspicions of othered peoples. The book spans the era between the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. It focuses on Mexican immigration, but also includes important examples of discrimination against African Americans and Asian immigrants. This relational presentation of the processes of creating ideas about race is crucial to the idea of “racial scripts,” which evolve as racism develops and redevelops based on accumulative prejudices in mainstream white American culture. In short, what racial discrimination might be leveraged against one minoritized group–mongrelization, demonization, portrayals of licentiousness–was and continues to be re-used in American racial relations in a tug-of-war of who “counts” as an American. And yet, Molina emphasizes that racialized populations resist these “racial scripts” by creating “counterscripts” to build solidarity and community within and among racialized peoples.

3. Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Seth Rockman presents a labor history of the early republic that focuses on workers who barely survived in the developing capitalist marketplace. In fact, many failed. He emphasizes that the broader economic system treated these workers as disposable and their labor as a commodity to exploit for private wealth and the national economic growth. Their low wages and desperate living conditions were the cost of doing business. Scraping By describes the precarious financial state of free and unfree laborers at the bottom of American urban society, but it also describes a field of work done by unskilled laborers in America’s cities: scraping streets to collect manure for agricultural use and mitigate public health dangers. Rockman’s is an interwoven history of private enterprise, public welfare, poverty, opportunity (or lack thereof), and the compounding impacts of marginalized identities in the early republic. He describes how and why Irish immigrants working as free laborers and enslaved Blacks might be hired to work the same jobs, but how working in those environments had different impacts on the workers of differing status. Rockman explains that the conditions endured by those “scraping by” did not create a common class consciousness, nor did it create a hierarchy of oppressed identities. Instead he illuminates that the economic systems developing in the early republic produced class through the buying and selling of coerced labor under the guise of a self-regulating market. Rockman ultimately shows that financial success for the lowest ranked urban workers in the early republic was nearly impossible, that the so-called free market depended on unfree or barely free labor, and that this was not a contradiction of the capitalist system, but rather was essential to its success.

4. Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Traci Brynne Voyles studies mining in Arizona and the transformation of place from Indigenous land and resource management to its colonial seizure and exploitation. Mining is a particularly damaging means of extracting resources. The result is turning earth–which carries meaning to Indigenous people beyond just its capitalist value–into waste. Uranium mining not only requires environmentally devastating means of extraction: it also presents a distinct risk to the Navajo Nation given the uranium’s radioactivity. Voyles explains how settler colonialism assumes land belongs to the settler or else is useless, that it is “wasteland.”  She writes, “The power exerted over environmental resources, and the ways in which those in power construct knowledge about landscapes, are a central part of how what we now call social injustices are produced.”  This, within the context of the settler colonial view of the land, creates “wastelands of many kinds (which) are constituted through racial and spatial politics that render certain bodies and landscapes pollutable.” The Navajo Nation is left on its own to clean up their “wastelanded” territory. Voyles models important questions about who determines which land can be polluted, how power dictates landscapes, and the violence wrought by settler colonialism on North American lands and peoples.

5. Zallen, Jeremy. American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Zallen, Jeremy. American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Jeremy Zallen tells the history of artificial light–that is, any kind of light produced by people when they cannot otherwise rely on sunlight.  American Lucifers examines the labor, commodities, risk, and market relations that distributed light to the masses. He categorizes this, ironically, as a dark history, filled with physical danger and the brutality of capitalism. Light was not always good: women working as seamstresses from their homes by the light of camphene lamps risked dangerous accidents from using dim but highly flammable fuel to illuminate their pitifully compensated labor. Enslaved labor produced both the camphene oil and the cotton that were so essential to these women’s work. Coal mines were dark and dangerous places, even with the development of safety lamps. Children who worked making matches in factories glowed from their exposure to phosphorous, but that was the least of the side effects of working with the material. Many lost their jaws from prolonged exposure, long before reaching adulthood. Zallen’s approach leans on conventions in labor history, materialism, and the study of global economic networks (the latest move from transnational histories). The book is reminiscent of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton in selecting a commodity and following it through its many evolutions and the processes humans created to sell it. However, Zallen takes an approach more clearly influenced by materialism, questioning the very role the light and means of producing it played in people’s lives.

Gwen Lockman is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of U.S. labor and leisure, with interests in work, play, class, community, identity, race, gender, and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the American West. Her current research uses park spaces in Butte, Montana, including the Columbia Gardens amusement park (1876-1973) and plans for new parks to come from Superfund cleanup, to investigate the socio-environmental history of mining, land use, and culture from the 1870s to the present.

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

by Gwendolyn Lockman

Past the local dump and the interstate, and separated by foothills from the nearby historic neighborhoods of Missoula, Montana, the Moon-Randolph Homestead can be found, steeling itself against the modern world but not quite stuck in the past. It is an unusual historical site where the ecological and the human, and the past and the present melt into one another.

Figure 1: Entrance gate for the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

Before U.S. westward expansion and federal homesteading efforts, Indigenous people traversed the North Hills of Missoula on the Trail to the Buffalo. They passed through nearby Hell Gate Canyon, named both for the cold, rough waters of the river and for the ambushes between tribes that occurred at the canyon. Once the U.S. seized the land in the late nineteenth century, homesteaders in the Missoula valley tried to raise subsistence crops and livestock there. These small parcels of land had little of the potential for profit that large, thousand-plus acre ranches enjoyed.

Ray and Luella Moon came to Missoula from Minnesota staking their homestead claim in 1889. They came to “prove up,” sell the land, and move on. Ray Moon sold his land to his relatives, George and Helen Moon, the same day he acquired the deed to the property in 1894. Then Ray and Luella left Missoula. George and Helen Moon had moved to Seattle by 1907. William and Emma Randolph came to Missoula from White Sulphur Springs, Montana to buy a farm so Emma could raise chickens and get William to settle down. The Randolphs tracked down the Moons in Seattle and wrote to them to purchase the land.[1]

William and Emma lived the rest of their lives in Missoula, alternating between the homestead, which they called the Randolph Ranch, and a home in town. They raised their three sons there and often let extended family stay with them for long stretches of time. William and Emma passed away in 1956 within months of each other. Their youngest son, Bill, continued living at ranch until his death in 1995. In 1992, Bill put a conservation easement on his land, which protected it from development after his death. The City of Missoula purchased the nearly 470 acres in 1997 and created the North Hills open space and trail system. Of those acres, 13 became the Moon-Randolph Homestead site. The North Missoula Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit, created the Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission in 1998 to advocate for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. [2]

Figure 2: Panorama of the Moon Randolph Homestead Site from the Barn looking South and West, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

In 1998, the city began a program to house caretakers on site to oversee the Moon-Randolph Homestead, raise livestock, host events, and interface with the public. The Department of Interior listed Moon-Randolph on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. It is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am to 5 pm, May through October, and is used by several groups during the week, including the Montana Conservation Corps, Opportunity Resource, Youth Homes, and Parks and Recreation Homestead Camps.[3] Dr. Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of cultural geography at the University of Exeter, was the first caretaker for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. She wrote her dissertation about her work in the late 1990s and early 2000s cataloging the Randolphs’ belongings.[4] DeSilvey’s scholarship contemplates the role of decay in heritage sites. She advocates for what she calls “encounter[s] with the debris of history,” allowing deterioration to proceed as a mode of historic interpretation.[5] Her approach to Moon-Randolph was to interfere as little as possible with anything on site. Though DeSilvey catalogued all of the artifacts and documents at Moon-Randolph, the decision to curate decay combined with a lack of dedicated city resources left much of what was on site to erode away or be eaten by the mice that inhabit the site.

Figure 3: Photos of decay at the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photos by Gwen Lockman.

DeSilvey acknowledged in her dissertation the virtual impossibility that the city-managed property be allowed to totally decay. She suggested that, “Future management of the site will have to find a compromise between a celebration of entropic heritage and the conservation of material traces.”[6] As an intern for the City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office and Department of Parks and Recreation, the priority for my summer job at the Homestead was to help the preservation and interpretations methods for the site to evolve.

Figure 4: Photo of winch, still standing after original Mining Shed Collapse in 2014. Photo from Moon Randolph Homestead/City of Missoula.

My duties included the curation of the reconstructed Mining Shed. The Mining Shed had been entirely reconstructed, out of both new and salvaged materials, after collapsing in 2014, and exists in direct contradiction with the decay at the Homestead. The original Mining Shed stood from around 1900 until its collapse in 2014. It sheltered a hoist for the small-scale coal mining operation that William Randolph maintained on his land. Coal mining was not an especially profitable venture in Missoula, though at least one company, Hell Gate Coal, successfully mined the North Hills in the early 1900s. The naming of the Coal Mine Road, which led to the family ranches of the North Hills, Randolphs’ included, suggests Missoulians knew the area to bear coal. One must still use Coal Mine Road to get to Moon-Randolph and its neighbors, the city dump included.[7] Coal at the Homestead was likely found by George Moon, if not Ray Moon. Mining was a special interest for William Randolph, who was more of a dreamer and tinkerer than a farmer. The Randolphs’ quaintly named “Little Phoebe” mine produced low-grade coal, mostly traded with neighbors or used at home. They hired men to work in the mine, signaling either some profit or William’s financial dedication to his side projects. Robert, the middle Randolph son, wrote about the mine in his boyhood diary during the winter of 1916-1917. The Randolphs used coal from Little Phoebe until the 1930s, then let it fill with water to use to irrigate the pasture. In 1937, Robert wrote from Spokane, Washington to ask his father if he had given the coal’s use any further thought. William converted the building into a workshop but worked around the hoist, which still stands in its original place. Snow in the winter of 2014 caused the original building’s collapse. City and private crews completed the reconstruction in 2018. The new building is slightly larger than the original structure but is a close reproduction of the old shed.[8]

Figure 5: Photo of reconstructed Mining Shed, July 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

My curation of the Mining Shed sought to more formally interpret the space while maintaining the Homestead as a place both lost to time and still writing its history. The floor space must be kept free so that the building can be used as a gathering space in inclement weather. It is the safest and largest covered space on site, which will be slow to change, because historic site classification restrictions prohibit new permanent foundation construction. The Mining Shed interpretation does not recreate a specific year of its lifespan but instead illustrates the several layers of its use over time and restoration. We arranged artifacts from mining and shop work. We integrated elements of the original building into the structure of the new building. This protects the intact remains of the old shed and makes the reconstruction apparent through comparison. I wrote limited interpretative signage and selected for display original documents from the Moon Cabin archive related to William Randolph’s mining ventures away from the Homestead.

One of my goals for the Mining Shed was to connect the Homestead to Montana’s economic history from statehood in 1889 through the post-war era. The Moon-Randolph history connects Missoula’s river, trade, agriculture, timber, mining, and railroad economy and history. William Randolph’s investments and work in Montana and beyond call attention to the several ways he sought to make money outside of agriculture. His ventures included work for Standard Brick Company in Missoula, management of the Sibley timber property in Lolo, Montana, and attempts at placer mining in the Nine Mile Valley east of Missoula. Presenting this history highlights piecemeal economic survival in Montana prior to the 1960s and the survival of the Randolphs’ story through material and documentary evidence.

Figure 6 Photo of “Little Phoebe” Mining Adit, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

These changes marked a shift toward formal curation at Moon-Randolph. However, we sought to maintain “The Spirit of the Homestead,” a term defined in the Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update for 2015-2024. The Spirit of the Homestead aims to maintain Moon-Randolph as “a living place, where historic activities continue and new uses are established, and a place where natural processes of aging and ecological renewal can be appreciated.”[9] The idea of “living history” at the site is not produced as reenactment or period restoration. Rather, the Homestead is kept “alive.” Trees overtake metal refuse from rusty, repurposed farm equipment. There are mice, chipmunks, rabbits, songbirds, hawks, snakes, deer, and the occasional bear. Buildings collapse. Caretakers raise pigs and chickens, haul non-potable water for irrigation from a cistern, and tend to a 130-year-old orchard that still produces cider apples. There is almost no signage and very little written interpretation. The site is left to speak for itself, otherwise visitors must speak to a caretaker or volunteer to ask questions, enjoy a tour, or help with chores.

Figure 7: Photo of Summer 2019 curation in the Mining Shed, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

And speak for itself it does: when I returned to the Homestead in May 2020 for a socially distanced excursion, the mining shed had new tenants. Magpies built their winter nests in the rafters of the reconstructed shed. Springtime bunnies darted in and out of the shed. Their curation enhanced ours. As much as there is curated decay at the site, there, too, is resplendent life. History and the present, decay, life, and curation, negotiate their coexistence in the North Hills of Missoula.

Figure 8: Photo of magpie nest in the Moon Randolph Homestead Mining Shed, May 2020. Photo by Caroline Stephens, Moon Randolph Homestead.

[1] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; Montana Association of Land Trusts, “About Conservation Easements,” http://www.montanalandtrusts.org/conservationeasements/; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 2-5. 

[2] Caitlin DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties: a History of a Montana Homestead, second edition (Missoula, MT: Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission, 2002); Caitlin DeSilvey, Salvage Rites: Making Memory on a Montana Homestead, doctoral dissertation, Open University (2003); Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; City of Missoula, North Missoula Community Development Corporation, and Five Valleys Land Trust, “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” Final, Adopted by Missoula City Council May 4, 2015, 7, https://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/31846/MoonRandolphHomestead_StrategicPlan_2015?bidId=. 

[3] Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “Welcome,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/.

[4] University of Exeter, “Professor Caitlin DeSilvey,” College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Geography Department, http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Caitlin_Desilvey; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 4-5.

[5] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 10.

[6] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 176.

[7] City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records; DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; J.T. Pardee, “Coal in the Tertiary Lake Beds of Southwestern Montana,” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II (1911);

[8] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; Robert Randolph, Diary, 1916-1917, Moon-Randolph Archive; City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records.

[9] “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 7.

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Review of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020)

Review of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020)

by Gwendolyn Lockman

Megan Kate Nelson. The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. New York: Scribner, 2020. xx+331 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War. 

Nelson’s writing is largely narrative and caters to a more popular audience. The layering of history compels the cultural, borderlands, and environmental historian while the details of battles captivate the military history enthusiast. Excerpts from letters and diaries as well as summaries of dialogue entertain those hunting for good stories. Nelson recounts an epic western tale with a contemporary scholastic skillset that earned her a nod as a Pulitzer finalist in 2020. 

The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

The book balances several viewpoints of the conflict, including the perspectives of men and women, Unionists and Confederates, Mexicans, and Indigenous people. She adjusts the perspective with each chapter, unfolding the narrative through a different person’s viewpoint every ten or fifteen pages. People, rather than larger-than-life forces, are at the center of this story about power and property in the Southwest. 

The book uses the stories of nine individuals to detail the battles between nations, armies, and ideas in what would become the Southwestern United States. Those people are: Mangas Coloradas, Apache leader; Juanita, wife of Diné warrior Manuelito; Alonzo Ickis, miner turned Union soldier; John Clark, New Mexico Surveyor General; Louisa Canby, wife to Union Colonel Edward Richard Sprigg Canby and nurse to injured soldiers; James Carleton, Union Colonel; Kit Carson, Southwestern frontiersman and Union Brigadier General; John Robert Baylor, Confederate Brigadier General from Texas; and Bill Davidson, a Confederate soldier and Texas lawyer. 

Mangas Coloradas Stands with a rifle by his side.
Mangas Coloradas, circa 1884. Source: Library of Congress.

If there are any characters missing from this story, they are African Americans, whose fate in the West was in the balance (as Nelson reminds us). She notes that enslaved Blacks in Confederate held Arizona Territory were few and mostly held by Confederate military officers (83). Slavery in The Three Cornered War focuses on Mexican enslavement of Indigenous Americans. However, the reader is left to assume the Confederate vision of empire would expand the system of race-based enslavement as far west as California. This vision could have also included enslaving Indigenous Americans had the Confederate States of America endured. 

The Three Cornered War concentrates on the events between 1861 and 1868, with background details for Nelson’s main characters inserted as needed. The eastern theater of the war appears only as snippets of news. The Southwestern theater was a set of wars all its own. Not only were the Union and the Confederacy competing in their visions of manifest destiny, but Mexicans fought to regain claims recently lost to the United States in the Mexican American War of the 1840s, the Apache fought to maintain Apachería, and the Navajo fought to maintain Diné Bikéyah. 

Nelson does not overtly discuss borderlands in the ways scholars of the field might desire, but she does evocatively illustrate the malleability of boundaries in the New Mexico Territory in the 1860s. Land changes hands, borders move, access to water, resources, and overland routes are contested, and recent wins and losses remain only barely settled in The Three Cornered War. This tension makes abundantly clear that the present-day borders of the United States were far from predestined. The Confederates had strategized a plan for their own transcontinental railroad to connect California to Georgia, and the rebels intended for slavery to flourish across the continent, perhaps even capturing more land from Mexico. 

Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States' forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada.
Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States’ forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. Source: Library of Congress.

Unlike the skirmishes further east, armies in the Southwest were small: casualties could quickly devastate any of the bands of soldiers and warriors in conflict. The Apaches and Navajos fought to keep Anglos and Hispanos alike out of their lands. Mexican officials heard diplomatic pleas from both the Union and the Confederacy but attempted to delay decision making until a victor prevailed. The book includes several maps to help the reader situate the movements of these groups and the quickly changing landscape of the southwest.

Nelson makes clear that these contingencies often depended on the actions of military leaders who acted without seeking approval, in large part because there simply was not adequate time to communicate with distant officials before circumstances changed. Dishonorable and treacherous war tactics were constant, and seemed necessary, but could face delay or prohibition from central authorities. The southwestern theater was a place where men gambled with their lives, but the winnings made it worthwhile.

Though the Union won the conflict and control of the land, Nelson reminds readers this came at a price and made the United States’ objectives contradictory. She writes, “These struggles for power in the West exposed a hard and complicated truth about the Union government’s war aims: that they simultaneously embraced slave emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American empire of liberty” (252). The price for the eradication of race-based slavery in the United States was the very sovereignty of its native peoples. In this three-cornered conflict, the United States sharpened its blades against all in the name of liberty granted only on the Americans’ terms. 

Forward-Looking Perspectives upon Returning to the Classroom and the Zoomroom

by Gwendolyn Lockman

We hoped we would face a more “normal” fall for 2021. Instead, we face another semester that will demand flexibility in the face of anxiety as we continue to teach through the Coronavirus pandemic and the Delta variant surge. After scrambling to adapt to online learning environments in March 2020, many of us are returning to in-person classrooms as well as modified learning environments for the Fall 2021 semester. Online teaching and learning revealed many valuable intangibles from the physical classroom. However, we also have an invaluable opportunity to discard old habits that hindered both faculty and teaching assistants, and exhausted students. What follows is a handful of suggestions about what to enthusiastically reinstate in the classroom, what to leave in 2020 without looking back, and what to adopt from online learning for face-to-face instruction.

Bring it Back

One of the greatest losses of online instruction was the ability of instructors, assistants, and students to get to know one another. Communication became hugely limited. We lost the passing conversations at the start and end of class, the recognition of sharing multiple courses with another student, the buzz of laughter (or not) at a lecturer’s joke. There is value in seeing one another and knowing one another.

The first thing to bring back to the classroom is learning and using students’ names. For many online classes, especially those delivered in webinar format or offered asynchronously, this might have been impossible for faculty, and difficult for teaching assistants. Learning all student names in a large lecture course may be difficult for instructors. But using names can be just as important and beneficial to helping students feel more valued and more invested in courses, according to CBE Life Sciences Education.[1] Name placards in large lecture halls and recognition of student names can help everyone feel more comfortable asking for help, talking to the instructor outside of class, and being confident in their mastery of course material. If this is not feasible in a large lecture course, teaching assistants can learn the names of students in their assigned sections to help achieve similar results. Group projects can help students learn each other’s names too.

In smaller classrooms, engaging in small talk, questions about campus and current events, and playing ice breaker games within the first two weeks of class can help students and instructors get to know one another. UT History Professor Dr. Ashley Farmer offers a model for engaging student-led discourse for the first five minutes of class, which is adaptable to large lecture halls and seminars.[2] She notes that these conversations help students invest in the course, build connections between course materials and the world around them, understand and learn from each other, and understand course content in broad contexts that lecturing might not allow or facilitate.

Learning student names and establishing patterns of student contribution to the class are also important tools in expectation setting. This sometimes-slow work was easy to discount during online learning, especially where the whims of class chat functions might have more influence in determining course culture than a professor’s lecture style. As we return to the classroom, there are positive ways to regain the control we might have felt we lost during online instruction. This is in part an important step for leveling the playing field of navigating higher education, especially as we offer instruction to second-year college students who have yet to be physically present in a university classroom or lecture hall, or third-year students who only have one semester of in-person college in their toolbelts. Go back to basics. Let students know how office hours work, when you check emails, how to read a syllabus, and how to ask for help.

Leave it Behind

There are some pre-pandemic expectations–as well as bad habits we settled into during the pandemic–we should consider leaving behind. First, and above all, drop the distrust of students. There are certain basic standards to uphold, particularly as they pertain to university honor codes. Plagiarism is not okay. But building in more trusting practices for asking for help, extensions, and rescheduled exams can help prevent the issue in the first place. This is easy enough to do through clear expectation setting. Many students don’t know that extensions are an option, and plagiarism becomes a convenient solution when one has run out of options. Consider offering a one-time per semester no questions asked, one-week extension for assignments. This may not work for final exams, when grade deadlines loom, but is a simple solution to integrate into the course.

This also brings us to the use of doctor’s notes and proof of bereavement. The thinking behind offering a no questions asked extension is that sometimes we don’t owe each other explanations, or that we do not have one. Academics miss deadlines frequently, as do employees in office settings.

While missing a deadline might have varying consequences in the workplace, we should trust students are not immune from “real life” and need to treat them as adults negotiating their personal and professional boundaries in the transition from secondary school student to college graduate. Put simply, students don’t owe you their trauma, nor do you owe them yours. What do you stand to gain by requiring students to explain precisely how they are struggling outside of the classroom? While we might want to understand where students are coming from, or to ensure they are not misleading us, I am convinced after receiving dozens of emails from students caring for younger siblings, taking on jobs to help families with sick or recently deceased parents, and trying to turn in assignments while attending funerals, that we don’t need to put students through this. I also went through my own health crisis during the pandemic. Looking back on the emails I sent my professor from the emergency room to explain that I couldn’t make class today but might try in two days, I realize it all could and should have waited.

This brings us back to classroom expectation setting, and drawing your own boundaries is just as important for setting expectations for yourself as for the students in your courses. Modeling positive behavior is a cornerstone of learning and adaptation, whether it is in the primary school classroom, the higher education lecture hall, or the workplace. Consider rethinking email policies to be explicit with students about when you will and will not answer emails. Follow that up by refraining from replying in the wee hours of the morning, or at least using the “schedule send” function common in web-based inboxes these days. Frankly, it is awkward to receive emails in the middle of the night, unless there is a significant time difference between correspondents. Work-from-home presents the danger of further entrenching the idea that we are always available for work. We do not have to accept or promote this model. Email policies are simple means of boundary-setting that can avoid any unintended connotations, expectations, or stresses caused by erratic communication schedules.

My email policy is that I do not respond to messages between 10 pm and 6 am, ever. I don’t check email then if I can help it, and if I do, I schedule send for the morning. I encourage students to ask for help as soon as they think they need it but to expect I will get to their email early in the morning if they send something urgent in the night hours. I am modeling boundary setting, a schedule that includes off-hours, and clear communication. We can also block off weekends or days when we have other engagements. This is another case where we might consider what explanations we owe students. It might open students’ eyes to the world of faculty by telling them about a conference or other professional development activities, but it might not be necessary to share your traumas with students. Boundaries exist for both parties–educators and students.

The Changing Role of Tech

I was a student who sat at the front of a classroom with a notebook and pen. Personally, I am not a fan of laptop use in lecture-based classes, but it is discriminatory to prohibit the use of technology in class, and it is a dated perspective we should not maintain after the pandemic made online learners out of many of us.[3] Without a doubt, there is research to back up the claim that taking notes by hand is better than typing notes for learning and thinking. In certain studies, laptop users did not perform as well on exams as students who took notes by hand.[4] But we are training students in more than notetaking and exam taking (more on that later). Moreover, there are also studies which suggest that students who use laptops in class have better computer skills, spatial awareness, participation, interest in learning, and motivation to do well.[5] There are two big takeaways here: we should trust students to figure out what works best for them, and we should reconsider what we’re really asking of and facilitating for students. What skills do students need to get out of courses? What opportunities are we missing out on by resisting technology?

This question seeps in to how we evaluate students, too. What are we getting out of in-class exams in blue books? I am not calling for prohibition of in-class exams. It feels easier to curtail plagiarism, there are established means of offering accommodations, and it is easy to be abundantly clear about scheduling. But what opportunities are we missing out on by requiring several in-class exams per semester as the only means of evaluating students? What skills are we providing students for life after college? Maybe we can restructure our classes to offer several types of evaluations and several opportunities for different kinds of success. Being a good test taker isn’t much of a skill in the workplace, but working collaboratively on group projects, reading and comprehending reports quickly, and writing succinct memos, pitches, and communications are.

We might remind ourselves of the true purpose of evaluation, namely gauging what students are learning, how effective we are in communicating to students, and whether our framing of information is helpful. Furthermore, trying out different kinds of evaluation can better help students figure out where they excel in different fields, rather than dooming them to dismiss courses based on what they feel they fail at. As a historian, I’m not always as adept as my peers are at understanding theory or using academic terms like “ontological” or “heuristic.” But I excel at presentations and interpersonal communication. These skills are still valuable to historians, along with several other professions and fields. If we don’t give students opportunities to enjoy our courses, they won’t. We offer students more chances to enjoy material outside their comfort zone if they have options for how to approach learning.

One more point on technology and trust: if you are still teaching online this semester, stop with the surveillance of students’ study spaces and automated means of proving they aren’t cheating.[6] TurnItIn is an appropriate and useful way to check for written plagiarism, but the programs that track students’ eye movements and clicks, or instructors who require students show videos of their rooms, are out of line. This Orwellian, if not Machiavellian, model of instruction does little to promote or center student learning. It creates working environments and relationships built on distrust. There are many valuable tools for integrating tech into the classroom that we need to carry forward into face-to-face instruction. Surveillance is not one of them.

Carry it Forward

Online learning presented us with plenty of challenges, but it also forced many of us into an innovative teaching mode we might not have chosen otherwise. There are dozens of online tools for learning that can help us teach at the university level, and that students have already used in their secondary school classrooms for years. We can integrate web-based quiz, poll, and forum platforms, dynamic online group projects, and plagiarism-checking services into our classrooms. Much of this tech is not new and is well-developed at this point. Instead of eschewing the presence of laptops and cellphones in classes, we can ask that students use those devices to engage with courses. If you aren’t sure where to start, ask your students what platforms they like using. They undoubtedly have opinions and experience.

Online learning facilitated conversations–though certainly not all topics or strategies–about accessibility and learning. We need to continue thinking about and acting on how to make classrooms accessible.[7] Maybe it means rethinking your technology policies, seating charts, attendance and tardy policies, or assignment design. One way to demystify asking for help is bringing resource-providers to the classroom. Build in time–whether 5 or 50 minutes–for representatives from campus libraries, writing centers, student success centers, tutors, disability services and accommodations, and mental health and counseling services to come to class. It might not be possible for you to help every single student in class, and you might not be the right person to help in a given situation, but the least we can do is help students gain access to resources that already exist. 

Above all, we should carry with us the adaptability to rapidly changing circumstances, the valuing of human interaction, and the openness to connecting the classroom to the world around us. Many of us missed in person teaching, campus events, and a sense of community. We were challenged to adapt syllabi that had not changed much in several years. Some of us were confronted with how public health fit in to fields where we had never previously considered it. The Covid-19 pandemic has been exhausting, and we should recognize that with grace for ourselves, our colleagues, and the students we teach. We will undoubtedly face more challenges in the coming academic year and the ongoing health crisis. To end on a more hopeful note, though, may we be invigorated by the possibilities that come from reentering spaces for learning and soon reach a day where we can leave our haphazard home recording studios behind.

Gwen Lockman is a PhD student in U.S. History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of U.S. labor and leisure, with interests in work, play, class, community, identity, race, gender, and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the American West. Her current research uses park spaces in Butte, Montana, including the Columbia Gardens amusement park (1876-1973) and plans for new parks to come from Superfund cleanup, to investigate the socio-environmental history of mining, land use, and culture from the 1870s to the present.

[1] Katelyn M. Cooper, Brian Haney, Anna Krieg, and Sarah E. Brownell, “What’s in a Name? The Importance of Students Perceiving That an Instructor Knows Their Names in a High-Enrollment Biology Classroom,” CBE Life Sciences Education, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5332051/.

[2] Not Even Past, “A Conversation about Teaching with Dr. Ashley Farmer,” September 3, 2020, https://notevenpast.org/a-conversation-about-teaching-with-dr-ashley-farmer/.

[3] Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Jordynn Jack, “When You Talk About Banning Laptops, You Throw Disabled Students Under the Bus,” November 27, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/when-you-talk-about-banning-laptops-you-throw-disabled_b_5a1ccb4ee4b07bcab2c6997d.

[4] James Doubek, “Attention Students: Put Your Laptops Away,” NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, April 17, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-put-your-laptops-away; Nancy M. Aguilar-Roca, Adrienne E. Williamss, Diane K. O’Dowd, “The impact of laptop-free zones on student performance and attitudes in large lectures,” Computers & Education, Vol. 59, No. 4 (December 2012): 1300-1308, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.05.002.

[5] Michael Trimmel, Julia Bachmann, “Cognitive, social, motivational and health aspects of students in laptop classrooms,” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 20, No. 2 (April 2004), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2004.00076.x.

[6] Drew Harwell, “Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back,” the Washington Post, November 12, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/12/test-monitoring-student-revolt/.

[7] Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, “An Inclusive Response to Covid-19: Education for Children with Disabilities,” Global Partnership for Education, May 11, 2020, https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/inclusive-response-covid-19-education-children-disabilities.

Gender Symposium, Spring 2021

by Gabrielle Esparza and Gwendolyn Lockman


The Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of historical approaches to the study of gender and sexuality. We hope to build a community of scholars working together to consider the benefits and challenges of incorporating these issues into their research. We do not see gender and sexuality as narrowly defined topics and seek presenters who engage with a wide variety of subjects, methodologies, and approaches. The Symposium aims to explore the creative and scholarly potential of gender and sexuality as fields of inquiry.

We encourage diverse styles of presentation, including informal talks about research experience and/or primary sources, workshops that focus on a work-in-progress, critical discussion of a selection of readings, and formal presentations of conference papers or dissertation chapters. In addition to individual presentations, we accept panel discussions to contribute various perspectives of gender studies. During the Spring 2021 semester, the Symposium will host all presentations on Zoom. Those interested in attending can register here.

Follow the Gender Symposium on Twitter and Like them on Facebook.

Gender Symposium, Fall 2020

by Gabrielle Esparza and Gwendolyn Lockman


The Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of historical approaches to the study of gender and sexuality. We hope to build a community of scholars working together to consider the benefits and challenges of incorporating these issues into their research. We do not see gender and sexuality as narrowly defined topics and seek presenters who engage with a wide variety of subjects, methodologies, and approaches. The Symposium aims to explore the creative and scholarly potential of gender and sexuality as fields of inquiry.

We encourage diverse styles of presentation, including informal talks about research experience and/or primary sources, workshops that focus on a work-in-progress, critical discussion of a selection of readings, and formal presentations of conference papers or dissertation chapters. In addition to individual presentations, we accept panel discussions to contribute various perspectives of gender studies. During the 2020-2021 academic year, the Symposium will host all presentations on Zoom. Those interested in attending can register here.

Follow the Gender Symposium on Twitter and Like them on Facebook.

Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past

Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past

By Alina Scott

2020 is a significant moment in the history of the United States. As some locations begin the process of opening up in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, the country is now collectively mourning and joining in protests against police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota policemen. In response, we have compiled an index of Not Even Past articles, reviews, podcasts, and teaching resources about Black resistance and resilience, by mostly Black authors. Today and every day, Black Lives Matter and Black Histories Matter.

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC in 1972 (Credit: Luis Garza)

“Black Women’s History in the US: Past & Present” by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross– Authors of A Black Women’s History of the United States, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Kali Gross, reflect on the journey of writing a Black woman’s history, the historiography written by and about Black women, and the importance of this collection.

“Black Women in Black Power” by Ashley Farmer –Dr. Farmer, author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, discusses the importance of Black women organizers in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panther Party.

“#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy” by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan

“Stokely Carmichael: A Life” by Peniel Joseph

“Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation” by Jaden Janak–Janak recalls the process of digitizing The Oklahoma Eagle, a historically Black newspaper razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the politics of digitization, and the significance of preserving Black history.

“Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso” by Kali Nicole Gross

“The Odds are Stacked Against Us: Oral Histories of Black Healthcare in the U.S” by Thomaia Pamplin– Pamplin’s analysis includes qualitative and quantitative analyses of the generations of discrimination in Houston’s healthcare system with Houstonians who experienced it first hand.

“Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical” by Jacqueline Jones

“Before Red Tails: Black Servicemen in World War I” by Jermaine Thibodeaux

“Muhammad Ali Helped Make Black Power Into a Global Brand” By Peniel Joseph

Frank A. Guridy on the Transnational Black Diaspora

‘“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library’ by Gwendolyn Lockman

“Black Amateur Photography” by Joan Neuberger

“Eddie Anderson, the Black Film Star Created by Radio” by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley

Loving v. Virginia After 50 Years, Panel at the Institute for Historical Studies–This IHS panel was organized around a showing of the film Loving (2016) with the director, UT alumnus, Jeff Nichols, University of Texas History Professors Seth Garfield and Jacqueline Jones, and Professor of Law at Syracuse University, Kevin Noble Maillard.

“Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro Leagues” by Edward Shore

“Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah” by Tania Sammons

“Let the Enslaved Testify” by Daina Ramey Berry

“Black is Beautiful – And Profitable” by Tiffany Gill

Bernard Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael & Willie Ricks enjoy a moment of levity. (Credit: Bob Fitch, Stanford Libraries)
  • Episode 90: Stokely Carmichael: A Life with Peniel E. Joseph– Dr. Peniel Joseph, Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values & Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Professor in the Department of History, UT-Austin
  • Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery with Heather Williams– Dr. Heather Williams, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a moving book about on the subject, Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.
  • Episode 49: The Harlem Renaissance with Frank Guridy–Dr. Frank Guridy, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, joins us to discuss the multifaceted, multilayered movement that inspired a new generation of African-Americans—and other Americans—and demonstrated the importance of Black culture and its contributions to the West.
  • Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States with Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris– Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Leslie Harris, Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta, discuss a project to re-discover urban slavery, a forgotten aspect f the slave experience in the United States

Additional episodes available on 15MinuteHistory.org

A history class at the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington. (Credit: Frances Benjmain Johnston, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

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