Institute for Historical Studies, Race and Caste Research theme, 2021-22

August 25, 2021

Not Even Past is delighted to collaborate with the Institute for Historical Studies and its innovative Race and Caste research theme in 2021-2022. Under the leadership of a new Director Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the Alice Drysdale Sheﬃeld Professor of History, the Institute’s program this year centers on the work of nine junior and advanced graduate student Fellows from the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Each student will develop either an essay for submission to a scholarly publication, or a proposal for a grant application.

Each piece will be workshopped twice during the year. Fellows will present the first draft of their work virtually via Zoom in the Fall semester, and a revised version of the essay in Spring in-person on campus. They will receive two rounds of critical feedback and crucial guidance on their projects from leading scholars in their fields joining from UT and across the globe. At each workshop, the student will be in conversation with three scholars– two from outside of the university and one UT affiliate. With their final, polished essays at year’s end, Fellows will submit their works to scholarly publications in their field, or to grants organizations.

“The intention here is to guide the student on how to transform a good essay into a great essay,” said Cañizares-Esguerra. “There are no formulas, of course. We want discussants to help Fellows identify blind spots in their arguments and in the structure of the essays, if there are any. Each respondent brings a different expertise to bear. That is the beauty of this exercise.”

The Race and Caste cohort has already participated in intensive discussions around the mechanics of essay writing. Last July, Cañizares-Esguerra invited a roundtable of accomplished UT History alums to speak about their publications, and to define how a “great” article follows particular structures. As graduate students, these alums submitted pieces to leading journals, including American Historical Review, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Renaissance Quarterly, and The William and Mary Quarterly.

“The basic structure we concluded,” Cañizares-Esguerra said, “is to bring two, and sometimes more, separate, unrelated historiographies to bear on a third subject, thus changing perspectives on all three areas at once. To do this, one needs a command of the interventions these historiographies are seeking to make. We need students to do the historiographical work daringly and explicitly.”

In addition to workshopping their essays, Fellows will host podcasts with their respective respondents to explore and engage with the external scholar’s work in relationship to the Fellow’s research. Fellows will also write short articles examining respondents’ publications, particularly those works that speak most closely to the students’ areas of study. Recordings of the workshops, podcast episodes, and short written pieces will all be featured on UT History’s public history resource, Not Even Past. The first podcast is available here.

Launching the Race and Caste workshop series on Monday, September 13 at Noon, Fellow Alexander Chaparro-Silva will present “Democracy and Race in the Americas: Readings of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America South of the Rio Grande” in conversation with three prestigious scholars working in his field: Dr. Lina del Castillo (Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin); Dr. Nicola Miller (Professor of Latin American History, University College London); and Dr. James Sidbury (Professor of History, and Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Rice University). Chaparro-Silva is an intellectual historian and doctoral student in History at UT Austin. His dissertation analyzes how Latin American intellectuals came to the US, offered a sophisticated comparative reflection on democracy and race relations in both Americas, and crafted racialized continental differences during the nineteenth century. His research is supported in part by The Conference on Latin American History and The Tinker Foundation. He coedited a book about print culture in Spanish America during the Age of Revolutions and has published several peer-reviewed articles in the US, Colombia, and Argentina. Register to attend this workshop and receive the pre-circulated paper here, and save the date for his second workshop taking place January 24, 2022, at Noon (details forthcoming).

Read about this year’s Race and Caste Fellows and their projects:

“The Mexican Empire under Agustin de Iturbide and Indigenous Texas”

By Sheena Cox

Sheena Cox is a Borderlands Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is focused on the Liberal Enlightenment in Texas, and its impact on Indigenous relations with Tejanos and Mexicans, 1810-1839. In addition to her dissertation research, Sheena is also dedicated to public history and historic preservation through projects with the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas Historical Commission. From 2019-2021, Sheena worked as the coordinator for TSHA’s annual meeting program. She has served as a graduate research assistant for the Handbook of Texas, and as an assistant editor for the Handbook of Texas Women and Handbook of Dallas Fort-Worth Handbook projects.

“Pacific Soundings: Race, Abolitionism, and the Birth of Mexican Citizenship”

By Gary Leo Dunbar

Gary Leo Dunbar is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His research examines the history of slavery, abolitionism, and citizenship in the Americas with a specific focus on Pacific Mexico. Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed his master’s work at Central Michigan University (CMU) in the U.S. and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico. His research has been funded with grants from the U.S. Department of Education, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, and UT’s history department and College of Liberal Arts. He is the recipient of a President’s Award for Best Conference Paper at the International Graduate Historical Studies Conference, a Graduate Paper Prize from CMU’s College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences, and an Outstanding Graduate Thesis/Project Award from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at CMU for his master’s work. Gary is currently at work on the second edition of Thomas Benjamin’s The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400-1900 for Cambridge University Press.

“Reimagining Borders: Triangular Transnationalism and Chinese Mexicans”

By Jian Gao 高堅

Jian Gao is a third-year PhD student at UT Austin. My primary research focuses on the transnational history of the Chinese in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and my secondary research focuses on the global dynamics of Latin America during the Cold War era. My works have appeared in The Latin Americanist, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, and International Report on Drug Studies. My papers won multiple awards from Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and the World History Association (WHA).

“Relaciones in Response to a World of Questionnaires: Community Knowledge, Ethnicity and Legal Culture from the Spanish Empire’s Towns (c. 1570-1590)”

By Rafael Nieto-Bello

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

“Skiing on the Sacred: The San Francisco Peaks, Indigenous Rights, and the U.S. Ski Industry”

By Jesse Ritner

Jesse Ritner is a Ph.D. candidate studying U.S. environmental history. His dissertation “Elegy of a Dying Sport: Snow, Technology, and the Rise of the North American Ski Industry” explores how science and technology were used to build a weather-dependent sport in climates that lacked the reliable snowpack needed for alpine skiing. His project then traces how new technologies created new classed and racialized relations between the ski industry, skiers, laborers, and the non-human world. “Skiing on the Sacred” is closely related to the final chapter of his dissertation which looks at the ways in which technology created a dependent relationship between the ski industry and the Forest Service at the expense of nearby populations. The article “Skiing on the Sacred” in contrast focuses on the ways in which laws, the Forest Service, and the ski industry systematically invalidated Indigenous claims to the San Francisco Peaks. Jesse has received several grants and Fellowships for his research, including an especially generous grant from the American Meteorological Society. Along with studying history, Jesse is also an avid skier.

“Covarrubias’ Crossings: Picturing the New Negro and the Making of Modern Mexico”

By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. His work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. I trace the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing. In 2018, nexos awarded my essay “Testigo (in)voluntario: la muerte de Kevin Carter” with the Carlos Pereyra Essay Prize. I was born and raised on the outskirts of Mexico City, where I worked in various filmmaking and music projects. I graduated in Politics and Public Administration from El Colegio de México. Learn more about his work at www.rsmoulinie.comm and follow him on Twitter at @rsmoulinie.

“’They Have Always Worn Spanish Clothes:’ Indigenous Elites and Sumptuary Legislation in Seventeenth-Century New Spain”

By Haley Schroer

Haley Schroer is a Ph.D. candidate in colonial Latin American history. Her work focuses on the intersection of race and material culture in colonial Latin America. In particular, her dissertation examines the rise of racialized clothing laws in the Spanish Empire throughout the seventeenth century. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, The Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, the P.E.O. Sisterhood, and The Conference on Latin American History’s James R. Scobie Award. Schroer received a B.A. in History and Spanish, Summa Cum Laude, from Texas Christian University in 2016. She earned her M.A. from UT-Austin in May 2018 where her master’s report, “‘Scandalizing the Public’: Clothing and Perception in Mexico City’s Seventeenth-Century Inquisitorial Sumptuary Trials” won the 2019 Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis/Report. She is currently completing her dissertation under the direction of Susan Deans-Smith and Ann Twinam.

“‘Whether We Bore The Resemblance of Indians’: Kinship and Coalition Building in Black and Indigenous New England”

By Alina Scott

Alina Scott is a History Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores eighteenth and nineteenth-century Native intellectual history and literature, digital humanities, critical race theory, archival studies, gender and sexuality, and religion. Her dissertation,”Murder by Inches: Indigenous Intellectuals, Land, and Sovereignty in Wampanoag Petitions, 1820-1850″ examines Indigenous petitioning campaigns and protests throughout the nineteenth century. Alina has served as Associate Editor and Communications Director at Not Even Past and a managing editor for Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal. She hosts the weekly 15 Minute History Podcast, part of the University of Texas’s Podcast Network. Her research has been supported by Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, the McNair Scholars Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Georgetown Humanities Ambassador Fellowship, and the Institute For Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

Bears Ears National Monument

July 28, 2021

by Jesse Ritner

On December 4, 2017, former President Donald Trump slashed the size of Bears Ears National Monument by 85%. In a further damaging move, he reduced its sibling monument, Grand Escalante-Staircase National Monument, by another 50%. It was the first time in history any National Monument was reduced in size. In the coming days, the Biden administration will decide whether to restore the original borders of these Monuments. Despite these recent changes, Bears Ears and the lands surrounding have a long history, dating back thousands of years.

Map comparing the original and new boundaries of Bears Ears — *Figure 1 shows the dramatic reduction in Bears Ears’ size. Source: the New York Times*

Bears Ears, which sits in south-eastern Utah, has a human history dating back 13,000 years. The people, landscape, animals, and climate have all changed in dramatic ways since the first people arrived in the region. However, the Ute Mountain Ute, the Pueblo of Zuni, the Ute Indian Tribe, the Navajo Nation, and the Hopi Tribe are all direct ancestors of these original people.

Around 11,000 CE, the Puebloan people began building large cliff dwellings and painting elaborate murals on canyon walls and in caves. These were complex civilizations. Due to frequent warfare, the cliff dwellings served as places of refuge when people came under attack. In addition to having stone walls and places to store food, the dwellings were frequently located in canyons with only one or two entrances. Enemies were hard-pressed to sneak in and take them by surprise. Both the cliff dwellings and the artwork still fill the landscapes of Bears Ears and Grand Escalante-Staircase National Monuments.

The moon house is built into a canyon — *A cliff dwelling, hidden in the canyons of Bears Ears. Source: Wikicommons*

Yet, like all civilizations, the Puebloan people adapted to changing times. Many of the people, by 1290 CE had migrated south, where the Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo reservations now are. Others migrated towards the mountains where the Paiute and the Ute now live. Just because they migrated, however, does not mean that they lost their connection to the land. The Indigenous ancestors of the Puebloan culture still visit the area regularly. They hunt and fish and gather food and medicinal plants. They visit the cliff dwellings and the carvings and paintings. In many ways, the area is still home to these people.

The thousand-year-old artifacts often draw visitors to the region, but Diné (Navajo) hogans and sweat lodges, Nuche (Ute) tipis, and Indigenous rock art sites are still visible throughout southern Utah. Indigenous reservations now ring the two monuments. These lands are often presented as places set aside for the Indigenous nations and tribes who inhabit them. But for the people who live there, they were often like prisons. In effect, they cut Native people off from sacred lands.

The reservation system was created through a collection of violent battles. In an act of genocide, the US army fought Native American tribes, massacred women and children, and forced groups of people to walk long distances, with the clear intent of reducing the Indigenous population. The Navajo reservation was built in such a way.

Manuelito poses, sitting in a chair. His lap is draped with a blanket. — *Manuelito led the* *Diné through the troubling times of the Long Walk. Source: Wikicommons*

From 1863-1866, after a scorched earth campaign, Union soldiers removed approximately 10,000 Diné people from their traditional homes. They did not go without a fight. For example, one Navajo Headman known as Manuelito was born near Bear Ears twin buttes. Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, Jennifer Nez Denetdale – who is Diné and a descendent of Manuelito – wrote that “Manuelito led his people in their resistance to forced relocation on ‘the Long Walk’ to Bosque Redondo.” Nevertheless, in 1864 they were forced to walk to New Mexico. In Dine, the event is known as Hwéeldi. Bears Ears served as a key location of resistance. According to Diné filmmaker and anthropologist Angelo Baca, during “the Long Walk, Navajo resisters fled the military incursion, sought protection in the Bears Ears area, and escaped confinement…The landscape is so rugged that the U.S. military couldn’t follow us. They didn’t know where they were going, and it was too hard on their horses, too hard on them. They’d just give up half the time.” Six hundred years after the creation of the cliff dwellings, Bears Ears continued to shelter the Navajo from danger.

While the U.S. Army worked to remove or exterminate Native nations, members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (colloquially known as Mormons) began arriving in the region. In 1847, Mormons built their first settlement in present-day Utah on the edge of the Great Salt Lake. They named it Salt Lake City. Brigham Young, the leader of the church at the time, then sent missionaries throughout the region to establish LDS settlements. Far from finding empty lands, these settlers rapidly claimed land from the Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, Goshute, and Navajo.

In the late 1860s, four years after the Long Walk, the Army turned its sights on the Ute. The Ute, who had adopted horses following the arrival of the Spanish in the Southwest, were spread out over a huge geographical range, making their removal a long and drawn-out process. In 1868, after silver was found in the region, the first Nuche were forced onto a reservation after being pushed out of the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado. Removal continued, ending in 1895, when members of the last Nuche band were finally imprisoned in a small sliver of land which was intended to destroy their nomadic culture, end their access to sacred sites, and to force them into the ‘civilized’ occupation of farming.

Hole in the Rock — *Hole-in-the-Rock has become a pilgrimage site for Mormons. Source: Wikicommons*

While Indigenous people were being removed, Mormon settlers began building their own historical ties with the landscape. For example, in 1879, the San Juan Mission Expedition made its way into southeastern Utah, near Bears Ears. Attempting to reach what would become the settlement Bluff, Utah, the expedition followed an older trail, long used by Native Americans in the region. However, the trail proved too narrow for their wagons. To exit a canyon, the LDS settlers famously carved and blasted a hole through a canyon wall, now called “Hole-in-the-Rock.” It is currently located in what is called the Shash Jaa Unit. LDS heritage tourism and pilgrimages demonstrate a certain reverence for the actions of LDS ancestors who took part in the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition. While LDS and Indigenous relationships to the land are culturally distinct, reverence for Hole-in-the-Rock demonstrates how the land has become significant, albeit different in meaning, to both Indigenous and settler cultures alike.

Although the era of violent removal was technically over, violence between Native nations and settlers continued. The so-called Posey War, which occurred in the spring of 1923, is one example. In March of that year, the sheriff of Blanding, Utah, named William Oliver, arrested two Nuche, Joe Bishop’s Little Boy and Sanup’s Boy for robbing sheep, killing a calf, and burning a bridge. During a recess at the trial, the two made a dramatic escape. When sheriff Oliver failed to capture his charges, he returned to town and deputized a large group of men.

A person riding a horse — *Chief Posey poses on his horse. Source: History to Go.*

Meanwhile, others from the nearby Nuche community of Westwater fled toward Navajo Mountain, a traditional place of sanctuary. The mountain sits in the center of Bears Ears National Monument. Indigenous men, who stayed back to delay their pursuers, exchanged shots with the sheriff’s men. “The Indians,” historian Robert McPherson writes, “killed a horse, barely missed three passengers in a Model T, and created a media sensation that played in newspapers as far away as Chicago.” Posey, in turn, was shot. It proved to be a fatal wound. Although Joe Bishop’s Little Boy was shot and killed instantly in one exchange, the pursuers did not recognize the man. The Utes were then imprisoned for a month until a U.S. Marshal finally found Posey’s body.

McPherson, in his contemplation of the war, writes that “for the Paiutes, [Posey’s war] was not a war and never was intended to be such. A desperate flight through the canyons, a few shots fired as a delaying action, and a very rapid surrender do not justify elevating an exodus to a war.” Nevertheless, as recently as the 1920s, Bears Ears has continued to act as a place of refuge in a long history of genocide.

*Canyonlands National Park. Source: the National Park Service*

Despite the violence which occurred in southern Utah, by the 1960s, members of the U.S. government were becoming aware of the historical and environmental importance of the space. In 1961, as the environmental movement began to pick up steam, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall proposed a 1-million-acre National Park, which would have included large parts of Bears Ears National Monument. In the end, however, the proposal was shrunk dramatically, turning into the 300,000-acre Canyonlands National Park, which today is one of the most popular in the nation.

Despite the massive expansion of public lands in the 1960s, by the mid-1990s these lands were under threat by state, local, and businesses who wanted to extract mineral wealth from them. In 1995, the Utah State Senate began promoting an anti-wilderness bill. In response, writer Terry Tempest Williams and others began pushing back. In the spring of 1996, when the bill came to the U.S. Senate floor, it was filibustered.

While building national parks was becoming increasingly difficult, the National Historic Preservation Act gave the president the power to preserve lands deemed historically significant through executive action. In the fall of 1996, invoking this power, President Bill Clinton set aside 1.9 million acres of land to create the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

A picture containing outdoor, grass, nature, mountain

Description automatically generated — *Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Source: Bureau of Land Management*

While writers initiated the protection of Grand Staircase-Escalante, the current iteration of Bears Ears was first imagined by Utah Senator Robert Bennett. Bennett, a proponent of public lands, asked the Navajo if they had a vested interest in any of the lands in the area. The Diné, of course, said yes. Utah Diné Bikeyah, a non-profit organization, was formed in 2010. Diné Bikeyah (pronounced di-NAY bi-KAY-uh) means “people’s sacred land,” in Navajo/Diné. The organization answered Bennet’s call. In turn, they collected information from tribal elders and shaped an argument for why Bears Ears should be preserved to protect sacred Indigenous lands.

Unfortunately, Bennett’s process came to a halt in January of 2011 when he lost to the Tea Party Republican Mike Lee. With Lee explicitly in opposition to the maintenance or expansion of public lands, the dreams of Utah Diné Bikeyah were put on hold until a more welcoming public official was elected. Nevertheless, in preparation for that moment, the organization continued building its case. From 2014, through Obama’s executive order creating Bears Ears in 2017, Indigenous activists petitioned Congress to create the monument.

In 2015, the Inter-Tribal Coalition was formed. Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe came together to fight for the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. This organization brought together five tribes to protect Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe (Bears Ears in each nation’s respective language). Working together, they used GIS and oral histories to map the many sites that had historical and spiritual significance to the five tribes. As the Utah Diné Bikeyah and the Inter-Tribal Coalition worked to convince Congress that they should preserve Bears Ears, author Steven Trimble once again drew attention to the importance of the region. In Red Rocks, a collection of essays, he noted the “historical context, natural history and archaeology, energy threats, faith, and politics. Together, they offer a nuanced case for restraint and respect in this incomparable Redrock landscape.”

Diné anthropologist and activist Angelo Baca speaks on the importance of Bears Ears.

Much like Grand Staircase-Escalante, Bears Ears was stuck in a deadlock in Congress. Nevertheless, in early 2017, by executive order, Bears Ears became a National Monument. Before signing the order, President Barack Obama cited the many reasons Bears Ears should be protected, including its unique rock formations, its archeological sites, including the Cleovis period, the Archaic period, and, of course, Indigenous relics from the 12th and 13th centuries. Finally, and most importantly, he cited the area’s cultural and historical importance for Native Nations and Tribes in the area.

It proved short lived. Soon after Donald Trump was elected, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke visited Utah on a four-day “listening tour,” during which he spent most of his time with anti-monument activists and politicians. In contrast, Zinke spent less than an hour with the Inter-Tribal Coalition. Both the coalition and the media understood this as a clear expression of his priorities. Zinke wanted public lands for extraction, not for public use. In a widely covered event, Zinke even wagged his finger at a protestor who was telling him he needed to meet with Indigenous people. Zinke told her to “be nice.” As Zinke toured the area, Senator Mike Lee, now supported by Donald Trump, worked to shrink the monument. He was one of the loudest voice against the creation of the monument. Even so, despite Lee and Zinke’s best efforts, neither the country nor Utah agreed with them. Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies released date in 2017 revealed that two thirds of voters supported the number of monuments in the country, and by the same margin, Utah voters supported keeping Bears Ears as it was.

View “Bears Ears National Monument” ClioVis Timeline in full screen here

In 2017, President Donald Trump, in a historic act, shrunk Bears Ears National Monument, opening large amounts of land for oil drilling, uranium mining, and the extraction of other raw materials. He shrunk Bears Ears by approximately 85% and Grand-Escalante by close to 50%. In the process, he put in danger local and global environments, threatened essential archeological sites, and hurt Utah’s thriving outdoor recreation industry. He also sparked a national debate about whether Presidents could shrink national monuments. In response, the Inter-Tribal Coalition and their allies (such as outdoor organizations) sued President Trump for unlawfully shrinking Bears Ears.

Throughout the Trump administration, Native and non-Indigenous people alike visited the Bears Ears region to practice both new and old traditions. For example, Indigenous activists have long held an annual Indigenous dinner, using ingredients from Bears Ears and using pre-colonial cooking techniques and foods. Indigenous people frequently connect with the land at Bears Ears in spiritual ways, as with this event.

Bears Ears Creates Bonds Through Food with Cynthia Wilson in the Indigenous Kitchen from Saharspice on Vimeo.

Following the 2020 election, President Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. Biden’s campaign website had promised that “on Day 1, Biden will also begin building on the Obama-Biden Administration’s historic conservation efforts by issuing an executive order to conserve 30% of America’s lands and waters by 2030, focusing on the most ecologically important lands and waters… His administration will work with tribal governments and Congress to protect sacred sites and public lands and waters with high conservation and cultural values.”

Thank you Madame @SecDebHaaland for meeting with Tribal leaders and Coalition representatives of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Pueblo, Hopi Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, and Navajo Nation yesterday to discuss the future of the sacred #BearsEars cultural landscape. #HonorTribes pic.twitter.com/KlNSaqpRnU
— Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition (@savebearsears) April 9, 2021

Currently Bears Ears is waiting to see whether the U.S. government and President Biden is willing to protect Indigenous rights. Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) became the first Indigenous cabinet official when she was appointed to be the Secretary of the Interior. In 2019, in an interview with the Guardian, Secretary Haaland described a recent camping trip she had taken to Bears Ears noting that “there are some pretty amazing ruins there….I don’t even like to call them ruins, because in our culture, in Pueblo culture, if you acknowledge our ancestors, they are there… The spirit of the people never leaves.” This is a sentiment widely shared by Indigenous people in the region. Bears Ears is sacred, filled with the ancestors of the many groups who have continuously inhabited the region.

Today, the Inter-Tribal Coalition, and many other Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are eager to see whether Bears Ears will be included in the massive expansion of public lands that Biden promised during his election.

Climate in Context Conference Report

July 6, 2021

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Conference Report

By Raymond Hyser

The Climate in Context Conference took place on April 22 & 23, 2021. To view recordings of sessions, visit our virtual conference page.

Session I: Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

The first panel of the conference was a roundtable composed of five graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin’s History Department. Although temporally and geographically diverse in their areas of focus, each panelist engaged with environmental issues in their research. For each of their presentations, they were tasked with discussing how climate change intersects with their own work.

In his presentation, “An Upwelling of Stone: Climate Change and Infrastructure Agendas in Early Modern India,” Jonathan Seefeldt discussed Rajsamand, a large-scale precolonial dam in the present-day western Indian state of Rajasthan built between 1662 to 1676 AD. Using Rajsamand, Seefeldt problematized the broadly-conceived notion that these massive infrastructure projects were projections of kingly power by highlighting that the dam’s construction was less a prestige project than a response to failed monsoons, unusual regional aridity, and mounting social strain.

Diana Heredia-López’s presentation, “Cultivating Parasitism: Early Modern Insect Crops and the Limits of Commodification,” advocated for the need to investigate the different manifestations of parasitism throughout the Plantationocene and the non-linear trajectories of plantation agriculture by exploring the seventeenth-century project to scale-up the production of cochineal in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Jesse Ritner’s paper, “Skiing in Variable Conditions: Climate Adaptation, Profitability, and Repercussions,” examined how modern ski resorts used highly profitable snow-making technologies to adapt to variable climatic conditions that caused inconsistent or insufficient snowfall for ski resorts. Through the creation of consistent snowfall, these technologies were supposed to make skiing more accessible, but the reliance on artificial snow production ultimately exacerbated disparities within the ski industry.

In “Drafting Blueprints: Critiquing the Past to Fight Climate Injustice Today,” Micaela Valadez’s presentation explored the history of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas, to critique the historiography of the organization as being unbalanced and not contending with the organization’s decision to not use the rhetoric of race or class when agitating for change. In doing so, she argued that if historians are to help in the current climate justice movement, they need to divert their attention to understanding how communities of color fight against environmental and climate injustice.

Brooks Winfree’s talk, “African Americans, Slavery, and the Long History of Environmental Degradation in the Cotton South,” advocated for historians to consider slavery and enslaved people’s interest in forging alternative understandings of the land by considering how the cotton-based plantation zone of the nineteenth-century Gulf South became a contested site of competing ideas of environmental use.

Dr. Mary Mendoza from Pennsylvania State University provided commentary on the five presentations. She commended the historians for considering a wide range of issues in the complex relationships between people and the environment in the context of climate change. She pressed each of the presenters to dig deeper into how diverse peoples adapted to and responded to changing environments and climates. Dr. Mendoza also stressed the importance of looking at how environments mediate relationships between people as they compete for natural resources.

Session II: Historicizing Climate

In the second session of the conference, four scholars examined the historical ways of knowing climate in temporally and geographically different contexts. Dr. Clark L. Alejandrino’s presentation, “Beyond Numbers: Knowing Typhoons in Late Imperial China,” argued against the fetish for numbers that dominates the study of past storms and, to some extent, historical climatology. He argued that historians need to take seriously the diverse, non-numeric ways that people along the southern coast of China recognized, understood, and conceived typhoons in the past.

Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s talk, “The Anthropocene and Epistemological Colonialism: The 18^th-Century Spanish American Origins of Humboldt’s Global Histories of the Earth and Climate Change,” critiqued the historiography of Alexander von Humboldt and his role in creating the intellectual genealogies of the Anthropocene. While Humboldt played an important role in spreading environmentalism throughout North America and Europe, he largely erased both the physical and intellectual communities he interacted with in Latin America.

In “Measuring by Proxy,” Dr. Melissa Charenko explored how scientists’ use of climate proxies, preserved physical characteristics of past climates that stand in for direct meteorological measurements, constrained and compelled what they thought about climate’s past and future. She focused on predictions derived from tree rings in the 1920s and the predictive limitations of pollen analysis in the 1980s given the unprecedented future of global climate change.

Dr. Deborah Coen’s presentation, “Degrees of Vulnerability: Why We Need a Feminist History of Climate Science,” discussed the discourse surrounding the diverse concepts of human vulnerability that has developed since the 1970s and hypothesized that this evolving discourse reveals the influence of the global feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. She advocates that a history of the science of climate vulnerability should attend to the presence of this past, the living legacy of two centuries of efforts to separate the knowing human subject from the human object of geophysical influence.

Session III: Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

In the third session of the conference, the invited scholars analyzed the causes and consequences of the climate crisis with a focus on the intimate connections between fossil fuels, race, colonialism, and capitalism. Dr. Christopher Sellers’s talk, entitled “Gathering Clouds over Petropolis: A Prolegomena,” focused on a single historical thread within the anthropogenesis of climate change: the oil industry. Centered on two locales, the eastern coast of Texas around Houston and the southern coast of Veracruz in Mexico, Sellers offered more local and human scales of historical action that explored how corporations, governments, and other institutions created and sustained the material conduits that have provided for the world’s growing petroleum needs over the last century.

In Dr. Andreas Malm’s presentation, he discussed the book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism that he co-authored with the Zetkin Collective. The book is the first study that critically engages with the far right’s role in the current climate crisis and how fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. The racist legacy of fossil fuels has led to the far-right’s defense of the fossil fuel industry and their anti-climate change policies.

Dr. Andrew Curley’s talk, “The Cene Scene: Modernization Myths, Navajo Coal Development, and the Making of Arizona,” Curley scrutinized the “cene” narratives of writing history within larger geological frameworks and stressed the importance of Indigenous understandings of temporality in relation to water resources in the American Southwest. When considering the “cenes,” we must ask what future is enabled for indigenous people when we understand all of time through these broad geological and geopolitical lenses. One of his main points was that the metrics and theorizations of our current geological era must account for the struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, and there must be space for demands for decolonization and abolition in climate debates.

Dr. Victor Seow, in his presentation, “States of Second Nature,” examined the interrelationship between the state and nature. The role of the state, while not ignored in studies of climate, is often pushed to the background. Seow argued that modern states play an active role in engendering environmental change and that we need to extend our inquiries beyond the capitalist systems that are often the points of focus. He ended with a discussion of turning toward a statist solution to the climate crisis, a crisis that modern states were complicit in.

Session IV: Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

In the fourth session of the conference, five scholars presented their ideas on how the historical profession, and academia in general, can be more responsive to the climate crisis. Dr. Andrea Gaynor’s presentation, “We Use the Living Earth to Make Our Histories,” argued that historians often engage in disavowing the problems of climate change and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. She advocated that historians have important roles to play through modifying how we conduct our professional work and acting to modify the institutional and wider social frameworks that we operate within. She followed up with concrete suggestions that included the digitization of archives to reduce research travel and hosting low-carbon conferences through virtual participation and catering choices.

Dr. J. T. Roane’s talk, “Rural Black Social Life in the Chesapeake After the 1933 Great Hurricane,” Roane explored the strong relationship between Black communities and waterscapes in the Tidewater region of Virginia. With the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century, Black people were increasingly excluded from the waterscapes that played such vital roles to Black communities.

In “Louisiana: Race, Justice, and the Ecological Legacies of the Plantation Economy,” Dr. Justin Hosbey illustrated how the humanitarian crisis triggered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed the racial violence and class domination that structures New Orleans and the broader American South. He analyzed how the politics of space, place, and class in Black New Orleans has been transformed by post-Katrina redevelopment policies and that these reconstruction projects can be read as anti-Black spatial tactics.

Dr. Paul N. Edwards’ presentation, “Writing History into the Sixth IPCC Assessment Report,” discussed his work as one of the few social scientists working on the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report and the challenges of integrating historical research into the IPCC Assessment Report.

Dr. Dolly Jørgensen’s talk, “Isn’t all Environmental Humanities ‘Environmental Humanities in Practice’?,” followed Edwards’ and chronicled how after she and Dr. Franklin Ginn took over as co-editors of the Environmental Humanities journal in January 2020 they worked to make the journal more inclusive of environmental humanities practices. As part of this effort, they introduced a new category of journal article, “Environmental Humanities in Practice,” and examined the tension in this decision to develop a separate category of scholarship geared toward outreach.

Session V: Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

In the conference’s fifth session, five scholars considered the public-facing aspects of their work and how work about climate history, climate change, and environmental humanities gets translated to the public. Dr. D. O. McCullough’s talk, “Specific Constraints for a Universal Challenge: Navigating Resources and Space to Create a History of Climate Science Exhibition,” illustrated the challenges and possibilities of using museum exhibits to communicate the history of climate science and offered several suggestions for so effectively. He advocated for curators of history of climate science exhibitions to draw their narratives from the objects available for display, to treat their own institutions as artifacts to model critical reflection about past practices in meteorology and climate, and to foreground museum space and audience in the design process.

Dr. Bethany Wiggin’s presentation, “When Will It Be Over? Water, Flood, Toxics, and the Duration of Colonial Legacies in Philadelphia,” explored climate impacts as ongoing colonial relations and explored the coloniality of climate change through a series of interrelated public humanities projects developed in Philadelphia amidst flash floods, refinery explosions, and school children’s hopes and dreams for Philadelphia in 2100.

In Dr. Prasannan Parthasarathi’s talk, “Indian Ocean Current,” he discussed the “Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives,” an exhibit at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art that he co-curated with Salim Currimjee. The exhibit integrated material on climate change, ocean science, and the crisis of fisheries with perspectives from six contemporary artists from around the western Indian Ocean World.

Dr. Tom Chandler and Dr. Adam Clulow’s presentation, “Modeling Virtual Angkor: An Evolutionary Approach to a Single Urban Space,” spoke about how the Virtual Angkor Project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor, the largest settlement complex of the preindustrial world, at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence in Southeast Asia. They highlighted the long development of the project, the challenges involved in modelling the historical environment, and the question of climate variability and the decline of Angkor.

Raymond Hyser is a third-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. His research interests include the intertwining histories of science, agriculture, and the environment in trans-imperial spaces, particularly within the British Empire, during the nineteenth century. He also has a growing interest in world history and digital humanities. His current research traces the agricultural knowledge networks of coffee cultivation between the West Indies and South Asia during the long nineteenth century.

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented Virtual Conference

May 26, 2021

April 22-23, 2021
Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin

As the culmination of a year-long series of events, this conference brought together diverse scholars whose work grapples with the challenges that climate change presents to the discipline of history. Participants addressed precedents for this “unprecedented” crisis by uncovering and analyzing the historical roots and analogues of contemporary climate change across a wide range of eras and areas around the world. Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?

To consult specific conference sessions, use the links below:

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

Opening Remarks

Daina Ramey Berry
Chairperson of the History Department & Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Miriam Bodian
Director of the Institute for Historical Studies & Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Land Acknowledgement

Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (Mapuche)
Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Conference Theme Introduction

Erika Bsumek
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Megan Raby
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Session I. Emerging Perspectives: A Graduate Student Roundtable

Mary E. Mendoza (Commentator), Pennsylvania State University

“An Upwelling of Stone: Climate Change and Infrastructure Agendas in Early Modern India”
Jonathan Seefeldt, University of Texas at Austin

Large-scale precolonial dams in South Asia have been persistently interpreted as prestige projects primarily concerned with royal legitimation. I am interested in thinking through the merits of this characterization and the histories it perhaps forecloses. To do so, I consider the case of Rajsamand in the semi-arid hills of the present-day western Indian state of Rajasthan. Built from 1662 to 1676 AD, Rajsamand remains one of the largest still-active precolonial embankment complexes in South Asia. The reservoir was the first major infrastructure project of Raj Singh I, a particularly enterprising regional monarch and a frequent thorn in the side of the Mughal empire. I consider what specific factors were projects such as Rajsamand—completed at tremendous expense with significant contributions from lower-level landholders—responding to other than a broadly-conceived, millennia-spanning, subcontinental-wide desire to project kingly power? To begin to answer this, I focus briefly on an unusual, understudied meteorological catalogue from the same period. This text, in alignment with the emerging consensus from proxy data, suggests the years surrounding Rajsamand’s construction were a time of failed monsoons, unusual aridity, and mounting social strain. I argue the vernacular texts on hand combine with the remarkable built footprint of Rajsamand and its sibling projects to present a picture of a precolonial state deeply involved in day-to-day efforts to stabilize the whims of the monsoon and sustain food production.

“Cultivating Parasitism: Early Modern Insect Crops and the Limits of Commodification”
Diana Heredia-López, University of Texas at Austin

This paper explores the implications of using the Plantationocene as a framework to explore the early environmental transformations in the Americas. It focuses on a seventeenth-century project to scale up the production of cochineal in the Yucatan peninsula. Cochineal, a red dyestuff endemic to southern Mexico, constituted one of the largest revenues for the Spanish empire. For more than three hundred years this dye’s production remained in the hands of indigenous households who knew how to maintain the parasitic relationship between the prickly pear cacti (Opuntia spp.) and the dye-bearing insect, Dactylopius coccus. The parasitic nature of cochineal cultivation contrasts with the inadvertent fostering of parasites and pests in modern day plantations. This paper thus highlights the need to investigate the different manifestations of parasitism throughout the Plantationocene as well as the non-linear trajectories of plantation agriculture.

“Technological Ambivalence: Skiers and the History of Climate Solutions”
Jesse Ritner, University of Texas at Austin

Ski resorts sell images of skiers in waist-deep snow. But the vision is a mirage. Most people ski on groomed beginner and intermediate runs. And most of these slopes are not covered with real snow. Rather, they are covered with artificial snow. This paper argues that the U.S. ski industry used snowmaking to adapt to variable climates that provide insufficient snow for modern ski resorts. The technology proved highly profitable. Yet, snowmaking, and the development that came from it, had both latent and manifest repercussions that influenced class and racial relations. The paper concludes by discussing how studying this highly specific climate adapting technology can help us think through the implementation and ramifications of new technologies that will likely be used as the planet continues to warm.

“Racial Capitalism and Climate Justice: Historical Perspectives on Environmental Racism in Texas”
Micaela Valadez, University of Texas at Austin

This short paper will briefly cover the history of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, Texas, a mostly ethnic Mexican organization founded in 1974. I critique the historiography of the organization as unbalanced in the favor of COPS earliest victories without contending with the legacies of their work into the 2000s and their decision to not use the rhetoric of race or class when confronting people in power. Overall, I argue that if historians can be of any use to the current climate justice movement we have to divert our attention to understanding how communities of color fight against environmental and climate injustice. We have to consider the ways that the state responds to organizations like COPS that include giving in to their demands and allocating funds to prevent environmental disasters and hazards. Finally, we have to understand how these kinds of relationships between organizations and the state divert attention away from the systemic and structural sources of the very problems that COPS and groups like them were meant to confront.

“African Americans, Slavery, and the Long History of Environmental Degradation on the Gulf Coast”
Brooks Winfree, University of Texas at Austin

This think piece considers how the cotton-based plantation zone of the nineteenth-century Gulf South became a site of contestation over competing ideas of environmental use. White enslavers envisioned a vast and extremely profitable belt of cotton cultivation stretching from Alabama to eastern Texas, cultivated with the labor of enslaved African Americans on land appropriated from Native people. Even before their arrival in the region, enslaved people knew of the horrific laboring conditions of the “Cotton Kingdom,” where enslavers would compel them to labor long hours in one of the harshest physical environments in the continental United States. Yet the “Cotton Kingdom’s” economic success depended on enslaved people’s intimate familiarity with the land and their knowledge of agricultural techniques. Ultimately, the enslaved forged alternative understandings of the environment around them by incorporating the physical world in religious practices, interpreting the new landscape in ways that privileged African, rather than Euro-American, land uses, and using the features of the terrain to secure their freedom. This piece concludes by calling on scholars to more seriously consider slavery and enslaved people’s interest in forging alternative understandings of the land as key themes for environmental histories.

Opening Keynote Address: Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University

“The Reindeer and the End of the World: Apocalypse, Climate, and Soviet Dreams”

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Bathsheba Demuth

Session II. Historicizing Climate

Megan Raby (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“Beyond Numbers: Knowing Typhoons in Late Imperial China”
Clark L. Alejandrino, Trinity College Hartford

Numbers dominate the study of past storms in particular, and to some extent historical climatology in general. We need to count the number of storms and we need to measure how strong they were on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Historical climatologists have subjected documentary evidence for storms, such as those from China, to the “tyranny of numbers” with some refusing to recognize records that have no barometric readings or wind speed measurements. I argue in this paper that we need to go beyond this fetish for numbers from modern meteorology and take seriously the very different ways that people along the South China coast recognized, understood, and conceived of typhoons in the past. One need not have measurable typhoons or a precise count of their number to write a history of typhoons.

“Degrees of Vulnerability: Why We Need a Feminist History of Climate Science”
Deborah Coen, Yale University

Knowledge for the Anthropocene is necessarily knowledge of our own vulnerability. But what kind of a scientific object is human vulnerability? Diverse concepts of human vulnerability to climate change have developed since the 1970s at a nexus between disciplines that might otherwise never have encountered each other: atmospheric science, critical geography, political ecology, development economics, human rights law, and feminist epistemology. While no consensus has been reached on the concept’s meaning, the efforts to define it have constituted a vital and necessary conversation about the role of values in scientific inquiry. Viewed historically, I hypothesize, this evolving discourse reveals the influence of the global feminist movement of the 1980s and ‘90s. Echoing Indigenous philosophers, feminist practitioners of “vulnerability science” have rejected the fetishization of the autonomy of the scientific researcher, insisting instead that relationships of interdependence are foundational to knowledge-making. They have posited the performative character of knowledge of human-environment interactions and the co-production of science and communities of scientific knowers. Yet the scientific institutions they work within exert constant pressure to deny these relations of interdependence. Taking a deeper historical view, we can recognize this resistance as a historical legacy of the Kantian fiction of the autonomy of the moral and epistemic subject. A history of the science of climate vulnerability should attend to the presence of this past, the living legacy of two centuries of efforts to separate the knowing human subject from the human object of geophysical influence. For our vulnerability to climate is co-extensive with our capacity to know climate, by exposing ourselves to new experiences of the atmosphere and new relations of interdependence with other beings.

“The Anthropocene and Epistemological Colonialism: The 18th-Century Spanish American Origins of Humboldt’s Global Histories of the Earth and Climate Change”
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin

“Measuring Climate by Proxy”
Melissa Charenko, Michigan State University & IHS Fellow

Climate proxies are the preserved physical characteristic of past climates that stand in for direct meteorological measurements. These natural recorders of climatic variability are ubiquitous in studies of climate since they are some of the only ways to determine climatic conditions over the vast stretches of Earth’s history where no instrumental measurements or record-keeping exist. This paper examines how scientists’ use of proxies constrained and compelled what they thought about climate’s past and future. It focuses on predictions possible from tree rings in the 1920s as well as pollen analysis’ limited ability to predict in the 1980s given the “unprecedented” future that awaited because of global warming.

FRIDAY, APRIL 23

Opening Remarks

David Mohrig
Associate Dean for Research, Jackson School of Geosciences
University of Texas of Austin

Session III. Contextualizing the Climate Crisis

Tracie Matysik (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“Skin and Fuel: Some Episodes from the Fossilization of Whiteness”
Andreas Malm, Lund University

What does the rise of the far right mean for the battle against climate change? In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, authored by Dr. Malm and the Zetkin Collective (Verso Books, May 2021), presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. No one loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. Now right-wing forces have risen to the surface, some professing to have the solution—closing borders to save the nation as the climate breaks down. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up. For this conference, Dr. Malm has made available for pre-circulation Chapter 9 of White Skin, Black Fuel, entitled “Skin and Fuel.”

“The Cene Scene: Modernization Myths, Navajo Coal Development, and the Making of Arizona”
Andrew Curley, University of Arizona

“States of Second Nature”
Victor Seow, Harvard University

“Gathering Clouds over Petropolis: A Prolegomena”
Christopher Sellers, Stony Brook University & IHS Fellow

Global climate change has spurred notions like the Anthropocene that have further thickened the Western academy’s grasp of worldwide environmental change, but often with limited regard for more local and human scales of historical action, where the climate crisis itself was born. I present here a prolegomena for a book that seeks to reckon with how multi-scalar as well as political the human making of the climate crisis has been. To do so, it carves out a narrower focus, tightening its lenses on the global and the local as well as more intermediate scales to better illuminate their connections, parallels, and interactions. I tease out a single historical thread within the anthropogenesis of climate change, of that one industry responsible for more greenhouse emissions than any other in human history: oil. To coherently render the local faces of this industry’s more over-arching history, my narrative centers on two locales: the eastern coast of Texas, around Houston, and the southern coast of Veracruz, in Mexico. Set in very similar landscapes along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, both became centers for the global oil industry, one in the Global North and the other in the Global South. While ranging upward to state, regional, national, and transnational and global scales, I repeatedly return to these local places. Their transformations offer a concrete window on how corporations, governments, and other institutions created and sustained the material conduits that have slaked the world’s growing thirst for petroleum over the last century. And the tensions and conflicts emerging in or implicating these places, environmental and otherwise, illuminate the politics through which oil’s ascent in these two nations was enabled as well as challenged. Probing these challenges at the local as well as the regional, national, and global levels, I explore where historical precedents for an effective climate politics may lie.

Session IV. Practicing What We Preach: A Roundtable

Erika Bsumek (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“We Use the Living Earth to Make Our Histories”
Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia

Academic historians, among many others, have failed to fully confront the climate and biodiversity crises, often engaging in disavowal of the problems and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. There are, however, several steps we can take to reconfigure our work for equity in a carbon-constrained world, many of which were outlined in a working paper on sustainable history drafted by a group of Australian historians in 2019. Building on the work of these authors and others, here I argue that historians have important roles to play in disrupting disavowal of the climate and biodiversity crises: by daily conducting our professional work as though we know the truth about planetary collapse, by acting to modify the institutional and wider social frameworks within which we operate, and by writing about the past as always a more-than-human unfolding.

“Rural Black Social Life in the Chesapeake After the 1933 Great Hurricane”
J. T. Roane, Arizona State University

“Louisiana: Race, Justice, and the Ecological Legacies of the Plantation Economy”
Justin Hosbey, Emory University

The humanitarian disaster triggered by Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial
violence and class domination that structures New Orleans and the broader U.S. South. In the immediate wake of the storm’s destruction of the U.S. Gulf Coast, the state of Louisiana transformed New Orleans’ public schools into privatized charter schools and commissioned the destruction of the majority of the city’s public housing. Drawing on ethnographic field research between 2013 and 2019, this article explores the social impact of this privatization by analyzing how the politics of space, place, and class in Black New Orleans have been transformed by post-Katrina redevelopment policies. Using geographer Clyde Woods’ analysis of New Orleans as a plantation geography, I mobilize critical work in Black geographies, Black studies, and cultural anthropology to argue that these reconstruction projects can be read as anti-Black spatial tactics that continue to unmoor low income and working class Black New Orleanians from their communities into the present.

“Writing History into the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report”
Paul N. Edwards, Stanford University

“Isn’t all Environmental Humanities ‘Environmental Humanities in Practice’?”
Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger

When I and Franklin Ginn (University of Bristol, UK) took over as co-editors of the journal Environmental Humanities in January 2020, we began having discussions about how to make the journal more inclusive of environmental humanities practices, including the many community, outreach, and pedagogy projects that our practitioners are involved in. As part of that effort, we recently launched a category of article called “Environmental Humanities in Practice” targeting scholarship and sharing of experiences about interventionist work. Yet there is a tension in this decision to make a separate category of scholarship about outreach: Isn’t all environmental humanities really “environmental humanities in practice”?

Session V. Going Public with Climate History: A Roundtable

Joan Neuberger (Chair), University of Texas at Austin

“Specific Constraints for a Universal Challenge: Navigating Resources and Space to Create a History of Climate Science Exhibition”
D. O. McCullough, American Philosophical Society

Communicating the history of climate science holds promise as a way to help build public consensus around the climate crisis that matches the scientific consensus. This paper explores the challenges and possibilities of using museum exhibits to communicate the history of climate science and offers several suggestions for doing so effectively. Curators of history of climate science exhibitions should draw their narratives from the objects available for display, treat their own institutions as artifacts to model critical reflection about past practices in meteorology and climate, and foreground museum space and audience in the design process. These approaches can help exhibit designers maximize the potential of their particular resources to help solve this universal problem.

“When Will It Be Over? Water, Flood, Toxics, and the Duration of Colonial Legacies in Philadelphia”
Bethany Wiggin, University of Pennsylvania

In the absence of a direct hit from a super storm like Hurricane Sandy, Philadelphians are more likely to ask of climate change, “When Will It Begin?” rather than the question this paper poses, “When Will It Be Over?” By asking “When Will It Be Over?” this paper foregrounds climate impacts as ongoing colonial relations and explores the coloniality of climate change through a series of inter-related public humanities projects developed in Philadelphia amidst flash floods, refinery explosions, and school children’s hopes and dreams for Philadelphia at 2100. In raising questions about climate change’s origins and progress, it considers historical responsibility and asks for repair, including forms of research and teaching appropriate for the climate changed. It explores how best, in the words of the organizers of this conference, “we” might “go public.” Asking “When Will It Be Over” reminds us that we are working in the wake of Atlantic slavery, and it suggests the need for publicly engaged, anti-racist historical work that spans critique and action.

“Indian Ocean Current”
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College

“Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives” was an exhibit at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art in the spring and fall of 2020. The exhibit integrated material on climate change, ocean science, and the crisis of fisheries with the perspectives of six contemporary artists. This combination reflected the curators’ commitment to inject climate change into diverse conversations. Inspired by this goal, the South African artist Penny Siopis, did two new works for the show, “Warm Waters” and “She Breathes Water.”

“Modeling Virtual Angkor: An Evolutionary Approach to a Single Urban Space”
Tom Chandler, Monash University & Adam Clulow, University of Texas at Austin

The Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. For approximately 500 years from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, the Khmer empire dominated the politics and economy of Southeast Asia. Centered on modern day Cambodia, it extended its influence across a vast swath of territory, encompassing most of present-day Thailand and the southern provinces of Laos and Vietnam. At its peak, the city of Angkor, which had an estimated 750,000 inhabitants dispersed over an interconnected, hydraulic landscape, was “thelargest settlement complex of the preindustrial world.” In the decade since it commenced, the Virtual Angkor project has evolved organically to encompass new technologies and approaches in an effort to present a comprehensive reconstruction of the city and its inhabitants. In this talk we explore the long development of the project, which scaled up from a single elephant to over 20,000 agents moving through a fully realized city, the challenges involved in modelling the environment and the question of climate variability and the decline of Angkor.

Concluding Remarks

Erika Bsumek
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Megan Raby
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Closing Keynote Address: Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

Introducing the keynote speakers for Climate in Context – Naomi Oreskes

Convened by Dr. Erika M. Bsumek, Associate Professor of History and Dr. Megan Raby, Associate Professor of History. Presented by the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Generously co-sponsored by:

Introducing the Material History Workshop

May 17, 2021

By Atar David & Raymond Hyser

Last summer, as the global pandemic threatened to push yet another academic year into the Zoomiverse (a threat that soon became a reality), it became clear that we all needed to put on hold our standard conceptions of graduate school. While online classes became the new normal and access to the library slowly returned, we felt the experience of being a young scholar in a large department and university slipping away from us. Many of us felt as if the opportunity to share our thoughts, work, fears, and hopes with our peers in a supportive and intellectually enriching environment was being taken away from us by the changes unleashed by COVID-19. We had to adapt ourselves to this new reality without completely adopting the notion of being apart from each other. Our solution to this conundrum was to create a space that, despite the physical distance, would help bring us all together. Looking for a common theme, we decided to form a bi-monthly workshop centered on what we loosely defined as material history. Thus, the grad-student-run Material History Workshop was born.

The intellectual premise was fairly simple. Much like other grad forums that address questions of identity, gender, race, and the environment, we wanted to talk about physical things, objects that you can touch, smell, eat, wear, buy, sell, and create. We felt that too often these objects are overlooked as benign, secondary, or simply marginal compared to other grander forces that shape history. We wanted to dig deeper into the supposed banality of the materials that make up everyday life, to explore how bread is baked, how clothes are dyed, how coffee is grown, and how snow is made (it’s true. There is a long history of snowmaking. Just ask Jesse Ritner). We strongly believed, and still do, that encapsulating the historical context in which our things exist may teach us something fundamental about our past, present, and future. Each of us had our own notion of how to understand the histories of our objects: through the human experience of usage, by historicizing the relationship between people and matter, through their environmental impact, and by how we ascribe them meaning.

*An empty seminar room in Garrison hall*

We met every other week either to discuss academic works that were meaningful to our professional identities or to read and discuss our own papers and thesis chapters. We discovered that though each of us studies a different time and place, we were able to engage in productive and thought-provoking conversations. In our virtual workshop, ideas about food regulations in twentieth-century Egypt met the socio-environmental implications of American snowmaking technology, and the stories of coffee cultivators in British Ceylon benefited from the discussions we had about indigenous experiences with material regulations in Colonial Mexico. Some recurring themes kept appearing: environment and nature, capitalism and trade, identity and culture. As the weeks went by, we also decided to invite inspiring scholars to share their concepts of materiality and material culture with us. We were surprised by how responsive and engaging these scholars were, by how curious they were to hear what we had to say. We are, needless to say, thankful for all those scholars who agreed to participate in what we hope would become a tradition of dialogue in the years to come.

We all hope that by the fall, the workshop will resume in a hybrid model, one that will allow us to get coffee together and share physical space, but won’t exclude those who are still distant. Knowing how eager we all are to return to a semblance of normalcy where we can once again pour over manuscripts and dig into dusty boxes around the world, we want to make sure that being away does not mean being alone. We want to preserve our vibrant discussions while allowing new ideas to form and grow and additional members to join. If last year taught us anything, it is that community can make all the difference when we are physically distant. Care to join us?

Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented – Conference Program

April 22, 2021

April 22-23, 2021
Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Free and open to the public. Register to attend here.

This conference brings together diverse scholars whose work grapples with the challenges that climate change presents to the discipline of history. Participants will address precedents for this “unprecedented” crisis by uncovering and analyzing the historical roots and analogues of contemporary climate change across a wide range of eras and areas around the world. Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?