Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

La XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México en la Historia / XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico in History

By Camila Ordorica

Note: This bilingual article appears first in Spanish and then in English.

Por segunda vez en los 73 años desde su creación, este año UT Austin será la sede de la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México, la cual se celebrará del 30 de octubre al 2 de noviembre. Bajo la coordinación de un comité conjunto presidido por la Dra. Susie Porter, de la Universidad de Utah, el Dr. Pablo Yankelevich, de El Colegio de México, y el Dr. Matthew Butler, como organizador local de UT-Austin , la conferencia convoca a un diálogo sobre la relación binacional entre México y Estados Unidos (y más específicamente Texas), así como sobre archivos. ¿Cómo ha cambiado la escritura de la historia sobre México y la frontera desde la última vez que la Reunión se celebró aquí, en 1958? Este artículo presenta una breve historia de las Reuniones Internacionales de Historiadores de México desde 1949 y ofrece algunas notas sobre cómo ha cambiado desde entonces la escritura de la historia sobre México y sus fronteras.

For the second time in the 73 years since its inception, UT Austin will host the XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico, which will be held from October 30th to November 2nd. Under the coordination of a joint committee chaired by Dr. Susie Porter of the University of Utah, Dr. Pablo Yankelevich of El Colegio de México, and Dr. Matthew Butler as UT-Austin’s local organizer, the conference is planned to be a dialogue concerning the binational relationship between Mexico and the United States—and more specifically Texas—and about archives. How has the writing of Mexican and borderland history changed in the last time the meeting took place here, in 1958? This article presents a brief history of International Historians Meetings beginning in 1949 and gives some notes on how historical writing about Mexico and its borders has changed since then.

Corría el año de 1949 cuando el historiador mexicano Silvio Zavala, como parte de los esfuerzos de contribuir a la profesionalización de la disciplina histórica en México organizó el Primer Congreso de los Historiadores de México y los Estados Unidos que se llevó a cabo en la ciudad de Monterrey. El objetivo de éste fue generar y enriquecer los lazos internacionales de diálogo e intercambio entre historiadores de ambos países con la finalidad de establecer contacto entre los estudiosos, organizar investigaciones, fundar nuevas sociedades, así como sistematizar nuevas revistas e innovar en la enseñanza de la antropología y la historia.[1] Nueve años después, en 1958, la reunión se replicó en la Universidad de Texas en Austin, presidiendo este segundo evento Lewis Hanke, historiador del mundo lascasiano. Con un propósito similar, la conferencia estuvo enfocada en el diálogo sobre las fronteras, principalmente la frontera México-Estados Unidos, aunque también se habló de fronteras medievales en España y las fronteras de América Latina, como fue el caso de las fronteras de Brasil y Argentina. A propósito de este bilateralismo, se hicieron presentes intelectuales emblemáticos como Antonio Castro Leal, J. Frank Dobie, y François Chevalier, y asistieron los gobernadores de Texas y de Nuevo León a el banquete final. Además, una sesión fue patrocinada por la Comisión de Buena Vecindad del Estado de Texas. De meros escribanos estuvieron un tal Luis González y González y Edith Parker, única mujer que se menciona en todo el programa.[2]

Lewis Hanke posa delante de un mapa del mundo / Lewis Hanke poses in front of a world map. — Lewis Hanke posa delante de un mapa del mundo, hacia 1975 / Lewis Hanke poses in front of a world map, ca. 1975. Fuente / Source: University Photograph Collection (RG 120_2), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.

De acuerdo con las memorias que escribió el propio Hanke, estas dos reuniones iniciales fueron de las primeras iniciativas binacionales de intercambio académico exitosas, ya que múltiples esfuerzos se habían realizado en el continente sin demasiado consecución.[3] Sin embargo, a pesar del éxito de éstas, pasaron once años hasta que en 1969 se realizó la tercera reunión en la ciudad de Oaxtepec en Morelos, cuyo presidente fue Daniel Cosío Villegas, economista y gran historiador del liberalismo mexicano. En esta edición, se presentaron nuevas directrices de la historiografía mexicana así como los avances y cambios en la disciplina desde la primera reunión, veinte años atrás. Como parte de las conclusiones de esta tercera reunión, se estableció un Comité Organizador que se encargaría de sistematizar estas reuniones. Desde entonces, las Reuniones Internacionales de Historiadores de México se llevan a cabo cada cuatro años y se alternan entre una ciudad mexicana y una ciudad estadounidense, con la excepción de 2006 cuando la ciudad huésped fue Vancouver. Además de los presidentes de congreso ya mencionados, las reuniones concurrentes fueron encabezadas por las siguientes personas: Nettie Lee Benson (Santa Mónica, 1973), Edmundo O’Gorman (Pátzcuaro, 1977), Woodrow Borah (Chicago, 1981), Miguel León-Portilla (Oaxaca, 1985), David J. Weber (San Diego, 1990), Luis González y González (México, 1994), Charles A. Hale (Forth Worth, 1999), Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (Monterrey, 2003), Christian Archer (Vancouver, 2006), Enrique Florescano Mayet y Friedrich Katz (Santiago de Querétaro, 2010), John Coatsworth (Chicago, 2014) y Óscar Mazín (Guadalajara, 2018).[4]

En cada una de sus instancias, la Reunión ha tenido una temática específica alrededor de la cual se organizan las mesas de discusión, las cuales igualmente responden a las problemáticas de la historiografía mexicana y sobre México. Además, todas y cada una de ellas han sido organizadas en conjunción de múltiples instituciones de ambos países así como de Canadá desde el año de 1995. Así, en términos generales, estas reuniones han contribuido ampliamente al desarrollo de una historia mexicana con carácter hemisférico y global tanto en su estudio como en su producción y aplicación.

En el año que corre se llevará a cabo la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México, del 30 de octubre al 2 de noviembre, en la Universidad de Texas en Austin, bajo la coordinación del comité organizador conjunto que dirigen la Dra. Susie Porter de la Universidad de Utah, y el Dr. Pablo Yankelevich de El Colegio de México. El Dr. Matthew Butler (UT-Austin), es coordinador local. Después de Monterrey (1949 y 2003), ésta será la segunda instancia de la Reunión que será en una ciudad y en una universidad donde ya se había auspiciado con anterioridad. En el marco de la próxima conmemoración del bicentenario de la Constitución Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (1824) que incluía a Texas, este año el tema de la XVI Reunión es “Federalismos en la historia de México y México-Texas”. La XVI Reunión pretende entablar un diálogo sobre la relación binacional entre México y Estados Unidos, pero más específicamente con Texas, bajo un paradigma político y hemisférico distinto al que existía hace dos siglos y que, sin lugar a dudas, ha tenido muchos cambios desde que la II Reunión en 1958. Aunado a esto, la XVI Reunión se une a las conmemoraciones universitarias del centenario de los archivos históricos de América Latina Nettie Lee Benson con el objetivo explícito de reflexionar críticamente sobre lo que significan los archivos y la documentación histórica en términos de libertad de acceso a un patrimonio en común, apostando por la colaboración archivística internacional en favor de la escritura, el acceso, y la salvaguarda de la historia.[5]

Profesores mexicanos y norteamericanos trabajando juntos / U. S. and Mexican teachers working together. — *Profesores mexicanos y norteamericanos trabajando juntos, 1958 / U. S. and Mexican teachers working together, 1958. Fuente / Source: Portal to Texas History / Portal de la Historia de Texas.*

Ante esto, ¿cómo ha cambiado la escritura de la historia de México y de la frontera en los últimos sesenta y cuatro años desde la II Reunión? Resulta interesante pensar esta pregunta frente a las actas publicadas sobre la II Reunión en el libro The New World Looks at its History: Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), sobre las cuales resaltan las conclusiones y los mayores descubrimientos. Entre ellos encontramos un punto principal, a partir del cual se desplegaron otras temáticas de análisis: la idea de la frontera como producción sociocultural con origen occidental.[6] Más específicamente aún, las actas resaltan el descubrimiento de que “el Río Grande era un límite moderno completamente artificial entre las culturas indígenas del norte de México y los Estados Unidos sin ningún significado académico.”[7] Vista desde los ojos del 2022, esta declaración––el programa de 1958 habla del “Gran Concepto de la Frontera” (The Great Frontier Concept)––parece hasta inocente, dado que el carácter sociocultural y tecnológico de las fronteras es algo que está ampliamente aceptado como verídico dentro de la disciplina histórica en particular y de las humanidades y ciencias sociales en general. Sin embargo, vale la pena resaltar que esta idea que hoy en día está tan normalizada tiene su propia historicidad, dentro de la cual la II Reunión tuvo un papel para su desarrollo y su institucionalización como un área de estudios en sí mismo, los llamados Estudios de Fronteras o Borderland Studies en las décadas de los setenta y ochenta. Para que hoy en día la frontera México-Estados Unidos y consecuentemente las demás fronteras en el mundo se vean y entiendan como parte de procesos de contingencia histórica, fue necesario y primordial que, en primera instancia, se llegara a esta realización histórica. Por lo tanto, no es de sorprender que este hallazgo se diera en el contexto de un conversatorio internacional, desde el cual la superposición de diversas formas de ver y hacer historia tuvieron la cabida necesaria para resaltar una problemática en común: el territorio y su gobernanza.

Hoy en día, la frontera que divide a México y Estados Unidos mide 3,185kms de largo. Esta es una de las fronteras más largas y letales del mundo y atraviesa los estados mexicanos de Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, y Tamaulipas y los estados norteamericanos de California, Arizona, Nuevo México, y Texas. En ella confluyen múltiples y diversas comunidades que viven una vida compartida entre ambos países o que, en su fallo, quedaron de tal o cual lado de la misma en razón de la distribución geopolítica organizada después de la Invasión Norte Americana en 1848. En el mundo híper-globalizado de hoy, esta frontera se caracteriza por el alto grado de vigilancia, versatilidad y violencia donde, como menciona Sayak Valencia, se “transforman e integran los mercados locales, el trabajo, la territorialidad, las normas jurídicas, los idiomas y la fuerza de trabajo sexualizada.”[8] Además, en ella confluyen los crecientes y constantes procesos de migración desde América Latina, donde cientos de personas mueren cada año en el intento de “cruzar al otro lado.” Así, dado que la frontera es una línea imaginaria pero a la vez híper-real, en ésta se han instaurado dinámicas dobles que hacen del espacio un lugar donde “todo se vale,”[9] volviendo un lugar de perpetua violencia que, ante todo, busca obstruir los tráficos económicos y migratorios. El muro que separa ambos países y que es constantemente engrandecido representa más que cualquier cosa la artificialidad de este límite moderno de cuya realidad se asombraron los académicos durante la II Reunión de 1958. Hoy, hablar sobre federalismos en la relación de México y Estados Unidos sin hablar también de la frontera es imposible, así que valdrá la pena escuchar las conversaciones que surgan al respecto en la XVI Reunión a finales de octubre de este año.

XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico in History

It was in 1949 that Mexican historian Silvio Zavala, as part of his efforts to professionalize the historical discipline in Mexico, organized the First Congress of Historians of Mexico and the United States, which was held in the city of Monterrey. Its objective was to deepen the international ties between historians of both countries, increase dialogue and exchange, establish contact between scholars, organize research, and found new societies, as well as to systematize new journals and innovate in the teaching of anthropology and history.[1] Nine years later, in 1958, a second meeting was held at the University of Texas at Austin, with Lewis Hanke, a historian of the world of Bartolomé de Las Casas, presiding over the event. While having a similar purpose, the conference focused on a dialogue about borders, mainly the Mexico-United States border, although there was also discussion of medieval borders in Spain and the borders of Latin America, as was the case with the borders of Brazil and Argentina. This bilateralism was symbolized in the attendance of intellectuals like Antonio Castro Leal, J. Frank Dobie, and François Chevalier, and the governors of Texas and Nuevo León attended the final banquet. In addition, a session was sponsored by the Good Neighbor Commission of the State of Texas. Present as mere recorders were one Luis González y González and Edith Parker, the only woman mentioned in the entire program.[2]

Una fotografía aérea del campus de la Universidad de Texas en Austin durante la década de 1950 / An aerial photograph of the University of Texas campus in Austin during the 1950s. — *Una fotografía aérea del campus de la Universidad de Texas en Austin durante la década de 1950* / *An aerial photograph of the University of Texas campus in Austin during the 1950s. Fuente / Source: Portal to Texas History* / *Portal de la Historia de Texas*.

According to Hanke’s own memoirs, these two initial meetings were among the first successful binational academic exchange initiatives, though multiple crossborder efforts had been made before without much success.[3] However, despite their success, eleven years passed before the third meeting was held in 1969 in the city of Oaxtepec in Morelos, where the president was Daniel Cosío Villegas, the economist and great historian of Mexican liberalism. In this iteration of the conference, new directions for Mexican historiography were set out, and the advances and changes in the discipline since the first meeting twenty years earlier were discussed. As one outcome of this third meeting, an Organizing Committee was established to systematize future meetings. Since then, the Meetings of International Historians of Mexico have been held every four years and alternate between a Mexican city and a U.S. city, with the exception of 2006 when the host city was Vancouver. In addition to the aforementioned conference presidents, the respective meetings were headed by the following persons: Nettie Lee Benson (Santa Monica, 1973), Edmundo O’Gorman (Pátzcuaro, 1977), Woodrow Borah (Chicago, 1981), Miguel León-Portilla (Oaxaca, 1985), David J. Weber (San Diego, 1990), Luis González y González (Mexico City, 1994), Charles A. Hale (Fort Worth, 1999), Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (Monterrey, 2003), Christian Archer (Vancouver, 2006), Enrique Florescano Mayet and Friedrich Katz (Santiago de Querétaro, 2010), John Coatsworth (Chicago, 2014) and Óscar Mazín (Guadalajara, 2018).[4]

In each of its iterations, the Meeting has had a specific theme around which the panels were organized, a theme that also responds to the problems of Mexican historiography as well as issues affecting Mexico. In addition, every conference has been organized by multiple institutions from both countries as well as from Canada since 1995. In general terms, these meetings have contributed broadly to the development of a Mexican history that is hemispheric and global in character, both in its study and production and in its application.

This year, the XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico will be held from October 30th to November 2nd at the University of Texas at Austin, under the coordination of the joint organizing committee led by Dr. Susie Porter of the University of Utah and Dr. Pablo Yankelevich of El Colegio de México. Dr. Matthew Butler (UT-Austin) is local organizer. After Monterrey (1949 and 2003), this is only the second time that the Meeting is to be held in a city and university where it has been hosted before. Within the framework of the upcoming commemoration of the bicentennial of the Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States (1824), which included Texas, the theme of the XVI Meeting this year is “Federalisms in the history of Mexico and Mexico-Texas.” The XVI Meeting aims to engage in a dialogue concerning the binational relationship between Mexico and the United States, and more specifically Texas, under a political and hemispheric paradigm very different to that of two centuries ago and which, undoubtedly, has also undergone many changes since the II Meeting in 1958. In addition, the XVI Meeting complements the University’s commemoration of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection and has as one objective a critical reflection on the meaning of archives and historical documentation in terms of freedom of access to a common patrimony, especially concerning the promotion of international archival collaborations and the shared writing of, access to, and safeguarding of history.[5]

How has the writing of Mexican and border history changed in the last sixty-four years since the Second Meeting? It is interesting to think about this question in light of the proceedings published on the II Meeting in the book The New World Looks at its History: Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963). The book’s conclusions and major discoveries stand out. Among them we find a main point, from which other lines of analysis emerged: the idea of the frontier as a sociocultural construction of Western origin.[6] More specifically still, the proceedings find that “the Rio Grande was a completely artificial modern boundary between the indigenous cultures of northern Mexico and the United States with no scholarly significance.”[7] Viewed through the eyes of 2022, this statement–the 1958 program speaks of “The Great Frontier Concept”–seems almost naive, given that the sociocultural and technological character of borders is widely accepted within the historical discipline in particular and the humanities and social sciences in general. However, it is worth noting that an idea that is so standard today has its own historicity, and that the Second Meeting played a role in developing and institutionalizing this idea as an area of enquiry in its own right, the so-called Borderlands Studies in the 1970s and 1980s. In order for the U. S.-Mexico border and consequently other borders around the world to be seen and understood today as part of contingent historical processes, it was necessary and essential that this historical realization first be achieved. Therefore, it is not surprising that this finding emerged in part from an international dialogue, in which diverse ways of seeing and making history were given the necessary space to converge and so highlight a common problem: territory and its governance.

Today, the border that divides Mexico and the United States is 3,185 kilometers long. It is one of the longest and most lethal borders in the world and passes through the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas, and the U. S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Along it converge multiple diverse communities that live a shared life between two countries or that, by default, have remained on this side or that of the border due to the geopolitical redistribution that occurred after the U. S. Invasion of 1848. In today’s hyper-globalized world, this border is characterized by a high degree of surveillance, versatility, and violence. As Sayak Valencia has noted, it is where “local markets, labor, territoriality, legal norms, languages and sexualized labor forces are transformed and integrated.”[8] Moreover, it is where the growing and constant processes of migration from Latin America converge, where hundreds of people die each year in an attempt to “cross to the other side.” Given that the border is an imaginary but at the same time hyper-real line, dual dynamics play out there, turning the space into a place where “anything goes,”[9] a place of perpetual violence that, above all, seeks to obstruct economic and migratory traffic. The wall that separates the two countries is constantly enlarged. More than anything else, this represents the artificiality of this modern boundary whose reality astonished the academics at the II Meeting in 1958. Today, to talk about federalism in the relationship between Mexico and the United States without also talking about the border is impossible, so it will be worthwhile to listen to the conversations that emerge in this regard at the XVI Meeting at the end of October of this year.

[1] Manuel Ceballos Ramírez. Historiadores. Cincuenta años de reuniones internacionales, 1949-1999. México, Monterrey, 1999.

[2] Benson Latin American Collection, Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico, Final Program (Austin: University of Texas, 1958).

[3] Ceballos Ramírez. Historiadores.

[4] XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México. “Archivo: Reuniones Anteriores.” University of Texas at Austin, accedido 14 de agosto / accessed 14 August 2022, https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/archivo/

[5] XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México. “Tema de la Reunión.” University of Texas at Austin, accedido 14 de agosto / accessed 14 August 2022, https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/tema-de-la-reunion/

[6] Revista Mexicana de Sociología 26, no. 2 (1964): 596–97. https://doi.org/10.2307/3538621.

[7] Lewis, Archibald R. “The Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1, no. 4 (1959): 400–401. http://www.jstor.org/stable/177605.

[8] Sayak Valencia. Capitalismo Gore. España: Melucina, 2010, 124.

[9] ibid., 123.

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.

Banner image courtesy of the Texas General Land Office.

Environmental Humanities: Five Non-History Books I Recommend from Comps

By Jesse Ritner

For graduate students in History, comprehensive exams (also known as orals, qualifying exams, or comps) are a crucial milestone on the way to finishing the Ph.D. I took my comprehensive exams in the Fall of 2020, defending about five weeks after the first COVID-19 isolation orders. Yet even without a pandemic, reading something like 160 books and dozens of articles and chapters from edited collections is a daunting task that freezes many. The stacks of books on your bedroom floor remind you as much of all the books you have not read as they do of the works you did read. Meanwhile, the sheer monotony of reading at least one (if not two or three) books every day exhausts the mind, the spirit, and the desire for a Ph.D. For me, my respite was in books written by non-historians. So here are my recommendations of works for burgeoning environmental historians that weren’t written by historians.

Seymour, Nicole. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

In this book, Nicole Seymour weaves a new concept she calls “bad environmentalism.” A literary theorist, she dives into “unserious” books, movies, art, and music and looks for joy. Theoretical in nature, the book never overwhelms the reader with deep dives into critical theorists unfamiliar to historians. Instead, it is funny, enjoyable and a call for a new type of action. Seymour reminds us that environmentalists shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. Laughing at the things that so many take seriously does not mean giving up hope. In fact, freeing ourselves from the type of purity that sits at the center of environmentalist ethics overcomes the doom and gloom so many environmentalists feel by reminding us of the pleasures of the environment we fight to protect. As much as anyone, Environmental Historians need the reminder.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Reprint edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Upon its release five year ago, The Mushroom at the End of the World was the favorite within the field of Environmental Humanities. Everyone had to read it. Five years later, some have lost their enthusiasm, dissuaded by occasional historical and biological inaccuracies. The critiques are reasonable, but that should not dissuade graduate students from reading the book. Tsing’s ethnography of Matsutake mushrooms – a weed that grows in forests disturbed by humans is a beautifully, poetic, and inspiring narrative about life after capitalism – or otherwise put, life after the end of the world. The forests and mushroom hunters she studies seem almost to live in a science fiction future that has freed them from the corporate and global controls the rest of us suffer through. The amazing parts are the constant reminders that her book is not futuristic, it is about the here and now. Tsing makes us ask the question (even if it brings disaster): what if capitalism cannot end fast enough? Or maybe, her reading of the end of the world is the antithesis of The Walking Dead and other apocalyptic narratives where only the strongest survive through fragile democracies or absolute authority. Instead, mushrooms offer a radical opportunity to build a just world in harmonious relation with the environment.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press Books, 2016.

Povinelli’s magnum opus, Geontologies, is anything but an easy read. Yet for the lover of Michelle Foucault, no one has better integrated biopower and the environment. Povinelli contends that the origins of power are not in Foucault’s now-famous formula “to make live or let die” but rather center around the ability to make matter lively or inert. She contends that the capacity of governments and culture to distinguish what lives and what lacks life is the foundation of settler colonialism and capitalism. Through ethnography she demonstrates the way in which deeming certain matter as “without life” frees settlers to extract it, market it, and destroy it without a moral sense of harm and destruction felt by so many non-Western cultures. All these years later, historians still obsess over biopower. Povinelli offers us a constructive way forward, driving us to ask new questions about power, and to realize that the origins of all power are in the ability to determine material reality.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Unknown edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2010.

If anyone can flesh out for me the politics of vibrant matter, I will forever be thankful. But despite the ambiguous relationship between Bennet’s new materialism and political ecology, Vibrant Matter offers graduate students a way to think about history from molecules up, rather than culture down. Bennet’s work has influenced an array of now-influential environmental historians, including Timothy LeCain, Bathsheba Demuth, and Nancy Langston, among others. Nevertheless, there are still many reasons to return to this foundational text. There are others to choose from: Karen Barad’s theory of “agential realism” is, I think, more useful, while Philippe Descola’s “object-oriented ontologies” offer a path into issues of race, indigeneity, class, and the more common themes of history. That said, in a land of dense theory, Bennet’s is by far the most lucid and the most fun. If nothing else, read her chapter on the North American Blackout. It has changed many environmentalists’ view of the world. Maybe you will be next.

Govindrajan, Radhika. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Animal Lives. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

When taking Dr. Jason Con’s class “Nature, Culture, and Power,” we had the honor of reading and discussing a draft of this book with Radhika Govindrajan. Govindrajan powerfully and successfully deconstructs the separation between people and nature in mountain villages in India’s Central Himalayan region through questions about kinship, nature, culture, animality, and biology. Her stories are fascinating and comical (both to the reader and the people involved). For example, she discusses the queer imagination within stories about women trapped in the forest who have sex with bears – stories that are told in jest, but have moral weight. She examines the kinship between monkeys (usually thought of as pests) and the people they steal from, and the many other ways that those she studies are tied into more-than-human networks. Engaging, sometimes funny, heartfelt, and thought provoking, Govindrajan challenges us all to rethink our interactions with the world, and to perhaps re-examine how we think about human-animal kinship in the past.

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.

Not Even Past – looking back at 2021-22

It’s been another busy year for Not Even Past with more than 130 articles published across the academic year. To celebrate all this incredible academic content we have compiled everything in one page below. Not Even Past‘s reach also continues to grow, and we just broke a million page views over the past 12 months, making the magazine an important resource not just for the University of Texas community but for Public History online.

NEP Year in Review 2021-22 by Adam Clulow

To view specific sections, use the links below:

Features
Books
Teaching
Digital and Film
Blog
IHS and Public History
Texas
Author Spotlights

Features

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

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

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

Books

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

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

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

Teaching

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

Digital and Film

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

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

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

Blog

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

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

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

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

IHS and Public History

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

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

Author Spotlights

Texas

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

Texas State Historical Association – “Teaching Texas History in an Age of Hyper Partisanship” and “Forgetting and Remembering: Why Does Searching for an Accurate Past Provoke Backlash?”

Lessons from the Grave

Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery, which was established in the mid-1800s, is located in a quiet neighborhood on the east side of the city. The property is separated from the city center by busy highways and rapidly expanding housing developments. Its black, metal gates create an unassuming boundary between the hundreds of crumbling grave markers inside and a two-lane road many local dog-walkers enjoy. And yet, just a couple steps inside, centuries of stories belonging to women, men, and children from around the world begin to unfold.

A visit to the Oakwood Cemetery provides a window into the many lessons buried in historic cemeteries. One the one hand, its gravestones shed light on Austin’s history of socioeconomic inequality and discrimination along racial and religious lines. At the same time, they testify to the rich cultural diversity of the city, shaped by centuries of migration from across the US and across the world. Finally, they honor the memories of the people, young and old, who combined to build Austin.

A fall or wintertime photo of Austin's Oakwood Cemetery: under a partly cloudy sky, headstones and obelisks rise amid a cluster of barren trees. — *Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery. Photo courtesy of the author.*

The physical orientation of the cemetery provides the first insight into Austin’s long history of socioeconomic inequalities. This cemetery follows a grid-pattern, forming a matrix of ten major horizontal lanes intersected by six vertical paths. However, there is no uniformity within the various sections. Subtle differences are expected, such as personal touches in decoration, to honor the deceased individual. Walking along the paths–some paved, and some not– allows visitors to note broader disparities between individual zones. For example, the gravestones concentrated towards the center of the cemetery appear larger and better cared-for and therefore easier to read. The monuments along the periphery are generally smaller and often broken.

A cracked gravestone bearing the inscription: "Elizabeth B. Consort of Rev. J. Haynie Born in Georgia, [illegible] 1787. DIED Oct 4, 1863." — *Some gravestones have been reattached, like this one for Elizabeth B. Haynie, which has a visible crack.* *Photo courtesy of the author.*

Studying the disparities between well-kept gravestones and those that appear more neglected sheds light on the differing economic resources of Austin’s citizens throughout its history. Oakwood’s various expansions helped explain this layout. Over time, the city of Austin added several new sections to this property. There were at least seven additions to the cemetery in 1866, 1875, 1889, 1892, 1895, 1901, and 1910. Sometimes, an expansion was officially designated for a specific group, such as individuals belonging to a certain religious denomination, or people of color. For example, the Jewish temple Congregation Beth Israel purchased designated sections for Jewish burials in the late-1800s. The clear differences in size and condition of burial monuments between the sections of the cemetery illustrate that not all groups received the same care or resources.

A broken headstone bearing the partly legible inscription: "In [illegible] My only beloved son Mark Wilson. Born in Dublin Ireland. Feb. 19 1844. Murdered in Austin." — *Other headstones remain in pieces. Here, the full inscription remains unreadable because of the fractures across the grave marker. Photo courtesy of the author.*

Oakwood’s gravestones also reveal several clues about the city’s history of racial discrimination. Significantly, an area near the Navasota Street entrance was officially assigned to people of color. The grave markers in this sector appear smaller and more worn where they survive at all. Historic markers acknowledge that because the city tended to prioritize the wealthy, European-descendant patrons, the zone near the Navasota Street entrance became a “catch all” for poor residents and out-of-town visitors who died in the city as well as Mexican American and Black women, men and children. Because of this prejudice, the exact identities and locations of many of the graves in this area cannot be determined.

At the same time, the information recorded on these headstones provides a testament to Austin’s history of cultural diversity. One way to see this is by examining the multiplicity of languages used in the inscriptions. Less than two meters inside the Comal Street entrance, there are several small, almost illegible grave markers. Closer examination reveals names that suggest that the deceased individuals were of Mexican or Mexican American heritage. The inscriptions themselves (including birth and death dates, places of origin, and sometimes short prayers) appear in Spanish. Other gravestones throughout the cemetery feature Latin, German, and Hebrew messages, which shed light on the large immigrant communities that have shaped Austin’s history.

A headstone bearing the inscription: "P. Lopez Unrecuerdo." — *An example of a headstone for P. Lopez, situated at the edge of the property, that simply reads “Unrecuerdo.” To the right is a gravemarker that has fallen over. Photo courtesy of the author.*

A gravestone bearing the inscription: "Gertrude Alten, GEB D. 19 Juni 1887, GEST D. 12 July 1887. Seelig sind die reines herzen sind, denn sie werden Gott [schau?]." — *This memorial for Gertrude Alten, born 1887, appears in German. Photo courtesy of the author.*

A headstone bearing the inscription: "Hier ruhet in frieden Henry Isensee born in Germany 16 Nov 1843 died 6 June 1914." — *This stone for Henry Issense, born 1843, reads “hier ruhet in frieden” (Here he rests in peace). Photo courtesy of the author.*

A headstone bearing the inscription: "George Holdstock Born in Beverley, Yorkshire, England Oct. 11, 1837 Died Jan. 5, 1900. Sarah A. Holdstock Born in Birmingham, England, March 20 1840. Gone but not forgotten." — *Another grave marker reveals the English origin of George Holdstock, born in Beverley, Yorkshire, England, in 1837.* *Photo courtesy of the author.*

Two small gravestones bearing the simple inscriptions "Vater" and "Mutter." — *Simple gravestones here simply say “Vater” and “Mutter” (Father and Mother). Photo courtesy of the author.*

The insignia featured on many of the grave markers from these immigrants also provide important insights into the cultural values of the deceased. Some stones feature prayers, floral or animal designs, and even symbols associated with specific community organizations. For example, a prominent symbol for the Woodmen of the World (a fraternal organization) appears on the headstone for Aurelio Pena.

A large headstone carved to resemble an upright log with vines around the base. The inscription reads "Recuerdo de los lenadores Aurelio Pena Nacio el dia 3 de Dec. de 1871 Fallecio el dia 3 de Junio de 1911." A symbol at the top bears the inscription, "Woodmen of the World Memorial." — *Pena’s monument also features a vine-like design at the base. Photo courtesy of the author.*

A headstone featuring a carved butterfly symbol. The inscription reads: "Edgar W. Forster Born Nov. 5, 1880 Died Apr. 2[illegible]." — *A large butterfly has been carved into the headstone for Edgar W. Forster. Photo courtesy of the author.*

Finally, the burial plots fundamentally pay tribute to the lives of Austin’s early residents. They are often arranged to reflect family structure, with husbands and wives next to each other surrounded by children, grandparents, and even aunts and uncles. Many gravestones prominently feature birth and death dates. This information demonstrates the tragic prominence of infant death through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some such monuments feature affectionate nicknames or detailed carvings of children and animals. These deteriorating stones serve as memorials to lives cut short.

A headstone bearing the simple inscription: "Infant." — *This headstone simply reads “Infant.” Photo courtesy of the author.*

A headstone bearing the inscription: "OUR BOY Emmet Carl Borho May 29 1909 July 1 1914 We Can safely leave our boy Our darling in Thy trust." — *This grave marker for five-year-old Emmet Carl Borho features the inscription “Our Boy” surrounded by a floral motif. Photo courtesy of the author.*

Oakwood cemetery is a testament to the lives of Austin’s past residents. Even a leisurely stroll through the shady, tree-lined lanes reveals how much twenty-first century visitors can learn from the graves. From the social and cultural hierarchies that lay behind the cemetery’s organization, to the memories and practices that family members preserved on the headstones of the deceased, these monuments contain vital information about this city’s history. They also tie the heart of Texas to vibrant patterns of global migration.

Local Memory: Telling Austin’s Musical History

Local Memory: A History of Music in Austin is a digital public history project by Brian Jones and Michael Schmidt. We created Local Memory to document less-familiar chapters of Austin’s musical history. Anyone familiar with the culture of the Texas capital likely already knows Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and the college town’s reputation as a counterculture/roots-music haven. Far from being the obvious culmination of the city’s musical culture, however, those artists and genres changed it. Their musical embrace of the margins largely stood in opposition to the taste, aspirations, and self-image of Austin’s performers and audiences during the previous half century. Surprisingly, it may be the cultural style that took shape before the mid-1960s that proves to be more enduring. The “weird” period that made the city famous ultimately may end as an interlude.

Local Memory’s first two online exhibits point to a forgotten period in Austin’s music history: the years between the onset of the Depression and the beginning of rock and roll. For most listeners, these are likely unfamiliar decades. The 1970s have long dominated Austin’s musical identity, endowing the city with a reputation for non-conformity in a territory of traditionalism.[1] By Ronald Reagan’s second term, the Texas capital was synonymous with outlaws and outsiders, hippies and intellectuals, images evoked by musicians like Nelson, Doug Sahm, and Townes Van Zandt as well as venues like Antone’s, the Soap Creek Saloon, and the Armadillo World Headquarters.

The powerful legacy of the 1970s, however, has obscured the ways that Austin was already a unique musical place before the advent of these cosmic cowboys. Local Memory shows that the city of the Violet Crown already stood apart culturally from Texas’ other major cities during the first half of the twentieth century, albeit in a way remarkably different from its later reputation.

Spanning the period from roughly 1929 to 1955, Local Memory documents two thriving local music scenes that emerged during these years. The first, “Athens on the Colorado,” focuses on dance orchestras at the universities while the second, “The Rise of the Honky Tonks,” covers small vernacular pop bands in working class dance halls and bars. Together, these scenes embodied what made Austin a distinct musical environment in Texas in the decades before the 1970s. It was a city remarkably in sync with the national music industry in a state producing a staggering number of regional innovations.

A screenshot from the Local Memory website with text introducing the "Athens on the Colorado" exhibit. A black and white photograph of the University of Texas' Hogg Auditorium, dated 2 February 1934, also appears on the page. On the righthand side of the page, a text window Local Memory patrons to listen to an audio recording of author Andrew Busch discussing urban planning, the Texas Hill Country environment, and Jim Crow segregation. — The title page to Local Memory’s first exhibit provides a view of UT’s Hogg Auditorium, an introductory essay, and a series of audio segments about Austin’s urban-environmental history with scholar Andrew Busch.

Local Memory tells this story as much with images, maps, graphs, primary documents, oral histories, and music recordings as it does with text. It gives visitors the chance to hear Nash Hernandez discuss his father’s life and band; see the economic disparities between Black and white musicians in Austin through data and graphs; read a 1938 article in the Daily Texan explaining jitterbugs; see the massive growth of Honky Tonks in Austin between 1935 and 1950 through interactive mapping; and explore the look and ambience of UT dances in the 1930s through a photo-essay. Local Memory attempts to create a polyphonic multi-media narrative, one that not only includes the voices of many authors and participants but also does so through many forms of information.

*Visitors can scroll through interactive maps to see the changing nature of Austin’s club scene between 1930 and 1950.*

Through Local Memory, we show that if Austin became linked to intellectual, outsider, and roots music in the late twentieth century, it stood out as the most pop-centered city in Texas in the first half of the century. Instead of bucking the trends of the music industry, it was more deeply attuned to them than any other city in the region. At a time when musicians in Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston were creating the distinctive regional styles of Western Swing, Honky Tonk Country, Conjunto, Orquesta music, and early Rock and Roll, Austin did the opposite: it closely followed the broadest forms of national popular music.

*In this oral history, musician Ruben Hernandez tells the story of his father’s seminal local band, the Nash Hernandez orchestra.*

We document this in our exhibit “Athens on the Colorado: The Rise of the Universities,” which examines the music of the 1930s and early 1940s. Although largely forgotten now, Austin was a major hub for Big Band music during the height of its New Deal era popularity. This might seem surprising for a small city that was geographically and culturally far removed from the film industry, recordings studios, and Tin Pan Alley on the East and West Coasts. Austin’s large student population and the growing resources of its colleges, however, helped ensure that its musical life was far more connected to the national music networks than was the case in other Southern and Southwestern towns of its size.

A final screenshot from the Local Memory website, displaying several pie charts grouping 30s-era musical performances by the races of performers. Four small pie charts display information about performances at specific venues (the University's gymnasium, its student union, the Austin Country Club, and the Stephen F. Austin Hotel); a larger central graph aggregates data from all four venues. In each case, the overwhelming majority of performers were white. A small inset map identifies the location of each venue. — *This data visualization essay shows the drastic economic inequalities between white musicians and musicians of color in Austin during the 1930s.*

College students dominated Austin’s commercial pop music world throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.[2] This demographic gave the city a unique musical profile in Texas. Although vernacular musics, like fiddle tunes and barrelhouse blues, were certainly present and beloved by their listeners, Austin’s live music world was overwhelmingly characterized by modern dance orchestras. The highly-arranged Swing and “sweet” music of these bands was the hallmark sound of the national industry at the time, the essence of large, corporate, mass-marketed trends. This mainstream orientation distinguished Austin from the music scenes of other Texas cities, where national big band styles were played at dance venues and hotels but existed as a small part of a larger panoply of local styles.

The University of Texas’s growing student body and oil wealth made Austin a consistent destination for now legendary orchestras of the era, including those attached to Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, and Dizzy Gillespie. At the same time, the constant appetite for dancing from the students, clubs, and fraternities/sororities created a foundation for the city’s first sustained ecosystem of local orchestras, who largely looked to syndicated radio and the national music industry for inspiration. As a contemporary poll in Billboard demonstrates, the University of Texas had become one of the biggest venues for dance orchestras in the country by the early 1940s. Putting on close to 100 concerts in 1942, UT not only far outpaced all other single institutions of higher education, but it put on around 20% more dances than all the universities in California and Pennsylvania combined.

Although the University of Texas was only one of four colleges in Austin in the 1930s, it commanded the most resources. Its cultural and financial draw were, in fact, considerably greater than the rest of the city as a whole, giving it an outsized influence on Austin’s cultural character in the 1930s. UT students—perhaps because they were young elites self-consciously aware of being in what others considered a backwater—tended to favor the most “sophisticated” styles offered by the popular music industry, not regional music made by non-professional or working-class musicians.[3] Consequently, music in the Texas capital was decidedly more mainstream and outward-looking than any other city in the state during this period.

Austin was bigger than UT. The city’s segregated African American colleges, Samuel Huston and Tillotson, formed a rich, if largely separate, musical environment. Judging from the available sources, Black undergraduates’ popular music taste was similar to their white counterparts—they favored large bands that played the cutting-edge Swing music at the center of the music industry in the second half of the 1930s. Many of region’s African American dance bands, in fact, were linked to local colleges, like the Sam Huston Swingsters and the Prairie View Collegians.

Austin’s place as a major center for African American higher education in the Southwest in the 1930s also attracted some of the most innovative, successful, and respected orchestras in the country to East Austin. The Cotton Club on E. 11^th Street, which served as a dance venue for SH and Tillotson students, hosted some of the era’s premier touring bands, including famous musicians like Jimmie Lunceford, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, and Lionel Hampton. During a portion of his 1936 tour, Duke Ellington stayed for five days in East Austin, where he had friends amongst the local faculty. Although his band didn’t perform at the Cotton Club, he made numerous appearances at important black civic institutions, including talks and solo/duet performances at Tillotson College, the Samuel Huston College Chapel, the Metropolitan AME Church, and Kealing Middle School.

If Austin’s preference for big band music in the 1930s and early 1940s deeply linked it to the central styles of the Depression-era market, the appearance of new local venues, sounds, and audiences between 1942 and 1950 kept it in sync with contemporary shifts in American musical life. The thrifty pre-war years were a time of market consolidation and an emphasis on styles with wide-appeal, namely pop-oriented big bands and dance music. The post-war music market, on the other hand, fragmented into an array of cutting-edge genres, small record companies, and demo-geographically-specific audiences. This was a moment of radical creativity by the pioneers of Bebop, R&B, modern Country and Western, Chicago electric blues, Conjunto and the independent labels—like Prestige, Atlantic, Starday, Chess, and Ideál—who recorded them.

Local Memory’s second exhibit, “The Wild Side of Life: The Rise of the Honky Tonks, 1940-1950,” traces the growth of the dance halls, musicians, and audiences that fostered this music in Austin. Venues like the Skyline Ballroom and the Victory Grill primarily catered to working class dancers and featured emerging styles of pop music often deemed unsophisticated by culturally-aspiring college students. Breaking with the previous two decades, these spaces and dancers supported a whole new generation of musicians in Austin, dramatically expanding the kinds of music played in public.

The Honky Tonk scene exemplified this departure. By the second half of the 1940s, a rim of rough and tumble venues—memorably called “skull orchards” at the time—lay just beyond Austin’s city limits. These clubs provided a home for the burgeoning sounds of electrified post-war Country music and Western Swing, music that previously had been peripheral to the commercial concert life of the city. Austin’s hinterlands became a magnet for local acts and Country & Western groups from the surrounding counties, including artists like Hank Thompson and Jimmy Heap. These venues were soon plugged into the national circuit. They consistently drew major touring stars from California and the newly minted Country capital in Nashville throughout the 1950s.

From the beginning, these halls were decidedly part of the town and not the gown. Initially fueled by G.I.s on leave from the newly-built Camps Swift and Hood, these threadbare segregated halls became permanent venues for the area’s white working class musicians and audiences. Ultimately, these Honky Tonks, along with analogous clubs in East Austin, created alternative worlds for live music, challenging the power long exerted by the universities over the sounds of the city.

A black-and-white photograph of a band led by musician Johnny Simmons, dated 1947. Handwritten labels identify the six musicians pictured: saxophonists Clarence "Speck" Hicks and Roy "Tankhead" Roberts; drummer Dallas "Pluk" Mederias; trumpeter Paris "Fuzzy Wuzzy" Jones; bass player Jesse Hart, whose nickname is partly obscured; and pianist/bandleader Simmons, nicknamed "Buck." Another label identifies a location, L. C. Anderson High School. — Austin’s close synchronization with national trends was exemplified by the career of local bandleader Johnny Simmons. Simmons began leading a Swing orchestra during the 1930s, but changed into a rhythm and blues performer in the late 1940s as national music styles evolved. Image source: Austin History Center, PICA_30019. For more on Simmons, see our essay, “The Forgotton Swing and Rhythm & Blues of Johnny Simmons.”

At the same time, the Honky Tonk era maintained an important continuity with the big band scene of the 1930s. Like its predecessor, the post-war music scene kept Austin closely attuned to the larger patterns of the music industry. Again, the city did not revolt against mainstream trends but closely followed them. Ironically, keeping pace with patterns driven by other parts of the country made Austin more closely resemble the rest of Texas, which had long fostered a range of innovative regional styles.

It was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Austin began to turn itself into a haven for less commercial, more progressive, counter-cultural music. That outsider identity is now likely in retreat, however. As the city becomes increasingly expensive—rents rose a remarkable 40% in 2021[4]—the relatively cheap and arty environment that undergirded Doug Sahm’s “Groover’s Paradise” and Richard Linklater’s Slacker is disappearing (some feel that this side of Austin began to decline as early as the 1990s). For all its future-oriented claims, the tech industry has seemingly returned Austin to the past, renovating and flipping the capital into a big city version of the elite mainstream culture of its interwar period.

[1] For an example of how Austin’s identity is deeply associated with the music and culture of the 1970s, see John T. Davis’s Austin Monthly article “How the 1970s defined Austin.” https://www.austinmonthly.com/how-the-1970s-defined-austin/. The major exceptions to this timeline are the early folk career of Janis Joplin and the psychedelic scene revolving around the 13^th Floor Elevators and the Vulcan Gas Company. These counter-examples comfortably fit as predecessors to the ethos and style of what came after them, however.

[2] It should be pointed out that the cultural power in Austin of University of Texas students during this period magnified the effect of the racist ethos of UT-affiliated minstrel shows and blackface performances. See, for example Dr. Edmund Gordon’s Texas Cowboy Pavilion stop on the Racial Geography Tour. https://racialgeographytour.org/tour-stop/texas-cowboy-pavilion/

[3] For example, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys—whose Western Swing was massively popular with working class audiences in Texas, California, and the Southwest during this period—never played on campus.

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/01/30/rent-inflation-housing/

Review of Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (2022) by David Conrad

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) must be one of the most written-about directors in film history. There are over 20 books in English exclusively devoted to Kurosawa. These include Donald Richie’s The Films of Kurosawa (1965), David Desser’s The Sa murai Films of Akira Kurosawa, (1983), Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosaw a (1991), Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro’s Kurosawa:
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (2000), just to name a few—not to mention studies in which Kurosawa serves as a crucial point of reference.

As the first Japanese director to win at an international film festival and the most well-known outside of Japan, Kurosawa has attracted prolonged interest and extensive studies not only because of his idiosyncratic style but also to the shifting cultural and historical contexts under which his films were conceived and produced. The director remained active throughout his career of over 50 years from the mid 1940s to the 1990s and made 30 films in total.

While many existing studies strive to articulate the enticing form and aesthetics of this film master, historian David Conrad’s Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (2022) contributes to the large body of Kurosawa scholarship by putting the turmoil and transformation of Japanese society in the latter half of the 20^th century under the spotlight when reading Kurosawa’s films.

Unlike many previous studies, which tend to focus on a small body of Kurosawa’s films (such as his samurai films, for example) or on a single film at length, Conrad pays equal attention to all Kurosawa’s films. The plot, narrative, film technique and style of the film play only a partial role in Conrad’s appreciation of Kurosawa, and he seamlessly interweaves biographical information, anecdotes, and sociopolitical context into his readings. Each one of Kurosawa’s films, in their own way, provides a window into a specific moment of Japan’s modern history and captures the zeitgeist of that moment. In this way, Conrad sees even the “historical dramas” (jidaigeki) of the director as “contemporary drama” (gendaigeki), and as he aptly puts it, all of Kurosawa’s films could be treated as “products of the jidai (meaning “period” or “era” in Japanese) that make up Japan’s dramatic, painful, inspirational, contradictory 20^th century” (1).

The author often opens a new chapter by laying out the social backdrop and historical events around the year when the film was released, before diving into the film. Kurosawa’s career spanned the Shōwa era (1926-1989), the reign of emperor Hirohito, to the Heisei era (1989-2019), with the accession of his son Akihito. Conrad divided the director’s oeuvre into four periods: “The War Years” includes 3 films from Sanshirō Sugata (1943)to Sanshirō Sugata Part II (1945), “The Occupation Years” with 10 films from The Men who Treaded on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) to Ikiru (1952), “The Miracle Years” includes 10 films from Seven Samurai (1954) to Redbeard (1965), and “The Global Years” with 7 films from Dodesukaden (1970) to Mādadayo (1993). This reminds us that this study is as much about Kurosawa the auteur as it is about modern Japan.

Each chapter deals with one film, and the author reads the scenes, images and dialogues closely to excavate details in which history seeps through. Several recurring motifs come to the fore in Conrad’s study of the correlation between Kurosawa and modern Japan. First is the U.S.–Japan relationship. The role played by the U.S. in shaping Japan’s postwar domestic and foreign policies cannot be overemphasized, and Conrad maps out a well-rounded picture of the changing power dynamic between the two nations through Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), The Bad Sleeps Well (1960), Yojimbo (1961), and Kagemusha (1980), among others.

The second key issue is censorship, from the wartime military government (1940-1945) to the Occupation forces (1945-1952) and the post-occupation Japanese government. Referencing both the production records and interviews with the director, Conrad identifies the varying nature and logic of these different censorship regimes and the ways that Kurosawa navigated multiple transitions from one phase to another or within one dominant regime. For example, Conrad points out that despite the fact that “feudal themes” were prohibited after the beginning of the Occupation, Rashōmon (1950), a film set in premodern Japan and containing obvious “feudalistic” content, was produced and made its way onto the big screen only because the start of the Korean War (1950-1953) had rendered it imperative for American censors to loosen control in order to show “democracy” in action. Kurosawa seized the opportunity and exploited the fertile ground of Japan’s past for storytelling.

The third topic central to Conrad’s reading of Kurosawa is the shifting gender politics of modern Japan. From Taishō women’s rights movements in the 1920s to women working in the military factories during wartime, from the pan-pan phenomenon (i.e., street prostitutes who served mainly the GIs) during the Occupation to the emerging feminist activists since the 1960s, Conrad shows how Kurosawa engages through his films with matters of women’s rights and status in modern Japan.

One of the merits of Conrad’s approach is the ways in which he reads the social dynamics and history of 20^th-century Japan out of Kurosawa’s jidaigeki (films situated in premodern Japan before the mid-19^th century). He argues persuasively that “jidaigeki imitate the past but tell us about their present.” (101) For example, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) takes place in 1586 Sengoku Japan and tells a story focused on seven masterless samurai helping farmers repel a group of bandits who harass the village and loot their crops. Despite the temporal distance between the story’s setting (1586) and the time when the film was made (1954), Conrad thoughtfully demonstrates how the 16^th-century peasants’ conundrum in the film mirrors that of Japanese farmers working under American’s land reform policies after 1947. Moreover, the feudal caste structure between peasant and samurai in the film sheds light on the enduring social inequalities and fixed class hierarchy in post-Occupation Japan when the nation as a whole got wealthier. The elaborate village defense plan and the ad hoc soldiers in the film offer a political parallel to Japan’s de facto army, the Self Defense Force, established with the help of the U.S. in 1950 as a reaction to Korean War.

Historical drama meets modern Japan: three male actors--all dressed incongruously in period clothing, two of whom are holding wooden spears--pose for a photo in alongside an American-made Jeep during the filming of a Kurosawa movie in 1945. — *Three actors in period clothing pose for a photo in front of an American-made Jeep during the filming of Kurosawa’s historical drama* The Men Who Treaded on the Tiger’s Tail (1945). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This kind of analysis is what makes this book distinct from both the conventional historical textbooks and even film studies. It focuses on the contextual dimension of an auteur’s oeuvre without ever losing sight of the films themselves. It uses film as a portal leading its readers to an understanding of the entangled and layered nature of wartime and postwar Japanese history. Readers learn both political and historical “hard facts” but also aspects of Japanese culture including traditional wedding attire, garbage disposal regulations, folk monsters, evolving beauty standards, and even the Japanese obsession with cats.

Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan is a historically- and culturally-grounded study of the director. It is both an informative and enjoyable read for anyone who finds the director’s works appealing and wish to know more about the historical and social condition that made them possible.

Yunfei Shang is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on East Asian cinema, film and media theory, digital cinema and media revolution. Her dissertation project deals with the popularity and influence of Japan’s media products especially film, TV documentary and drama in mainland China since the late 1970s.

Tracking Kurosawa Through Postwar Japan (and How I Turned a Side Hustle Into a Book)

My favorite director made a movie about my PhD dissertation topic 70 years before I wrote about it. The problem was that I didn’t find out about it until I was several years into my alt-ac career. Discovering the movie was the catalyst I needed to write a book I never thought I’d write.

OK, the movie isn’t exactly about my dissertation topic, American-backed land reform in occupied Japan, but it has some striking overlaps. The first film Akira Kurosawa made under the American censorship regime that existed during the postwar occupation of Japan was No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi). In the film, legendary actress Setsuko Hara changes from liberal bourgeoisie to radical rural activist. How her character plans to elevate farmers’ standards of living is left vague – the Americans would not unveil the transformative land redistribution program that I wrote about for another year – but the language she uses when envisioning a bright postwar future is that of General Douglas MacArthur and his staff of reformers. Their goal, and that of Hara’s character, was to “liberate” Japanese society by replacing “feudal” mores with “democratic” ones, and to do it before local communist reformers could try their own brand of remodeling. At a time when over half of the Japanese workforce was in agriculture, transferring the ownership of farmland from landlords to tenants was an essential part of the program, and one that the American occupation authorities pursued with real enthusiasm.

I’d known about Kurosawa for most of my life. As a teenage cinephile I fell in love with his 4-hour epic Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), which I first saw on a two-tape VHS release from Blockbuster. The passion for movies I developed back then intensified during graduate school, when I found myself in dire need of a hobby, an escape, and a creative outlet. History had always been my main hobby, but now that it was for all intents and purposes my job, it was more burden than pleasure. Movies, unrelated to my dissertation topic, provided the distraction. I watched an average of two a day, mostly arthouse classics. I started writing about what I was watching and eventually found an outlet that paid me a bit and sent me to several of Austin’s film festivals with a press pass.

*Akira Kurosawa (left) and Mikio Naruse (right) during the shooting of Nadare, directed by Mikio Naruse, 1937. Akira Kurosawa was third assistant director on that film. Source: P.C.L. Eiga Seisaku-jo.*

It was easy to justify spending more time on movies than on my dissertation, and I did, but somehow I finished the latter and then put academia mostly behind me. I stayed on campus, but in a staff role, and with my access to the libraries I sourced hard-to-find, impossible-to-stream movies through interlibrary loan. With a bias toward Japanese film, an affinity stemming from the three years I spent living in northeastern Japan, I’d now seen most of the major works of Kurosawa, Yasujirо̄ Ozu, and Masaki Kobayashi – three directors long held in high regard among international movie buffs. I also got married, to a woman I met in line for a movie at South by Southwest. Kathryn has a history degree as well, and our first conversation involved WWII submarine movies.

1946’s No Regrets for Our Youth was one of the last Kurosawa titles I encountered, but it put me right back in that dissertation headspace – in a good way. It was a perfect crossover of the topic I’d spent years writing about and the medium I’d dived into to avoid doing that very writing. Thinking that you could surely find similar overlaps between Kurosawa’s other movies and the historical moments in which they took shape, I asked Kathryn if I should do a YouTube series on the topic. With her background in film production, she gave me good advice: “You should write a book instead.” If we’d known about the looming onset of the COVID-19 pandemic or the much more joyous arrival of our two children that would occur during the writing, it might have seemed like an even more daring suggestion! But I took her advice and the result is my new book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan.

Kurosawa’s solo directorial career spanned exactly 50 years, from 1943 to 1993. These were, by historical coincidence, five of the most turbulent and transformative decades in Japan’s history, and Kurosawa’s work reflects the dynamism of the era in both intentional and unintentional ways.

The first part of the book examines the movies a young Kurosawa made during the war while under the power of an ultranationalist censorship regime. Part Two traces his maturation during the seven-year American occupation, whose censorship Kurosawa later described as comparatively light but that he sometimes railed against in the moment. Part Three finds subtle connections between Japan’s era of high-speed growth – its “economic miracle” – and Kurosawa’s big-budget epics that won international film awards and put the director on the world map. These were the movies that directors like Sergio Leone, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg would remake, adapt, and homage for years to come. Part Four follows Japan’s expanding role in the international community in the form of tourism campaigns, cultural exports and “soft power,” and engagement with issues of global concern like the environment and nuclear power. In all eras, changing ideas about issues such as sex and sexuality, social welfare, and world affairs gave shape to Japan’s experiences and to the stories Kurosawa told.

Making of "Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō)". taken in 1956.
(from left to right) Shinjin Akiike, Fumio Yanoguchi, Kuichiro Kishida, Samaji Nonagase, Takao Saito, Toshiro Mifune (People riding in the jeep), Minoru Chiaki, Takashi Shimura, Teruyo Saito (scripter), Yoshirō Muraki, Akira Kurosawa, Hiroshi Nezu, Asakazu Nakai, Sōjirō Motoki. — Photograph with cast and crew from *Spiderweb Castle, Kurosawa’s 16th film. Source: Kinema Junpо̄* .

My key primary sources were the movies themselves. Each of Kurosawa’s 30 official films receives its own chapter. The most famous of them have been written about many times, but never quite like this. The 1985 samurai epic Ran, an adaptation of King Lear, is usually analyzed in terms of its themes of loyalty and revenge, and critics emphasize its striking production design. In this book it is a springboard to discuss disability rights, 1980s feminism, contemporary urban theater, the visibility of queer people, and elder care. Kurosawa’s 1958 medieval action-comedy The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin), famous as an inspiration for Star Wars, provided me an opportunity to write about the birth of neighborhood preservation committees, Japan’s national parks and protected national treasures, the significance of the gold standard, and the expansion of rail and rail advertising in the economic boom years.

In some cases I have departed from longstanding convention by offering my own translations and transliterations of titles, as in the case of Kurosawa’s 1955 film, made in response to a US hydrogen bomb test that claimed one Japanese life and triggered a food safety panic. Beyond Kurosawa’s filmography, I make reference to several dozen other relevant movies, some famous and some quite obscure. A full list of them is available at https://letterboxd.com/davidconrad/list/movies-mentioned-in-akira-kurosawa-and-modern/.

Books and articles from scholars working in the fields of history, economics, religion, public policy, medicine, design, literature, entertainment, food, and other topics helped me fill out the study. I already had a good grasp of the scholarship on the earlier periods covered in the book, but I knew little about more recent decades apart from what I’d learned and observed during my time in Japan. Firsthand experienced helped me know what questions to ask of the literature.

On many occasions I was thrilled to find even stronger overlaps than I expected between on-screen content and off-screen context. For example, Dersu Uzala, the film Kurosawa made in 1975, is the true story of a turn-of-the-century explorer who mapped the Russian Far East for the Tsar. Kurosawa spent a year shooting in Siberia during the mid-70s Cold War thaw that eased tensions between the USSR and the Western bloc, of which Japan was an important if ambivalent part. In the movie, an indigenous woodsman helps keep the St. Petersburg man alive in the harsh elements of the taiga. The same year that movie came out, a Japanese documentary called The Man Who Skied Down Everest hit theaters around the world and even won an Oscar. By coincidence, it also tells a story of adventure in the Asian hinterland and the relationship between indigenous peoples and the sojourners from the so-called first world who rely on them. The first Japanese team to summit Mt. Everest documented their 1970 climb and the nearly-fatal titular stunt of one of their members, but they also captured the ice collapse that killed 6 of their Sherpa porters. Prior to the accident, the team had screened Seven Samurai for the Sherpas on a small TV at 15,000 feet. Such seemingly-accidental resonances between Kurosawa’s stories and current events dot the pages of the book.

Advertisement for a mitsubishi washing machine, circa 1956. — *Consumer goods like washing machines changed lives during Japan’s economic miracle. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Yet Kurosawa’s interests and temperament sometimes put him at odds with his colleagues and countrymen. Nowhere is this more clearly on display than in Part Three of the book, which discusses Japan’s famed postwar economic miracle. As incomes more than doubled and high-end consumer goods like TVs, refrigerators, and cars became commonplace, filmmakers like Ozu (see 1959’s Ohayо̄) and Ichikawa Kon (see 1962’s Watashi wa nisai) had their characters desire and acquire the comforts and conveniences of midcentury life. In Kurosawa movies from this era, on the other hand, such creature comforts tend to creep in at the edges of the story, or in the case of his period pieces are wholly absent. Kurosawa was prone to jeremiads and was something of a cinematic Cassandra, but as his movies grew more ambitious and more costly, the reality of Japan’s postwar transformation is evident even in their often-bleak visions of past and present.

Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan is a work of history rather than film criticism, and that informed the choice of images. There are 60 images in the book, none of them movie stills. The oldest is an 18th-century illustration that pertains to Kurosawa’s final film, and there are also rare images from the Meiji and Taishо̄ periods that predate Kurosawa’s career. The most recent image is from an event in 2019, over 20 years after Kurosawa’s death. Towards the middle of the book is a striking snapshot of a 1970s protest that I licensed from the photographer. I’m excited for a wider audience to see it, and many other images, for the first time.

*The earliest image in the book is this 18th-century illustration of moon viewing by Ishikawa Toyomasa. Source: The Met.*

The book is written for a general audience, especially people who love Japanese media and want to know more about the historical reality that underpins it. Writing it thrust me back into the academic process in a way that I wasn’t looking for but thoroughly enjoyed. I hadn’t envisioned writing this book, but now I am looking forward to the second and third books, whatever they may be.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and now works in the Office of Graduate Studies where he tries to make grad students’ lives easier. During his spare time he reads and writes history, binge-watches Criterion Channel movies, and raises two small children.

Re-imagining Public History: A Tribute to Joan Neuberger

by the Editor of Not Even Past, Adam Clulow

As Not Even Past winds down for another academic year, we want to take a moment to celebrate the remarkable contribution of Dr. Joan Neuberger, our Founding Editor, who will be retiring from the University of Texas this summer. Joan guided the magazine for almost a decade from its formation before stepping down in 2019.

Many people worked on Not Even Past. It received consistent support from successive chairs of the department, the College of Liberal Arts and LAITS. Colleagues across the department and beyond gave generously of their time and expertise in writing for the magazine, which drew as well on the work of a group of exceptionally talented Associate Editors. But Not Even Past is also unimaginable without Joan.

When I first took over as Editor from Joan in 2019, I had no idea what lay ahead. Joan handled the task seemingly effortlessly, responding within minutes to any email and always knowing how to shape an article and improve an argument. In reality, and as I soon learned, this took an immense amount of effort, hundreds and thousands of hours each semester, managing the work of a magazine that publishes like a fully staffed magazine but with no permanent staff. Joan set the standard as editor and her immense energy, creativity and passion underpinned Not Even Past‘s growth and success.

Joan Neuberger, Founding Editor of Not Even Past, testifies on SB 11 (Campus Carry) before the Senate State Affairs Committee — Joan Neuberger, Founding Editor of *Not Even Past*, testifies on SB 11 (Campus Carry) before the Senate State Affairs Committee (January 2016) Photo by Matt Valentine.

Across her career Joan has won many accolades. In 2018, she was awarded the Herbert Feis Award that is given annually to recognize distinguished contributions to public history. It is worth quoting the citation, which sums up Joan’s indefatigable energy: “As the driving force behind multiple noteworthy online history projects such as the Not Even Past website, the Thinking in Public project database, and the 15 Minute History podcast, Joan Neuberger’s scholarship harnesses the possibilities of the latest digital platforms for public engagement. Each year her work touches tens of thousands of people, both inside and outside the academy. In addition, she is an enthusiastic mentor and editor for other historians writing for a general audience.”

Itza Carbajal, Maria Esther Hammack, Rebecca Johnston, John Lisle and Joan Neuberger during the recording of the 15 minute history podcast "Episode 84: Behind the Tower: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting" — Itza Carbajal, John Lisle, Joan Neuberger, Maria Esther Hammack, and Rebecca Johnston during the recording of 15 minute history podcast “Episode 84: Behind the Tower: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting“

Joan has always reserved special time and energy for her work in training graduate students to become public historians. Below, we have reproduced just a few testimonials from current and former students, for they speak louder than any other accolades of how hard Joan has worked to train, inspire and accompany students on their academic journeys to become distinctive public voices in their own right.

Every year Joan recruited an Assistant Editor, who worked closely with her on every aspect of the site. In 2016-17, that was Emily Whalen, who wrote to us that “Working with Dr. Neuberger on NEP transformed the way I thought about public history. After a year as a graduate assistant for the blog, I began to understand public history was less an added perspective than it was a holistic philosophy, a way to approach our entire professional toolkit and bring the public along with us as we delve into the past. I will also always remember Dr. Neuberger’s generosity with younger scholars. She is a model for professional mentorship and thoughtful guidance.”

In 2017-18, Natalie Cincotta, took on the role. Here are her words: “I am so grateful for Dr. Neuberger’s exhaustive efforts to make public history a core part of the graduate program. Through Not Even Past, 15 Minute History, Thinking in Public and coursework, Dr. Neuberger has engaged graduate students as writers, editors, and producers in the creative process of making history scholarship broadly accessible. Many of the graduate students who have worked or written for NEP (and other projects) have gone on to create their own websites and podcasts, write for national news publications, and use public history tools in the classroom. Thanks to resources like NEP, graduate students will go out into the world with a repertoire of tools and skills to engage the public in our work as historians in new and exciting ways. “

In 2018-19 the role was filled by Jesse Ritner who writes that “I had the privilege of working with Dr. Neuberger as the Assistant Editor and Books Editor of Not Even Past, where I have also contributed several articles. Writing for NEP, as much as anything has helped me write clearly, in a voice that is my own. Dr. Neuberger’s guidance, and the tremendous amount of energy she put into my pieces, is rare to receive outside of a student’s relationship with their advisor, and I think is one of the most valuable things that professors can offer graduate students. Working for her gave me a sense of what it means to work in digital history and public history, as well as to see (and at times experience) the tremendous amount of work it takes to produce and maintain projects as large as NEP. Her honesty, at times intensity, and her dedication to her project and the students who work for her and write for her, is something that I think the department will sorely miss.”

Alina Scott, the Assistant Editor from 2019 to 2020, explains that “It has been a pleasure working with and learning from Dr. Neuberger. Her Public and Digital History class sparked my interest in public scholarship. Her ability to take her students’ work seriously, prompted me to apply to work with her on NEP. While serving as the assistant editor of NEP, this became even more clear. Dr. Neuberger’s dedication to her students and public history is evident in how much time she spends with our work. Her care and attention to detail in editing and engaging with the main arguments of NEP submissions go above and beyond the requirements of the job. She also pays keen attention to the needs of the public, adapting NEP to reflect those needs. Not Even Past remains an important resource for UT graduate students and faculty, relevant digital tool, and contribution to public scholarship because of the dedication of Dr. Neuberger.”

Many other current and former students contributed to Not Even Past. Kristie Flannery writes that “With Not Even Past, Joan offered history Ph.D. students opportunities to learn about and experiment with how to write the kind of history that people want to read. Joan encouraged us to use our developing expertise to produce clear, engaging, and provocative pieces for public consumption about scholarly monographs as well as novels, films, music and museums that we love (or hate). Producing the high quality stuff you see on the blog involved a lot of patient and kind editing from Joan. Contributing to Not Even Past transformed my understanding of history as practice, of what it means to be a historian and to write history. Thank you!” For Brittany Erwin, a PhD candidate in the department,“Dr. Neuberger’s public history course was a jumping-off point for my digital humanities research. She was a great soundboard and editor, and I am so grateful for her insights.”

We leave the final words to Rebecca Johnston who writes that “the very existence of NEP encourages history students to think about the importance of our work in the public sphere. But it does more than help us find our relevance to the public – it pulls us out of our academic silos into a collective conversation with others in our own department. With NEP, Dr. Neuberger has created a community space that helps to make our department more whole.”

Not Even Past re-imagined Public History at the University of Texas at Austin and we thank Joan for all she did to turn the magazine into such a valuable resource for history online.

Humanizing Great Mother Russia: “Ekaterina” on Amazon Prime

Our family’s choice for evening relaxation requires striking the delicate balance between pseudo-highbrow (for the historian) and light (for the trauma therapist). As a result, we usually settle on shows that are both foreign and trashy. “Ekaterina” on Amazon Prime promised to fit the bill and delivered. I had lived in Russia a few times in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was eager to re-experience the fairy-tale magic (although not the impoverished desperation) of St. Petersburg. We began watching in January of 2022. The news that Putin had begun to amass troops on Ukraine’s borders was still fresh and barely believable, but that didn’t stop me from noticing that major funding for the show was provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.

In a way, this is a story of transplants: two German noble kids who, thanks to the rampant practice of European royals tangling their DNA across national borders, both find themselves in Russia, destined to marry one another. Their encounter is orchestrated by Empress Yelizavyeta (Elizabeth), daughter of Peter the Great and aunt to Peter the Not-so-much. The younger Peter has been imported to be heir to his grandfather and aunt’s throne but, unfortunately, has some screws loose and isn’t the brightest bulb in the shed when it comes to matters both of the heart and the bedroom. Worse still, he is in love with enemy and military aggressor Frederick the Great of Prussia and obsessed with infantile soldier games. Yet he is also a brilliant violinist, not always as idiotic as he appears, and has the odd moments of sensitivity and insight.

Peter’s stagnation and pathos serves as an immobile backdrop to the meteoric trajectory of the German princess Sophie Friederika, played by the impossibly beautiful and cat-eyed Marina Aleksandrova, who arrives in Russia as a teenager for an audition to marry him and promptly falls in love and lust with another nobleman, foreshadowing her adult reputation for having many lovers. More to the point, soon after her arrival, she wholeheartedly throws herself into the project of becoming ruskaya, converting to Orthodox Christianity, taking the name Yekaterina, and quickly shedding an unconvincing bad accent for perfect Russian.

The real star of the first season, however, is Empress Elizabeth, magnificently and forcefully portrayed by Yulia Aug, one of the first not-skinny deeply complex female heroines I have seen on screen. In real life, Elizabeth was known as Russia’s most enlightened emperor since she didn’t execute anyone. She did, however, overthrow the previous tsar, a toddler, in a coup and keep him imprisoned in miserable conditions for the rest of his short, tragic life, so there’s that. The actress and the tsarina she portrays are a kaleidoscope of physical and character traits. Big and brilliant, ruthless and conniving within the vipers’ nest that is the palace environment, yet also sexual and sympathetic and not without a highly developed sense of humor and playfulness, she personifies imperial Russia itself. Yekaterina, even while the victim of Elizabeth’s capacity for great cruelty, takes note and uses her aunt-in-law as a template on which to model her own imperial modus operandi.

The season itself was all about palace intrigue although sadly, none of the street scenes of St. Petersburg I was hoping for. It tracks Friederika/Yekaterina’s evolution from a guileless but ambitious German teenager, to—after Elizabeth’s death and Peter’s accession to the throne—a hardened and scheming palace politician determined to achieve the highest position possible from which to defend Mother Russia’s armies and honor from the betrayal of her Prussophile husband-turned-emperor. We all know how that will end: she will collude with her lovers to assassinate her husband as well as other hapless victims standing in her way and thereby assume the throne and go on to be known to history as Catherine the Great. If you want to make an omelet, the series says with a pseudo-apologetic, sorry-not-sorry shrug, you gotta crack some eggs.

Watch Ekaterina: The Rise of Catherine the Great | Prime Video

We finished watching season one as the invasion of Ukraine began and the final scene made me feel sick to my stomach, as if I had just realized that I had allowed myself to be seduced by someone else’s abuser. As Catherine entered and walked through the great hall to the accompaniment of the announcement of the list of Russia’s dominions, bedecked with her empress’s crown and robe, I couldn’t help but flash back to the fall of 1989. I was a student, hosted by a family in one of outer Moscow’s endless apartment blocks, and the daughter of my hosts, an adorable blond nine-year-old girl, pointed at a map of the USSR and told me proudly what she had no doubt learned in school, “это наши республики—these are our republics.”

This is what Russians were told and knew even as their empire was wobbling on the edge of the precipice: that their country might be a failure by many metrics, including their own lives and their children’s opportunities, but at least it was BIG, and those other republics were theirs. Today’s Russian imperial propaganda is smarter and had momentarily caught me in its logic as well, reminding me of my own love for that country and the people I cared for in it—not through the heavy hand of the evening news but through the subconscious mechanisms of art: complex, soulful, funny, even feminist, and devastatingly cruel. Back on the screen, Catherine walks forward, in a sumptuous costume and on a rococo set funded by the Vladimir Putin’s Ministry of Culture, meeting her destiny as imperatritsa of “all of the Russias”: Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberia, Suzdal, Estland, Livonia, Karelia, Tver, Yugar, Perm, Vyatka, Bulgaria, Chernigov, Ryazan, Rostov, Yarolsavl, Belozero, Khutor, and Circassian and Caucasian lands . . . Yes, the list was very long. The list was the point.

Isabelle S. Headrick is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on the global modern education movement and its interaction with Iranian, Jewish, global French, and family histories.

Note: For further reading on the Russian Ministry of Culture, follow the work of UT history student Rebecca Adeline Johnston, including two recent posts, “In Russian Cultural Policy, the Customer is Always Wrong,” and “The Only Russian Official Angrier Than Putin at How Things Are Going in Ukraine.”

The banner image uses the painting Elizaveta Petrovna in Tsarskoe Selo, painting (1905) by Eugene Lanceray. Source: The Tretyakov Gallery.

Review of Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (2021)

This is no ordinary work of history. That’s a good thing. As opposed to many scholarly studies, this book has an author with real-world experience in his field. Martin Indyk, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs under Clinton and Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under Obama, knows the Middle East like the back of his hand.

The same could not be said of his biographical subject before the Yom Kippur War. While orchestrating détente with the Soviet Union and an end to America’s presence in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger had his mind elsewhere and spared few thoughts for the Middle East. But that changed abruptly when Israel and its Arab foes took up arms once again in October 1973.

Thereafter Kissinger went above and beyond in his regional outreach. Master of the Game documents how over the next two years, the secretary of state held many meetings with Arab and Israeli interlocutors in seeking a lasting peace. From his shuttle diplomacy came a string of disengagement agreements: two between Israel and Egypt and one between Israel and Syria. In Kissinger, Indyk sees a brilliant practitioner of statecraft whose pragmatic, incremental approach succeeded where others had failed.

Driving Kissinger’s relentless diplomacy was a particular vision for the Middle East. This vision, argues Indyk, modeled itself on the order Metternich, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand forged for post-Napoleonic Europe (the subject of Kissinger’s dissertation-cum-monograph A World Restored). The question of whether a bespectacled academic well-versed in European statecraft could apply his wisdom to the Middle East was soon answered.

Although Indyk is mainly interested in American decision-making, Arab and Israeli officials are not mere bystanders in his story. He writes at length about how the likes of Ismail Fahmy, Yitzhak Rabin, and Hafez al-Assad sized Kissinger up, not just the other way around. No number of American carrots and sticks could make both sides come to terms with one another. Those were decisions they alone could make. Present and prospective policymakers should bear in mind that however strong the United States may be, Middle Eastern countries can always push back.

*Henry Kissinger meeting King Faisal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to review the Middle East peace process and bilateral relations on March 19, 1975. Source: Saudi Press Agency*

Indyk shares lessons he has drawn from Kissinger’s accomplishments. One of these is the role of domestic politics. In the United States, Kissinger faced pressure from pro-Israel voices to be as generous as possible toward the Jewish state. Israel witnessed a premiership change during the period in question (due to Golda Meir’s perceived weakness) and had many constituencies to placate. The Egyptian and Syrian governments were not democratic but nonetheless were mindful of public opinion.

Some of the strongest lessons are those unique to Israeli-Palestinian peacemakers. As Indyk observes, Washington cannot make things happen on its own. All the more so when it eagerly pushes Arab and Israeli officials to the negotiating table where “a sense of urgency is often absent” (304). The fact that Americans are keen to strike deals does not mean Arabs and Israelis are.

Although he does not deify Kissinger, Indyk risks overstating his importance. Kissinger clearly played an important role in bringing Arabs and Israelis together and negotiating the details of their agreements, but is it fair to anoint him “Master of the Game?” Calling him as much masks Kissinger’s considerable shortcomings in his shuttle diplomacy.

These are shortcomings that Indyk acknowledges. For instance, Kissinger’s ignorance of Middle Eastern politics made him “underestimate the importance of the Palestinian issue in the legitimation of his American-led order” and sideline King Hussein and the Jordanians when they could have been invaluable peace brokers (554). Kissinger’s amoral realism left little room for matters beyond power politics, but he would learn the hard way that Arab leaders were willing to go to the mat for the Palestinians.

That realism was the only reason why Kissinger was in the Middle East in the first place. In facilitating these Arab-Israeli negotiations, he sought to wrest Egypt, and to a lesser extent Syria, from the Soviet sphere. In so doing, he also hoped to create a stable balance of power that would avert wars like the one in 1973.

Ultimately, Israel grew strong enough to resist pressure to give concessions to Arab adversaries, and it has neither concluded a peace treaty with the Syrians nor a final-status agreement with the Palestinians. Yet Indyk shows convincingly that Kissinger did not intend for Israel to turn into the regional superpower it became. Such an outcome was discordant with his Metternechian worldview and did not redound to his goal of making Egypt and Syria centerpieces in a new U.S.-aligned Middle East. Then as it does now, self-interest mainly explained America’s presence in that far afield place.

For all of Indyk’s criticisms of Kissinger, his admiration of the man is palpable. Indyk’s service in two administrations that failed to achieve a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal has helped him appreciate how extraordinary Kissinger’s diplomatic accomplishments in this part of the world were. As Indyk shows in Master of the Game, negotiation, and diplomacy require considerable skill.

Those at odds with Indyk’s methodological approach might say he gives too much importance to Kissinger the individual. Why not give credit to the legions of government staff and civil-society actors who worked so hard to make these agreements happen? Does Kissinger truly deserve the star billing he gets? These are genuine questions, but, in my view, the choice to make Kissinger the central figure in this story stands up to scrutiny. Arab and Israeli leaders negotiated through him. No one else spent more time in conversation with them or diplomatic capital in bringing both sides together. Kissinger undoubtedly was the sine qua non.

On a separate note, this book puts the lie to charges that the United States has given Israel whatever it wants. To the contrary, there is ample evidence of U.S.-Israel friction. The Israeli side often frustrated Kissinger. The barbs traded with Prime Minister Golda Meir could be ferocious. She could not believe a fellow Jew could be so dismissive of Israel’s security interests, while he resented Israeli intransigence. Under Rabin’s government, too, the Americans and Israelis gave each other an earful over seemingly minute details. Thanks to plentiful American and Israeli sources, Indyk makes exchanges like these lively and engaging. In this way, Master of the Game is the latest installment in a literature that has cast the U.S.-Israel relationship as one of tension and compromise rather than harmony. See Dennis Ross’ Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (2015) for another example.

Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy: Indyk, Martin: 9781101947548

Evidence in the book should also dispel the view that Kissinger was heartless. On his way out of Israel without a peace treaty in March 1975, Kissinger started crying after declaring “we have no other goal except to enable the young people in this area to grow up without the fear of war” (478). While he has been criticized for his alleged callousness, this book shows that Kissinger, albeit unwaveringly devoted to his craft, was not immune to emotion.

Those who’ve had enough of America’s misbegotten adventures in the Middle East might be tempted to skip this book. That would be their loss. Master of the Game tells the story of an overall successful policy of negotiation. A superpower got many of its sought-after objectives by engaging a handful of middle powers. As great-power rivalry returns to Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, American policymakers would do well to learn from Kissinger’s example.

In telling a remarkable story, Master of the Game proves it is possible to write well without sacrificing scholarly standards. The book includes its fair share of colloquial gems—Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan “sounded like an excited bro planning a fraternity party” while talking to Kissinger, we’re told (256). Forgoing the heavy prose that can mar academic writing, Indyk makes this book accessible to the lay reader. That might be a function of his time in the government, where it pays to shun the abstract for the concrete.

At the same time, Indyk’s book is firmly grounded in historical evidence. Among the archives Indyk consults are the Nixon and Ford Presidential Libraries, the Department of State’s Office of the Historian, and the Israel State Archives. He gives the sources their due. Policymakers in search of historical background and practical advice would do well to read this book. Inside they will find a road map for remedying seemingly intractable disputes, not only in the Middle East but perhaps in the world beyond.

Daniel J. Samet is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.

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