Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Making Sense of the Major: Studying History at College

From the Editors: This is a new series designed to introduce the experience of studying History at college from the student’s perspective. It is designed to demystify the discipline and to make it more accessible to all students.

Whenever I tell someone I’ve just met that I’m a history major, they say something along the lines of “Oh, I could never do that, I hate history.” That’s fair enough. Not everything is for everyone; I have little interest in differential equations. But this distaste for history often stems, in fact, from a fundamental misunderstanding of what studying history actually is. Middle and high school history classes are designed to make everyone literate in history; they are not meant to teach someone how to be a historian.”. The result is that many people have a distorted view of what it means to actually study history. In the first article of a planned longer series, I want to dispel these misconceptions and talk about what history classes in college are actually like, what skills studying history teaches, and the kind of work history students do.

First, a disclaimer. I’ve only taken history classes at the University of Texas at Austin, and while I’ve looked over many other universities’ degree plans and requirements, and I want this series to be as generally applicable as possible, some details may be different from university to university. If you have any specific questions, email the university’s history advisors. They’re very friendly, and they want you to succeed.

*Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin. Source. Photograph by Adam Clulow*

To answer everyone’s first question, studying history is not memorizing names and dates. Perhaps I shouldn’t confess this, and I apologize to any of my professors who are reading this, but I don’t really know the exact date of almost any of the events I’ve studied. That’s something that high school history classes focus on because it’s easy to turn the day of, say, the Pearl Harbor attack into a multiple-choice question: “What day was the attack on Pearl Harbor?”. Now, don’t get me wrong, you still need to know when some things happened, usually what year, but the order of events is far more important. “What political decisions did Japan and the United States make leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor?” is a question that takes much longer to answer and is much more difficult to turn into a multiple-choice question than the exact date.

But, of course, that question is also far more interesting and indeed significant. The Japanese government’s desire to secure their flanks from a surprise attack by the United States while they pushed further into China, the American oil embargo on Japan, and the invention of the Japanese long-range attack fighter A6M Zero may have made some kind of attack inevitable. Or perhaps it did not. Delving into questions like this is the point of studying history. The complex interplay between different social, economic, and political (to name a few) factors, not to mention the ever-present element of flawed human decision-making, cannot easily be distilled down to fit a standardized test. When your 10th-grade AP World History course has to cover literally all of human existence from the emergence of the first Homo erectus to the present, it only makes sense that they will have to leave some things out.

Second, history classes are not typically big lectures where you listen to a single teacher tell you what happened, memorize that, and repeat it back to them. Don’t get me wrong: some history classes are lectures, especially survey courses for freshmen and sophomores, designed to give a shallow overview of a wide topic, but the vast majority include some element of discussion. Your college isn’t going to want to give you a history degree because a professor made you memorize some facts about ancient Rome. They want you to interrogate the sources, discuss your conclusions with your peers, and become a well-rounded citizen capable of engaging across different levels. The best classes I took were not in massive 250-student lecture halls but smaller 20-person seminars where everyone had an equal opportunity to share their ideas.

A typical example of a History seminar room. — *A typical example of a History seminar room*. Photograph by Adam Clulow

If history classes are not about memorizing dates and facts as dictated by a dispassionate lecturer, then what are they? Well, in fact, they are not too dissimilar from literature courses. Let me explain what I mean. Most days, when you attend a history class, you’ve already done most of the work. Before every class session, there will be some assigned reading, usually from a primary source relevant to what you’re learning in class. You’ll then show up to class, the professor will have a short presentation, usually to provide some additional context, and then they will ask some open-ended questions for you and your classmates to discuss. Things like “What does this remind you of?” or “What is the author getting at?” This is the same way that literature classes work. If you take a Shakespeare class, you’ll have to do the same thing: read an act or two of Two Noble Kinsmen and show up to class ready to discuss.

As for assignments, mercifully, worksheets are gone. In most history classes, you’ll only have a handful of things that you actually turn in for a grade. This is in contrast to STEM classes, which have pretty consistent, sometimes daily, homework to turn in. Most assignments are some kind of written essay, and the prompts are usually as open-ended as discussion classes. I’ve had essays focused on topics like how to define the word “secularism,” give an overview of some moon landing conspiracies, and assess whether I find a particular source trustworthy or not. These are straightforward prompts, and you can answer with almost anything, provided you can back it up with sources. For most classes these sources will be the ones you’ve already read, but some classes will also have a long research paper where you’re expected to do independent research. One unanticipated benefit to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is that many universities and libraries digitized large sections of their catalog, so finding sources and doing research has never been more accessible. Finally, some classes will have formal midterms and finals, but these are usually straightforward. They typically take the form of a short paper written relatively quickly, a few paragraph questions, or very rarely the few dreaded multiple-choice questions.

*The University of Texas Architecture Library. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

This has two effects. It keeps you engaged in both the class and the subject, as you are provided the opportunity – and indeed expected – to form and share your own opinions; It also teaches you how to synthesize those ideas in the first place. Taking two different sources and using them to form your own, new opinion is one of the primary skills of historians. This is the bedrock of critical thinking and is becoming more and more valuable. In the digital age, where we are constantly bombarded with information and opinions, the ability to cut through the noise and try to find facts is essential to staying well informed.

Studying history also teaches fundamental research skills. It can be frustrating at times but getting your hands on a new text and interrogating it for fresh ideas is a deeply rewarding experience. For a personal example, when I was working on my thesis over the Texas Navy, I kept running into a problem where a lot of the diaries and accounts I was looking for were lost in 1881 when the Texas capitol burned down, taking with it many archives. I found fragments in other primary sources, and a few long quotes in secondary sources, but nothing complete. I struck gold when I was looking through a ship’s log one day in the archival reading room, when the content suddenly changed. The words flipped upside down and became a diary. I suddenly realized what I was holding. The Texas Navy was so broke towards the end of its existence that they could not afford a new log book when one ended, so the captain took one of his younger officer’s journals and used the blank pages as the new log book. When it was filed in the archives, whoever did the filing chose to list it as a log book and not as a diary. What I thought was dry positional and wind speed data had suddenly turned into a treasure trove of information. I’m not exaggerating when I say that was one of the most exhilarating moments of my college studies. And research is filled with little “gold mine” moments like these.

*The Burning Capitol, Austin Nov. 7th, 1881. Source: the Chalberg Collection of Prints and Negatives, Austin History Center.*

Finally, studying history teaches you the value of communicating your ideas. Being a history major involves a lot of writing and talking. It’s all well and good to have a new idea, but you have to be able to communicate it effectively for the idea to get out and spread. At UT and at every other school I’ve looked at, there’s at least one course specially designed to teach students how to research history, but more importantly how to communicate it. By going to college, no matter what your major, you’re going to become knowledgeable on some advanced topics. That’s the point of going, after all. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to tell people what you learned. Most majors will have some sort of communications class built in, such as engineering communication or business communication, but the great part about history is that most of our work has communication built-in from the beginning. This means that if you become a history major, you’ll have much more experience communicating your subject than your peers in other fields.

So that’s what being a history major looks like. It’s not memorizing names, dates, and events. It’s about assessing sources, forming your own opinions and communicating them effectively. In the next part of the series, I’m going to go over why you should consider becoming a history major and what opportunities studying history can provide.

Motherhood, Patriotism and Enfranchisement: How Mexican Catholic Women Defined Womanhood in the Mid-Twentieth Century

My thesis focused on tracing and analyzing the complicated political conversations within the women’s division of the Mexican Catholic Action, specifically regarding women’s suffrage from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. My work revealed a layered set of beliefs that defy these women’s simple classification into feminist or antifeminist categories. Their complex reconciliation of conservative views with more progressive ones is a trend that has also been found in the historiography of international Christian women’s organizations through various time periods.^[1] In a relatively recent article, Mexican historian Pedro Espinoza Meléndez also identifies seemingly opposing currents of thought present in ACM women’s publications.^[2] In this way, my research builds on new scholarship to suggest the need for frameworks that avoid the feminist/antifeminist binary we may be inclined to apply. We should especially be careful if western interpretations of these terms are being used to explain phenomena in non-western regions.

Mexican women did not obtain the right to vote in federal elections until 1953, although there were important antecedents to this final victory dating back at least to the Revolution. One of the reasons for this was the fear that they would infuse national politics with more conservative ideas. Some primary sources provide evidence not necessarily for the validity of these fears, but definitely for their existence and influence in the 1930s. For example, in a speech given at the first National Women’s Congress in 1936, activist Esther Chapa said that many believed “woman is influenced by the most conservative and reactionary currents, and can therefore tip the general politics of the country to the right.”^[3] It is significant also that Chapa declared this fear, rather than other, more overtly misogynistic ideas (which she also discussed) to be the excuse “that is most energetically used by certain enemies of women’s votes.”^[4] Of course, she vehemently denies that these concerns should be taken seriously. Based on other sources, historians have also generally agreed that the precarious political establishment at the time feared that women’s participation would derail them from a progressive political path.^[5] For example, one of the first historians of women’s fight for suffrage in Mexico, Ward M. Morton from the University of Florida, cited the enfranchisement of Spanish women in 1933—which resulted on a rightward swing in Spanish politics—as one of the key causes for hesitation on the part of left-leaning or centrist Mexican officials in the 1930s.^[6]

*Elvia Carrillo Puerto, one of the first women representatives in the country in 1923, alongside Beatriz Peniche Ponce and Raquel Dzib Cicero. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

There is value in this explanation, but the extent to which these fears were founded is difficult to assert. What is clear, however, is that these ideas were significant at the time, and have permeated into the historiography. In my opinion, one way of getting closer to a nuanced view of the issue is to refrain from treating women as a monolithic group in Mexican society, especially in such a crucial moment of development for the nation’s democracy and larger political apparatus. Because the women of the Mexican Catholic Action promoted ideas from both the right and the left, the study of their beliefs is particularly useful in this endeavor.

When looking at Catholic women’s opinions on the vote, it is crucial to define the elements that made the struggle singularly complex in Mexico. First, due to the wording of the Mexican Constitution, women’s political rights always included two related, but distinct goals—the right to vote and the right to get elected. Inextricably connected, these were fought for and obtained simultaneously in Mexico, unlike in many other countries. This may appear to be a trivial difference. Its significance becomes clear, however, when remembering the previously-explained fear of a women-led hit to progressive political parties and policies. With both ballot boxes and federal offices opening up to women, these fears would have reasonably been amplified. I should also note that due to their reputed conservatism, it was traditional, Catholic women—such as those in the Mexican Catholic Action—who were the most blamed for the potential setbacks that would come from women’s enfranchisement. As I will demonstrate, while they did hold some conservative ideas, these were paired with more left-leaning attitudes, eventually including unequivocal support for suffrage. The study of their point of view is therefore especially interesting and significant. Gendered conceptions of citizenship responsibilities further compounded the challenges women faced in the fight for political rights.^[7]

At least three additional contextual factors must be explained prior to any exploration of Catholic women’s political views from the 1930s to the 1950s. The first is the emergence and promotion of Catholic social doctrine in Rome starting in the late 1800s. Generally speaking, Catholic social doctrine was the church’s ideological response to significant events such as industrialization, the rise of communism, and large-scale warfare, conceived largely to maintain relevance in the face of these and other global trends. Some of its principles included the right to own private property, a condemnation of communism as well as unfettered capitalism (a debate that would become especially relevant post-WWII), and the basic dignity of human beings. As will be detailed later, Mexican women actively interpreted Catholic social doctrine, using it as basis for their political goals, including obtaining the right to vote.

The second important background event is the Mexican Revolution. On the one hand, revolutionary characters and ideals—including the expansion of democracy—proved to be of extreme value for many post-Revolution political factions. Indeed, the party that would command the executive branch of government from 1929 to the year 2000, was the National Revolutionary Party (later named the Institutional Revolutionary Party). By the late 1940s, Catholic women would adduce revolutionary principles to explain why granting them political rights was in line with the perceived promises of the revolution.

*The Mexican Revolution. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Third, we must understand the nature of church-state relations in Mexico. The Cristero War (1926-1929) brought the tensions between the church and the post-Revolutionary Mexican state to the battlefield. As the war ended, various Catholic lay organizations that had previously engaged with national politics merged to form The Mexican Catholic Action (ACM) in 1929, during the papacy of Pius XI. Although most members of the ACM were from the middle and upper classes, they also had growing peasants’ divisions and chapters across the country. Some historians have argued that the incorporation of many Catholic lay organizations translated into a general decrease in their political involvement, as Catholic Action groups worldwide were directly under clerical authority.^[8] Other historians, such as Kristina Boylan, have found that female members—who were the majority—actually retained and fostered the political streak of earlier Catholic lay groups in Mexico.^[9]

Catholic social doctrine, especially papal encyclicals associated with its theory, was widely discussed and promoted in ACM circles. Pope Leo XIII’s famous Rerum Novarum encyclical in 1891 is widely regarded as one of the founding documents of Catholic social doctrine.^[10] In it, the church proposed it as a way to inter-class harmony, emphasizing Christian charity.^[11] In the ACM, this particular encyclical and a few others were especially celebrated. For example, in a report from the co-secretary of the ACM’s central committee from June 25th, 1939, one of the forms outlined discussed plans for the formation of study circles for social education, in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the Rerum Novarum.^[12] Later, Popes Pius XI and Pius XII cited and expanded its philosophy. Aside from his additions to Catholic social doctrine, Pope Pius XI actively encouraged the foundation of Catholic Action groups around the world.

*Pius XI, by Nicola Perscheid, circa 1922. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Building on Boylan’s research on ACM women’s activism, I proposed that although the women of the Mexican Catholic Action enthusiastically followed the pope and were heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine, they also actively interpreted, modified, and spread messages from Rome according to their interests. For example, while Rerum Novarum suggested that woman was “by nature fitted for home-work” in order to raise children, the ACM adopted a wider interpretation of this role.^[13] A 1938 article titled “Prepare Yourself for our Assembly,” meant to be read prior to that year’s national assembly of the young woman’s division, argued that all women have social duties, “whether it falls upon them to become mothers or…whether their maternity is purely spiritual.”^[14] By this perception, women should act as mothers towards their own children, but also to anyone who needs a mother, and towards the Mexican nation. Introducing a spiritual maternity into the lexicon reflects how these women managed to marry conservative political views such as their opposition to divorce and critiques of certain media, with more liberal ones, like their support for suffrage and women’s ability to take up professional roles. The adoption of these seemingly adversary attitudes demonstrates that rather than passively obeying papal precepts, Catholic women actively shaped their meaning. Eventually, and especially as church-state relations became less combative, ideas such as these would become part of the basis for their support of suffrage.

The Mexican Revolution and a fervent patriotism that followed it also underpinned the ACM’s gradual embrace of enfranchisement. In 1947, in Mexico finally received voting rights, albeit limited to local elections. That same year, the ACM disseminated a bulletin titled My Vote as a Mexican Catholic Woman. It was written by Emma Galán, who had served as president of the ACM’s young women’s division and had thus been part of the ACM’s Central Committee. In the publication, Galán devotes a whole section to “the aggrandizement of Mexico” and declared that voting was “a moral duty in the face of love for the Motherland.”^[15] Invoking the Mexican Revolution, the document also reveals that women viewed enfranchisement as the achievement of its goals, supporting the expansion of suffrage to include voting in federal elections as well. To Galán, it was anti-revolutionary and anti-patriotic to abstain from voting or to oppose suffrage.

A column by Hermila Galindo published in a 1917 issue of the magazine Mujer Moderna (Modern Woman). In it, she announced her candidacy for localrepresentative. She also outlined her agenda, which included “defending the interests of [all] mothers,” “matrimonial hygiene,” and “procuring everything which would contribute to her dignity.” It was followed by a short editorial note clarifying that women did not have the right to vote in Mexico. Source: Wikimedia Commons {PD-US-expired}

Galán also offers that not voting was also anti-Catholic. The ACM first adopted this position around 1939, though initially, they didn’t explicitly include women.^[16] Eventually, though, political circumstances led to women’s incorporation. The ACM was vocally against the secularization of schools, for example, and since education issues were traditionally viewed as part of women’s realm, they became assets in this political fight. Bringing women into the fold through the vote would, therefore, advance their political goals, goals that would at the same time bring about a Mexico that was in line with Catholic social doctrine. Beyond secularization in schools and other such concerns, there was a persistent belief that unfettered capitalism, and most especially communism, were preventing the ACM’s idealized, Catholic Mexico—one that reflected Catholic social doctrine as they saw it—from flourishing. In this way, giving pious women the right to vote was not against Catholic social doctrine, but a benefit to its spread.

The new version of the Mexican one thousand peso bill includes the image of three revolutionary figures: Carmen Serdán (left), Hermila Galindo (center), and Francisco I. Madero (right). Serdán was known for her support of Madero, and her participation in the revolution as a writer and member of a revolutionary junta. Galindo was an early supporter of both divorce and suffrage, and served as Venustiano Carranza’s secretary for some time. According to historian Gabriela Cano, she even ran for office before she had that right explicitly in 1917, at least in part to protest this constitutional restriction. The bill has been in circulation since the end of 2020, as per the Mexican Central Bank. The photo was taken by one of the author’s family members.

Overall, I hope my investigation of Catholic women’s discourse surrounding suffrage contributes to the perspective that different groups of women throughout history have defined their role and purpose differently, drawing from multiple theories and doctrines. It is hard, therefore, to apply or even find a general rule that defines all women in a given time period. Instead of attempting to do so, I have carefully analyzed the views of a limited sample—those of the women in the Mexican Catholic Action, who themselves embody a complex intermingling of ideas. These women incorporated both national and international considerations—such as papal precepts, and the revolution’s legacy—into their political consciousness, and in doing so they were denoting the meaning of femininity. Their support for suffrage and women’s work outside the domestic sphere was accompanied by some conservative ideals, especially when it came to divorce, sexuality, and general impropriety, as Espinoza Meléndez found.^[17]

They viewed the vote as an essential tool to bring about a very specific version of Mexico, one in which neither unfettered capitalism nor communism took root, as generally validated by Catholic social doctrine. In the context of the Cold War and the unstable post-revolutionary political landscape, these views had important implications. Needless to say, ACM activists’ vision of Mexico was different than that imagined by other political groups. By recognizing these complexities, we can begin to understand and humanize historical subjects more fully. Considering a diversity of historical opinions, especially those expressed by women, can get us closer to answering questions that historians have asked for decades. I also suggest that the study and characterization of their brand of patriotism, as well as their views of modernity should continue to be researched.

Daniela Roscero Cervantes graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023, receiving degrees in history and journalism. This article is based on her history thesis, Conservative “feminists”: Women’s Citizenship, Suffrage and Political Representation I Mexican Catholic Discourse, 1940-1953. She is currently enrolled at the University of Chicago to complete a master’s in social sciences with a concentration in history. Her research interests focus on modern Mexico, as well as the history of the borderlands, Mexican-Americans, and U.S.-Mexico relations.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Benson Latin American Library Rare Books collection, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.
Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, accessed December 7, 2023, Vatican.va.

Mexican Bulletins Collection. UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico.

Mexican Catholic Action Collection. Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico. Mexican Bulletins Collection. UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico.

Secondary Sources

Bard, Christine. “L’apotre Sociale et L’ange du Foyer: les Femmes et la C. F. T. C. a Travers Le Nord Social (1920-1936).” Le Mouvement Social no. 165, (1993): 23-41

Barry, Carolina and Enriqueta Tuñón Pablos. “Capítulo 9: Las Sufragistas Mexicanas y su Lucha por el Voto,” In Sufragio Femenino: Prácticas y Debates Políticos, Religiosos y Culturales En Argentina y América edited by Carolina Barry, 250-278. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2011.

Blasco Herranz, Inmaculada. “Citizenship and Female Catholic Militancy in 1920s Spain.” Gender & History 19, no. 3 (2007): 441-466.

Boylan, Kristina A. “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism 1917-1940.” In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano, 199-222. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007.

Boyle, Joseph. “Rerum Novarum.” In Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays, edited by Gerard V. Bradley and E. Christian Brugger, 69–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Cano, Gabriela. “Mexico: The Long Road to Women’s Suffrage.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Women’s Political Rights, edited by Susan Franceschet, Mona Lena Krook, Netina Tan, 115-127. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Ceballos Ramírez, Manuel. “Historia De Rerum Novarum en Mexico (1891).” In El Catolicismo Social: un tercero en discordia, Rerum Novarum, la “cuestión social” y la movilización de los católicos mexicanos (1891-1911). Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987.

Dau Novelli, Cecilia. Società, chiesa e associazionismo femminile: l’Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia (1902-1919). Rome: AVE, 1988.

Espinoza Meléndez, Pedro. “Antifeminismo y feminismo católico en México: La Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana y la revista Acción Femenina, 1933-1958.” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 6, no. 6 (2020). http:// dx.doi.org/10.24201/eg.v6i0.381.

Morton, Ward M. Woman Suffrage in Mexico. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1962.

^[1] Christine Bard, “L’apotre Sociale et L’ange du Foyer: les Femmes et la C. F. T. C. a Travers Le Nord Social (1920-1936),” Le Mouvement Social 165 (1993): 23-41.

Cecilia Dau Novelli, Società, chiesa e associazionismo femminile: l’Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia (1902-1919) (AVE: 1988).

Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, “Citizenship and Female Catholic Militancy in 1920s Spain,” Gender & History Vol. 19, No. 3 (2007): 441-466.

^[2] Pedro Espinoza Meléndez, “Antifeminismo y feminismo católico en México. La Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana y la revista Acción Femenina, 1933 – 1958.” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 6, no. 6 (2020) http://dx.doi.org/10.24201/eg.v6i0.381.

^[3] Esther Chapa, The right to vote for women, 1936, p.9, Benson Latin American Library Rare Books collection, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

^[4] Esther Chapa, The right to vote for women, 1936, p.9, Benson Latin American Library Rare Books collection, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

^[5] Carolina Barry and Enriqueta Tuñón Pablos, “Chapter 9: Mexican Suffragists and Their Fight to Obtain the Vote,” in Sufragio Femenino: Prácticas y Debates Políticos, Religiosos y Culturales En Argentina y América (Caseros, Argentina, Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2011), p. 261-265.

^[6] Ward M. Morton, Woman Suffrage in Mexico (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1962), p. 21-25.

^[7] Gabriela Cano, “Mexico: The Long Road to Women’s Suffrage,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Women’s Political Rights(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 119.

^[8] Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, “The Rerum Novarum Encyclical in Mexico (1891)” in El Catolicismo Social: un tercero en discordia, Rerum Novarum, la “cuestión social” y la movilización de los católicos mexicanos (1891-1911) (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987), 51-67.

^[9] Kristina A. Boylan, “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism 1917-1940,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano (North Carolina: Duke University press, 2007), 210-234.

^[10] Joseph Boyle, “Rerum Novarum,” in Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essay, ed. Gerard V. Bradley and E. Christian Brigger, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 68-89.

^[11] Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 22, 24, 30, 61, 63.

^[12] Report of the co-secretary for June 25th 1939 Central Committee Meeting, 22 May 1939, 2.2.1.1 Sessions of the Central Committee 1930-1978 box 1, folder 2 1934-1939, Archivo ACM, Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico.

^[13] Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 42.

^[14] Anonymous, “Prepare Yourself for Our Assembly,” Juventud, September 1938, 16, Section 6-Publications, box 7, bound book starting 1938, Mexican Catholic Action Collection, Iberoamerican University Historical Archives, Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico.

^[15] E. Emma Galán G., bulletin titled “My Vote as a Mexican Catholic Woman,” 13, 35 Mexican Bulletins Collection, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico.

^[16] Notice number twenty-three from the Central Committee, ca. May 1939, 2.2.1.1 Sessions of the Central Committee 1930-1978 box 1, folder 2 1934-1939, Archivo ACM, Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico.

^[17] Pedro Espinoza Meléndez, “Antifeminismo y feminismo católico en México. La Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana y la revista Acción Femenina, 1933 – 1958.” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 6, no. 6 (2020) http://dx.doi.org/10.24201/eg.v6i0.381.

Banner image via Pexels – Photo by Luis Ariza: https://www.pexels.com/photo/mexican-flag-on-flagpole-13808918/

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

In Memoriam: Dr. Laurie M. Wood

Laurie M. Wood was one of the foremost early modern global historians of her generation and a remarkable friend and colleague. Her first book, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire, won the 2021 Boucher Prize from the Society of French Colonial History. The committee lauded her integrated framing of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds as “a remarkable accomplishment … a powerful and creative intervention” made possible by “astonishing archival tenacity” and “beautiful writing.” They highlighted her use of stories of the powerful and marginalized to show how they created “power, order and the very nature of French colonialism.” The commendation astutely encapsulated all the qualities that made Laurie’s work so outstanding and impactful. She was one of the leaders of a new research approach that saw all the regions of the first French empire as inextricably linked.

Laurie was a native Texan who was proud that every educational institution she was part of was public. She grew up in Abilene, graduated summa cum laude as a History major from Texas Tech, and earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Her horizons of all kinds expanded quickly far beyond the Texas Panhandle but she remained devoted to Texas food (serving barbecue for the many out of state visitors to her wedding in Abilene, and delighting in eating queso, chips, salsa and tamales on a trip back with her family last Thanksgiving), to the faith she grew up with, and to watching football as a holiday ritual. An alchemical year as a UW Law & Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison profoundly shaped Laurie’s professional and personal life. In nine months in Madison, she framed her book project, secured a tenure-track job at Florida State University, and met her partner, Cale Weatherly.

Soft-spoken and kind, Laurie was a no-nonsense intellectual powerhouse who thrived under pressure. Her work was always profoundly collaborative, and she generously exchanged research, writing, and ideas with many peers. Unfailingly thoughtful and supportive, her straightforward pep talks, warm sense of humor, and incisive feedback made her an ideal scholarly interlocutor – and more than that, a true friend who was always there to talk through setbacks and celebrate successes, both personal and professional. She brought her trademark combination of energetic enthusiasm, seriousness of purpose, and historiographic acumen to her collaborative projects, which included one on everyday materials of colonial legal spaces and another on the multiple meanings of a botanical expedition in French Guyane, to be completed by her co-author. She told one coauthor her goal was to make their work “maximally helpful” to fellow scholars, which was a very Laurie approach to historiography.

Laurie’s research track was jump started early in her PhD program by the generosity of John Garrigus, who shared his archival photographs of notarial documents made in Saint Domingue in the early 1790s for a first-year research paper. Laurie was fascinated by the questions of the broader French world – its legal process, its varied set of actors, its geographical immensity and its extraordinary archival records. As she framed her dissertation and then her book, she integrated these themes as the core of her research agenda. In her reading (she was the first UT student who had ever taken four graduate historiography courses – in colonial Latin American, early American, and African as well as early modern European history) and in her sharing work in writing and conversation with the UT’s early modern history group and others, she came to recognize the essential role of the Indian Ocean, and centered the problematic as a global, not simply Atlantic, one.

Yet even as her work expanded geographically, it remained grounded in the stories of the individual people who made France’s empire. This very human scale reflected a core methodological priority of Laurie’s: to think about and work to see the past from the perspective of historical actors. As she explained in an interview about Archipelago of Justice, she didn’t want to just look at the big picture of France’s empire but to grapple instead with “the very localized question of what happens when … you’re trying to imagine the French empire that rules your life in really tangible ways but is also really hard to wrap your mind around.” The twin priorities of thinking globally and locally drove much of Laurie’s research agenda.

At Florida State, Laurie quickly became a dedicated and creative professor. Bubbling over with ideas to help the department, she lit up any meeting with characteristic insight and ruthless practicality. Her innovative and popular courses often dealt with parts of the world students are unfamiliar with. She was as committed to students who would go on to important but ordinary occupations as she was to academic stars, always making her classes accessible to a wide range of undergraduates. She strongly believed that confronting historical truths could have a lasting trickle-down effect that her students would take with them into many parts of their lives. From the moment she walked in the door, she also turned her determination to be “maximally helpful” toward the graduate students. In addition to leading a wide range of seminars and broadly training early modern scholars, she also coached them through grant proposals and interviews and all the skills of being a professional historian that graduate school seldom actually teaches. She knew how hard the work was, and she wanted people to go into it with their eyes open and with the best skills and tools she could provide them.

Staying true to her research priorities, Laurie developed her second book project, Flickering Fortunes: Women, Catastrophe & Complicity in the French Tropics, with lightning speed. With the support of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton, the Hagley Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, Flickering Fortunes focused on the female “foot soldiers” of the eighteenth-century French empire in what would have been a major historiographic intervention. Drawing on material from her extraordinary archival database, Laurie envisioned arguing how even though women were often left behind in port cities, they had a significant role to play in building, managing, and upholding slavery and global capitalist systems.

Laurie’s synergistic approach to research and teaching was driven by her enthusiasm for all aspects of her work. As any of Laurie’s colleagues can testify, her passion for early modern history was endless and infectious. Perhaps nothing better testifies to her intellectual energy than the fact that, through two years of intensive treatment for aggressive breast cancer before her death aged 38, she continued to find joy and meaning in her research and teaching. She also sustained her connections with students and colleagues. She leaves her two young children, her husband, their families, and a wide circle of friends. She loved them so much and she loved everything about being a professor.

A fund has been established at Florida State in Laurie’s honor to support the undergraduate community she cared about so much and at Penn where she received her care. This fund is designed to support research into the subtype of breast cancer (mTNBC) that Laurie had. mTNBC is the most deadly, the least understood and the most lacking in targeted treatments.

Julie Hardwick, University of Texas at Austin

Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College

Notes from the Field: The Strange Case of Thome Corea

From the editors: Notes from the Field is a series with a long history at NEP. In this latest iteration, the series has three broad areas of focus. First, Notes from the Field is designed to take readers into unexpected corners of the world’s great archives and to explore the experience of working there. We hope to describe some of the spaces and places in which historians work every day. Second, we’re interested in unexpected stories that might not become the central focus of a book or an article but which nonetheless reveal intriguing corners of the past. And third the series discusses the often unexpected experiences of doing fieldwork. Together these stories form our new Notes from the Field.

I’m a historian of early modern East and Southeast Asia, so I’m fortunate to work in some of the most interesting archives in the world. I spend a lot of time at the National Archives in The Hague, a city in the Netherlands. This archive stores hundreds of thousands of documents connected with the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), which carved out a commercial empire in Asia in the seventeenth century.

I’ve used archives across four continents. The National Archives is undoubtedly the most accessible and user-friendly. You can travel there by train, registration is simple, and it’s easy to get access to original documents rather than poor microfilmed copies. It’s a wonderful place to work.

But it can also be a little overwhelming. Within an hour after arriving, you can find yourself confronting huge piles of documents, invariably written in the dense and idiosyncratic script of VOC employees. That script, especially as used in earlier documents, can takes dozens of hours per source to decipher.

The challenges involved in doing research at the National Archives are daunting, but they also makes working there exceptionally exciting, as historians frequently come across documents that no one has seen in hundreds of years. One of my favorite documents is just one page long. It’s a confession signed by Thome Corea, a ‘Japanese’ mercenary who was stationed on a remote island in Southeast Asia in 1623.

The document is connected with the Amboina conspiracy case, the subject of my second book. The case started with one of Thome Corea’s fellow soldiers. On February 23rd, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō in the employ of the Dutch East India Company was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern-day Indonesia.

When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was subjected to the “torture of water”: a cloth was “put before his face and fastened behind his head, hanging upon under his chinne, [and] after this the water was poured upon his head.” The result of this process, which we would call waterboarding today, was a confession claiming that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants. The merchants allegedly hoped to seize control of the VOC fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp.

Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom (including Thome Corea) admitted to signing onto the plot in return for a substantial reward. A few days later, attention turned to the English, who also confessed–again, under torture–to a role in a conspiracy aimed at the “taking of the castle, and the murdering of the Netherlanders.” On March 9th, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees with the governor at its head convened to render judgment on the conspirators. The result was an emphatic guilty verdict, and shortly thereafter, ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.

Imagined depiction of torture RP-P-OB-68.279, Rijksmuseum

The case became enormously controversial in Europe. When news of what had happened reached London in 1624, it sparked immediate outage. English officials denounced the flawed nature of the judicial procedures while ridiculing the notion that a conspiracy had existed in the first place. As news of the trial spread, propelled by the publication of cheap broadsheet ballads and incendiary pamphlets, everyone seemed to be talking about Japanese soldiers and their particular capabilities.

For Dutch writers determined to emphasize the potential strength of the Amboina plotters, the Japanese were fearsome warriors capable of swaying the outcome of any conflict. A “small number of Japonians were not slightly to be regarded,” exclaimed one writer, as the “valour & prowess of that Nation” made them far more potent than an equivalent contingent of European soldiers. Not so, scoffed their English opponents, who claimed that the Japanese were no military “Gyants” and that the wondrous feats ascribed to them nothing more than “Apochriphal Legends” with no basis in fact.

*Column of Japanese Soldiers, Anonymous, 1600 (RP-P-OB-75.407, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)*

One of the ‘Japanese; soldiers caught up in the Amboina case was Thome Corea. He was tortured and waterboarded by Dutch officials and rapidly confessed. But as he was illiterate, he could not sign his name. Instead he made a rough mark.

Although he represented himself as a ferocious Japanese soldier, Thome Corea was in fact not Japanese. In fact he was Korean. We know from the records associated with the trial that Corea was aged fifty in 1623, meaning that he was born around 1573. He was thus probably brought to Japan in the turbulent aftermath of the great military leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s massive invasion of Korea in 1592.

He likely came to Japan as a young captive along with tens of thousands of Korean children, women and men who were enslaved by the returning armies. Keinen, a Buddhist monk who traveled to Korea as part of the invading forces, observed the mass transport of children: “They are carrying off Korean children and killing their parents. Never shall they see each other again. Their mutual cries—surely this is like the torture meted out by the ﬁends of hell.” (1) Thome Corea may have been one of these children.

At some point, he secured his freedom but was unable to return to Korea. Instead, like so many of his countrymen he was drawn to western Japan’s bustling cosmopolitan ports like Nagasaki or Hirado. There he seems to have eked out a living until the Dutch East India Company came recruiting. It offered three year contracts, dangerous work, and poor conditions–but also the promise of a steady wage.

Corea’s unlikely career suggests that the Company’s recruitment plans opened up an unexpected space for reinvention, one in which Korean captives could morph, in search of a stable wage, into fearsome (and potentially dangerous) Japanese soldiers. If so, Corea was not alone in making this change. VOC records include multiple references to “Japanese” soldiers with names that suggest external origins but who were able to take advantage of new opportunities afforded by the Company’s martial visions.

Thome Corea generated just a few lines in the sources and one hastily scrawled cross to mark his confession. He was part of important events in global history but he did not drive them. But his story is important. Like so many historians, I love working in the archives because I’m able to uncover evidence of hidden lives. Thome Corea is an example of such a life and finding him was one of my favorite adventures in the archives.

(1) Wm. Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe, and Paul Varley, ed. Sources of Japanese Tradition : Volume 1: From Earliest Times to 1600 (Columbia University Press, New York, 2010: 467-72

A Conversation about Teaching with Dr Ashley Farmer (updated)

From the editor: Not Even Past Teaching Profiles are designed to explore how historians at the University of Texas and beyond teach, how they inspire and galvanize students. In this article, we speak with Dr Ashley Farmer. Dr Farmer has a remarkable record of achievement in the classroom. She won the 2020 Faculty Teaching Award from the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies, the 2020 Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts and the 2019 Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching from Texas Exes. She was also nominated for the Lucia, John and Melissa Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women’s and Gender Studies and was a semi-finalist for the Friar’s Centennial Teaching Award Fellowship. This conversation was recorded in 2020 at the height of the pandemic but we are republishing it now to mark another milestone for Dr Farmer. In 2023, the Academy of Distinguished Teachers recognized Ashley Farmer for her exceptional record of teaching excellence and invited her to become a member.

As part of this conversation, I was able to read some of Dr Farmer’s syllabi and classroom materials. They speak to a classroom that engages, excites and transforms students, making them better citizens and giving them new ways to understand the world. Most moving is a video included below in which one of Dr Farmer’s student’s speaks to their experience as a freshman in one of her classes. Such teaching requires enormous commitments of time and energy. In addition to showcasing incredible teachers, my hope is that such teaching profiles will also provide a resource for other teachers thinking about specific classroom strategies and the discussion below focuses particular attention on a series of unique activities and exercises that Dr Farmer has developed for use in the classroom.

AC: Alongside your groundbreaking research, you’ve won a range of teaching awards and I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite such a record of achievement in the classroom in a relatively short space of time. What classes and academic experiences shaped you as teacher?

AF: I know this is going to sound a little funny, but I was a Montessori school kid for many years. I didn’t just go to preschool, but I went through a good chunk of grade school as a Montessori student. And I bring this up because one of the things that Montessori pedagogy focuses on is experiential learning, tactile learning, and also this idea that if we trust students, they’ll do what they need to do and can be in control of organizing their own lives and how they want to learn. And so I think that that had a more profound effect on me than I realize now that I am a teacher, just that ethos about letting students explore; the ethos about saying here’s a collection of things we have to do, but we don’t have to do them in one particular way, but here’s some concepts that we’re going to explore together. I think that was really useful.

And going to a historically Black college like Spelman. It was small. The entire curriculum was not just Black centered, but Black women centered. So, for example, I was a French and Spanish major in college, which is different from what I do now but the point is, that instead of learning French history, we would take classes like Francophone literature of North Africa, right. We would read novels about the Black experience that happen to be in French. So you’re learning the language and the writing, but also thinking about the Black experience that way. And I think that was just really formative for reminding me that we don’t always have to engage in learning in the dominant modes in which it’s expected or in a certain kind of curriculum that often marginalizes certain types of people.

AC: Our conversation today will focus on your course, Introduction to African American History. Can you introduce that course to someone who’s not familiar with it?

AF: So Introduction African American history is an entry level course for anyone interested in learning more about the Black experience in America. It goes from the 1400s to the present so it’s very quick in 16 weeks. I often call it an odyssey because we’re hopping from one point to the next very quickly. But it is meant to not only give students a basic understanding of Black history, but also to get them to think about how this history is shaping the world around them. So I often ask students to think less about regurgitating points and dates like when was the Civil War? Or, what was the 13th Amendment? Instead, I ask my students to think about what the 13th Amendment meant for everyday Black people or what life choices did Black people have to make based on the options that were given to them in a certain historical moment. The course has a cultural diversity flag and also a History core credit flag so I get a range of students from freshman to seniors who take the class.

*Classroom exercise from Introduction to African American History*

AC: This course includes a range of highly innovative and effective class exercises. I was struck especially by the classroom activity, “Creating a New Society”. Can you tell us about this exercise?

AC: This is a large lecture class but you don’t start each class by lecturing. Instead you write that you cede “the floor for the first five minutes of class to a student who wants to raise an issue about campus, Austin, or the national climate.” Can you tell us more about this?

AF: I like to always get to the classroom a little bit before class starts. I set everything up and then we just kind of talk informally as a class. I ask what’s going on campus? Or if they saw a certain topic in the news? To give an example around Halloween time, we talked about costumes. I know students are aware of conversations about racism, sexism, and cultural appropriation around costumes, so I will say something along the lines of: did you see this costume I saw online? Does anybody know what’s happening with costumes on UT’s campus? And usually that will allow for someone to speak up about something that they have been thinking about.

I start that way at the beginning of the semester and I find it by mid semester students come in with something they want to talk about. One day, I arrived a bit late, so I didn’t get to do this. And I had one student stop me and say: “What are we talking about today? Because we always talk about stuff before we get started. So what’s our topic today?” They wanted me to go back and do our informal discussion first before we got started with our lesson plan for the day. It made me laugh, but also showed me that they value these conversations that we have together. I think beginning class this way is important for a couple of reasons. Typically, students bring up things that are happening in the world that are related to class. We learned about something, say, the prison industrial complex in class. Students will then bring up an article they have seen about prisons in Texas. Or, we talk about the historical context of policing and then students will want to talk about the school’s relationship to policing or something like that. So these conversations help students connect what’s happening in the classroom to the real world. Also, in the spirit of consciousness raising, it also shows students that I believe that I’m not the only person in the room that can offer valuable information or perspectives or who has something to teach or raise awareness about. We all can contribute to helping each other understand what’s happening on our campus, in the world, around us. And truth be told, because the students live and work and learn on the campus in a way that faculty members don’t, this is honestly where I get a lot of my news about what is happening on campus. So it’s mutually beneficial

Classroom exercise from Introduction to African American History

AC: Another exercise I was really struck by is the “Freedom Reflection Exercise”? Can you describe this exercise and what it aims to achieve?

AC: What it like to be teaching this course in this moment when the national conversation about race is being transformed by Black Lives Matter?

AF: You know, it makes our conversations feel very urgent. All of a sudden, things are happening both locally and nationally that really clues students in, if they haven’t been engaging before in these conversations, that something’s not right. And they need to know more. I don’t think many people have a hard time understanding how watching the George Floyd murder is something that is heartbreaking and tragic. It should not happen. It happens disproportionately to Black people. But then when you start to learn about how it’s not an isolated incident, you’re in search of ways to understand something so difficult, in search of a kind of language or lens to understand it. Students are often thinking: I know something unjust has happened and continues to happen. How did we get here? How do I talk about it and how do I possibly do something about it in a responsible way? And that’s what I see as a history class like this doing. It is helping people get the language or the framework to understand the world around them and take different actions. So I will say that even though I’m not teaching this particular class this year, I have had at least 10 emails from students who have taken the class over the last couple of years. In the emails they say that they remember when we talked about these issues in class, and now they understand how that’s coming in to play. They tell me that they remember when we talked about the Voting Rights Act and voter suppression and how that is playing out in society now. So I do think that this is a part of education that can really meet the moment we are in.

AC: There is a remarkable video of a student who has nominated you for a major teaching prize explaining their transformative experience in one of your classes. I think it speaks to exactly what you’re saying about how teaching can meet the moment we’re in. Can you tell us about that particular class?

AF: For that class, we were in a midterm election year. And I planned for us to talk about the Voting Rights Act on the same week that the election was happening, to draw the connection between the class and larger society very clearly. I told them when you have learned about people getting beat within an inch of their life and people getting shot, people losing their jobs, how dare you not go literally 50 feet to the library and cast a vote? And I said it in those terms: you cannot take this so lightly. And I think that that is important because we’re now teaching students who have become politically literate and electorally literate in a moment where a Black man or a woman president or vice president are all possible, which for most of us, was perhaps something that we thought would never happen. And I think that sometimes this can lull people into a sense of complacency about the security of our electoral system and the democratic process. So I try to draw a clear line for them between struggles of the recent past and today. I think this is contextualization that can really help prepare students to understand this moment.

One of Dr Farmer’s students describes their experience as a freshman in one of her classes

AC: For a class like Introduction to African American History, you cover some very difficult and traumatic topics. For example, you discuss lynching as a form of racial and sexual terror. Can you tell us how you approach this and how you create an environment in which you’re able to respect and honor the victims of these crimes while engaging the students as historians?

AF: I start out by saying: We’re going to look at some really, really difficult things and everybody is going to have a really different reaction to them because we all have a different relationship to heinous act. But it is not something that we can turn away from. It’s not something that we cannot discuss if we are going to try to make ourselves understand the Black experience in America. So our job here is to figure out how as a community we want to do that. One of the ways I do this is by starting with just a few pictures of lynchings. And I ask students to work together with each other, usually just with the person sitting next to them, to think about their initial emotional response to these images. I ask them to think about the images and how they want to talk about them. I ask them to consider what language they want to use to honor these victims and what our role as historians is in documenting and talking about lynching. I treat the students like they’re historians, you know, in the professional sense in talking about this in a way that doesn’t let the perpetrators off the hook. I have students collectively come up with a set of community rules about how we should talk about lynching in an honest and respectful way. I put them on the board and say this is how we have decided how to talk about this topic as a group. And then we move forward with our discussion with these rules in mind.

AC: : What I found most fascinating and effective is the ways in which your research and teaching intersect and speak to each other. Key to this is your classroom pedagogy, where you model your approach after the community meeting “where interested parties from all ranks and backgrounds come together to discuss a subject or issue”. Can you tell us more about this?

Thank you so much for talking to me and for sharing some of the teaching strategies, methods and approaches you use in the classroom.

3 Great Books about Japan

From the editors: Since its creation, Not Even Past has published hundreds of reviews covering a wide range of periods, places and issues. In this series, we draw from our archives to suggest three great books focused broadly around a single topic. In this article, we present three fascinating and important studies related to Japan.

Our three book suggestions cover a lot of ground from John Dower’s classic examination of Japan’s experience of defeat in the years following World War II to Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci’s pioneering investigation of birth control and eugenics in Japan and the US to the rowdy and unexpected life of a Tokugawa samurai. These books showcase some of the best scholarship on Japan. Our reviews come from three wonderful scholars, David Conrad, Kellianne King and Edgar Walters who provide insightful analysis of these important studies.

David Conrad writes:

“Dower sets out to convey “some sense of the Japanese experience of defeat by focusing on social and cultural developments. . . at all levels of society.” Initially, the bitter reality that their exhausting war had ended in defeat proved profoundly demoralizing for many Japanese citizens. Dower’s portrayal of the shantytowns of bombed-out Tokyo provides poignant evidence of the impoverished condition in which many Japanese found themselves at war’s end. But as Japan embarked on its long occupation interlude, its citizens seized opportunities to start over, rebuild, and redefine their nation. Defeat became a creative process rather than a destructive one and the people of Japan embraced it with eagerness. In the atmosphere of reform that characterized the occupation, an efflorescence of what Dower calls “cultures of defeat” emerged. For example, kasutori culture explored the sleazy underside of urban life. Radical political movements tested the limits—and sincerity—of American reformism. Changes in artistic images, popular entertainment, songs, jokes, and even the Japanese language itself reflect the vitality and diversity of Japanese culture during the American occupation.”

Read the full review here.

Kellianne King writes:

“Contraceptive Diplomacy travels uncharted territory by investigating transpacific attempts to bolster state power through a combination of birth control and eugenics. Takeuchi-Demirci’s work reminds us that U.S. eugenics projects did not exist in isolation, but on the world stage during a century fraught with international conflict. In working together to promote population control, Japan and the United States actually competed to demonstrate their cultural and scientific superiority. Feminist-led initiatives became, as Takeuchi-Demirci calls it, “a tool for patriarchal control and world domination” (210). Born in an anti-imperialist and socialist climate during the first World War, birth control traveled in imperialistic ways to facilitate international diplomacy. Takeuchi-Demirci shows the different ways discourses can be manipulated to serve dominant desires, and how even those who initially resisted this co-option, such as Sanger, become complicit. While the argument that eugenics served state goals is not particularly new, Takeuchi-Demirci does shed light on previously ignored Japanese-American projects. Her work makes this scholarly oversight appear all the more glaring given Sanger’s extensive involvement with the Japanese government and women’s groups.”

Read the full review here.

Edgar Walters writes:

“Musui’s Story is an exceptional account of one man’s hell-raising, rule-breaking, and living beyond his means. The autobiography documents the life of Katsu Kokichi, a samurai in Japan’s late Tokugawa period who adopted the name Musui in his retirement. Katsu is something of a black sheep within his family, being largely uneducated and deemed unfit for the bureaucratic offices samurai of his standing were expected to hold. As such, he typifies in many ways the lower ronin, or masterless samurai, many of whom famously led roaming, directionless lives and wreaked havoc among the urban poor and merchant classes. The autobiography follows Katsu’s whirlwind of adventures, which involved a great deal of fighting, name-calling, and extortion. What Katsu lacks in ambition is more than made up for by his knack for getting into trouble. The supposed premise of the autobiography is to serve as a cautionary tale for his descendants, as Katsu advises from the very beginning, “Take me as a warning.” In actuality, however, the story smacks of a thinly veiled account of braggadocio.”

Read the full review here.

“Texas, Our Catholic Texas”?

Please join UT Libraries, Texas Catholic Historical Society, The Summerlee Foundation, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and The Institute of Historical Studies for:

“Carlos E. Castañeda’s ‘Catholic’ Texas?”

Wed & Thu, Sep. 20-21, SRH.1, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Second Floor Conference Room)

Texans may remember singing the state song, “Texas, Our Texas,” during their state history classes in fourth and seventh grade. The state curriculum for fourth graders requires students to recite the words of the state song and the Pledge of Allegiance to the Texas State Flag. Texans who moved after elementary school may be more familiar with state symbols adopted by the state legislature, including the bluebonnet, longhorn, pecan tree, mockingbird, chili con carne, or monarch butterflies.

It raises an obvious question: how were the official words and symbols that represent Texas selected?

Invitation for the Carlos E. Castañeda’s 'Catholic' Texas? event

In 1923, Texas Governor Pat M. Neff announced a call for a state song through a contest with a $1,000 prize. Hopeful songwriters submitted several hundred pieces for the competition, including entries by songsmiths outside of Texas. Ultimately, “Texas, Our Texas” was selected as the winning song. Native Texan Gladys Yoakum Wright penned the song’s lyrics with music composed by newcomer William J. Marsh. Six years later, Governor Dan Moody designated the state song and officiated it during a formal ceremony in 1930. “Texas, Our Texas” remains the only official state song for the Lone Star state, with a one-word lyric change of “largest” to “boldest” following the admittance of Alaska to the United States in 1959.

Advertisement card distributed by Rev. Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. of St. Edward's University. — *Advertisement card distributed by Rev. Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. of St. Edward’s University. The first side of the card includes the music of “Texas, Our Texas”.* *Courtesy of the Catholic Archives of Texas*

Today, some debate the relevance of the state song through editorial pieces, online petitions, and private discussions. Some claim the lyrics and music composition do not accurately reflect the multicultural heritage of Texas. Others argue that songs from musical genres birthed from distinct Texana cultures, such as blues, country, rap, or Tejano, should also be recognized as official state songs. While others state that better-known songs such as “Deep in the Heart of Texas” should replace “Texas, Our Texas.”

Nonetheless, the state song is part of the distinct Texas identity crafted while planning celebrations for the Texas Centennial in 1936. Beyond the centenary anniversary of the Texas Revolution’s conclusion, the Texas Centennial ushered in the adoption of unique branding used for tourism advertisements, the establishment of Texas history museums, and the erection of monuments. The Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas showcased the state’s cultural heritage through exhibit halls and live performances. Other Texas cities hosted events showcasing their unique local history and culture.

Pamphlet on the Centennial’s “El Paso Day”. — *Pamphlet on the Centennial’s “El Paso Day”*. *Courtesy of the Catholic Archives of Texas*

Like the newly adopted branding romanticizing the history of Texas cities, the Catholic Church in Texas tried to cement its role within the overall Texana identity. In 1923, the same year Governor Neff called for a state song, the Texas State Council of the Knights of Columbus passed a resolution to establish their Historical Commission. The Texas Knights of Columbus Historical Commission was charged with collecting and interpreting historical documents to create a Catholic account of Texas history. The Commission proposed a publication deadline before the secular Texas Centennial with plans to host a Texas Centennial Exposition exhibit documenting Catholic contributions to the state. The legacy of the Commission’s work is seen today with its groundbreaking publication, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519-1936, which was authored by Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda.

During the 1920s and 1930s, discussions centering on identity politics questioned the nationalism of Catholics across the United States. Catholics were denied membership in social organizations or trade unions, with some Catholic institutions vandalized by the Ku Klux Klan. Nationally, anti-Catholicism prevailed during Al Smith’s failed presidential run against Herbert Hoover. In Texas, the Knights of Columbus desired to prove their Americanness through supporting historical memory projects like the Commission. Catholic contributions to statehood were not regularly as part of the academic interpretation of Texas history.

While the Commission was busy locating archival material for its final publication, its chair, Rev. Paul J. Foik, C.S.C. of St. Edward’s University, sought ways to involve lay Catholics. The Knights of Columbus and the Commission aimed to assimilate Catholics into mainstream culture by combining nationalistic symbols with public religious displays. Foik encouraged Catholic social organizations like the Catholic Daughters of the Americas, parochial schools, higher education institutions, and parish priests to celebrate Texas Independence Day as a “Catholic Fourth of July.” The Texas Independence Day celebrations were to be public patriotic events with Texas flags displayed in parishes and parochial schools.

Foik distributed the card below to use during Texas Independence Day celebrations statewide. One side of the card includes famous Texas Revolution quotes, while the other consists of the music for “Texas, Our Texas.” Although not explicitly mentioned by Foik in his correspondence, it was certainly not a coincidence that he promoted the new state anthem as its composer, Marsh, was a devout Catholic. In addition to composing the state anthem, Marsh wrote music for the Texas Centennial Exposition’s Catholic Day Mass at the Cotton Bowl Stadium with an estimated 20,000 attendance.

Explore more on the work of the Texas Knights of Columbus Commission, Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda, and the Catholic exhibit at the Texas Centennial Exposition here: https://txcatholic.omeka.net/exhibits/show/castaneda.

The conversation on the Commission and Castañeda’s legacy will continue during “Carlos E. Castañeda’s ‘Catholic’ Texas?” on September 20-21, 2023, at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/historicalstudies/events/symposium-carlos-e-castaneda-s-catholic-texas-day-1.

Selena Aleman is the archivist for the Catholic Archives of Texas, where she oversees collections from Texas Catholic hierarchy and lay organizations like the Texas State Council of the Knights of Columbus. She holds a master’s degree in information studies from UT’s School of Information.

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Did Mark the Evangelist Write a Secret Gospel? Did Jesus Have a Relationship with a Young Man? A Fresh Investigation into the Secret Gospel of Mark

In 1958, an American biblical scholar named Morton Smith was inspecting the book and manuscript collections of Mar Saba, a 1500-year-old monastery in the Judean wilderness. While leafing through a 17th-century printed book Smith discovered something unexpected–a note in Greek written on the blank pages at the back of the book. At the start of the note was a cross, a clue that a monk may have written it. The note purported to be a letter written by an important early Christian leader, Clement of Alexandria, along with quotes from a secret version of Mark’s Gospel. Smith soon realized that the contents of this letter and the secret Gospel were so shocking that, if true, they could call into question the traditional image of Jesus found in the gospels.

Morton Smith’s photo of the last page of Voss’ printed book and the first page of the Letter to Theodore manuscript. Morton Smith Papers, box 1/7, and Saul Liebermann Papers, box 1/11. Image courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the letter, Clement reveals that the version of the Gospel of Mark found in the New Testament was only a first, incomplete draft of the Gospel. Clement claims that after the death of the Apostle Peter, his assistant Mark traveled to Alexandria in Egypt, where he wrote an expanded version of his Gospel that contained secret teachings for spiritually advanced Christians. But this Secret Gospel of Mark, Clement says, eventually fell into the hands of a group of hedonistic Christian heretics who believed that experiencing carnal pleasures would lead to salvation. Known as the Carpocratians, these heretics rewrote parts of the Secret Gospel of Mark so that it could lend scriptural support to their sexual practices.

A Christian named Theodore, to whom Clement writes, is anxious to know whether stories about Jesus that the Carpocratians have told him are really part of the Secret Gospel. In response, Clement quotes a passage from the “real” Secret Gospel, a story about Jesus raising a young man from the dead. When he comes back to life, the youth looks at Jesus, loves him, and begs Jesus to stay with him. The youth is rich and has his own house, where Jesus stays for six days. Finally, instructed by Jesus, the youth comes to him at night, naked except for a linen sheet over his body, and Jesus teaches him—as the Secret Gospel puts it—“the mysteries of the Kingdom of God.” Despite its suggestive content, Clement tells Theodore that the Carpocratian heretics have wrongly interpreted this story sexually, adding phrases like “naked man with naked man” to their corrupted version of the Secret Gospel. Clement is about to explain to Theodore what this enigmatic story about Jesus really means . . . but then the letter breaks off.

*Clement of Alexandria as depicted in André Thevet’s* Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584). *Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Morton Smith soon realized the enormity of his discovery, and after taking black and white photographs of the handwritten pages, he put the book back where he found it in the monastery. Two years later, he announced the discovery of the letter of Clement to Theodore concerning the Secret Gospel of Mark at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, an announcement that was also heralded on the front page of the New York Times. Ever the provocateur, Smith shocked the straight-laced audience of biblical scholars by quipping that any priest who behaved like Jesus did in this text would find himself in serious trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors. After his announcement, Smith then devoted years trying to make sense of the letter’s contents, and in 1973 he released two books detailing his findings—one technical and academic, and the other designed for a general audience.

Smith did not believe, as Clement claimed in the letter, that the Secret Gospel was an expanded version of the Gospel of Mark written by the same author—namely, Mark the Evangelist. But because the story of the raising of the young man resembled the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John (chapter 11) and the story of the rich young man in the Gospel of Mark (chapter 10), Smith believed that the Secret Gospel preserved a very ancient story that both Mark and John used in their Gospels. If he was right, Smith had discovered in the Secret Gospel one of the earliest known stories about Jesus, a narrative that offers us a glimpse of the historical Jesus’ secret teachings and intimate interactions with his closest disciples.

*A seventeenth-century portrait of St. Mark by Guido Reni. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

After Smith published his findings in 1973, most scholars believed that Smith had indeed discovered an authentic, ancient letter from Clement of Alexandria, but few thought that the story from the Secret Gospel predated the canonical gospels, as Smith argued. Rather, many scholars preferred to see the Secret Gospel as a second-century apocryphal expansion upon the Gospel of Mark, which was similar to a number of other early apocryphal gospels.

But there were a handful of scholars who were suspicious about the circumstances of the discovery, and suggested that it might be a modern forgery—possibly fabricated by Smith himself. After all, other than Smith’s photographs, there was no proof that this manuscript existed, and Smith’s decision to leave the manuscript in the monastery instead of removing it for safekeeping was second-guessed. Despite allegations of forgery, however, the conventional wisdom among scholars was that Smith’s initially assessment was likely correct.

*Morton Smith’s photo of Mar Saba from his personal sketchbook. Image courtesy of T. Alwood.*

Yet this conventional wisdom was shattered in 2005 by Stephen Carlson, a patent lawyer who at the time was not a trained biblical scholar. Carlson published a book whose title made his view of Smith’s discovery absolutely clear—The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Carlson alleged not only that forensic analysis of the manuscript showed the presence of a “forger’s tremor” (that is, irregular movements indicating an attempt to imitate a different style of handwriting), but also that Morton Smith had left behind several subtle clues–“breadcrumbs”–in the letter of Clement that revealed him to be the author.

Although scholars who believed that Smith had discovered an authentic writing pushed back against Carlson’s claims, his book led a flurry of other scholars to claim to have found evidence that Smith had forged the manuscript. Some pointed to parallels between Smith’s discovery and the contents of a 1942 novel, The Mystery of Mar Saba; others saw indications that Smith was already interested in the ideas that the Secret Gospel contained before he “discovered” the manuscript; still others alleged that Smith was a gay man, and that he had created a text containing a homoerotic encounter between Jesus and a young man in order to validate his own sexuality.[1]

Many of the arguments that Smith forged the document rely on evidence that is highly circumstantial. Nevertheless, the sheer number of these arguments seems to have created a new conventional wisdom among biblical scholars: that the Secret Gospel of Mark is a modern forgery, and Morton Smith is likely its author. Certainly, there are still scholars who argue that Clement’s letter and the Secret Gospel are genuine ancient writings, but these voices have become increasingly marginalized. At present, scholars can be divided into two broad camps: those who believe that Morton Smith discovered an enormously important ancient writing, and those who believe that he invented this writing himself.

*Morton Smith in front of Mar Saba in 1983. Image courtesy of A. Pantuck.*

While there is much about Morton Smith’s discovery of Clement’s letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark that remains unclear, we are convinced of two facts that, taken together, render both of the current scholarly opinions about this text inadequate. First, given our extensive experience working with manuscripts, we regard the Greek handwriting style of the manuscript to be so complex and so characteristic of other Greek handwriting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it would have been impossible for Morton Smith to forge it. Perhaps a master forger whose native tongue was Greek might have been able to create this manuscript, but Smith was not a Greek-speaking master forger.

Second, we are convinced that this letter, even if ancient, was likely not written by the second-century Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria. The real author of the letter probably made use of the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, a fourth-century Christian historian and biographer. While the true name of the author remains a mystery, it was probably not Clement of Alexandria. So, the writing that Morton Smith discovered was not composed by Clement of Alexandria. Nor was it forged by Smith himself. Neither of the current scholarly opinions about the Secret Gospel of Mark are correct. The truth, we argue, lies somewhere in between.

In our new book, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), we offer a new theory about the origins and historical significance of the Secret Gospel of Mark. But we also reveal that the story of the Secret Gospel transcends the document itself, which incidentally is now lost. While the Secret Gospel of Mark can teach us something about Christianity’s distant past, it also exposes the inner workings of a small cadre of biblical scholars tasked with reconstructing that past. In the end the Secret Gospel may have less to say about the historical Jesus than it does about the preoccupations, politics, and rivalries of those who seek to uncover the truth about him.

[1] For a lively back and forth that addresses much of this evidence for Smith’s alleged forgery, see Craig Evans, “Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt,” 75-100; and Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck, “Craig Evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt,” 101-134; both of which can be found in Tony Burke (ed.) Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013).

Connecting the Dots: How ClioVis Can Help You Prepare for an AP History Exam

From the Editors: “Course Notes” is a new series written by and for history students. It allows undergraduate History majors to reflect on their experiences and share useful advice with their high-school, college-bound, and undergraduate peers. “Course Notes” will showcase important academic resources, proven study methods, and valuable test preparation strategies. It will also introduce readers to the History major program at the University of Texas at Austin, explaining what majoring in history entails and what undergraduates find meaningful about studying the past. In the first article in our series, UT History undergrad and former high-school tutor Samantha Tonini explains how she turned ClioVis–a digital teaching tool that allows users to build historical timelines–into a study guide for Advanced Placement exams. Samantha’s article invites students to take advantage of ClioVis’ unique features, which can help make sense of the names, dates, and changes over time that form the backbone of every high school history class.

I remember when I took an Advanced Placement European History course during my sophomore year of high school, it was a major step up from other advanced courses in terms of reading, memorization, and writing. Anytime there was an exam, you could always spot the AP European History students: right up to the last minute, our heads would be buried in massive binders as we tried to go over everything. It was extremely stressful and I struggled to find an effective study method.

Advanced Placement courses culminate in a lengthy comprehensive exam administered by the College Board, the organization responsible for designing AP course curricula. When AP exam season rolled around, I and several classmates shared Google Slides designed to integrate major events on a single timeline. It was extremely useful in terms of just memorizing the facts, but it did make it more difficult to understand the complexities of the material we were studying. The events began to feel very separate and independent from each other. Thankfully, we all passed the exam, so our timeline was at least somewhat effective as a study tool.

The next year, I became a tutor for other AP Euro students, and it was my goal to try to help them understand how timeline events are connected–this is an extremely useful way to organize course material for the writing portions of the AP exam. To that end, I began building an AP Euro study guide using ClioVis, a timeline-based digital teaching tool developed by UT Austin historian Erika Bsumek. When I started to create my study guide, I must admit, it was rather daunting at first. AP European history is dense course, and I had some flashbacks to my sophomore year of high school as I looked over the College Board course guide. All the kings, wars, and philosophers came flooding back and I was quickly reminded why I found the course so stressful to begin with. However, I quickly found that as I created the events and divided them by categories using the “category” tagging feature in ClioVis, the significance of each event and its relationship to other events became clearer. I found that focusing on events tagged with specific categories helped me create a streamlined narrative that I was able to follow and study.

One of my favorite features of the platform is that users can embed videos into each event. Using this, I was able to include videos from popular YouTube study channels such as Crash Course and Heimler’s History. Similarly, in the reference section, I could include links to different sources or websites relating to each event. These tools, along with writing my own descriptions of the events, helped create a perfect study tool that fifteen-year-old me would have loved to have access to. In the timeline below, you can see that I only created events for the first time period of the AP Euro curriculum. However, I hope that other AP Euro students will use my guide as a model and will create a study guide that will allow them to better prepare for their AP exam.

When it came to connecting events, I was initially stumped. What was the best way to use this feature? In the end, I decided that I could use it most effectively to show the kinds of connections students might use to address different writing prompts. AP history exams require students to write three kinds of essays in response to three types of question: Short Answer Questions (SAQs), which students are supposed to answer in just a few sentences; a Long Essay Question, which requires several well-organized paragraphs of analytical writing; and a Document-Based Question (DBQ), which asks students to write another long essay based on a packet of primary sources. To help students prepare for the written portion of the AP Euro exam, I looked over past SAQ, LEQ, and DBQ prompts from the past decade that covered the historical period my study guide addressed. Once I had found all the prompts that I wanted to use, I put the prompts in text boxes attached to connections between events that could be used to answer the question. Of course, other students may prefer using the connections feature to write out how events are actually related. It is all up to personal preference. I personally felt that I would have wanted a way to tie in practice prompts into the study tool. There is no wrong way to do it!

If I had ClioVis back during my sophomore year, I would have been overjoyed! While my large Google slides timeline was useful, ClioVis made the process of mastering content more engaging. Using this tool is a fabulous way to organize study materials and to begin to understand how course-relevant historical events are related to each other. I would encourage students to collaborate and build timelines together since AP history exams cover so many events. And building a timeline with a peer could lead to interesting conversations, which would also help master material. But regardless of whether you use it to build a timeline with your classmates a week before the AP exam or by yourself throughout the school year, ClioVis can help improve your studying.

Samantha Tonini is a UT History Major and the ClioVis Intern for 2023.

Image source: Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-book-stack-books-education-207740/

Review of Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (2020) by Ron Harris

Bannar image for Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (2020) by Ron Harris

It’s an old question: how did northwestern Europe, seemingly an economic backwater around 1400 CE, rise to trading dominance in just a few centuries? In Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700, Ron Harris offers a fresh answer. He traces the financial tools and organizational forms in Eurasia that offered alternatives to—or building blocks for—the business corporation. By comparing these organizational forms in China, India, the Middle East, and western Europe, Harris argues that the business corporation was formed in response to the structural and commercial weaknesses, rather than the strengths, of England and the Dutch Republic.

Book cover for Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (2020) by Ron Harris

Harris underpins this complex discussion with a clear organizational structure. Part I provides the context of premodern Eurasian trade and its gravitational center, the Indian Ocean. From at least the second century CE, regular maritime trade networks connected Rome to Indian Ocean markets, while ancient Silk Routes across Central Asia reached their fullest extent under Mongol rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Following the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Europeans were largely cut off from these trade routes. In contrast to previous theorists, Harris argues that Europeans possessed no substantial technological or military advantages to overcome this commercial marginalization. In a position of relative weakness, Europe was more often an importer than exporter of business innovations.

In Part II, Harris considers the “organizational building blocks” that determined the possibilities of Eurasian trade before 1400.[1] The itinerant trader, the bilateral trade relationship (established through an agency contract or loan), and the merchant ship with its specialized personnel appeared independently in every major region. More complex organizational forms migrated from distinct points of origin. Harris attributes the spread of two major organizational forms to Islam, namely the funduq or caravanserai and the qirad. Tracing its roots to ancient Greek traveling lodges, the Arab funduq followed Muslim conquerors and traders to North Africa, southern Europe, and Central Asia. These outposts provided lodging, sustenance, protection, and trading opportunities for merchants; they were a boon to trade networks across the Silk Routes and beyond. The qirad, on the other hand, was a “bilateral limited partnership.”[2] Particularly useful to Muslims forbidden to profit from interest-bearing loans, it brought investors into contact with traveling merchants in a particular way: the investor would contribute capital to a shared “pool of assets” that the traveling merchant would manage on a trading mission.[3] When the traveler returned, he and the investor would divide the profits, usually claiming 50% each. It is likely that the Arab qirad inspired the Italian commenda.

A painting of a funduq in Persia from the 19th-century. — *This 19th-century print by Eugène Flandin portrays a funduq in Persia. Source: Rijksmuseum.*

Part III highlights three Eurasian institutions that effectively dominated trade before the business corporation. The first was the family firm. For example, the Pu lineage in southern China monopolized official government positions that provided near-exclusive access to maritime commerce under the Yuan dynasty. In Mughal Gujarat, the Ghafur and Vora family firms were less connected to the state apparatus and had the freedom to send ships and agents across the Indian Ocean world. The Fugger family in Augsburg rose from peasant origins to great wealth in a few generations, thanks to the flexible use of partnership contracts and other tools. The second institution was the merchant network, which usually involved the family firm but extended to other merchants within a particular region or ethno-religious group. Jewish networks based in Cairo or Livorno and the Armenian network in New Julfa made use of many of the financial building blocks discussed in Part II. The third institution was the state-supported trading expedition. The Ming dynasty voyages of Admiral Zheng He and the Portuguese Carreira da Índia are key examples.

According to Harris, each of these organizational forms was outpaced by the European business corporation, first manifested in the English and Dutch East India Companies that were founded at the turn of the seventeenth century. In Part IV, Harris explains that the business corporation, a distinctly European form, grew from the legal and financial partnerships that the clerics and religious orders of the medieval Roman Catholic Church established to protect Church property. The emergent legal “corporate form” was adopted by chartered towns and guilds.[4] In sixteenth-century England, as merchant guilds evolved into regulated corporations and eventually business corporations, four financial tools were added: joint-stock equity, investment lock-in, interest transferability, and protection from state expropriation. Limited liability would only be introduced to the corporation in the eighteenth century. Harris argues that this innovative combination of features was a pragmatic response by the English and the Dutch to the “significant entry barriers” they faced in accessing Eurasian trade because of their marginal location, lack of attractive export goods, and late entry to the game.[5]

Two relatively brief chapters are devoted to the early organizational history of the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (usually known by its Dutch acronym, VOC). Most importantly, Harris contrasts the oligarchic management of the VOC with the more egalitarian structure of the EIC, in which all shareholders were entitled to voting rights as well as access to company news and accounting. In any case, both companies raised significantly more capital from a larger pool of investors than any previous venture in Eurasian history. Because they achieved the broad, impersonal cooperation of investors in political contexts that resisted the expropriation of company funds by the state, the EIC and VOC offered “the ultimate organizational solution” to the problems of long-distance trade.[6]

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading post at Hooghly in Bengal, 1655. — *The Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading post at Hooghly in Bengal as depicted by artist Hendrik van Schuylenburgh in 1665. Source: Rijksmuseum.*

But why did the business corporation not develop elsewhere in Eurasia, and why did the form not migrate to the Middle East, India, or China until the modern period? Harris sees the corporation as an embedded European institution that did not migrate because of three possible factors: (1) a lack of demand in other locations, (2) the availability of alternative institutions, or (3) political resistance to its migration. In the Middle East, for example, there was little distinction between the state and the religious establishment, which jointly dominated institutions that may have otherwise benefitted from the corporate form—especially towns and guilds. The waqf (or religious endowment) shared certain features with the corporation through the pooling and protection of assets, but it did not—and could not—engage directly in trade. In South Asia, there was little demand for the corporation because the subcontinent existed at the center of historic trade networks and produced the most valuable goods that were sought by others. In China, Harris suggests that “[t]here was no space between the state and the family.”[7] Thus, the state monopolized trade and the family lineage was limited to pooling and protecting its own assets in the manner of a trust, rather than a business corporation.

A word of caution: Going the Distance does not make for light reading. Furthermore, regional specialists may take issue with the inevitable gaps and generalizations that accompany all comparative history. For example, Gregory Schopen’s Buddhist Monks and Business Matters has much to say about a powerful corporate form—the Buddhist monastery in South Asia—that bears comparison to the supposedly unique medieval European equivalent.[8] Such work is notably absent from Harris’s analysis. Yet, viewed as a whole, Going the Distance is a compelling piece of comparative history that also takes the trouble to incorporate detailed case studies on the basis of primary sources. Informed readers will recognize Harris’s intervention in scholarly debates about the so-called Great Divergence of European and other global economies. Some may find his treatment of the joint-stock business corporation too sanguine, in spite of his explicit “preemption concerning Eurocentrism.”[9] Ultimately, Harris resists the pressure to make absolute claims about the historical legacy of the business corporation and concludes his book with an expression of ambiguity: “Was the organizational revolution a precondition to the financial revolution, to the fiscal-military state, and to the British Empire? Possibly.”[10]

[1] Ron Harris, Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 63.

[2] Ibid., 110.

[3] Ibid., 132.

[4] Ibid., 254.

[5] Ibid., 273.

[6] Ibid., 373.

[7] Ibid., 364.

[8] Gregory Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

[9] Harris, 11.

[10] Ibid., 376.

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